Owning up to policy failure is the first step back from oblivion

IT takes a special kind of chutzpah to suffer a crushing defeat and then to present it as a triumph. Churchill got away with it after Dunkirk. Rebecca White is no Churchill.

It was, she proclaimed on election night, a fantastic campaign. But, as any examination of the record will show, it wasn’t a fantastic campaign at all.

Election analyst Kevin Bonham put it this way: “A government that seemed to be sleepwalking to a loss of majority has rebounded to the point of suffering just a trivial swing against it. The Labor opposition did rebound to a degree, but mostly at the cost of the Greens.”

Labor’s modest gains were made almost entirely by cannibalising the centre-Left vote. Even after a massive landslide to the Liberals four years ago, and despite the evisceration of public hospitals, child protection, schools and courts, the Liberal vote went down by only 1 per cent.

Labor’s increase came not from a swing to the progressive side of politics from the conservatives but from its own side.

For so long as that remains the case, the Liberals will stay in office.

So why did the progressive side of politics do so badly against a conservative government that was clearly on the nose?

For the Greens it was a combination of the lack of a major environmental issue, the continued downsizing of the Lower House that was designed to disadvantage the Greens and independents, a leader tainted with her association with the disastrous Giddings government, and unconvincing candidates in Bass and Lyons.

Throughout their existence, the Tasmanian Greens have existed on single issues: dams, forests and pulp mills. With the demise of their big black beast, Gunns, the Greens’ relevance to the Tasmanian electorate is once again in doubt. They have never been able to appeal to the keep-thebastards-honest vote. If they had, they would not now be looking at the live possibility of permanent oblivion.

With Labor, the problem was all about its inability to run a decent and professional campaign. So long as they blame the gambling lobby for their own shortcomings, they will fail to address what really kept them in the wilderness.

And Labor supporters now have to come to terms with an uncomfortable reality: Rebecca White has a tin ear for policy. For many months before the campaign began, polls consistently identified two issues that would change votes: health and jobs.

The Liberals’ consistent and apparently deliberate starvation of public hospitals, their appallingly inept administration and their broken promise to “fix the system” had eroded the electorate’s patience to a critical level.

And the Government’s continued crowing about job creation and an allegedly booming state economy did not reassure many thousands of people who remained unemployed, underemployed or scared of losing what jobs they had.

Labor should have profited from neglect of hospitals and jobs, writes Martyn Goddard

In the event, Labor had no policy on either of these key issues that put them clearly ahead of the Liberals. And that — not pokies, not even fear of minority governments — is the biggest single reason they failed to make serious inroads into the conservative vote.

The pokies policy was a disaster. If doing the right thing means you lose any chance at implementing any of your policies, is it still the right thing? “Certainly”, Gough Whitlam said, “the impotent are pure.”

That policy not only mobilised vast amounts of cash and political chicanery against Labor but provided, in the end, an object lesson to all other state governments on what happens when you take on the pokies barons. As it was, all it provided was a massive distraction to anything else Labor had to say.

And they had remarkably little to say about the issues voters cared much more about: whether they would have a job, and whether public hospitals would be able to care for them if they got sick.

Policy development was left till the last moment and then restricted to a tiny group around the leader. The major specific health initiative of the entire campaign was an onthe-run decision to give to a private hospital operator the only land available to extend the Launceston General Hospital.

When the major set-piece announcement came around, it had no major specific project in mind. And it was clear that Labor had not understood the level of Commonwealth funding that would have been available. Given that this would account for almost half the cost of treating any patient and would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, that reveals an extraordinary level of policy ignorance.

Nor was anything of significance said about job creation or much-needed stimulation for a state economy still in a fragile recovery phase. Because they were afraid of being attacked as profligate, they refused to countenance even the most modest borrowing to fund much-needed infrastructure which would have provided jobs, improved services and stimulated the economy.

And so they obediently followed the script that Peter Gutwein had written for them.