Slick marketing ticks the boxes but won’t help the homeless
ASa piece of critical analysis, outgoing Liberal chief of staff Brad Stansfield’s assessment of Labor’s election campaign wasn’t exactly impartial.
But it did provide a fascinating insight into the priorities and thought processes of the Liberal Government.
It is true that marketing themselves is what the Liberals do best.
However, what we saw over the past four years — and what has already emerged since the March 3 victory — is that what makes a good campaign does not necessarily make a good government.
When your primary objective is grabbing headlines
Michael Stedman
and winning the pictures on the evening news you get promises like an underground bus mall, dual lanes on every highway and a phantom bridge across the Tamar River.
The Liberals have woken up with an almighty porkbarrelling hangover that will not be easily cured.
But perhaps most concerning is the insight Mr Stansfield provided into his party’s health policy, which appears to have been designed purely — in his words — to “gazump” Labor.
The policy lasted a day before it was demolished as being inflated by Commonwealth money and six-year delivery timeframes.
By then the Liberals had already achieved their objective of grabbing wall to wall headlines.
But still, there is no end in sight to the health crisis.
The same approach was evident in Will Hodgman’s post-election housing summit.
Within hours of the meeting, promises of an additional 3000 houses had already been revised to 2000 and land earmarked for development had been revealed as landlocked or within road reserves.
And still, there is no end in sight to the housing crisis.
The Liberal Party’s slick media management may have helped them in the campaign but now they are in government it won’t help them fix the very real problems confronting the state.
Whenever a party is defeated there is a sober assessment of what could have been done differently.
Labor will take advice from experts, not the biased views of our political opponents.
There is no doubt the Liberals benefited directly from the millions of dollars spent by the poker machine lobby.
That does not change the fact that Labor’s poker machine decision was the right one, morally and ethically.
Independent polling printed in this newspaper showed 57.1 per cent of Tasmanians support removing poker machines from pubs and clubs.
To be clear, no one in the Labor Party was blind to the negative consequences of taking on the powerful vested interests.
But sometimes politics is about leadership.
And that marks the core difference between Rebecca White and Will Hodgman.
Rebecca White has been defined as a leader who is prepared to stand up for what she believes in — to do what is right, even when it is politically risky.
In contrast, Will Hodgman seems happy to be defined by images of him in a hard hat and on the back of a Harley.
That contrast was plain to see in the People’s Debate hosted by Sky News and the Mercury, where the Premier was comprehensively outclassed by a more passionate, better briefed and articulate Opposition leader.
It is no coincidence that Will Hodgman’s team cancelled at least two
appearances that would have seen him go head to head with his opponent.
We knew that against a first-term government and an economy that was performing well, winning was always going to be a tall order.
Our candidates made contact with more than 200,000 Tasmanians over the course of the campaign and it’s those conversations that framed our policy priorities in health, public education and housing.
If there was one thing we underestimated, it was our opponent’s willingness to throw fiscal responsibility out the window.
In the last week of the campaign I was receiving at least 10 emails a day detailing Liberal promises of $10,000 for a new hall roof here, $40,000 for a sporting club there — promises totalling more than $40 million.
It would have been politically expedient for us to match these commitments but incompatible with our objective to properly fund essential services.
We were never prepared to run a win-at-all costs strategy.
People voted for Labor for the first time — or the first time in a long time — because they saw in Labor a party that truly believed in putting people first.
Labor was the only party to win seats at this election — every other party went backwards.
The Liberals may have won the election, but victory has come at a cost.
Numerically they are down to 13 members.
In a House of Assembly of 25, it is a razor-thin majority, with just one new face amongst a team that already wears the scars of four years in government.
Eventually the rivers of gold that flowed to the Liberal Party will have to be disclosed, debts repaid and unrealistic election promises either fulfilled or broken.
Labor, on the other hand has 10 members — six of them new faces who bring a wealth of experience to the Parliament.
Across both Houses of Parliament, Labor has 14 members — equal to the Liberal Government.
Labor is within striking distance of majority government, with a dynamic leader who has shown she has what it takes to lead this great state.
The scare campaign about minority government that worked so well for the Liberals this time around will not work again.
And this term the Liberals are actually going to have to work out how to govern rather than simply campaign.