Published: 20 May 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Then there was the US-style election rally two days out from the poll - hours before Hawke’s death was announced by his wife Blanche d'Alpuget - in Blacktown, where Gough Whitlam had launched Labor’s successful It’s Time campaign in 1972. The ghost of Gough hovered over that rally. It was a time for change in 1972 and now, in 2019, it was time for change again.
Just why Shorten would want to tell Australians two days out from the poll that he is Labor’s modern day Whitlam is unfathomable. For a start, he has none of Whitlam’s strengths - his wit, his oratorical skills, his ability to inspire young Australians with a vision for a new Australia that had been stuck in the years of complacency and mediocrity that came with decades of coalition government.
And then there was the fact that the Whitlam government, for all its reformist successes, ended in a landslide defeat in 1975, wholly discredited as a government of competent economic management. Given that Scott Morrison’s campaign was all about convincing Australians that Labor could not manage the economy, the Blacktown rally and the conjuring of the ghost of Whitlam was a big - and revealing - mistake.
To suggest, as Shorten did in those final days of the campaign that he was somehow Hawke’s successor as a Labor leader and that he was channeling Whitlam when it came to big ideas and big reforms was ridiculous. He was neither Hawke’s successor when it came to his relationship with Australians, nor did he have Whitlam’s vision and courage, a commitment to either “crash through or crash” in his determination to change the country. He was a product of Labor’s factions, educated in Labor politics as a union official, a politician who spoke the class warfare language of old Labor, a politician who, unlike Hawke, could not transcend his union and political past.
A friend who is active in the Labor Party texted this message after it became clear that the election was lost: “If it turns out that it was about Shorten, then the lesson is clear: never choose a candidate who represents the logic of the party but not the logic of the country. Like Hillary Clinton.”
Like Clinton’s campaign in 2016, Shorten’s campaign was full of policy announcements that he could not manage to fully explain basically because he found it so hard to place them within a coherent argument for change. Like Clinton, Shorten had the policies but found it impossible to paint a picture of the Australia he wanted to re-shape.
He was unable to explain and advocate for the proposed changes to negative gearing and in dividend imputation tax benefits for self-funded retirees who paid no tax. These were not tax increases as Scott Morrison claimed but were changes that nevertheless were going to take away benefits - some would call them hand-outs - from significant numbers of Australians.
Shorten’s constant references to the “big end of town” no doubt offended many people who did not consider themselves wealthy. This was an example of the sort of language used by “old” Labor that would not work in 2019 and indeed, it was the sort language that Bob Hawke, for instance, never used.
And so Shorten could not counter the relentless sloganising of Morrison who repeated over and over again: Bill Shorten is after your money. It was not an empty slogan. In a sense Shorten and his team did want to take away benefits from some people. This is a difficult thing to explain and advocate for in an election campaign and clearly Shorten was not up for the challenge.
Then there was climate change that in the end, probably, cost Labor the election. It certainly lost Labor Queensland. What was wrong with Labor’s climate change policies was that they were not bold, certainly not bold enough to address what Shorten, in the final days of the campaign, described as a climate change emergency. There was a clear disjunction between the claim that climate change was the biggest challenge facing Australia and the world and the rather tentative policies to address it that Shorten was proposing.
His problem on climate change was best illustrated by the fact that he could not come down one way or the other on the proposed Adani mine, a terrible position to take which in the end did not save Labor from being routed in those Queensland regional seats where the mine was a major issue. Is there any way Hawke would have taken this non-position on the Adani mine, been too fearful to be forthright about what he really believed, that the mine, within the context of addressing the challenges of climate change, made neither environmental nor economic sense?
Of course, Morrison deserves some credit for the way he campaigned, for his relentless discipline, for his ability to successfully erase the recent history of his government and thus disappear the Liberal Party and make the election all about him and Shorten.
But in the end, Shorten was the wrong person to lead Labor when the party was advocating major reforms, major change. Perhaps the “right” person is not there in Labor’s parliamentary ranks and anyway, perhaps it’s not just down to Shorten, this shocking and unexpected loss. A loss of this magnitude suggests that Labor’s policies did not adequately address the concerns and anxieties of many Australians, especially Australians in regional Australia.
The fact that Labor picked up large swings in wealthy and traditionally safe Liberal seats like Higgins and Kooyong in Melbourne and registered large swings against it in regional Queensland illustrates the size and complexity of the challenge facing the Party. Shorten - and his very talented front bench team - were not up for that challenge. Is there a leader and a team in the parliamentary Labor Party that is?
Photo: Bill Shorten after conceding defeat on Saturday night. Credit: AAP/Lukas Coch
