PROLOGUE
‘I have always believed in miracles,’ Scott Morrison declared in his victory speech on election day 2019.1 Was the Morrison Government’s surprise win over the Bill Shorten–led Labor opposition a miracle? Or was it an unnecessary loss by Labor, which after its narrow defeat in 2016 looked set for certain victory? What went wrong?
After elections people, even political professionals, mostly put the result down to one main thing. Our personal experiences, incomplete knowledge, self-interest, and media reports drive us to make snap, instinctive pronouncements.
Sometimes those singular judgements might be correct: one factor may be overwhelmingly important in the result. But many elections in Australia are so close that if even a few aspects of performance between and during them were better, they could have changed the outcome.
Two election surprises tell the story: the Morrison Government’s 2019 federal election win and the Keating Government’s victory in 1993. Two shock results in a quarter of a century might not seem many, but Australia has only had ten federal elections in that period, so that’s an upset every five elections over those 25 years. It takes historical perspective to bring their lessons to the fore.
| YEAR | GOVERNMENT | NUMBER OF SEATS MAJORITY |
|---|---|---|
| 1969 | Gorton Government | 7 seats |
| 1972 | Whitlam Government | 9 seats |
| 1974 | Whitlam Government | 5 seats |
| 1975 | Fraser Government | 55 seats |
| 1977 | Fraser Government | 48 seats |
| 1980 | Fraser Government | 23 seats |
| 1983 | Hawke Government | 25 seats |
| 1984 | Hawke Government^ | 16 seats |
| 1987 | Hawke Government | 24 seats |
| 1990 | Hawke Government | 8 seats |
| 1993 | Keating Government | 13 seats |
| 1996 | Howard Government | 40 seats |
| 1998 | Howard Government | 12 seats |
| 2001 | Howard Government# | 14 seats |
| 2004 | Howard Government | 24 seats |
| 2007 | Rudd Government | 16 seats |
| 2010 | Gillard Government* | (6 seats) |
| 2013 | Abbott Government | 29 seats |
| 2016 | Turnbull Government | 1 seat |
| 2019 | Morrison Government° | 2 seats |
Elections may still be very close without falling into the ‘shock’ basket. This table shows the immediate post-election parliamentary majority of the Australian government over the past 50 years, during which there were 20 elections.2
In seven of the 20 elections, the government held office with a single-digit majority of seats or was a minority government. That is, in one-third of elections held over the last half-century, the difference between winning or losing came down to just a handful of seats. One-third is a lot, certainly enough to back the claim that elections in Australia are often close. No one in politics – leader, MP, party official, staffer, candidate, aspirant, rank-and-file party member, activist, journalist, commentator, voter – should ever forget it.
This book is based on the idea that while antipodean electoral systems are the best in the world, well-functioning democracies should not produce as many ‘surprise’ election results as Australia has over the past quarter-century. Too often political parties do not optimise all the elements of effective politics between, and during, campaigns. To the losers, ‘surprise’ election losses are unnecessary election losses, producing a visceral anguish that glowers through to the next election and beyond.
The purpose of How to Win an Election is to make unnecessary election losses less common by showing how to avoid them. As mentioned above, better performance in even one or two of the areas canvassed in this book could lead to a different outcome, so full attention should be paid to each of them, all the time, every time, without fail – in real time when it counts.
This sounds obvious. Doesn’t that happen anyway? Isn’t politics full of professionals who know that? If this were so there would be fewer ‘surprise’ election results – and 2019 would have seen the election of the Shorten Labor Government.
I wrote most of this book in the summer of 2020 as bushfires raged up and down Australia’s east coast. Many people died. Thick smoke blowing in from fires to the east, west and south forced me to decamp temporarily from Australia’s beautiful bush capital, Canberra, where residents in the outermost suburbs were on alert as fire encroached from the blazing Namadgi National Park. Wildlife and flora were decimated on an unprecedented, almost unimaginable scale. Dwellings were incinerated. While bushfires engulfed south-eastern Australia with an intensity and longevity unseen and unheard of in our history, the Morrison Government dog-whistled climate denial and gaslit the nation about its energy and environment policies.3 Citizens were traumatised by the Great Conflagration’s ongoing human and environmental catastrophe, and the government’s callous disregard of it.
As the book went into production, Canberra was hit by an epochal hailstorm. Seventy buildings at the Australian National University where I worked as an historian were seriously damaged. Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Australia shut its borders to the world and several states shut their borders to each other. The economic slowdown already underway before the pandemic cascaded into a deep recession: unemployment rose sharply and entire industries were on their knees. Poorly designed policy interventions to keep the economy alive helped some people and not others, helped some sectors and not others, and the better initiatives like free childcare were hastily withdrawn while still crucially needed. As the publishing process drew to a close, with Australia still in lockdown, I began a new job at the University of Canberra from home, later visiting its largely studentless, staffless campus as the coronavirus lockdown slightly eased. The bushfires, hailstorm and pandemic were not a series of random, unfortunate events. They are facets of the pervasive global phenomenon of bigger and more frequent catastrophes than ever before as Earth’s interacting physical, chemical and biological systems reel under the pressure of human impacts in what scientists now call the Anthropocene.4
In this context Labor’s unnecessary 2019 election loss assumes its proper proportions. The fact Australia has to wait until at least the next election for a competent, far-sighted government to enact decent climate policies and address the deep social and economic inequities highlighted so starkly in the pandemic, matters absolutely.
While How to Win an Election is primarily concerned with helping Labor avoid unnecessary election losses like that in 2019, the lessons apply across politics. Moderate conservatives motivated to drag their parties from the absurd, destructive right-wing excess that contributed to 2020’s hellish summer are welcome to these lessons too. Australia needs Labor governments more often, and for longer, in the interests of better policy and government. It also needs sane, centrist conservative parties so that when the Liberal–National coalition is in office, as is inevitable in our democratic system, it does not reverse, neglect or actually worsen policies essential to our future; otherwise we have no future.
Politics is a lifelong engagement, for some more than others. My father taught me to read on the block-letter headlines of newspaper front pages. I delivered my first public political analysis as an eight-year-old at a neighbour’s backyard barbeque. I voted for the first time aged 14 when my briefly indisposed mother let me have her postal vote. I interviewed the then Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) president and future Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke, on ABC-TV as a 15-year-old. That same year I sat atop a Volkswagen Kombi van photographing deposed Labor prime minister, Gough Whitlam, at one of the massive ‘Dismissal’ election rallies. These were held in capital cities around the nation after he was ousted in a constitutional coup by the Malcolm Fraser–led coalition opposition. At 16 my English teacher took me to task for the iridescent ‘Fraser for Fuhrer’ sticker in Gothic font on my school briefcase (and in retrospect I realise he was right). At 17 I moved to Canberra to study politics and history at the Australian National University (ANU). After graduation I went to the University of Sydney to study political economy; it had become clear that to really understand politics you had to understand economics too. To support myself I worked part-time in Sussex Street organising the papers of the Seamen’s Union of Australia’s federal office for donation to ANU’s Noel Butlin Archive of Business and Labour.5
This was where my experience of politics began to complicate. Why didn’t the Seamen’s Union have any women members? And why, chatting about politics one day, did a Seamen’s Union official describe Bob Hawke as a ‘lying, right-wing, opportunistic bastard’? Weren’t they on the same side? Equally, struggling to survive on part-time wages and looking for a full-time job, why did neither of the two Labor MPs I applied for research positions with reply while the sole Liberal did, and gave me the job? And why did that mischievous moderate Liberal introduce me with such glee to an aghast John Howard on my first day of work as having joined his staff straight from the Seamen’s Union of Australia?6
Working as a researcher in Parliament House for three years, then joining the Canberra Press Gallery as a journalist, and working there long afterwards, provided deep, direct, sometimes painful insights into how politics works and doesn’t work, especially in relation to leadership. Returning much later to ANU to work as an academic on modern political history and biography deepened my insights into repeating patterns and vulnerabilities over time.
One damaging pattern is the tendency of incoming party leaders to think they know better than their predecessor, let alone the ones before them, about how to win elections. Profound self-belief is essential for success in politics. This influences who leaders appoint as staff – almost always ‘believers’ – and the political colleagues they keep close. It inspires and intensifies their staffers’ and party allies’ belief in them over time; and perversely, if the leader is struggling in the opinion polls, their staffers and party allies often double-down on the believing.
Belief gets confused with loyalty. Staffers and colleagues bringing – even privately, and constructively – a dash of realism, or useful historical perspective, can be made to feel unwelcome. Sometimes they are excluded and, in the case of staffers, even fired, or more often sidelined and ignored.
Before you know it ‘groupthink’ takes hold where feedback is sought only from ‘believers’ who reinforce the leader’s energising, but by now damagingly myopic, self-confidence.7 When ‘groupthink’ takes hold, get ready for a ‘surprise’ election result, because vital lessons from the past will have been lost in the hubristic fog of the leader’s group hug with their ‘believer’ staffers and political allies.
What to do? Urging leaders to be more realistic has little chance of success: exhortation rarely changes anything. The answer has to be structural. How to Win an Election highlights ten things that if systematically attended to should make unnecessary election losses like Labor’s in 2019 far less likely. This transparent list makes it harder for future leaders to forget or ignore the basic elements of political craft at which they must comprehensively excel. It can be used by others as a checklist against which leaders, and party organisations, can be assessed between and during election campaigns. This checklist is the minimum set of things a leader and their party must do to maximise the chance of winning, and against which they should be accountable.
When the favourites for a flag lose a grand final, only fools blame it overwhelmingly on the performance of the captain, or the coach, or the list manager, or team statistician, or the club marketing department, or the reporters covering the game. Sports professionals know that every part of their operation has to be excellent and they analyse, reflect, prepare and adjust on the basis of current data informed by historical perspective. This might be a weirdly Australian thing to say, but if our leaders and parties could manage themselves as well as the best teams in our major sporting codes, the best team at federal elections would nearly always win. This is a contribution to help make that happen: to make unnecessary election losses like Labor’s in 2019 just that much less likely.