Della Bosca does Beazley a favour

Not that anyone advocates, or would run, a campaign that is all negative. The negatives are concentrated in the advertising, and are often cloaked as positives – e.g. a promise to put more police on the beat implicitly draws attention to your opponent’s failure to do so. Policy and policy promotion is still important, particularly at a grass-roots level. It gives basic credibility without which a negative campaign cannot bite.

Positive campaigns also have the function of making your campaign a large target and allowing the other side to campaign against you. So not only is positive campaigning a bad way of selling your own political product, but it gives the others a better chance at selling theirs.

This is a given that is as old as politics. Machiavelli documented it, and in modern Australian history, arguably only Gough Whitlam has won a federal election with a positive campaign. Certainly Menzies always campaigned against something, and Malcolm Fraser’s were always distinguished by a last week splurge on heavy negative television advertising. John Hewson’s Fightback! was a positive campaign, and it delivered Paul Keating an election he should never have won.

Most of us in the political process find this unpalatable – who doesn’t want to be loved – but you accept it for the reason that if you don’t, you will never have the opportunity to put any of your beloved policies into practice.

If Beazley wins the next election it will not be because electors believe that he is the greatest, but because they feel it is time for Howard to go. If people having Della Bosca’s belief in the power of positive campaigning were to run Beazley’s campaign, Howard would be more likely to survive.

Of course, the other reason Beazley is lucky is because Della Bosca made his mistake now. Despite the hyperventilated broadsheet and tabloid paragraphs, this is not a "disaster". Most Australians would be lucky to be able to spell Della Bosca and would be more likely to think it was that little caff down the corner, rather than the name of an ALP operative. It is not going to worry them what he thinks, if indeed it even registers with them. However, had he been party president for some time, or had it occurred in the middle of an election campaign, that would have been different. Besides, while Peter Costello is gleefully quoting Della Bosca, his words can just as easily by used against the government. Is Costello about to announce that in the next election campaign he will seek to impose a GST on food because Della Bosca says he should? If he doesn’t he is fencing with a buttoned foil.

Now the ALP has two good alternatives. They can leave the gregarious Jones there as a symbol of the knowledge nation, or they can go for a fresh face. If I were them, I think I would be choosing a woman (a group which tends on average to vote conservative) and preferably one from an outlying state, probably Queensland, where they need to do well. That would provide the right positive symbolism on which to build the next campaign. Even if they go for the anonymous Mr Sword, at least he is unlikely to try to interfere with the current course of ALP campaigning. Beazley should have a smile on his face. Better to blow a gasket during qualifying than one lap before the checkered flag.