Faultlines and failures.

Having changed leaders and embracing the clarion call for 'generational change' not only of its own parliamentary party but also of the government, the Australian Labor Party's defeat at the hands of John Howard's Coalition in the 2004 federal election has been widely construed as a bitter set-back for the Labor cause.

Such reactions overlook several mitigating factors: the Labor failure at the national level stands in stark contrast to its successes in state and territory politics and, as far as the national two-party vote is concerned, Labor's 2004 defeat is by no means its worst ever result.

By the same token, a closer inspection of the discernible trends in the national vote indicate some major faultlines in both the way the national leadership conducted the 2004 campaign and in the nature of the Labor vote generally. If Mark Latham is to remain party leader, and if Latham and his colleagues wish to make a serious challenge to the Coalition's hold on government in the next election, some of these faults need to be observed and acknowledged lest they re-occur at subsequent elections.

Two major features of the 2004 vote are immediately apparent. First, the Latham-led Labor Party failed to convince voters in outer-metropolitan electorates that it could displace the Coalition's ability to deliver stable and incremental government during a period of great uncertainty. Voters in these electorates are hypersensitive to notions of 'good governance', although the way these voters perceive good government is very different from, say, those intellectuals or former diplomatic and military leaders still smarting from the prominence of the 'children overboard' affair in the 2001 election or the dubious grounds on which Australia joined the United States and the 'coalition of the willing' in launching war on Iraq.

For voters in the marginal seats, good government is understood as incremental and careful decision-making in which restraint is exercised over the nature of programs proposed and the amount of funding to be allocated to them. Voters in the marginal seats have a tendency to view Labor as a 'high tax' party that eschews incrementalism for grand visions and major programs. Such a view may be axiomatic and, when compared with the way the Bob Hawke-led Labor Government ran until it was comprehensively subverted by Paul Keating, fails to recognise that Labor, too, can be incremental and careful in government.

But herein lies the rub. Swinging voters perceive Labor not so much by the Hawke record, but rather by the contribution made by the prime ministerships of Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating. And while Whitlam and, to a lesser extent, Keating figure as heroes to Labor partisans, these prime ministers are viewed by swinging voters as the personification of everything threatening about Labor activism, including a propensity to place politics ahead of economics in policy-making and an inability to preside over economic stability. So, while Labor romantics pine for the vision and stature of Whitlam and the acid humor and anti-Tory partisanship of Keating, swinging voters tend to view both prime ministers as being personally responsible for unstable government and poor economic management. It does not help the contemporary Labor cause when its parliamentary leader leads the charge to further romanticise Whitlam and when it is reported in the press that, during the campaign, he regularly took counsel from Paul Keating. If they want to be electorally successful, future Labor leaders will have to accept that the Australian electorate views past Labor prime ministers in ways very different to the romanticism of Labor partisans. The next generation of Labor leaders will have to be weaned off the Whitlam legend.

Future Labor strategists will also have to develop a more realistic appreciation of the nature of the Australian electorate generally, and of the importance of non-metropolitan electorates in particular. Of the twelve most marginal seats that Labor theoretically needed to win ahead of the 2004 election, six were non-metropolitan divisions. According to the electoral 'pendulum', a theoretically uniform five per cent swing against the Howard Government would have given Labor 24 seats, 12 of which would have been regional and rural electorates. Regional electorates were, and are, central to Australian election outcomes. Yet, far from seeking to secure their support, the Latham-led national ALP appeared to embark upon a strategy of deliberately antagonising regional and rural voters, particularly with its approach to environmental conservation. The consequences of the form and nature of Latham's 'Tasmanian old growth forests' policy have been widely canvassed and don't need repeating here. What is interesting to note, however, is the way in which the Latham campaign resonated with previously expressed concerns by students of the Party that Labor has become overly inner-city and Melbourne/Sydney-centric in its outlook and approach. Latham's silly conservation policy announcement was designed to curry favour with 'green voters' who, as any analyst knows, tend to be clustered in inner city electorates that are ultra-safe either for Labor or the Liberals. They also tend to be clustered in Melbourne and Sydney.

The task for Labor, however, was to find ways of redressing the representational imbalance that sees the Coalition so dominant in states like South Australia, Western Australia and, especially, Queensland. Given Labor's failure to make inroads in these states (indeed, the imbalance in Western Australia and Queensland has worsened), and given evidence of big swings against Labor among its core blue-collar constituency, it is clear that Latham's campaign could not have been more ill-directed.

The 2004 election result suggest that Labor's defeat being due to more than simplistic notions that the Party was the victim of a Howard Government 'scare campaign' on interest rates or the idea that a slightly stronger effort at countering negative perceptions about Labor's ability to manage the economy might have produced a different result.

The 2004 result serves to remind that there are some faultlines running through Labor's relationship with the electorate. Labor leaders clearly need to be mindful of the conservative nature of the Australian electorate, particularly in states outside of New South Wales and Victoria. They also need to be mindful of the delicate balance that exists between the Party's blue-collar and white-collar/post-materialist core constituencies, for the alienation of either constituency can have a deleterious effect on Labor's ability to win seats in which such constituencies can be found. This is particularly true of Labor's core blue-collar constituency, for it tends to be the electoral base from which the Party can launch campaigns to win regional seats.

Mr Latham ran an extremely poor campaign and must bear responsibility for the 2004 defeat. Latham might thank his lucky stars that the result was not much worse. The success of Labor candidates in a handful of marginal government seats offset the deterioration of Labor's representational standing in Tasmania, Western Australia and Queensland. Labor's poor approach also led to a strong right-of-centre performance in the Senate, although the consequences of the Howard government having an absolute majority in the upper house (due in no small way to Labor's pathetic overall performance in Queensland) probably has graver implications for the traditional balance-of-power-holding minor parties such as the Greens and the Australian Democrats.

There have been worse defeats for Labor over the years, but the fact that this defeat occurred under the direction of one of the more prominent members of Labor's 'next generation' bodes ill for the Party's future.

Nick Economou is Senior Lecturer in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University.

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