Wednesday, 8th December, 2004

There are nine governments in Australia – those of six states, two territories and the federal one. In Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, Labor rules. For a political brand, eight ninths of the market can’t be bad.

Yet since losing the ninth election to John Howard’s Liberal-National coalition, the newspapers and the airwaves have been full of discussions about the need for Labor to undergo radical change. It is like the thinking of that head of Coca Cola who decided that the formula of the most successful soft drink in the world needed to be changed because it had lost a few percentage points of market share. Utter nonsense.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Labor Party brand. In so far as there is a problem federally it is because the federal party leaders, unlike their state counterparts, have forgotten who they should be trying to sell their product to. In recent years they have been more interested in minor segments than the mass market. It really is as simple as that.

Changing the chief salesman without changing the target of his or her message will achieve little. But there is some evidence about the kind of person who would be the most effective at getting the message across. A person who voters are familiar with has a much better chance of success than some one who is relatively unknown.

The following table shows the age and length of political service of Australian Prime Ministers at the time of their first victory to become Prime Minister or as Prime Minister. Non election winners are excluded and Bob Hawke’s length of prior political experience is shown as 10 years not three because once he became a President of the ACTU in 1971 he was as much a political figure as any member of the House of Representatives.

First Victories of Australia's Winning Prime Ministers

Labor Contenders

The only exception on that list to the rule that experience counts is Stanley Melbourne Bruce who won his first election as Prime Minister at the age of 41 after being in Parliament only seven years. But Bruce was a decorated hero of Gallipoli who had been Prime Minister for two and a half years before leading his party to victory in 1925. Mark Latham this year was trying to become the second youngest man to become Prime Minister at an election after being in Parliament only a decade without becoming any kind of household name apart from publicity about leaving his first wife and thumping a taxi driver.

It will take another three House of Representative terms for Mark Latham to reach the average age and length of political service of those winning Prime Ministers. Kevin Rudd is even more of a political babe in the woods and while Stephen Smith and Wayne Swan will reach the magic age before the next election they are well short of the time in Parliament that most previous winners have taken to make their mark on the public.

The conclusion that it was a mistake not to return to Kim Beazley before the last election is hard to avoid.