It’s taken a week, but at least one Labor adviser has finally got a better answer as to why the Labor Party suffered a record loss. As long as Labor “spins” its mistakes, not only does it not learn any lessons, but it gives the public no reason to trust that it has changed. Labor suffers so much from not having open ongoing debate. If Kelty (and others) had said this two years ago, they would not be in such a hole now.
…the party’s breach of trust with voters over the carbon tax was a bigger cause of its defeat than the disunity cited by senior ALP figures.
Mr Kelty, who is backing Bill Shorten in the mould of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating to become the next ALP leader, said the seeds for last Saturday’s loss could be traced back to the failure of Labor to explain to voters why Kevin Rudd was dumped in favour of Julia Gillard in 2010.
“To be honest, I think they lost the election in two points of history,” Mr Kelty said.
Spin has a price:
“They didn’t ever explain the change of leadership from Rudd to Gillard. Therefore they didn’t lose the next election, but they didn’t win it either. So there goes that first downward trend. People couldn’t understand why it wasn’t explained to them.
Kelty is still mincing words a little. It’s not that people “saw” it as a breach of trust. It was a breach of trust.
“Second, when Julia Gillard actually announced the Greens policy (of introducing a carbon tax), people saw it as a breach of faith, a breach of trust. When people have come to a view that they don’t trust you, when you have broken a commitment to them, when enough people believe that, it gives them a great opportunity therefore not to be interested in politics, they just wait until the next election.”
Though this is certainly right:
“All the other things don’t matter. When that essential covenant of trust between the electorate and those who are elected is broken, it’s very, very hard to rebuild.”
The point the Labor Party is still a long way from getting is that they have been gullible fools and wasted countless billions for believing that science is done by consensus, and can’t be corrupted or distorted by massive one sided monopolistic funding. They were duped into thinking that “denier” was a term of science, and that simulations of the climate produce “evidence” that tells us something useful about the real climate. They soaked up stories of big-oil funded deniers, while staying oblivious to the big-bankster and big-government interests that were 3500 times larger.
But at least if the ALP had been honest in 2010 and said they would bring in a price on carbon, they would have found out the other reason why the carbon tax is still poisonous. The average punter just does not believe that a tax can change the weather.