Hollow men led Labor to disaster

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This was published 13 years ago

Hollow men led Labor to disaster

By Ross Gittins

Voters punished Labor for lacking principles and conviction. It is time for the party to ditch the thugs and recover some values.

THE one thing we can be sure of is that Labor has suffered a huge reverse. While we wait to learn which party will form government, it's instructive to ponder what it did wrong.

By all the rules of federal politics, Labor should have romped home. The rules say first-term governments get an extension to finish proving their worth. They say governments get tossed out after they've allowed the economy to bomb, not after they've seemingly avoided a recession. They also say voters distinguish between federal and state.

But one rule has stood up: oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. This disaster for Labor is its own fault.

Labor has been a remarkably timid government. Saturday's failure could make it even more so, but that would be fatal. Similarly, the conclusion Labor's reversal was caused just by a bad election campaign would be delusional.

No, if Labor wants to learn from its drubbing it needs to draw the obvious lesson: voters punished it for its lack of principles. Those who still voted for it did so with no enthusiasm and many registered their protest by turning to the Greens.

The great paradox of politics is that though voters hate change and hip-pocket pain, they want to be led by people with convictions and the courage of them.

First Kevin Rudd and then Julia Gillard were too conscious of the former and oblivious to the latter.

When the going got tough, Rudd threw overboard the economic reform that, along with rolling back the WorkChoices false reform, had been at the centre of his case for election: introduction of an emissions trade scheme.

The end of Rudd's remarkably long honeymoon with the electorate can be dated to his decision to give up on climate change rather than fight for its approval by a joint sitting following a double dissolution.

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Even those relieved to be free of a ''great big new tax'' were shocked by such a cowardly repudiation of one of Labor's core values.

Sensing this, the Liberals immediately switched from criticising the scheme to criticising Labor's abandonment of its ''greatest moral challenge''.

When Gillard deposed Rudd and set about getting the government back on track she had an opportunity to redeem the position to some extent, but again Labor's lack of conviction let it down. She toyed with taking tentative steps towards a carbon price, but in the end decided on a gimmick the public instantly saw through: the 150-person citizens' assembly. The end of Gillard's own brief honeymoon can be dated to that gutless decision.

But Labor's loss of principles extends beyond its loss of core belief in the need for reform. It also involves standards of acceptable behaviour in public life. It's now clear many voters were repelled by Labor's ruthless treatment of Rudd.

No policy reform principles and no personal principles turned out to be a deadly combination. Gillard stands revealed as little more than a careerist. Such people never endear themselves to the electorate.

Labor should dispense with the unprincipled Sussex Street thugs who were behind-the-scenes urgers on every major false step it made in its first term.

It was they who (acting behind Gillard and Wayne Swan) persuaded Rudd to abandon his climate change commitment, they who staged his beheading in a way that offended so many Labor supporters, and they who advised Gillard to rush to an election while her honeymoon lasted, when she should have allowed more dust to settle and given voters more time to get to know her.

These are the same geniuses who've delivered the debacle of the Carr-Iemma-Rees-Keneally New South Wales government (which itself contributed to Gillard's drubbing). They're uncomprehending bunglers of the first order.

Labor must abandon its obsession with controlling the 24-hour news cycle.

The spin doctors kept Rudd in control of the news for the best part of three years, but where did that get Labor in the end?

Apparatchik Labor's lack of convictions saps it of the will to fight for needed but controversial reforms; the 24-hour spin doctors' dark arts sap it of the ability to fight.

It's a snare and a delusion. Senior ministers get so used to relying on media stunts and emotional button-pushing that their ability to explain and defend complicated policies atrophies.

That Labor ended up on the defensive over its enviable economic performance shows how badly it was served by its media minders.

Their stock in trade is always to change the subject, never to stand and fight; to bamboozle, never to educate.

Labor's Hollow Men period has brought it disaster. Time to recover some values.

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