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What’s wrong with the Labor Party?

By Dennis Glover - posted Tuesday, 16 August 2005


What’s Labor doing wrong? Let’s begin by looking at some facts about Labor’s current electoral position:

  • Labor holds only 60 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. The conservatives hold 90;
  • Labor and the minor parties and independents have lost their majority in the Senate; and
  • at the 2004 federal election Labor received just 47.3 per cent of the 2-party preferred vote for the House of Representatives. A swing against it of nearly 1.8 per cent.

This sounds bad. But it’s worth comparing with some recent bad results:

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  • in 1996 to 2-party preferred result was 46.4 per cent;
  • in 1977 it was 45.4 per cent;
  • in 1975 it was 44.3 per cent; and
  • in the Vietnam War election of 1966 it was just 43.1 per cent.

Here are some other interesting facts:

Labor holds government in every state and territory, including the Northern Territory. If you’d suggested this was possible a decade ago, people would have laughed at you.

It recently held on in Western Australia when it was gone for all money just days out from the election.

If you add up every seat in every legislature in the states and territories Labor holds 337 of the 598 - that’s 56 per cent. The Liberals have just 158 - 26 per cent. And the Coalition combined holds only 207 - or 34.6 per cent.

In the Victorian Legislative Assembly the Coalition holds just 19 of the 88 seats. In Queensland the figure is 20 out of 89. The Liberal Party does not hold a single seat of the 15 in the Tasmanian Upper House.

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Why is this important? Because it proves that while it’s down, Labor is by no means out. To suggest the party is finished defies the evidence and history. And John Howard knows it. So what’s the problem?

There’s an obvious and massive one - the primary vote:

  • in 1993 it was 44.9 per cent;
  • in 1996 - 38.8;
  • in 1998 it went up slightly - 40.1;
  • in 2001 - 37.8; and
  • in 2004 - just 37.6.

It’s a bad trend.

If Labor is going to win elections it has to get its primary vote back to over 40 per cent.

And there’s worse news still. Labor is losing its heartland - in the sprawling once working class suburbs of Western Sydney and south-east Melbourne. In 2004 it lost Greenway in Western Sydney and came close to losing Holt near Dandenong. I don’t know how many of you know Dandenong, but if you do, you’ll understand the problem Labor faces. If it can’t hold on to Holt, Labor has some serious re-thinking to do.

So what are the reasons for Labor’s predicament? I have divided them into four major theories:

  • the critique from the left;
  • the critique from the right;
  • the critique from the hard heads in the Canberra Press Gallery; and
  • and analysis by the sociologists.


The critique from the Left

This can probably be summed up in five words: “Labor has lost its soul.”

According to this theory, the party lacks conviction:

  • it’s too poll-driven - in thrall to “focus groups”;
  • it should have opposed Howard harder over asylum seekers;
  • it should have opposed the Iraq War;
  • it’s turned its back on good old fashioned Labor policies, such as supporting public education, rebuilding Medicare and saving the environment;
  • it’s controlled by visionless spin doctors and managers; and
  • according to Philip Adams, it should bring back its last fair dinkum leader, Paul Keating.

The new party National President, Barry Jones, recently summed the “left critique” up by stating that: "Australia now has two parties of the mainstream right: the ALP on the centre-right and the Liberals on the hard right." In my view, there are serious problems with this analysis. First, the idea that there is no policy difference between Labor and the Coalition doesn’t stack up.

In 2004 Labor’s policies included: Redirecting funding away from the wealthiest private school to the neediest schools and increasing funding of public education; reversing the 25 per cent increase in HECS and abolishing full fees; pumping billions more into Medicare; ending old growth logging in Tasmanian forests; and ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. And - contrary to the popular left-wing misconception I mentioned earlier - opposing the War in Iraq and bringing the troops home - by last Christmas. Even on asylum seekers, Labor’s position - if anyone had bothered to look - actually contained the defacto end to mandatory detention.

It was possibly the most left-wing Labor manifesto since about 1972.

Second, while Labor may have too many market-driven spin doctors advising it and in parliament, it’s not obvious this loses it votes. Here is a list of people who will dominate the Liberal Party’s front bench in years to come: Tony Abbott, Andrew Robb, Tony Smith, Christopher Pyne and Mitch Fifield. Each one is a former political adviser or party official. While we’re on the subject, you can add Kerrie Nettle and Natasha Stott-Despoja from the Greens and the Democrats.

And if you think reliance on polling is the big problem, ask yourself: what is the most devastating, vote-harvesting political line of the last few decades in Australia, perhaps of all time. It was John Howard’s statement in the 2001 campaign that:

We determine who comes here and the circumstances in which they come.

It was taken from a focus group conducted by John Howard’s pollsters.

The Liberal Party is perhaps the most ruthless, professional, poll-driven political machine Australia has ever seen. Morally bankrupt perhaps. But successful. That’s why it exported its key advisers to help the British Tory Party in the recent UK election.

So perhaps the real issue isn’t the dominance of political professionals, just the quality of the professionals. (Now that I’ve retired, Labor should do better.)

In fact - and here I can talk from personal experience - most political advisers aren’t poll-driven, or cynical or right-wing. They’re often the idealists who sacrifice far more lucrative careers to serve our democracy, a bit like Toby Zeigler, Sam Seaborne and C.J. Cregg on the West Wing. (But unfortunately not as good looking!)

At a time when political apathy is at an all time high among the general population, I think it’s foolish to scapegoat some of our democracy’s most committed citizens - political advisers - for the problems that face Labor.

So my advice to anyone thinking about becoming a political adviser one day is - ignore the cynics - they’re driven by false nostalgia for a bygone era when politics was simpler and parliamentary parties supposedly listened to motions at local party branch meetings. The fact is, it’s never been like that, and if you don’t believe me, read Vere Gordon Childe’s history of the first ever Labor government’s in his book, How Labor Governs.

The critique from the Right

The right-wing critique of Labor can be summed up like this: “Labor has to be even more hard-headed if it wants to win.”

  • Labor does not do enough to appeal to “aspirational voters”;
  • it preaches a crude “class warfare” - as with its schools policy;
  • it’s too close to the trendy Greens;
  • it’s associated with high taxes and is seen as economically incompetent;
  • it’s lost the “white working-class vote” and appeals only to ethnic minorities;
  • it’s “anti-American” in foreign policy and insufficiently patriotic.

This analysis certainly has its strengths.

Monash University’s Lyle Allan, Ernest Healy and Bob Birrell recently argued Labor’s electoral support is increasingly confined to a number of electorates with higher than average concentrations of people from low-income non-English speaking backgrounds.

In fact, they suggest, Labor would have lost more seats in 2004 if it wasn’t for an unintentional ethnic gerrymander that spread just enough of these voters across a number of key marginal electorates.

The precise truth of this claim that Labor has been turned into an ethnic ghetto is difficult to determine. But while fear of interest rate rises may have swung the most votes in the 2004 election, I don’t think there’s any question that it did so against a background of a long-term trend of ethnic re-alignment between the parties.

Labor, the researchers claim, in so many words, is losing the “white working-class vote”, and they seek their explanation in Labor’s continuing identification with high levels of migration, ethnic branch-stacking and inner-city cosmopolitanism in general.

Are these right wing claims correct? Perhaps, but only partially.

For instance, Labor seems to always go out of its way to appear economically conservative - much to the annoyance of Barry Jones and others. Under Mark Latham it made a serious attempt to go after the aspirational vote. The party is definitely corrupted by branch stacking. That doesn’t seem to affect its vote at the state level, but it does mean its candidates sometimes have less appeal to middle Australia.

Perhaps the real answer is that despite the best efforts of Labor to appear economically responsible and moderate in all things, countering these perceptions is beyond its current power.

The critique from the Canberra press gallery

Then there’s the critique from the Canberra press gallery. Let’s remember, for most mainstream political journalists politics isn’t a clash of ideologies or grand systems; it’s a passing parade of human folly, understood by reference to one big idea - self-interest: the self-interest of politicians and of voters.

To them Labor’s most recent failures come down to three things:

  • Mark Latham’s unpopularity;
  • Labor’s dominance at the state level; and
  • general economic wellbeing.

The first is slightly problematic. It seems obvious now that Mark Latham was never going to cut it as an alternative prime minister. He was perhaps just too scary. I can tell you, as his speechwriter, he scared the hell out of me. And when contrasted to the solid John Howard, its obvious most would trust Howard to manage the economy and be in charge in a national crisis.

But this wasn’t so apparent at the time, and it’s what people said about John Howard once as well - when he opposed Asian immigration and opposed Nelson Mandela’s release from gaol in the 1980s.

For much of his time as Labor Leader, Latham’s personal polling was relatively high. He certainly gave a sense of hope to people on the Labor side as someone with the right stuff to take on John Howard.

The second explanation is a strong one - that people are happy to vote Liberal federally to balance the power of Labor at the state level.

This feeling can be for two reasons. First - a sort of “keep the bastards honest by denying them total power” strategy. And second - because it suits what people are after at each level.

The Americans have a good way of putting this. They say politics can be divided between the “mummy” issues - the soft social issues like health and education that are the responsibility of the states - and the “daddy” issues - like security and economic management that are the responsibility of the Commonwealth. Labor’s better at being mummy and the Coalition’s better at being daddy.

I think, though, the third Press Gallery explanation for Labor’s loss - that people were satisfied with the economy and were unwilling to risk change - is the strongest.

I can tell you from personal experience and access to high-quality polling that the majority of people don’t care about politics at all - except when it affects their finances. This is the politically uninterested vote. But they don’t just vote - because they’re in marginal electorates they largely determine the outcome.

Labor’s Shadow Treasurer, Wayne Swan, has recently released a book about the distribution of wealth in Australia and its impact on our political system. It contains some new research about the 2004 federal election that suggests there was a direct relationship between electorates with a high proportion of mortgagees and large swings to the Coalition.

Ranking electorates by the proportion of households with a mortgage, reveals a stark trend. For the bottom 20 per cent electorates, where just 18 per cent have a mortgage, the average swing was just 0.5 per cent to the Coalition. In contrast, the top 20 per cent of electorates, where 38 per cent have a mortgage, the average swing to the Coalition was 3.1 per cent.

This suggests voters cared most about maintaining their hard won affluence. And it’s probably why voters responded so well to Howard’s claim that the election was a referendum about who you trust to keep interest rates down.

The analysis by the sociologists

Sociologists - often amateur ones like me - have provided a different, long-term perspective on the decline of Labor’s primary vote. In broad terms it can be summed up like this: “The blue collar, working class, union-member base that created and sustained the Labor Party for a century is disappearing.”

Consider some facts:

  • when Bob Hawke won government in 1983, 57 per cent of all Australian employees were members of unions. Today the figure is 23 per cent - many of them middle-class public sector workers;
  • more Australians are now self-employed than are union members. And many of these are blue collar workers who would have been the backbone of the ALP a generation ago;
  • in 1983 35 per cent of Australians completed 12 years of schooling. Today the figure is 82 per cent;
  • in 1983 350,000 Australians attended university. Today the figure is 730,000 and falling.

Now partly this is Labor’s own doing. By expanding access to tertiary education, deregulating industrial relations and globalising the economy, the Hawke and Keating governments created the new middle class, began the destruction of its own base and created a natural constituency for the Liberal Party.

So that’s what’s wrong with the Labor Party.

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This is the an edited version of a speech given to the Politics students at Latrobe University on May 5, 2005.



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About the Author

Dennis Glover is a Labor speechwriter and fellow of the new progressive think tank Per Capita.

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