What’s wrong with the Labor Party?

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.