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CREATE POLICY WINNERS, NOT LOSERS

We remain in the cave of the anguished loser, still shot through with pain at the surprise loss, pain that is complicating and becoming confronting. You readily see, now it has been pointed out in hectares of pontificating wise-after-the-event post-election commentary, that the right people were not all in the right spots, in the key portfolios, where you needed to bring voters along with you. You were really let down by this – by them – weren’t you, and it’s important because of course you can’t be expected to win the whole election on your own. The criticisms of your performance seem unfair, really unfair. Everyone said repeatedly how terrific you looked and sounded. (Having surrounded yourself with groupthinkers, and lacking the equivalent of Caesar’s slave to whisper regularly in your ear, ‘You are mortal,’ how were you to know any different?) You turn to the person nearest to you in the cave and ask, in hurt tones, ‘I performed well, didn’t I?’ Your spouse replies with a resounding, ‘Of course you did, darling!’ Either way, you were terrific at the substance of politics, at policy, weren’t you? Your policies were far-reaching, visionary and risky enough to showcase your courage as someone who would do what needs to be done.

Policy is highly prospective for narcissistic missteps. A football analogy will not do here: it has to come from cricket.

A batter faces a bowler at the crease with the goal of getting as many runs as possible, since the team with the highest score wins. The bowler’s goal is to get the batter out, to ‘take their wicket’ as cheaply as possible, making sure the batter scores poorly. The batter rarely gets out on the first ball.¹ Rather, the bowler will send down balls of varying line and length to probe the batter’s weaknesses, reveal their vulnerabilities, and work out what kind of ball is most likely to lure them into playing a risky shot and getting out. The bowler tries to sucker the batter into showy shots in the knowledge that, while a few fours and sixes may get hit, it will make it easier to bowl them out quickly. Once the batter has lost their wicket and is out they can’t increase their score: they are finished.

The most basic policy error a politician can make is to be nudged into thinking of policy as a proxy for their potency, rather than a means of meeting voters’ legitimate needs and wants. The minute you fall for the ‘small target’ sledge – code for policy cowardice – policy becomes hostage to your self-perceptions and insecurities, which unconsciously then take priority over voter needs and electoral victory.

It is the same as a batter in cricket being suckered into playing showy shots that make them more vulnerable to being got out. You feel good playing the flashy shots, relieved jibes about your policy timidity have stopped, but you get bowled out quickly and your team never racks up the score necessary to win the match.

Is it clever to make yourself a big target if this makes it easier for your opponent to get you out and win? Given that if you don’t win you can’t implement any policy at all, the answer is no. As Gough Whitlam famously said as opposition leader in 1967, ‘certainly, the impotent are pure’.² Whitlam expressed this sentiment several months after his predecessor as Labor leader, Arthur Calwell, led Labor to defeat at the 1966 election where Labor suffered its worst vote since 1906.³

Between the 2016 and 2019 elections Labor made itself a big target without the political skill to carry it off. There were too many policies. Key policies were too complicated. Some policies created losers. Some were uncosted. The policies did not fit into a simple, strong strategic framework giving voters a compelling reason to vote Labor. These were the Labor election review’s own findings after the loss.⁴ They rejected the seductive but false ‘small target’ versus ‘big target’ binary, noting that ‘Labor has won elections with bold policy platforms and lost elections where it has pursued a “small target” strategy.’⁵

This is also true of the Liberals. Prior to Shorten Labor’s surprise 2019 loss the Liberals held the record for the worst (that is, most avoidable) ‘big target’ election loss: Liberal opposition leader John Hewson losing the so-called ‘unloseable’ 1993 election with his 345-page, ‘big target’ Fightback! policy manifesto.⁶ John Howard won government from opposition in a landslide in 1996 in a campaign where policy launches were few and the policies themselves often had more white space than content – a classic ‘small target’ approach. Howard won the following election in 1998 from government with a massive redesign of Australia’s tax system – a ‘big target’ approach.

Note the pattern: it is important. Parties that fight ‘big target’ campaigns from opposition tend to lose. Parties that pull off ‘big target’ campaign wins tend to do it from government. The reasons are obvious. ‘Big target’ campaigns require a lot more explaining; they take more resources; governments are resource rich and, being able to draw on government information marketing budgets to help make and market their case, are more likely to succeed in the difficult task of doing so. Governments are also in a better position to garner media support for ‘big target’ agendas than oppositions because governments find it easier to shape a friendly media environment through favours to media proprietors and story leaks to journalists.

What about Gough Whitlam’s successful ‘big target’ 1972 election win from opposition? This is the exception that proves the rule. Labor lost the previous nine federal elections before getting it right at this tenth one against a tired, divided Liberal coalition government. They had been in power for 23 years and, as Whitlam noted, had 60 ministerial changes in the six years between Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ retirement in 1966 and the 1972 election.⁷ The Liberals were led by a prime minister, Billy McMahon, despised and distrusted by many of his own colleagues, and made a laughing stock by election time through Whitlam’s devastating ridicule of him in parliament. Even then, Labor won just a nine-seat majority in a parliament of 125 seats and did not win a Senate majority – a reasonable win, but no landslide. Nevertheless it was a historic victory: the only time in the last half-century a party has won government from opposition with a ‘big target’ approach.

So don’t get suckered into ‘small target’ policy insecurity. It leads insidiously to your own psychic ease being prioritised over voters’ legitimate policy needs. Then there’s a good chance you will take unnecessary policy risks that, especially if you are in opposition, make an election loss more likely. Never forget. Only one opposition in the last 50 years won office using a ‘big target’ approach; it didn’t win by much, and its task was to dislodge a 23-year-old government in terminal disarray. Since the ‘small target’ versus ‘big target’ policy binary causes such devilment, let’s stop using it. Let’s start talking about a smart policy approach instead.

It is worth going back and reading Gough Whitlam’s 1972 campaign speech.⁸ Using straightforward language he made a compelling case for government. No proposal in Whitlam Labor’s program required a detailed explanation of the terms of the debate before making the case for policy change. Compare and contrast with the franking credit policy the Shorten Labor opposition took to the 2019 election. Most people still don’t know what franking credits are: they just think Labor’s policy change might or could cost them money, or cost their parents or grandparents money, in turn making their inheritance smaller. The Liberals morphed a policy proposal shadow treasurer Chris Bowen developed to help him balance the books on Labor’s overall spending, in the interests of economic responsibility, into a ‘death tax’. Come in spinner.

If a policy cannot be explained simply and be widely understood, it is not a smart policy to take to an election from opposition. Wait until you are in government and have time to structure expectations about it. You’ll also then have time to explain it in the context of the expectations you have patiently established, time to win support for it backed by the vast resources of government – and then either implement and bed it down well ahead of the next election, or take it to the next election, backed by a massive advertising campaign, for voters to have their say.

The Hawke Labor opposition won the 1983 election campaigning essentially on three words – reconciliation, recovery, reconstruction – with a clear idea internally of how it would govern in line with those principles.⁹ The following election, in 1984, Hawke and his devastatingly effective treasurer Paul Keating defended a detailed and controversial reform of the social security system, cutting middle-class welfare to focus spending on those who really needed it – a hard-fought election won from government which Labor would have likely lost from opposition advancing exactly the same policy.

Liberal opposition leader John Howard at the 1996 election denied he would ever create a goods and services tax (GST); and Prime Minister John Howard took a comprehensive GST proposal to the next election in 1998 and won. That election showed how extremely difficult it is to win with a ‘big target’ approach, though, even from government. The Kim Beazley–led Labor opposition won 50.98 per cent of the two-party preferred vote compared to the Howard Government’s 49.02 per cent, figures that would normally have seen Labor win if not for an unusually high concentration of votes swinging Labor’s way being in their own seats rather than marginal ones.¹⁰

The third, and most important, rule of policy in an election context is – as far as possible – avoid creating policy losers. There is a beautiful concept in microeconomics: transaction costs. If you want to discourage someone from doing something, create a transaction cost. If you want to make someone less likely to vote for you, create a transaction cost.

Ask yourself this. You want to vote Labor and it is going to cost you nothing to do so: you vote Labor. You want to vote Labor and it is going to, or might, cost you $1000 to do so: you stop and think about it, and after thinking about it you may or may not vote Labor. That is a transaction cost.

This is the situation the Shorten opposition put voters in at the 2019 election with its franking credit policy, except the dollar amounts for those affected were higher and lower than the $1000 plucked out of the air for demonstration purposes above. The policy change would have affected a relatively small number of people, though with the potential to scare a far larger number. In a tight election even a tiny number of votes can make the difference between winning and losing. Menzies won the 1961 election by one seat, Moreton, where the winning margin was just 130 votes. Why risk losing votes by proposing policies that create losers, especially when so many elections in Australia are so close?

Labor’s election review said, ‘Voters most likely to be affected by Labor’s franking credit policy swung to Labor’, and this has been used by some to argue this shows the policy was not significant in the 2019 election result.¹¹ However, the flow-on concerns fanned by Liberals among the children and grandchildren of those directly affected by it appears not to have been assessed, or attributed to that policy, nor the diffuse fear spread successfully among low-income earners who could not possibly have been affected by it. Low-income earners’ concerns are ascribed in Labor’s election review to ‘fears about the effect of Labor’s expensive agenda on the economy’, without evidence explaining why fears fanned by the Liberals about the franking credit policy ‘death tax’ scare was not also a factor.¹² If this is a tactical position by the Labor election review’s authors to defend the idea of ambitious policy, it is misplaced.

Policy can be as ambitious as you like, provided it is also smart policy; that is, policy that can be simply explained, easily understood and which – as far as possible – avoids creating losers. If it is complicated and there are losers, propose the policy from government with its vast resources to help you pull it off; and do it between elections, rather than at an election unless you have consciously, and with a great deal of expectation-structuring, explanation and marketing beforehand, decided to fight for re-election on it. Even if you do it from government, consider ‘grandfathering’ the proposal so it only applies in the future, a definitive way of creating ‘no lose’ policy.

There is only one worse policy sin in an election campaign than a proposal that creates losers: uncosted policy. The vagueness of uncosted policy enables your opponent to spin infinite fear from it without you being able to refute their claims. Voters have a right to know how much the policies you propose will cost. If a policy is expensive, do a cost-benefit analysis showing how the cost of not doing the policy is so much greater. Do not under any circumstances follow the example of Labor’s uncosted 2019 election climate change proposal, which gave the Liberals a blank canvas on which to project maximum fear about its price and, consequentially, concerns about economic irresponsibility. Uncosted policy is a gift that keeps on giving to your political opponents, for the whole five weeks of an election campaign. Not smart.

Finally there is the problem of policy ambiguity. Policy ambiguity about Brexit was a major reason for British Labour’s landslide 2019 election loss. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn straddled internal party divisions over whether Britain should leave the EU by taking a ‘neutral’ position to the election on it. As journalist George Eaton noted, this alienated Leavers and Remainers alike. ‘There is no way of knowing how voters would have responded to a more unambiguous stance,’ Eaton said. ‘But what we can say with certainty is that Corbyn’s neutrality appeared an act of evasive weakness, rather than one of strength.’¹³ Which will eventually bring us to Bill Shorten and the question of the Adani coal mine on which, in the Australian vernacular, Shorten straddled a barbed-wire fence – something which cannot be done without losing skin. But first, the polling.