What’s wrong with the Labor Party?

The second explanation is a strong one - that people are happy to vote Liberal federally to balance the power of Labor at the state level.

This feeling can be for two reasons. First - a sort of “keep the bastards honest by denying them total power” strategy. And second - because it suits what people are after at each level.

The Americans have a good way of putting this. They say politics can be divided between the “mummy” issues - the soft social issues like health and education that are the responsibility of the states - and the “daddy” issues - like security and economic management that are the responsibility of the Commonwealth. Labor’s better at being mummy and the Coalition’s better at being daddy.

I think, though, the third Press Gallery explanation for Labor’s loss - that people were satisfied with the economy and were unwilling to risk change - is the strongest.

I can tell you from personal experience and access to high-quality polling that the majority of people don’t care about politics at all - except when it affects their finances. This is the politically uninterested vote. But they don’t just vote - because they’re in marginal electorates they largely determine the outcome.

Labor’s Shadow Treasurer, Wayne Swan, has recently released a book about the distribution of wealth in Australia and its impact on our political system. It contains some new research about the 2004 federal election that suggests there was a direct relationship between electorates with a high proportion of mortgagees and large swings to the Coalition.

Ranking electorates by the proportion of households with a mortgage, reveals a stark trend. For the bottom 20 per cent electorates, where just 18 per cent have a mortgage, the average swing was just 0.5 per cent to the Coalition. In contrast, the top 20 per cent of electorates, where 38 per cent have a mortgage, the average swing to the Coalition was 3.1 per cent.

This suggests voters cared most about maintaining their hard won affluence. And it’s probably why voters responded so well to Howard’s claim that the election was a referendum about who you trust to keep interest rates down.

The analysis by the sociologists

Sociologists - often amateur ones like me - have provided a different, long-term perspective on the decline of Labor’s primary vote. In broad terms it can be summed up like this: “The blue collar, working class, union-member base that created and sustained the Labor Party for a century is disappearing.”

Consider some facts:

• when Bob Hawke won government in 1983, 57 per cent of all Australian employees were members of unions. Today the figure is 23 per cent - many of them middle-class public sector workers;
• more Australians are now self-employed than are union members. And many of these are blue collar workers who would have been the backbone of the ALP a generation ago;
• in 1983 35 per cent of Australians completed 12 years of schooling. Today the figure is 82 per cent;
• in 1983 350,000 Australians attended university. Today the figure is 730,000 and falling.

Now partly this is Labor’s own doing. By expanding access to tertiary education, deregulating industrial relations and globalising the economy, the Hawke and Keating governments created the new middle class, began the destruction of its own base and created a natural constituency for the Liberal Party.

So that’s what’s wrong with the Labor Party.