What’s wrong with the Labor Party?

In fact, they suggest, Labor would have lost more seats in 2004 if it wasn’t for an unintentional ethnic gerrymander that spread just enough of these voters across a number of key marginal electorates.

The precise truth of this claim that Labor has been turned into an ethnic ghetto is difficult to determine. But while fear of interest rate rises may have swung the most votes in the 2004 election, I don’t think there’s any question that it did so against a background of a long-term trend of ethnic re-alignment between the parties.

Labor, the researchers claim, in so many words, is losing the “white working-class vote”, and they seek their explanation in Labor’s continuing identification with high levels of migration, ethnic branch-stacking and inner-city cosmopolitanism in general.

Are these right wing claims correct? Perhaps, but only partially.

For instance, Labor seems to always go out of its way to appear economically conservative - much to the annoyance of Barry Jones and others. Under Mark Latham it made a serious attempt to go after the aspirational vote. The party is definitely corrupted by branch stacking. That doesn’t seem to affect its vote at the state level, but it does mean its candidates sometimes have less appeal to middle Australia.

Perhaps the real answer is that despite the best efforts of Labor to appear economically responsible and moderate in all things, countering these perceptions is beyond its current power.

The critique from the Canberra press gallery

Then there’s the critique from the Canberra press gallery. Let’s remember, for most mainstream political journalists politics isn’t a clash of ideologies or grand systems; it’s a passing parade of human folly, understood by reference to one big idea - self-interest: the self-interest of politicians and of voters.

To them Labor’s most recent failures come down to three things:

• Mark Latham’s unpopularity;
• Labor’s dominance at the state level; and
• general economic wellbeing.

The first is slightly problematic. It seems obvious now that Mark Latham was never going to cut it as an alternative prime minister. He was perhaps just too scary. I can tell you, as his speechwriter, he scared the hell out of me. And when contrasted to the solid John Howard, its obvious most would trust Howard to manage the economy and be in charge in a national crisis.

But this wasn’t so apparent at the time, and it’s what people said about John Howard once as well - when he opposed Asian immigration and opposed Nelson Mandela’s release from gaol in the 1980s.

For much of his time as Labor Leader, Latham’s personal polling was relatively high. He certainly gave a sense of hope to people on the Labor side as someone with the right stuff to take on John Howard.