Despite victory, the booers and hissers spoil the party

Late on election night I found myself in front of a television screen among a group of newly joined ALP members, the kinds of folk who pop up in these electoral circumstances the way buttercups appear in a field after spring rain.

They were cheering, booing and hissing, of course, roughly in the manner university students do when they first discover the joys of political involvement over a flagon of rough red. Except that these people had left their uni days behind some time in the 1970s.

John Howard's dignified concession speech elicited a torrent of boos that made his words almost inaudible. Julia Gillard's gracious tribute to the now ex-PM was met with sullen grumbling.

By far the greatest excitement, though, was reserved for Maxine McKew, the star ALP candidate who is the new member for Bennelong.

McKew is an intelligent, focused and personable politician with a big future. But it was hard to resist the impression that she appealed less for her personal and political qualities than on account of what she's taken to stand for.

You know what I mean. ABC-reared and raised. Socially concerned and culturally sophisticated. From the right part of town. Our kind of girl.

The media coverage of the election in McKew's home town of Sydney reflected some of the same obsessions. The three big seats in town were taken to be Bennelong, Malcolm Turnbull's eastern seat of Wentworth, and Joe Hockey's seat of North Sydney.

It's a focus that says more about the self-obsession of members of the political class than it does about Australian democracy.

In point of fact, the swing in Bennelong was almost slam-bang on the NSW average of 6 per cent. The Liberal vote went down by about 4.5 per cent; the greater part of Labor's increased vote actually came from the Greens, who ran dead.

In North Sydney the swing was less than 5 per cent, and Hockey was never troubled. In Wentworth there was no swing at all. High-profile but accident-prone lawyer George Newhouse was the only Labor candidate in NSW to lead his party backwards.

In short, most of the big stories were not such big stories, truth be told.

By contrast, there were other results, in other, less fashionable parts of town, that were much more telling indications of the country's new electoral landscape.

Yet in a city where most broadsheet journalists rarely travel more than 10km west of the CBD, these results elicited small interest.

The key Labor victory in NSW was clearly the outer-western seat of Lindsay, based on the city of Penrith. That was where the local Liberal Party, in its desperation, was caught handing out flyers inciting racial hatred a few days before the poll.

Here the very low-profile but persistent Labor candidate David Bradbury secured a swing of slightly more than 10 per cent, almost double that in Bennelong. Lindsay is now once again relatively safe Labor territory, after an absence of 11 years.

Macarthur, in the city's outer southwest, recorded an 11 per cent swing to equally low-profile small businessman Nick Bleasdale, who pushed local Liberal identity Pat Farmer right down to the wire in a seat that was supposed to be safe.

Elsewhere in western Sydney the swings were never less than 7 per cent, and often as high as 12 per cent. After a decade of alienation from the ALP, blue-collar outer-suburban Sydney was returning to the Labor fold.

Don't get me wrong. Labor has always been an electoral coalition of interests. There are those who vote Labor to protect the futures of themselves and their families. (For those people, WorkChoices was the key issue, since it spoke to their anxieties about the security of their family life.) And there are those who vote Labor because they identify with a set of social and moral values that they take Labor to embody. Since the baby boomers asserted themselves on the cultural stage in the '70s, these people have become both more numerous and much more visible and audible.

Of course, in practice, there is also a third category: those whose political allegiance is determined by some subtle amalgam of these two instincts.

Most political debate, however, is driven by those who belong to the second of these three categories. These are the kind of Labor people whose parents voted Liberal, and who identified Howard with some kind of reversion to the Australia of their parents' day.

They're the people who in their 50s still cheer, boo and hiss at the TV on election night, like a bunch of perpetual uni students.

A couple of years ago, when Labor looked set to spend another couple of terms in the electoral wilderness, then shadow minister Craig Emerson wrote a searching document for internal party consumption titled Seven Steps along the Mainstream.

Emerson began with the bracing observation that "in the recent past Labor has been at risk of making an unwanted transition from a major political party to a minor one". The public increasingly perceived the party as a socially divisive force "representing noisy minority interest groups at the expense of mainstream Australia".

Yes, that's the same mainstream Australia where people still own Hills hoists, and where they still mow their lawns on Saturday mornings, much as their parents did.

Emerson, Lindsay Tanner and others have been the key thinkers in returning Labor to the political mainstream. Kevin Rudd, for all his political savvy, has been the beneficiary of their revisionism.

Now Labor has plucked the fruit of their labours. Even though the booers and hissers have barely condescended to notice.

But now that Labor has returned to the mainstream, it's even more important that the party moves on. Ordinary Australian families are concerned about their mortgages and their working conditions. But they also expect the new government to take the lead on issues of national significance.

Over 2007 Rudd has been very effective in distancing Labor from the politics of noisy minority interest groups. But in government Australians will expect positive policy directions as well, and Rudd has been hazy about these so far.

Broadband Internet access is not a substitute for schooling or innovation policies. Rescuing the lives of Australians in remote Aboriginal communities will require policy boldness, not the timidity Rudd evinced during the final days of the campaign.

Labor has laid the ghosts of the recent past. It now faces the much bigger task of moving beyond the slogan of "New Leadership" to actual policy leadership. It's not yet clear whether it has sufficient political resources to do so.