Much has been made (to no great effect) of Kevin Rudd’s record in the Goss government. However, little has been written about Wayne Swan’s contribution to Labor’s historic election victory in 1989 against a long term, tired and discredited conservative government.
Graham Young, at his blog Ambit Gambit, has astutely picked up on the contemporary resonances of the lock step campaign coordinated by Swan from head office and Rudd from Goss’ office in Queensland in 1989. As he argues, the reconciliation between Rudd and Swan may be an underexamined but crucial factor in the electoral politics of 2007.
Queensland takeover? I’ve just been watching coverage of the Labor Day march in Brisbane, and while you couldn’t miss Rudd, you also couldn’t miss Wayne Swan walking one row back. One of Rudd’s most critical acts after he won the leadership was his reconciliation with Wayne Swan. This reassembled two of the crucial pieces of the team that pushed Wayne Goss to victory in Queensland in 1989. A campaign that was characterised by almost flawless execution of “search and destroy” rhetorical exercises.
That’s the sort of rhetoric that is being applied against the Howard government, and it’s working.
It might be fashionable among the political class to scoff at the number of times Labor figures repeat the phrase “Mr Howard is a clever politician�.
But the art of a highly disciplined message driven campaign is to repeat endlessly lines which reinforce perceptions already in the voters’ minds. Swan has been saying, over and over again, since he became Shadow Treasurer that “Costello is the highest taxing Treasurer in history�.
This bolsters the belief, already demonstrated by negligible budget bounces in previous years, among voters that tax cuts are just their due. It knocks the winds out of Costello’s sails before he even figures out how many sandwiches and milkshakes the battlers are to be presented with.
If, as I suspect to be the case, Latham was the only thing standing between Labor and victory in 2004, this election year might have more parallels with 1996 than any of the subsequent polls.
After Dawkins effectively gave voters the finger with a range of indirect tax rises in the 1994 budget, when Keating had put most of his campaign eggs in the anti-GST basket, nothing Paul Keating could have said would have made any difference to the 1996 result.
That dynamic might be at play this year. IR backflips reinforce voter cynicism, and so do the profligate measures already leaked – all obviously targeted to particular electoral demographics.
Rudd has already discounted any budget bounce by predicting it. But it wouldn’t surprise me if the five month trend continues. If it does, Howard will have learned that Queensland has some very clever politicians.
I think the difference this time is that Rudd and Swan are planning to win while the Tories are throwing mud and waiting for a miracle cure to their electoral problems.
And not before time. The whole idea that any bunch of yokels and numpties could knock Howard over was always
crapmisguided and threatened to put AustralianLabor(TM) on the same path to irrelevance as the moderate liberals within the Liberal Party.‘After Dawkins effectively gave voters the finger with a range of indirect tax rises in the 1994 budget, when Keating had put most of his campaign eggs in the anti-GST basket, nothing Paul Keating could have said would have made any difference to the 1996 result.’
I thought it was the LAW tax cuts that floored Paul Keating. Everybody says so. Or was the claw-back after the tax cuts what really happened? People really do seem to regard tax cuts as their due.
Speaking personally, I tend to agree with the analysis of Labor’s 1996 put forward by Rodney Cavalier in his chapter in Clive Bean et al (1996, eds), The Politics of Retribution: the 1996 Australian Federal Election. Cavalier’s argument is that voters had been ready to change government from as early as 1988, and were dissuaded from doing so by a combination of Labor being able to find non-economic issues on which it could outbid the Coalition in successive elections (notably the environment and Medicare) and the Coalition scaring the horses with overt extreme policies (notably Fightback! in 1993, and proposed changes to Medicare). These factors weren’t at work in 1996. Of course Dawkins’s indirect tax increases in 1994 (the year after winning an election by beating Hewson about the head on an indirect tax issue) also wouldn’t have helped Labor.
Apart from that, I agree with Mark’s post.
Lachlan Connor, Independent Senate candidate, may well have some thoughts on this http://www.grods.com/
In response to Megan and Paul, yep the L A W tax cuts were also a factor - both were reneging on election promises which were central to Labor’s re-election in 1993.
Cavalier may be right, but the polls for Labor only really went into freefall shortly after the 1990 victory - which along with Hewson’s accession to the leadership, was what put pressure on Hawke.
I think at any rate 1993 was the classic election where the government was heading for a caning, but the personality of the opposition leader was a major factor holding people back from shifting their vote.
I think the same was true in 2004. Crean may not have been able to win, but Beazley had he defeated Latham may have been able to. Another contender (Rudd, Gillard, Tanner, Swan) would have been the best shot as one thing Latham had going for him was the end of overt party squabbling which would have been less likely to have happened had Beazley succeeded Crean.
I also think it was as much Hewson’s persona as FightBack (particularly after some of the electorally appalling edges were taken off it in late 92) that defeated him - I know from involvement in the campaign targetting this was certainly as much the goal of the Labor strategy as the GST.
Mark, my reading of the 1993 election, as someone outside the ALP, was that Medicare also cropped up as the campaign went on in a way which may have decisively damaged the Coalition. My basic analysis is that Hewson and Fightback! were sufficient to enable Labor to turn what would have been a massive defeat into a close-run thing, but something extra was needed to put Labor over the line, amd Medicare was it. It was also my impression at the time that the Coalition and the private health funds did themselves no favours by running as hard as they did on, respectively, the Coalition’s proposed alternative to the Medicare status quo and the private health funds’ TV commercials bucketing the public health system. What did Labor strategists think about this at the time and in their post mortems?
I can’t really answer that Paul from personal knowledge as I was just a footsoldier at the time. I do know that we were all urged to show to Hewson’s rally because the perception was that he would end up looking like a nutzoid ranting and waving his arms around if there were protesters (he did) and I think that his attacks on renters, etc, and general air of monomania was being exploited as a big negative.
I’m sure you’re right about Medicare though.
In 2004 people were looking for a reason to give the government the flick, and Latham managed to dissuade them, simply by being Latham. This time, there is even a stronger reason to give the faux populists the flick, and it is nice Mr Rudd and his political ‘partner’ Ms Gillard in charge, who are, as far as one can see, reasonably sane and markedly more contemporary than the mixture of dinosaurs and marine predators that now constitute the current federal government. This time the ‘mob’, as that friend of the people Howard calls the electorate, are ready not so much with baseball bats, as with fly whisks.
Nice observation about Team Rudd and Swan.
Must admit I’ve been curious about how they are getting along in the backrooms. It is apparent that Rudd will do and say whatever is necessary to win. And Swan is a clever election strategist too, although he nearly tripped over with that brown bag affair in 2001 (of course it contained dirty money!). Swan’s got plenty of front and spine, I just wish he’d grow a neck.
So together they are a formidable team, endlessly repeating the same banal catch-phrases, and staying on message all the way to the ballot box.
Nobody breathe.
Standard Goebbels - all pollies do it.
Whoever burned down the Palm Island police station has my vote for PM.
I think the difference this time is that Costello is doing some strategic withholding of certain sweeties until after the election (if I heard correctly).