The whiteboard told the story. Fifteen names had been written on the list.
Places such as Page, Brad-don and Lindsay. But one more was needed to hit
sweet 16, the number of parliamentary seats that would take Kevin Rudd over
the line to make him Australia’s first Labor prime minister in more than a
decade.
The campaign room in the upper reaches of Brisbane’s giant Suncorp stadium was
taut with tension. High in the corner, the television was running Sky TV,
already reporting a Rudd victory. Down the corridor I could hear Labor
supporters whooping with delight every time another rival Liberal MP bit the
dust. From downstairs, where hundreds more were gathered, a muffled chant of
“Kevin, Kevin” had started.
It seemed the whole of Australia knew that history had been made. But Rudd’s
closest advisers, faces frowning with concentration as they furiously tapped
their laptops or whispered into their mobiles, were still refusing to call
it.
Then one more phone rang. “Are you calling it?” the caller was asked. The nod
told the story. When the seat of Petrie in Queensland was added to the
whiteboard, the long-serving Liberal prime minister John Howard was
unceremoniously tipped out of office.
Not for the first time that evening Kevin walked into the room, suit buttoned,
hands in pockets. He was studied and calm. “Congratulations,” I said. His
face broke into a huge smile. “Thanks, mate,” he said. And with that the
room filled with family and friends.
The anxiety and apprehension of the early part of the evening made way for
hugs and handshakes. Then, within minutes, came the hush as Kevin took the
historic phone call in which Howard conceded defeat. My friend had just
delivered Labor what the following morning’s papers would describe as a
“Ruddslide”.
I was in Australia, at the invitation of the Labor party there, for the last
part of the election campaign, to observe it at first hand. Since Rudd
became Labor leader last December, I have been working with him and his
impressive campaign team on their strategy to turn four successive defeats
into victory.
We started talking long before Kevin took the leadership. A late-night
conversation in a Sydney hotel bar started our friendship. Quite simply,
Kevin was sick of Labor losing. He was impatient to get rid of a Liberal
government whose best days were clearly behind it. And he wanted from me
some insights about how new Labour’s success in winning three elections in a
row in Britain could be applied in Australia.
My advice to him was simple. Winning elections requires more than a good
message or even a good messenger. It needs a consistent strategy and a clear
policy agenda for the future. For Labor to win, I said, it would have to
earn the public’s permission to be heard. That could happen only if he could
prove Labor had changed and had reconnected with the public’s concerns. If
Kevin could do that, then the election could be fought as a straightforward
choice between the future and the past.
Throughout the year, I never wavered in my belief that Labor would win. What
surprised me was the scale of it. Paul Kelly from The Australian said: “It
is a watershed election. On the numbers, it is Labor’s greatest victory.”
The scale of the task was huge. To win, Labor needed its biggest swing ever.
We exceeded expectations. In places such as Dawson in Queensland, Rudd’s
home state, the swing to Labor was 15%. The once-invincible Howard became
only the second prime minister in Australian history to lose his
parliamentary seat alongside his premiership.
It is a result that governments and opposition parties in Britain and
elsewhere will pore over. For a start, it defies all the normal rules that
govern the outcome of election contests. Elec-toral defeat often goes hand
in hand with economic decline. But the Australian economy is strong and
growing: 2m jobs have been created in the past decade. By a factor of two to
one, Australians think their country is going in the right direction. The
anger that accompanied the Tories’ turfing out of office in Britain a decade
ago was largely missing. Even after 11 years as prime minister, Howard
enjoyed positive approval ratings.
And yet Labor won. Part of the reason for being in Australia was to see at
first hand how an incumbent party that relied on its reputation for economic
competence to win successive elections dealt with the time-for-a-change
factor. In this case the answer is not very well.
Howard’s six-week Liberal campaign was all over the place. There was neither
discipline nor clarity, consistency in neither strategy nor message. But the
election was lost long before the campaign began.
After the Liberals defeated Labor for a fourth time in 2004, a sense of
arrogant invincibility crept into Howard’s government. His alliance with
aspirant voters gave way to more ideological considerations. Industrial
relations reforms that removed basic workplace protections scared the very
voters upon whom Howard’s 11-year ascendancy was built. And when Howard
failed to act on Australia’s serious drought, instead aping George W Bush’s
scepticism on global warming, he seemed ever more incapable of facing future
challenges.
In the preelection period, a policy vacuum left the Howard government looking
stale and tired with no discernible forward agenda. Even when a A$32 billion
(£13.8 billion) tax-cutting package was unveiled, it looked like a desperate
ruse to buy votes, and people saw through it.
A year before the election, the Liberals had blown the chance of renewing
themselves by switching leadership horses. The long-running and debilitating
dispute between Howard and his treasurer, Peter Costello, was resolved in
the PM’s favour. Howard saw off Costello’s leadership challenge and with it
any prospect of a generational change that could have repositioned the
Liberals as a future-facing party.
Instead, it was Labor that renewed its leadership. In Kevin Rudd, Labor chose
a different sort of leader, one who was moderate and modern, with an open,
engaging style that had particular appeal to younger voters. He was
continually mobbed by children on his visits to schools, and his appearances
on television chat shows showed him relaxed and confident, in touch and
forward-looking. A Christian and family man – his wife, Therese, is a
successful business-woman – Kevin has a compelling life story, particularly
his struggle to overcome adversity after the death of his father, that
resonated with the aspira-tional values of middle-ground voters.
As Howard vacated the political centre ground, Rudd marched forward to occupy
it. By making a virtue of fiscal prudence and promising to spend less than
the Liberals, he was able to reassure undecided voters that Labor had learnt
its lesson on tax-and-spend and that changing government didn’t pose a risk
to the booming Australian economy.
It was a masterstroke. The trick card Howard had played to devastating effect
in previous campaigns, of associating Labor with economic risk, was trumped
by Rudd’s obvious moderation. But what won Rudd the election was less his
efforts at reassurance and more his agenda for the future.
His fresh ideas on education, health and the environment captured the mood of
the nation. He offered action where Howard had refused to act: particularly
on climate change and on education, where Rudd’s promised revolution aims to
put Australia at the top of the global attainment league table. Here Rudd
tapped into an instinct in the Australian public that although its country
was doing well, it ought to be doing better, and that without urgent action
it would find itself overtaken by other nations.
The scale of his win provides Rudd with the opportunity to keep the Liberals
out of office for a generation. They are licking their wounds, uncertain now
whether to defend Howard’s legacy or trash it.
Meanwhile Rudd has strengthened his grip on his party by sidelining Labor’s
infamous parliamentary factions and choosing his cabinet on merit rather
than succumbing to the traditional back-room deals. I have no doubt he will
pursue a modernising progressive agenda for his country and dominate the
centre ground.
Howard lost because he ran out of ideas and got out of touch. He moved off the
centre and got stuck in the past. He thought he could overcome “time for a
change” by relying on the strength of the economy but he could not come up
with a compelling agenda for the future. After his 11 years in office,
people were bothered less by what had been achieved in the past and more
about what his plans were for the future.
Rudd, by contrast, captured the mood of the nation by facing outward to the
public, not inward to his party. He ran on a new Labour ticket, moving Labor
into the centre. He had the courage to move beyond the past. Rudd won
because he took ownership of the future. It was the key that unlocked his
victory. It is the key to victory in any election in any country.
