Analysis
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First there was a lost election campaign. Then there
was the review of the lost election campaign. Then there were the
reviews of the review of the election campaign.
It's extraordinarily easy to forget — amid the headlines that accompanied the release on Thursday of Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill's review of the 2019 federal election campaign — that we rarely actually ever see a document like this.There are always mutterings and murmurings about whether such documents will be released, or whether they should be fully released.
Quite regularly, someone "helpfully" leaks part of a review that hasn't been released, in aid of a leadership ambition or some other internal warfare.
But the full release of a political party's review of just why it lost an election it should have won? Hardly ever.
So putting aside what the review actually says about Labor — and what that means for the future — the release of this document is a rich vein of material for students of politics.
There's no self-pity to be found here
The review is rather splendidly dispassionate in the way it goes about documenting the campaign in all its splendour, or lack thereof."Labor lost the election because of a weak strategy that could not adapt to the change in Liberal leadership, a cluttered policy agenda that looked risky, and an unpopular leader", it begins.
(Pause for small cheerio to those on social media who yelled about media bias whenever one mentioned Shorten's unpopularity as an issue for Labor).
The review says that "not one of these shortcomings was decisive but in combination they explain the result".
There is no tone of either self-pity or self-flagellation in this report. No "we was robbed".Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese took a similar tone at the National Press Club on Friday, saying "we got it wrong".
"Not everything was wrong of course, but enough was. We lost an election, which given the chaos on the other side, we should have won."
Bill Shorten's supporters aren't happy with the campaign review and grumble that it doesn't seem to talk much about the role of policy in the election loss.
The subtext of this is that too much weight is being put on Shorten's standing with voters, and, also, that policy was a collective decision and by not looking at it, collective responsibility is being avoided.
The underlying message? The irony of unity
It is not entirely true that policy isn't discussed. The role of contentious franking credits changes, for example, is there in all its glory.That voters who were not affected by the policy in Labor's heartland voted against Labor because of the policy, while many of those who were badly affected by it voted for Labor, says much about its political pitfalls.
It says much about why Albanese clearly signalled on Friday that the policy is likely to go.
As to collective responsibility, Albanese told the Press Club that part of the "moving on" from the loss "is for those of us who have privileged to serve over the last two terms, to accept collective responsibility for the disappointing outcome".
If there is an underlying message in the report, it lies in the irony of unity.Whether it was the fact that there was no campaign committee; that there did not seem to be the structures in place for anyone to challenge or question strategy, or even question if there was a strategy.
These were manifestations of the culture that flowed from the conflicts of the past.
All these structural problems seemed to flow from the party's terror of its own past disunity.
The Opposition Leader, and the authors of the report, are using it to provide a line in the sand for the post-mortems, as much as to review what actually happened at every level of the campaign.
Expect a real internal battle to take place
Albanese talked briefly about the review on Friday before moving on to setting out some more markers for where he takes the party next.He does this having had the positions he has taken on a range of issues, from dropping attacks on the big end of town, to acknowledging the need to listen to faith communities, backed in by the findings of the review.
The review has also exposed some of the interesting issues Labor faces, whoever is leading it.
"The Labor Party has been increasingly mobilised to address the political grievances of a vast and disparate constituency," it says.
"A grievance-based approach can create a culture of moving from one issue to the next, formulating myriad policies in response to a broad range of concerns.
"Care needs to be taken to avoid Labor becoming a grievance-based organisation."What is more, it found that "based on high expectations of a Labor victory, progressive groups 'banked the win', campaigning to influence Labor's agenda in government rather than campaigning for victory".
There are echoes here of the problems the Democrats in the United States faced in their absolutely darkest recent days, when commentators observed that the party's efforts to try to embrace and appease all the parts of the so-called "rainbow coalition" which had come to make up its base only resulted in overly detailed policies, or policies workshopped into meaninglessness.
The positive of that is that, despite Donald Trump's dominance over day to day US political dramas, the Democrats did surge back in congressional elections last year, celebrating that very diversity in their candidates.
But this requires a honing down of messages and policies, and this is where the real internal battle between now and the next election will take place.
Albanese will need to reshape the policy agenda
One of Australia's leading qualitative pollsters said recently that focus groups now tell him that they view the May election as one where they "dodged a bullet" by Bill Shorten not winning.These groups include exactly the voters who moved against, or failed to support Labor in outer suburban electorates; the very voters who Labor was pitching to on low incomes, in often precarious economic circumstances, who "should" have been in support of Labor's policies on things like education and health.
The Labor review confirms what the pollster says: that, instead, these voters were just frightened that the party would tax them into oblivion.
Labor stalwart Senator Kim Carr observed to 7.30 recently that you can't have big spending policies without the funds to support them.
That's true. So if Labor is to strip back a lot of that tax revenue, it's going to have to strip back a lot of its spending too.
Anthony Albanese is trying to give himself as much as time as possible to reshape that policy agenda, and that will depend on him being able to redefine what Labor actually represents in these days when its historical footings have disappeared and "the Labor heartland" is a mirage, not a destination.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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