FEDERAL ELECTION POST-MORTEM

The ALP’s recently released post-mortem general election has a giant invisible elephant in the room: the party’s remorse for its failure by supporting neoliberalism and rejecting its decades-long radical “traditional labor principles.”

Nonetheless, the study blamed Bill Shorten for being hated and not holding a winning political vote. His plan to win the next federal election is to have a simple message, campaign around a set of policies that are “less cluttered,” rely more on digital advertising, and, if possible, have a “famous” leader (pressure on, Albo!).

The review notes that the ALP has been dealing with its unpopular president. Planning to head to polling day, shorten had a net negative score of -20 while Morrison’s had a rating of-4, “says the report.

As a labor “leader,” Awkward Bill Shorten struggled to find himself as if he meant what he said. With the “shifty bill” tag, the Liberals zeroed in on this, and then Palmer went ballistic with it in social media.

The easy, negative campaign of the Liberals, focused on Scott Morrison–exacerbated in a shamelessly fact-free social media and traditional media campaign by Clive Palmer’s $60 million–had an impact, but the ALP had no tactical change.

Nevertheless, the report makes the surprising revelation that it could find “nobody authorized to negotiate and settle a plan or any mechanism to track its execution.” “A mixture of the leader and his office, a shadow budget review committee and an expanded leadership group seem to have agreed on future spending strategies. An overall objective did not inform these decisions. Nonetheless, it seems that the National Secretary was taken by surprise by the number and size of the policy proposals revealed during the campaign.

“Another team including the leader, his staff, senior shadow ministers and senior party officials had served as a campaign audit committee weekly for several months, but it did not determine the overall strategy for the campaign.”