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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


When the Tampa hove into view and the Coalition’s rating surged by around 10 percentage points, many pundits wrote the ALP off. They were wrong. The government won with only 51.03 per cent of the vote – a win, but with a very slim margin.

At the time I argued that the effect on voting intentions of the terrorist threat would wane, but that Beazley needed to find a point of difference from the government on the refugee issue. During the course of the campaign I also argued that domestic issues would win through over international issues like refugees and terrorism. In retrospect those assessments seem to have been correct.

As we found in our focus group research, the ALP’s stance on refugees disillusioned many of its left-wing supporters. While they were voting Labor with their second preference, they were not enthusiastically supporting it. Labor lost its talkers and this had a negative effect on its vote. At the same time, it didn’t seem to be winning any friends among One Nation prospects. They didn’t believe that Beazley would stick to the policy if he won the election, so weren’t buying the cheap imitation when they could have the original. This attitude also seemed to transfer to the question of election promises. Many in the middle liked what Beazley was promising, but didn’t think he would be able to deliver. With each group the refugee decision was the catalyst or the reason for their position.

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Linton Crosby, the Liberal Party Federal Director, has said that Beazley lost because he wasn’t a "conviction" politician – in other words, he lacked guts. Supporters of Beazley say this isn’t so, and that on the refugee issue he did exactly what he believed was right. The argument runs that Beazley cares just as much about border security as Howard. In favour of that argument is Beazley’s life-long private and professional obsession with war; and the fact that it was the ALP that originally instituted the refugee detention camps. But while it is convenient to personalise parties as people and to talk of Howard and Beazley, in fact elections are contests between organisations. No single person makes all the decisions. On this issue the ALP shilly-shallied. Some members wanted to take a different tack to the government, yet the whole eventually didn’t. The public sensed a lack of institutional commitment, so it doesn’t really matter what Beazley’s personal view might have been.

Could Beazley have taken a different position from the Government and survived? Yes, he could. As Green’s Leader Bob Brown suggested on Terry Lane’s The National Interest the day after the election, a tough-but-not-as-tough policy could have kept faith with the left as well as being strong enough to appeal to the middle ground.

Part of Labor’s pitch could also have been a demand that refugee policy be bipartisan. This would have had the effect of raising the suspicion that this was yet another version of the "non-core" promise – was it a policy that the government really believed in, or would it abandon it once it had fulfilled its political purpose?

The other effect of giving blanket endorsement to the Government’s policy was that the ALP dealt themselves out of the issue altogether. The obvious inadequacy and expense of the "Pacific Solution" couldn’t be raised because it was the ALP’s solution as well as the government’s.

Since the election the critics of the campaign strategy have been saying that the problem was that the ALP didn’t get its policies out early enough. They evoke Gough Whitlam’s 1972 election campaign and claim that he won by educating the electorate. That strategy would have delivered an even larger loss in the last election.

The ALP has a great sense of clan loyalty, but the elevation of Gough Whitlam to the highest point in their pantheon of campaigners is ludicrous and a sign of baby-boomer nostalgia rather than hard-headed assessment. Gough’s record as a campaigner speaks for itself. Against a government that had been continuously in power for 23 years headed by Billy McMahon, arguably Australia’s worst ever Prime Minister, Whitlam could only manage a majority of 9 seats. This contrasts poorly with the 55 seat majority won by Malcolm Fraser three years later when he bundled Whitlam out.

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One of the problems with the Whitlam strategy is that the opposition deliberately makes itself the issue as it asks people to endorse its own agenda. More people vote against issues than vote for your opponent. A good campaign, directly or indirectly, keeps the focus on your opponent’s weaknesses, persuading electors to vote for you as a consequence of voting against them. Holding detailed policies back until the last moment is a necessary part of any Opposition’s campaign strategy as it leaves the Government’s performance as the only tangible thing to be discussed.

The ALP executed this part of the strategy well, by keeping most substantive policy releases until the election period, but their guile deserted them in the election campaign in two areas. While voters disliked the government’s domestic policies and preferred the ALP’s, they were more at home with the government’s position on the asylum seekers. As there was always going to be more dramatic media coverage of the war and the refugee issue than there was of domestic issues, the ALP needed to talk almost exclusively about domestic issues and almost ostentatiously ignore international ones, to cut through the noise created by international events.

They didn’t manage to do that. Beazley kept being drawn into the overseas agenda, and instead of saying words to the effect of "Well, what you are asking me is about the last three weeks, but I want to talk about the next three years. What is really important in this election is X domestic issue," he tried to match Howard as the international statesman.

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.

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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