Struggling Labor faces hot summer

THE Labor Party has ended the year at a remarkable low for a party that won an election and finished up with positive polling numbers, if only just.

One of the key conspirators in the ousting of Kevin Rudd, the Australian Workers Union national secretary Paul Howes, told me recently he believed Labor was at its lowest ebb since 1996.

That should be a worrying admission for the party faithful; 1996 was the year Labor fell to a record defeat after 13 years in office, losing to Paul Keating's nemesis John Howard and starting an 11 1/2-year stretch in the political wilderness.

Healing the party is the mantra Labor operatives are shopping around for the summer months. Julia Gillard recognises how divided the party is, so she intends to use the summer to forge unity before returning for the new parliamentary year in February on a strong footing to develop policy and attack the opposition.

It's a nice sounding theory, but if Gillard can't get enough clean political air to focus her energies on that task, she won't complete it. From the asylum-seekers' tragedy to the mining tax debate and the fallout from the WikiLeaks revelations, Gillard's summer so far has been no break. And the distractions (if you can call these incidents that) carry the added downside of throwing up more questions than answers about the government's core competency.

Traditionally, the summer months are a period of calm for a government - especially immediately after an election victory - and a period of destabilisation for an opposition. Opposition frontbenchers and backbenchers usually get edgy thinking about the long powerless haul ahead.

But this summer is different because the Coalition came closer to victory than it could have imagined 12 months ago. And the ongoing problems of the minority Labor government hold out opposition hope that a return to power might not have to wait until the end of the electoral cycle, which ensures discipline in the interim.

One senior MP went so far as to tell me he believed the next election was now the Coalition's to lose. As long as the opposition doesn't make any blunders, the government won't be able to pull itself out of the quagmire it is in.

The argument has merit when you look at the electoral map. Labor has 72 seats, as does the Coalition. Labor only gets to 76 with the support of Greens MP Adam Bandt, Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie and the rural independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott. The Coalition's numbers swell to 74 with the support of the West Australian Nationals MP Tony Crook and the independent Bob Katter: conservatives in conservative electorates.

When voters next go to the polls, the ageing Windsor is unlikely to contest (although he hasn't as yet announced plans to retire) and the much younger Oakeshott will have a serious credibility problem because of the way he has handled himself lately. You could almost consider the Coalition the favourite to win both seats (they were previously held by the Nationals), which effectively means it enters the electoral contest with a seats advantage.

A status quo result certainly won't do for the government. It needs to find a way to build on its present configuration of seats, which isn't unheard of, with governments having done so in 1993, 2001 and 2004. But this time it is going to be hard, especially if the government can't get clean air to sell its credentials.

The recent election loss for Labor in Victoria may make holding the large number of seats it has in the south hard for Gillard, although federal Labor will be hoping that because voters likely will have seen the back of state Labor in NSW and Queensland before the feds go to the polls, it will make winning seats in both states more likely.

The political divide to be watched next year will be the approach the two main parties take to issues affecting the two types of states across the nation: the mining states and the old manufacturing centres. Queensland and Western Australia voted in droves for the Coalition this year, just as Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria did for Labor. NSW is up for grabs, finely balanced courtesy of strong campaigning by Labor at the last election.

Labor plans to press ahead with its new mining tax, notwithstanding the debate that will hot up in the months ahead as to how it treats state royalties. Doing so is an appealing approach in non-mining centres, but entrenches the Coalition's advantage in the mining states.

The pivotal question for the electoral viability of the government is what happens in NSW: do the Labor Party's stocks rise with the death of NSW Labor at state level and courtesy of extra funding provided by the redistributive benefits of the mining tax? Or is Labor's reputation so tarnished that it can't recover so soon after a state drubbing?

And focusing on the important role of NSW in the coming year highlights that the state can't be viewed as a homogeneous entity. The western Sydney marginal seats vote very differently from those seats located in the state's coastal southern and northern corridors. Then there are the inner-city seats dominated by Labor but under constant threat from the presence of the Greens. If Labor does try to appeal to voters in the mortgage belt parts of the state, how the Liberals choose to award their preferences in inner-city areas could decide the fate of high-profile Labor frontbenchers such as Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek.

A fracturing of Australian society, whether it occurs between states or within them, naturally favours oppositions because they aren't the ones taking the daily decisions that upset people. That only becomes the opposition's concern once it wins power.

The conclusion, therefore, is that unless the Coalition turns on itself, it is the government that will have the tougher time next year. Whether it's policy, personal animosities flowing from the events of late last year, or the divisions in Australian society, Labor is the party likely to be hardest hit by these difficulties. And in a 24-hour news cycle you can learn about their problems every step of the way, making it a hard hurdle for Gillard to overcome.