Labor's only realistic path to government might be one that requires some serious political rewiring of its formidable political machine.
If you think you’ve had a disappointing 2019, spare a thought for the “True Believers”, the politicians, staffers, and paid-up members of the Australian Labor Party. Many of these good people spent the first few months of 2019 luxuriating in the certainty of imminent victory, and the remainder wallowing in a pit of regret and recrimination as the cold hard reality of a brutal electoral shellacking slowly sunk in.
In the 1980s, Labor’s average percentage of the primary vote was in the high 40s. By the end of the 90s it was down to a 40.8 per cent average. In the 2000s the average slipped into the high 30s, and as we close out the 2010s, federal Labor’s average primary vote over the past decade has dropped to 34.8 per cent. This is Labor’s worst decade since the 1930s, when a civil war split the Labor vote in two.
Watching Labor struggle over the past decade has been like watching an industrious housekeeper try to make a queen-sized bed with a fitted sheet for a double. Every time Labor stretches the sheet to reach a required electoral corner, the opposite electoral corner becomes exposed. The problem is not the housekeeper; it’s the diminished dimensions of Labor’s fundamental political appeal.
Labor has effectively snookered itself into a position where – short of waiting for Coalition governments to occasionally self-immolate – its only realistic pathway to consistently forming governments in the 2020s is to work with the moderate minor parties and independents sitting on the ever-growing crossbench.
As the number of seats on this list grows, the political opportunity grows with it. Like the housekeeper with the undersized bedsheet, it would be a fool’s errand for Labor to attempt to win these seats on its own. What it made in one corner, it would quickly lose in the other. Labor should protect its political patch, not radically reposition.
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