Rudd's victory for the true believers

Third, we come to the ethnic vote. Like single mothers, many members of non-Anglo Celtic ethnic communities are also low paid and potentially vulnerable members of the working class - an issue in Bennelong as mainland Chinese workers added to the Hong Kong small businesspeople whose entrepreneurial outlook Howard had claimed an affinity with. In other words, WorkChoices impacted on them too.

However, in previous elections, Howard had also been much more careful about the non Anglo-Celtic, ethnic vote. In 1996 he reassured minority ethnic organisations that he didn’t see them as elite “special interests” - only to slash funding to those organisations when he gained office. His 2001 election slogan: “We decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come” cleverly appealed both to Hansonites and to existing immigrants by suggesting that they were the desired newcomers.

By his final term however Howard had become convinced that he had won the culture wars. Consequently, he became more explicit in privileging his version of Anglo-Celtic ethnic identity, Anglo-Celtic values and Christianity. The Lindsay anti-Muslim leaflet dirty tricks debacle just cemented a perception that the Liberal Party was now hostile to the values of Australian multiculturalism that it had once helped to establish.

The contrast with a Mandarin-speaking Labor Leader with a multiracial family who wants Australian schoolchildren to be Asia-literate was only too apparent and probably helped to cost Howard his own seat.

Of course, electorates with high proportions of blue collar workers, single mums and people from non English-speaking backgrounds played only a partial role in Howard’s defeat.

Rudd convinced voters he was a safe pair of hands who could manage the economy. He reshaped the economic debate to convince voters that working families weren’t better off in terms of everyday costs. Other important issues ranged from Broadband and the role of the youth vote to climate change (with Greens preferences being crucial). Rudd will no doubt believe that his social conservatism on issues ranging from Indigenous affairs and asylum seekers to same-sex marriage also helped to prevent Labor being wedged (although the analysis here suggests that the situation is more complex than he acknowledges).

Above all, the Liberals’ campaign was woeful compared with ones in previous years and Howard was clearly past his prime as a politician. Nonetheless, the It’s Time factor went beyond a Coalition government that had been in office too long and had no plan for the future. It went beyond Rudd’s exhortation in his victory speech that it was now time to roll up the sleeves and get to work.

Undoubtedly this will be a socially conservative Labor government in many respects (although much less conservative than the Howard government). It will also be a fiscally conservative one that will want to keep business on side. Yet, it is also a government that was elected on the sort of broad social democratic coalition first pioneered by Gough Whitlam and cemented by Paul Keating. Hopefully Rudd will remember that. For, in this election, Howard’s neo-liberal strategy of splitting Labor’s broad support base finally failed to work.