Vic Labor MP lets loose on Gillard’s ‘messy, visionless campaign’
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Victorian Socialist Left MP Martin Foley has penned a savage takedown of the ALP’s federal election campaign, saying the twin pillars of Labor’s traditional support base were callously abandoned by a “messy, contradictory and visionless campaign that hoped to fly under the radar of serious policy engagement.” In a 4,500 word excoriation of federal Labor sent yesterday to party activists and titled “The people who believe in things” after Paul Keating’s 1993 election victory speech, Foley lets fly at the Graham Richardson-aping “hard men” of the NSW Right, who he says have become “hollow men”. “The ‘hard men’ have been cut too much slack. Despite their self serving defences of ‘whatever it takes’, the real work in the ALP is now to rebuild…a compelling policy and political framework. The self described ‘hard men’ who need to take responsibility for the National 2010 campaign have been shown to be the ‘hollow men’,” the member for Albert Park and former Australian Services Union state secretary thunders. The stunning post-mortem, obtained by Crikey, rejects Noel Pearson’s recent argument that John Button, as “Banquo’s Ghost”, has been hovering over a bloody scene of Labor’s “lost path”. Instead, Foley quotes another Shakespeare classic, saying that the party is “bound on King Lear’s ‘wheel of fire’ by having to deal with the ‘tears of molten lead’ needed to produce a combination of the visionary and hardnosed political response to re-engage the political ground forsaken.”
The ALP’s dual constituencies — progressive voters and the traditional working class — were both abandoned in the slavish service of shallow focus groups, argues Foley, and leadership and policy ideas were almost entirely lacking. “The easy way out is the low rent, empty approach to politics solely for power’s sake. The approach reached a nadir in the 2010 campaign through abusing the focus group tool to generate lowest common denominator policies that resonated with no-one,” Foley writes. The party’s disastrous campaign was run out of the party’s Sydney headquarters by federal secretary Karl Bitar with special assistance from NSW senator and Labor Right powerbroker Mark Arbib. Incumbent MPs and challengers received most of their talking points from apparatchiks whose chief concern was Western Sydney. The well-regarded Victorian backbencher says HQ ignored internal polling conducted in the run-up to the poll that showed values voters were about to jump ship. He argues their working class allies were also shown short shrift:
Foley says the ALP’s shocking 38% primary vote was a “commentary by voters who had previously supported Labor going elsewhere.” “You don’t lose 14 seats, suffer a 5.4% loss in your primary vote and end up with 38% of the primary vote when people stay with you.” He reserves special opprobrium for Julia Gillard’s off-the-cuff Climate Change Assembly, mirroring Tony Abbott’s lampooning of the PM’s approach. “…the ALP again vacated the values filed on Climate Change. In what until a moment before had been the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’ there was now a need for a citizen’s assembly — presumably with its members getting there in newly replaced clunkers.” Crikey understands that the assembly was greeted with dismay among ALP organisers in progressive inner city seats under threat from the Greens, who believed the policy was cooked up in a panic over potential increases in electricity prices. Foley cites internal polling and an election day Climate Institute survey that found 32% of respondents would have voted Labor if Julia Gillard had proceeded with a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. On asylum seekers, Foley accuses the party of falling into the trap set by John Howard in 2001, with its hardline approach serving only to drive left-leaning voters into Bob Brown’s clutches. He suggests the federal seat of Melbourne could have been won by Cath Bowtell if the party were serious about its progressive credentials. In the ‘what is to be done?’ section, Foley says the party’s headquarters should take a leaf out the Victorian ALP’s playbook who have successfully managed the challenge of marrying Labor’s two strands. He notes that the ALP won two seats from the Coalition in Victoria — McEwen and La Trobe — while the rest the of the country stayed static or went backwards. “The Federal ALP could do a lot worse than look to the model of Victoria to begin the task of rebuilding,” Foley writes, applauding the Brumby government’s staunch commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He says the party should immediately forge a path to political recovery in the key Brumby-led areas of human rights, sustainable economic and population growth. Foley was elected to the Legislative Assembly in a 2007 by-election following the retirement of Bracks-era Deputy Premier John Thwaites and holds Albert Park (on the 2006 election result) by 9.5%. He is expected to easily hold the seat at November’s state poll. On Thursday, the federal ALP will establish a formal post-mortem overseen by ex-premier Bracks and an as-yet unnamed representative of the NSW Right. Yesterday, the prime minister said the review would take in the period after Kevin Rudd’s election in 2007, in addition to the shambolic lead-up to polling day. |
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30 Comments
Seems a fair assessment.
Also with the ever increasing education levels in Australia (who would ususally be progrssive voters), slogans like ‘moving forward’, constant repetitition of midless mantras and no policy engagment whatsever would help either.
The ALP invented the white Australia policy, locking up asylum seekers in the name of politics and so on - where is this progressive party that Foley imagines has ever existed.
I told senior ALP figures in 2009 after the boat fire was so badly handled that 1 million feet just left and went to the Greens. I was right wasn’t I but the morons never listen.
Gillard certainly doesn’t care about asylum seekers except as tools to beat up Ruddock, she never advocated to have kids out of detention or any of the so-called progressive things that Foley has imagined she might do because she simply has zero interest.
I listened to Mungo last night with Philip and must get a copy of the election book. He was right on all scores.
For anyone who cares to have a listen online.
Martin Foley was elected on the retirement of Deputy Pemier and Albert Park MP John Thwaites; Rob Hulls became Deputy Premier at that point.
One interesting thing not noted is that in Victoria, NSW and SA the so-called mortgage belt areas swung to the ALP because they didn’t lose their jobs and houses in the downturn thanks to the stimulus (speaking of which do you note that NSW is still using the wretched Craig Mayne and the Herald has reported his words as fact, guess they can’t keep up with reality). It happened in SA in the state election as well because the liberals wanted to cut transport funding.
as for the human rights blurb - yeah right. Doc Evatt co-authored the universal declaration of human rights and the ALP have been ignoring it ever sinse.
Just as we do the convention on the rights of the child ratified by Hawke one year before Gerry Hand invented today’s prisons for asylum seekers. The numbers of tortured children would have anyone else in prison for life but the bastards walk free.
The convenant on civil and political rights, the convention and optional protocol against torture ratified and ignored, the refugee convention is actually enshrined in the migration act and allows for the entry of people without papers and forbids punishment bit.
We ignore it.
The media ignore it and after 2 years of me nagging the ABC they finally featured an international law expert on Lateline last night to get the legalities of things instead of stupid Leigh Sales pandering to the likes of the extremist nut job Ayaat Hirst Ali who lied to get refugee status and thinks the conventions should now be scrapped because they are old. Guy Goodwin-Gill said in 2001 after the Tampa that if our policy was any worse we would be shooting people at the borders.
Ao he soon set that notion of Ali’s right, she is just another ultra right winger lying to the world and slavered on by the west because she says all muslims are evil.
WE have no record on human rights beyond a completely dismal one so I don’t know what Foley thinnks has ever existed because it ain’t the truth.
@Sally. Er, yes.
For one ambrosian moment I thought this was about SA State Treasurer Kevin Foley.
‘Born again: returning to Labor heartland’, type of stuff..
Alas no. Our Foley would only relate to the Labor Heartland……at gunpoint.
Nice one Martin Foley.
Any chance of you having a word with your SA namesake?
Yep I know, wissing into the pind…….
To me the amateur hour antics of the likes “Karl Marks Brothers” (Bitar and Arbib), riding Labor like “A Day At the Races”, threw up (ambiguously) images of some “Nino Culotta”, “They’re a Weird Mob” :-“What would I think I’d like to hear, if I was an average Aussie?” - and turning out “F**k Soup”!
Foley’s manifesto reads like a job application for the 2013 election campaign to be run out of King Street instead of Sussex Street (which wouldn’t be a bad thing).
If the Vic ALP are so good on progressive issues, how come Vic Greens are polling around 17% (the highest in the country) for the November election?
@Dr Strangelove
“If the Vic ALP are so good on progressive issues, how come Vic Greens are polling around 17% (the highest in the country) for the November election?”
desal plant, north-south pipeline, bay dredging, zero public transport network growth, re-hiring private operators for public transport system, proposed $120 million/km rail network expansions, continuing urban sprawl, out of control developers with the minister’s ear, myki ticket system, “fast” rail to regional centres, private prison operators running open loop, billions a year on new freeways, approval for GM canola against the wishes of the vast majority, massive logging of native forests in our catchments at taxpayer expense, letting industry write native forest policy, grand prix etc.
Makes it hard to justify a vote for Labor, but equally difficult to countenance the conservatives. With the “would you rather we gouge out your right eye or your left eye” type choice, any “none-of-the-above” option looks better.
It’s interesting that no one expresses any concern re the manner in which union bosses seem to devote more and more of their time and efforet to moving themselves (and their allies) into political jobs. Is this a positive trend?
Foley is still missing the point just as much as the hollow men did.
What does he think the dull slogans and the citizens’ assembly are all about? Labor has been working to “re-engage with” voters for too long.
But voters don’t want to be “engaged with”. They want to be given reason to believe that the government has a clue what it’s doing and why.
Formulating good policy is not a matter of judging how to entice the most voters and repel the least. Tony Abbott’s $75,000 baby bonus and Julia Gillard’s rail-link pork barrels were both attempts to “engage with” voters which fell flat, because voters are repelled by insincere bribes with no inspiration but marketing strategy behind them.
Formulating good policy is a matter of, “If you build it they will come.” Voters may not like it; they may not come. That’s the risk that you take.
Free Country: you’ve nailed it. Leadership is lacking totally in the ALP, as it has since Keating left politics.
These assertions may well be true but the question I can hear the Sussex street guys asking, is What would that do to those bogan-filled Western Sydney and Central Coast electorates which in fact were retained this election despite a lot of expectation they would lose some of them? (And it is better to lose an inner city seat to a Green or independent Wilkie, than to the Coalition as would happen in boganland.)
I don’t know that the discussion of “successful” Victorian strategy convinces me. There may be other explanations, not least that Victorians are always claiming to be more progressive than any other Australians.
So the thing is, is it actually possible any more to hold together the diverse parts of the Labor electorate. Good policy (climate, mining tax, schools, aslyum seekers, immigration) seems so easy for the Coalition, in league with News Ltd, to make toxic to so many who barely pay attention to anything. Of course we see exactly the same thing on the other side with small l Liberals stranded in no man’s land with their vanquished leader Malcolm Turnbull losing to the forces of darkness and non-policy.
Then there’s the Queensland bogans and non-Metro types. I am pretty sure it can no longer be held together. Normally if there is no exceptional event (no sacking of leader etc) then most of these passively vote by habit but has the habit been broken irreversibly?
I wish. There’s no good policy coming out of the Coalition either. Otherwise they would have won the election.
@Michael
I agree with most of Foley’s analysis and think it’s patently absurd for the ALP for Labor to pursue the brain-dead Boganville vote in Western Sydney at the expense of the progressives in seats like Melbourne and Brisbane. If not for the Rudd removal and subsequent leak-fest, many of those Qld seats wouldn’t have fallen to the Co Dependency - Longman only fell because the ALP candidate walked right into a sucker punch
IMO he most seriously dumb thing they did was rush straight to the polls without giving Julia time to establish her credentials as leader and for some accommodation to be worked out with Rudd.
The whole fucking thing was driven by the NSW Right wetting themselves over the prospect of going in Oct/Nov with the State Election looming. One State faction should never again be allowed to dictate the national strategy and platform in that way. I believe that if they went later in the year, once the Rudd wounds had closed over a little, with a more cogent platform and strategy, the losses in Western Sydney would have been more than compensated for by wins in other parts of the county.
There definitely needs to be an educational outreach strategy implemented in Western Sydney over the next two years to redrawn the playing field on issues like asylum seekers - maybe finding a few million for Get Up to run a grass roots campaign to win over those who actually still have hearts and minds, but read the Daily Terror and listen to 2UE so they don’t feel left out of the water cooler conversations at work
The problem that Labor is facing is that all of the decisions seem to be coming from a group of like minded young middle aged men who don’t understand the wider population very well.
The problem for the Liberals is that they listen to a similar demographic.
There is a sameness about the decision makers - because they don’t understand the electorate they should try for a greater diversity in their own members. Then they may engage with the electorate as they will know what the electorate is thinking without jumping to the focus groups. Leading from behind does not engage.
As for the Liberals today suggesting that they are the party of ideas - except on climate change and a whole host of other things - they should see how hollow they are.
I wonder how the Qld bogans feel about voting down the mining tax when the big miners are raking in so much and they are getting so little.
What morons.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Because having all these “visions” is really going to increase the vote in Queensland. Thats where the ALP lost ground in this election. Losing 7 seats, even after QLD was increased from 29 to 30 seats. Add in the two lost to the Coalition in NSW and 1 in WA that makes 10. Even if the ALP had only won 4 of those they could have formed a majority government and still have Brandt, Wilkie along with Windsor and Oakeshott to fall back on.
Its all well and easy to say that the election should have been fought on what Victorians think and feel. They were the only state to increase ALP seats (though their primary vote dropped 1.88%). The average Victorian doesn’t even know the difference between rugby union and rugby league so how are they going to understand what Queenslanders think?
And what we need is more self-titled experts claiming that the ALP lost seats in this election because Labor didn’t have policies he/she liked and if Labor had a massive mining tax and hardcore emissions trading scheme and treated refugees much better that people in Western Sydney and Queensland would have voted for the ALP in DROVES and Labor would have won easily.
Of course the people saying this are inner city, urban living people who have never set foot in places like Mt. Druitt or Dalby or Toowoomba.
Quick question for Mr Foley and people here on Crikey. Do you think the ALP would have the Queensland seats of:
Longman
Leichhardt
Forde
Flynn
Dawson.
with a campaign based on better deal for refugees, mining tax and ETS?
You’ve hit the target, sausage maker, re the ‘progressive’ Tooth Fairy Brigade posters’ lack of contact with the sorts of people they dismiss as being foolish ‘bogans’, etc.
Add to this the problem of them remaining blissfully unaware of their own blinkered interpretations of the world, and inflated notions of the importance of having spent time in ‘education’ of one sort or another, and their resultant intellectual quagmire is complete.
Fortunately for them, however, they can face the world of their imaginations with all the confidence one gains from our world’s best practice achievements in the field of raising legions of students’ self-esteem to dizzying heights.
Isn’t ‘education’ marvellous?
Don’t think Martin Foley actually suggested the Queensland bogans would have voted for those policies but that LEADERS should lead. Absolutely. While as a Victorian I don’t really recognise the wonders of the state ALP government described here - bad pr or a rose-coloured view? - I do think much of what Foley has to say about the ALP since Tampa, the hollow men of the Sussex Street - one rewarded as Minister of Sport - please!- and the bereft campaign was accurate. Most people I know here in regional Victoria as well as in Melbourne would agree; many of them switched to the Greens at least in the Senate for the first time. Well done Martin but don’t like your chances of prevailing when the PM has rewarded the Princes of Darkness for their ‘efforts’. Shame Julia Shame.
Norman has a point: Are the best candidates coming forward. He is also wrong to infer that it is only “union bosses” or that it happens only on one side of politics.
Many union bosses are highly skilled, innovative managers, adept at standing in the middle of diverse opinions and finding solutions. So are many of the other side.
What I don’t want to see more of are the non-contributing long serving wastes of space which are so common amongst the current Federal Opposition and the adolescent, sloganeering, closed minds which are common in the Greens; as well as those who travelled on the backs of others into Labor seats.
Government is simply too important for any but the truly exceptional to warrant a seat.
The campaign was a disaster because it had nothing to say. In Queensland they could have run on the enormously successful BER, where there were NO complaints and vigourously counteracted the vicious campaign run by the LNP on waste and misanagement. South East Queenslanders love public spending as it keeps it going, and the coastal cities up to North Queensland as well. Bligh is unpopular because of privatising the railways. Refugees were not an issue in Queensland so they could have included it. People who care about human rights were forced to vote Green. No attempt was made to argue for Labor’s achievements in office whatsoever. This was stupid. It was a really stupid hopeless campaign. That’s how it looked from Brisbane’s southside, an area that has voted Labour locally, in the state and federally for over a hundred years.
Norman Hanscombe:
Kristina Keneally’s move to reform the preselection process in NSW Labor will be interesting. Whether or not it succeeds, it will put that question on the table in a way that’s very hard to take off again. This might teach the federal ALP something useful if it retains any residual ability for self-examination.
On Q&A recently Tanya Plibersek was asked where Labor had gone wrong in the election campaign. Her reply was the standard government line that its only failure had been insufficient propaganda:
Spoken with a completely straight face. No insight whatsoever.
Sausage Maker
Can you tell me what the ALP policy on refugees and the ETS was at the 2007 election? People vote for a lot of reasons, and every time they vote they vote for a government who has policies they dislile intensely. If you listen too much to people’s fears and dislikes you will only ever move backwards. In the last ten years elections have been won on a GST and an ETS.
This long winded ramble with no street smarts.
Note education, full time jobs and housing not mentioned.
No mystery why all voters are pissed.
sottile6 makes a good point. I think people have down played the Anna Bligh factor. There are lot of people here in Qld that were looking at their first opportunity to stick it to the ALP and unfortunately the federal election was it. Asset sales was the big one. Anna was too stupid to learn from JHW’s Workchoices moment. And we all know what happened to him when he wasn’t up front with the electorate. It was sneaky and she has since been caught out lying about it. Let’s face it, the govt has been gearing up to flog off QR for years through the process of turning it into a GOC. Ports the same. So for her to come and say that she only made a decision after the election is a crock of shite. And dispite all their chest beating, how chuffed must the LNP be about it. It’s a win/win for them. They would have flogged it off anyway because their ideology says so (private sector is far better running businesses than govt, just look at the excellent work the banks did of the world economy), but the ALP is coping the heart burn. Many people rightly or wrongly no longer differentiate between state and federal political parties. They see them as one in the same evil beast, believing that all policy/decisions is derived from National HQ (part of the case to abolish state politics but that’s a different debate). I still believe the person they should have knifed was not Ruddy but Bligh. But for some reason politics seems to embrace and reward farkwits at the expense of good talent. (Kevin Andrews, Barnaby and Anna Bligh are good examples). Although maybe that’s not giving due credit to the likes of Petro Georgiou and Lindsey Tanner who are smart enough to know when it’s time to leave the toxic swamp and utilise their talents elsewhere to make a difference.
A problem for Labor (in UK as well as Oz) is that having improved the conditions of the working class, too many in said class then imagine themselves to be moving up the greasy ladder and become aspirational tories.
Perhaps not as big a problem though, AR, as those who have never connected with the working class, getting themselves a union job, but using that to get into Parliament to ‘represent’ the working class?
To paraphrase those golden oldies, ‘first shoot all the lawyers’ & ‘eat the rich’, how about ‘abolish apparatchiks’? Unfortunately they are the symbiotes of any system, once established those parasites arise. Unlike in Nature however, most parasites don’t kill their host which would be counter evolutionary. Which goes to show what a waste of oxygen they are.