Policy complexity scared voters, says Chalmers

Opposition Treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers and his mentor Wayne Swan say Bill Shorten’s tax policies were an electoral failure.

Jim Chalmers tells the National Press Club Labor has to modernise its message. Picture: AAP

Opposition Treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers and his mentor Wayne Swan have declared Bill Shorten’s tax policies were an electoral failure and flagged a different agenda ahead of the next election.

Dr Chalmers — a staffer to Mr Swan when he was treasurer in the former Labor government — said the party left itself open to a scare campaign because of complexities around crackdowns on negative gearing and dividend imputation.

“Obviously, we couldn’t build a big enough constituency for our tax proposals. Their complexity left us vulnerable to under-the-radar lies and scares about death duties and pension cuts which couldn’t be countered effectively or in time,” Dr Chalmers said in a speech at the National Press Club.

“The impact of that, or one of the consequences of that, was that people were more prepared to believe some of the stuff that was being made up about tax, death duties and the like.”

Labor’s former finance spokesman — who with Chris Bowen was a key figure in Mr Shorten’s economic team — said there would be changes to the party’s tax policies before the next election.

“We will take our time to work out which ones to discard, which ones we think we can improve on, which ones we can take to the subsequent election,” he said.

Mr Swan, the ALP president who accompanied Mr Shorten’s campaign through central Queensland, said the federal election had been a “very bad loss for the Labor Party”.

“It raises serious questions. We could have avoided it if we had done some things different,” Mr Swan told the Australian National University’s leadership forum.

“Prime Minister Scott Morrison, after a shaky start, did very well at getting the Australian public to warm to him in a way that Bill Shorten was unsuccessful.”

Mr Swan urged caution on jettisoning the entire platform the party took to the May 18 poll.

“There was a problem with the size of our agenda. Too many policies running around and bumping into each other,” he said.

“ ‘The Bill you can’t afford’ (ad campaign) bit really hard in those areas where people were insecure or where they were alienated from the political system.”

Mr Swan said the most “appalling failure of our campaign” was Labor didn’t get the message out about its plan to stop the spread of insecure work: “We had a range of propositions in that area but we did not drive them home … most importantly we did not drive them home in central Queensland.

“There is an enormous amount of insecure work, labour hire and all of those issues. We didn’t make enough of those issues.”

Dr Chalmers, who called himself a “scrapper from Logan City”, declared an end to the class war language that had failed to garner the support of working and middle-class voters. He invoked the legacy of former prime minister Bob Hawke, who died two days before the election, as a blueprint for Labor’s future.

“I think his passing made many of us reflect on the kind of country we want this to be. Confident, intelligent, empathetic. Like he was. Forward-looking, outward-facing, upward-climbing, like we have been and can be again,” he said.