The pain of losing an election is excruciating, especially when you are expecting to win. A week on, Bill Shorten and his team will be experiencing an agony that will haunt them for what will feel like an eternity.
I know, because I went through it too.
As chief speechwriter to Ed Miliband, leader of the UK Labour party in 2015, I will never forget the feeling of hollow emptiness on seeing the results roll in. Where once a glorious future beckoned, all of a sudden there is nothing but bitterness and regret.
The questions on everyone’s lips are predictable: how on earth did it happen? How do we stop it happening again? It is obvious why people ask. But the better place to start is: why did no one see it coming?
We had the world’s best opinion pollsters and strategists working with the British Labour party in 2015. The same was no doubt true of Shorten’s ALP team. So why were they both expecting a victory that just wasn’t coming?
These mistakes happen when a political party ceases to be in relationship with people on the ground.
When a party’s membership is too small, its activist base too narrowly restricted and its broader community connections weak then the vital intelligence network on which it depends withers.
If you’re in an everyday relationship with everyday voters, then they will tell you what they’re about to do. There is no investment in phone banks or computer modelling that can beat that basic fact.
It is also only when you really know the voters in all their diversity that they will tell you what they didn’t like.
When we started those conversations in the aftermath of defeat in 2015, we expected that we’d hear about specific policies. Miliband’s Labour had backed income tax rises for the wealthiest and a new property tax. Perhaps that’s what scared people off.
In fact, when we started real conversations, we discovered that people very rarely vote on individual policies. They vote on an overall feel.
People want to hear a story about where this party is going to take the country, what are the fundamental values that drive them, what will the nation look like when they’ve come to the end of their governing term.
Back in 2015, British voters simply couldn’t answer those questions about Miliband. Many of them had no idea.
And it wasn’t the voters’ fault.
Our campaign had been too fine-tuned. We had offered a host of clever policies. But a list of dot points is not a national story. We had not created a new, appealing, different national vision – an alternative that people could understand and choose.
As a result, people were left with no sense of what kind of country Britain might be with Miliband at the helm. And asking people to change governing course without an end in mind is a really difficult ask.
There will be moments in the months ahead when Shorten wonders whether this was a mistake he made as well.
After we failed in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn took over the Labour party and nothing ever looked the same again. The parliamentary party fell into a torment from which it still has not recovered.
That won’t happen in Australia. It was only possible in the UK because in the British Labour party the members and supporters are the only ones who can elect the leader and it costs only £3 to sign up. The ALP isn’t even having an election for a new leader.
But whatever his failings, the Corbyn leadership has brought some lessons too.
The 2017 general election that Corbyn fought might also have ended in defeat, but it went far better than the Miliband campaign. The Conservatives lost their majority and Labour enjoyed the biggest increase in its vote for 70 years. That was for two very simple reasons.
It was because a party of less than 200,000 had become a party of half a million, and a party program that had hedged its bets had been replaced by one that wore its colours far more proudly on its sleeves.
Anthony Albanese would do well to take note of both.
No one in the ALP has yet asked my advice. But I will give it all the same: grow the membership, do everything you can to restore deep relationships in communities of all kinds, listen to what people tell you and then return the compliment by telling them, loudly and proudly, what you are all about and what kind of country you want to help build.
That’s the way to win back people’s hearts and that’s the best way you can win back power.
• Marc Stears is director of the Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney
