Zombie issues: Labor's baggage that just won't die

By Peter Chen

Photo: There are various explanations for Rudd's failure to thrive. (AAP: Lukas Coch)

While the Liberal campaign hasn't been without its problems, it's been the Labor strategists that are finding they can't get any traction. The wisdom of a last-minute leadership change is looking less smart by the day, writes Peter Chen.

For the ALP, the election is clearly not going as planned. With polling delivering bad news and Kevin Rudd at risk of losing his seat, his return to office looks to have delivered only the most transient of bounces.

Should their polling continue to decline at the current rate, the party will be close to the level that generated the final spill by election day.

While the Liberal campaign hasn't been without its problems, it's been the Labor strategists that are finding they can't get any traction. The wisdom of a last-minute leadership change - with this enduring damage to Labor's national brand as being infected by the "NSW disease" - is looking less smart by the day. "Better to have ploughed ahead and shown commitment to a team that had led a difficult minority government and delivered some hard policy decisions than look panicked and corralled by the Opposition" will probably be the refrain from us armchair generals on September 8.

There are various explanations for Rudd's failure to thrive. These include the tactical problem of recycling a leader with serious negatives that three years of only semi-abeyance has suppressed in the public mind, but not eradicated. It has only taken a short time and some reminders of Rudd's private temperament and policy leadership style to refresh memories of why Labor started dipping into the thirties in 2010.

But history shows that comebacks are achievable. Even though they both have heads you can draw with a compass, Rudd is very different to his first predecessor. Howard's two terms away from the Liberal leadership gave him a chance to disown his negatives very effectively. Remember his stance opposing Asian migration and the ironic moniker of "honest John": The treasurer who failed to deliver his promised fistful of dollars? Me neither. Howard used the time to reposition himself as an older, wiser leadership figure for 1997 election. Given the way Abbott has been channelling the Howard government as an exemplar of a golden age, it looks like six years of distance is all that is needed to fire-break the past.

One of the most significant factors plaguing Rudd, however, is the inability of Labor to spike two issues that have dogged it constantly: refugee arrivals and budgetary management. These were policies that Abbott had been running rings around Gillard for most of her term and have clearly been common "spontaneous recall" top-of-mind concerns among Labor's focus group members.

Recognising this, Rudd attempted to shut these issues down from day one of his return. Following the strategy of "neutralising negatives" used in both politics and advertising (a tendency to highlight, rather than hide the weak parts of your product) he blind-sided the left by adopting the new Pacific solution. This allowed him to play to the concerns of once heartland seats, while also foregrounding his mastery of international relations. The latter remains an Abbott question mark that's yet to get much of an airing in the campaign, in stark contrast to Kevin Rudd who is set to deliver a foreign policy speech tomorrow at the Lowy Institute. This also gave Rudd a good position to demonstrate a willingness to listen to the backbench as the new collaborative boss and, most importantly, to spurn the Greens.

The shift on carbon pricing was an even bigger crap sandwich for Christine Milne, a relationship that appears to be all free-kicks for the ALP. Rudd knows that, unlike the Democrats who could cut their preferences either way, there's nowhere else for the Greens to go. This is evidenced most recently at the Green's official campaign launch where Christine Milne has continued the line that a vote for the Greens is "double value" because it elects Greens Senators while reducing the likelihood of a Senate dominated by the Liberal-National Coalition.

In this area the Greens haven't been wedged as much as pile-driven into a crack on the pavement, with all the resultant visibility of surface filler. Milne might have been better served by publicly cornering the Governor-General and arguing Labor had lost confidence of the House to grab some airtime before the election kicked off.

But for all Rudd had managed to dominate the media cycle between his return to office and announcement of the election, these issues haven't stayed down the way he must have wanted. Irrespective of Labor's proud history of the instigator of the mandatory detention regime, Howard's decade in power has allowed the Liberals to "own" punitive asylum seeker policy. Rather than let the new PM swoop in to claim the issue, Abbott pushed back aggressively and hard - even if that has meant occasionally dipping into his own nut jar to pull out stinkers like the "rupiah's for rowboats" buyback scheme.

The budget's been an area where the ALP could have better traction, but for some reason they're unwilling to argue the case. The Bowen-Hockey Q&A debate last week would have been a good place for the Government to turn around the "school halls" sledge by appealing to parents across the nation who've never seen a new building at their school during the time their kids have been there. While carbon pricing and global instability has a slightly ethereal quality to it, some of the bricks-and-mortar initiates could be defended with people looking for practical policy ideas rather than talking about new economic models in an age of fluctuating global capital markets. The former is campaigning to middle Australia, the latter is something best left for your next Monthly article. If Rudd's going to cop the negatives of his term, he should at least attempt to turn around some of the positives: but instead the title of "infrastructure Prime Minister" has been taken by Abbott.

Overall, the Government hasn't got the supercharger of campaigns: momentum. A new leader might have been able to pull it off with a clean slate and some clear air. Gillard might, as with the second half of the 2010 campaign, have built it up. But Rudd's policy negatives just haven't gone away and the momentum is all on the other side. Maybe the man who must be PM will heed Howard's ghost: two terms. Wait two terms.

Peter John Chen is a politics lecturer in at the Department of Government at the University of Sydney. view his full profile here.

Zombie issues: Labor's baggage that just won't die - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)