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No guts, no guile and no glory: how the Labor Party lost the 2001 federal election

By Graham Young - posted Saturday, 15 December 2001


The culmination of this was the controversy about the video tape which allegedly showed refugees throwing their children over-board. The Government said it existed, the Opposition wanted proof. This was a sucker punch. The tape wasn’t going to change anyone’s mind about the issues, and the public switch off to politicians when they accuse each other of lying. As a result of the ALP’s demand for the tape to be released the agenda swung back to the government’s preferred ground in the crucial last days of the campaign.

The other area where the ALP failed was expectations management. In the recent British elections the British Labour Party was terrified of the "Queensland effect". This was a reference to the Queensland Coalition’s successful 1995 State election campaign which defeated Australia’s then most popular Premier, Wayne Goss, by suggesting voters deliberately act to limit Goss’s majority as a way of making him listen to them. If enough voters obey that message they can end up giving a government a minority. In that Queensland election I was driving strategy on the Coalition side and Mike Kaiser was doing the same for the ALP. Naturally we were curious to see whether that strategy was an option for the ALP this time. Our focus groups told us that it was – if participants thought Howard was going to win easily, they said they would be less likely to vote for him.

Bob McMullan emerged this election as a key Labor strategist, and I think every time that I heard him asked about the ALP's election prospects he gave the wrong answer. When they were the odds-on favourite after Ryan he was telling journalists Labor would romp home. Wrong Bob, the correct answer is "This is an aberration. The election is going to be very tight. If John Howard wins then he will…". Then when they failed to win Aston it was a case of Aston being an aberration, but we are still going to win. Wrong again. Correct answer: "This confirms what I said after Ryan, whatever the polls say, there is every likelihood that John Howard will win the next election and then he will continue to …". That’s what you have to do when there is an expectation that you are going to win easily, otherwise you won’t.

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Immediately the war and the Tampa arrived, expectations turned around completely. Our focus group voters thought that the government was certainly going to win as a result of international issues. The correct line in this changed situation was to lean hard into this expectation and try to accentuate it so that even those people who want the government to win, but are upset about a particular issue, are encouraged to lodge a protest vote. Instead the Labor Party was still claiming that they would win. Not only did this position them wrongly, but as it contradicted what the majority believed, it would have alienated voters.

Election campaigns in Australia are like 400m sprints. There is generally little separating the top contenders, but only one wins, and only one gets the glory and the endorsements. The difference between winning and losing comes down in many cases to minor errors of technique and psychology. Forgetting to lunge at the finish line can be just as fatal as not believing you can win. As a result of events beyond their control the ALP ended up being the back-marker, but they could have won. If they had taken the risky decision on refugees, and kept their technique together on expectations management, they could have clawed in the extra percentage of the vote that they needed to counter Howard’s grab for the far-right.

What they need to be careful of now is that they don’t take the defeat as a sign that the general approach was wrong and adopt the "educative" model, or they’ll still only win a silver medal next time.

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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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