Religion, business key, Kevin Rudd tells ALP

Kevin Rudd has outlined a plan for federal Labor to rebuild in his home state, slamming party’s current approach.

Former PM Kevin Rudd. Picture: Kym Smith

Kevin Rudd has outlined a plan for federal Labor to rebuild in his home state, slamming its approach to religion and small business, as well as Bill Shorten’s failure to connect with voters who have elected state ALP governments in Queensland for 25 of the past 30 years.

Speaking ahead of the 30th ­anniversary of Wayne Goss’s ­reformist state government taking office in 1989, the former prime minister said Labor had alienated Queensland’s thriving Pentecost­al church communities by ridiculing Scott Morrison’s faith ahead of the federal election in May.

This had compounded the inabil­ity of Mr Shorten and, before him, Julia Gillard to “connect” with the state’s voters and to reach out to small business.

Mr Rudd’s comments will ­reinforce the findings of Labor’s recently released election post-mortem that its campaign suffered from a weak strategy that could not adapt to the Liberals’ leadership switch to Mr Morrison, a cluttered­ policy agenda and Mr Shorten’s unpopularity.

“Here in Queensland, the voting­ public need to have a ­genuine sense of connection with the federal leader,” Mr Rudd told The Weekend Australian. “It doesn’t mean they need to be from Queensland, but they have to have a sense of real connection. That wasn’t the case with Bill, that wasn’t the case with Julia.”

He said Pentecostal congregations were growing across the state, which had worked in favour of the Prime Minister, who worships with the Horizon church near his family home in Sydney’s Sutherland.

Queensland voters didn’t like “shit being poured on religious people”, even though they weren’t necessarily religious themselves.

And federal Labor would continue to find it “hard going” in Queensland unless Anthony ­Albanese could “utterly convince” small business the party was with them. “My wife, Therese, built a small business from nothing … and, being the son of a dairy farmer, I know what small business is like, I’ve run one myself, it’s what most people do up here in one way or another,” Mr Rudd said.

“So … our job as the Labor Party in terms of the connect point is to have a view of the future that says we are on about the little guy, whether that happens to be the person who is the employee of David Jones, the employee at ­Target or the other little guys who have decided to leave paid employme­nt and put their hundred-thousand bucks of savings into the small business that they are going to take a risk on to build that for the future.”

Reflecting on the disparity ­between Labor’s performance at the state and federal level in Queensland, where it holds only six of 30 federal seats despite dominating at the state level since his days as the late Goss’s key ­adviser, Mr Rudd said it was partly a function of the rapport with voters achieved by Goss and his successors as Labor premiers. Since 1989, the state ALP’s grip on power has been broken only twice, first by National-Liberal Coalition premier Rob Borbidge in 1996-98, then by Campbell Newman for another single term from 2012.

But former Labor deputy prime minister and treasurer Wayne Swan said while Queensland’s ­decentralised demographics were unique, its voters behaved much like those elsewhere on May 18.