Reasons for Labor’s defeat in the last ‘un-losable’ Australian elections – but will there be better days ahead?

Dr Nick Economou shares his insights into Labor's defeat in the May elections


In 1993, after a general election at which it had failed to defeat Labor, a colleague wrote that, if the Liberal party could not defeat Paul Keating, then perhaps it would never win an election ever again and that right-of-centre politics needed to be completely re-organised.

It was a big call – and inaccurate, as it turned out, for three years later Labor was out and the Coalition was back in with John Howard as prime minister. The memories of 1993 have been rekindled by Labor’s defeat in 2019 and the subsequent internal party review in to the party’s inability to win the ‘un-losable’ election.

The review, not surprisingly, sheeted responsibility for the defeat to a number of contributory factors many of which resonated as reasons why Liberal leader Dr John Hewson failed in 1993. Like the hapless Hewson, Labor leader Bill Shorten was not particularly popular with voters. Like Hewson’s ‘Fightback’ manifesto that underpinned the Coalition’s approach to the policy debate in 1993, Shorten and Labor in 2019 had too many complicated policies on the go that were easy targets for their critics. And rather like Hewson, it appears that Shorten was responsible for the conduct of the election campaign and turned out to be impervious to critical advice.

All of these observations make sense and do a reasonable job of accounting for why Labor lost the election notwithstanding the fact that the national opinion polls were predicting a Labor win. Yet there is a deeper problem for the ALP, and the review makes indirect reference to it by observing the way support for Labor was stronger in the affluent, well-educated inner urban electorates than in other parts of the community. Some in Labor have already seized on this and declared that the party needs to return to its working class roots to re-discover what it is that Labor stands for.

The problem here is that the working class traditions being yearned for in this context no longer exist. Australia is in the midst of a post-industrial reality. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics less than 10 per cent of Australians work in manufacturing, compared with over 80 per cent working in service provision industries. The old days of the labour movement being comprised of an army of unionised working men capable of militancy that could pose a real threat to the economy have largely disappeared. The union movement today is more likely to be comprised of an army of working women, with public sector and human services being the areas with concentrated union membership.

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The services sector of the economy is notorious for its low wages, its diversity, its dependence on casual and part-time workers as well as contracted staff, and the lack of scope for effective industrial militancy. The stagnation of Australian wages – such a feature of the economic debate that even the Reserve Bank of Australia sees this as a problem – is a testament to emasculation of the union movement. Union membership has declined accordingly.

In to the vacuum created by this industrial decline have come the well-educated middle class for whom left-of-centre politics is less about the economy, and more about social issues. The rise of this social group has affected all political parties, as the qualitative shift in the nature of the political debate in Australia indicates. Debates about industry protection, research and development, and even industrial relations appear to have dropped off the Australian agenda. In their place have come debates reflecting a preoccupation with marriage equality, gender equality, about the need to reconcile indigenous and non-indigenous Australia, and the environment (especially climate change).

“ Australia is in the midst of a post-industrial reality. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics less than 10 percent of Australians work in manufacturing, compared with over 80 percent working in service provision industries.

These matters preoccupy all of the major parties, but they have the potential to resonate quite particularly with the left-of-centre parties which run the risk of being seen to be driven by these issues to the exclusion of other bread-and-butter issues matters that are of greater importance to their other core constituencies.

The ALP is a case in point. Labor is committed to indigenous recognition via constitutional reform, but does nothing and promises nothing to address the way Section 44(i) of the constitution potentially excludes migrants, the children of migrants and the grand children of migrants from participating in national politics. This is despite the reality that ethnic voters comprise Labor’s strongest constituency. One of the most uncomfortable moments between the 2016 and 2019 elections for Labor was the marriage equality survey where strongest resistance to the idea of marriage equality came from ethnically diverse seats in Sydney and Melbourne.

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Despite this evidence of a tension between its core constituencies over outlooks and aspirations, modern Labor ran in to the 2019 election firmly aligned with the well-educated upper middle class with promises of indigenous reconciliation, greater gender equality, and an unfunded and not particularly well thought-out climate change policy that sounded like it could have come from the Australian Greens. This approach might wow voters on the university campuses and in the cafes and salons of inner Melbourne. It clearly does not have the same appeal beyond the inner metropolis, however. And as parliamentary Labor is basically an inner metropolitan party, being able to find a balance between competing class aspirations will be very difficult. Yearning back to the good old days of Bob Hawke and the corporatist tendencies of Bill Kelty and the ACTU does not cut it as those days have gone as the absence from Australia’s industrial landscape of large factories full of unionised workers indicates.

Does this mean that Labor’s chances of re-election are so bleak as to be impossible? In a two-party system (which is basically what Australia’s party system is), the alternative party to the major party in government is always a chance to win an election especially if voters have tired of their government. It’s a slim chance, however, and as the 2019 election showed, even leadership turmoil in the non-Labor parties is no guarantee of electoral success. Bill Shorten’s failure in 2019 was just another in a large number of federal Labor failures. If it isn’t already the case, it may be that the vain-glorious but failed attempt by modern social democratic party politics to be relevant in a post-industrial world of the sort Australia witnessed in 2019 may well be the way of the future.

* Dr Nick Economou is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Monash University.