Losing it
I have just finished Annabel Crabb’s Losing it: The inside story of the Labor Party in Opposition. This is the third book this year to cover similar territory. First there was Bernard Lagan’s Loner, and who could forget The Latham Diaries.
What can I say? It was well written. Crabb has a great turn of phrase. It was more analytical than Lagan. But while it was a good read, it was not a great read. To be fair, for me at least, it suffered from being the third to til the same soil. Perhaps it was as Crabb predicted,
Books about parties in opposition have none of the flash and swagger of books about parties in government; this is acknowledged, and the author offers her apologies accordingly. Books about governments are marvels of mechanism: how Decision A was made thanks to a deal between ministers B and C; how Tycoon D met secretly with the prime minister to orchestrate the thwarting of Tycoon E, staring down the opposition of ministers F and G. Books about oppositions instead have as their meat and bread a battleground much more personal, often more bloody, and from which a purpose is invariably harder to divine. [p.2]
Crabb attributed much of Latham’s failure at the election to his many personal failings. In terms of the personal failings, I found this Liberal Party research following the ‘lay off my family’ media conference hit the nail on the head.
Liberal Party internal research on attitudes to their new young adversary; however, conducted after Latham’s explosive press conference, detected a subterranean trend of uncertainty about him. While focus group participants reported that they thought Latham was ‘interesting’ and ‘fresh’ and ‘challenging’, there were other, darker appraisals.
Some thought he was ‘embarrassing, crude and crass’ or ‘unpredictable and erratic’. The research also found voters who believed Latham was ‘hypocritical (he dishes it out, but can’t take it)’, ‘weak (he cries)’, and ‘dangerous (he mistreated his first wife)’. There’s something wrong with his personality,’ concluded one contributor in the anonymous survey group.
The analysis of this research, submitted to the Liberal Party as the federal election loomed close, had an encouraging message for the Government despite Mark Latham’s continuing popularity: ‘Labor is singing a tune of better health and education outcomes, fairer tax cuts, and more opportunities for people. It all sounds good to these voters, but they worry about the dark side of Mark Latham’s personality, and the dark side of Labor which is their proven inability to manage the nation’s finances. [p.226]
One of Crabb’s theses is that Labor has not been competitive at recent elections in part because it is out of touch with the electorate. Crabb identified two sources of disconnect. First, the Coalition has outclassed Labor on qualitative polling. Second, Labor’s union-based, factional arrangements produced practitioners that respond the party’s erosion of external influence nationally “by clinging to the power they wield internally… Latham’s complaint that more than a third of his Caucus considered themselves to be factional ‘powerbrokers’ is perfectly justified.” [p.281].
Perhaps as a result of this perceived weakness, Labor has fallen into the dangerous habit of fighting each [election] campaign roughly as if it were the last one. It’s a generalisation, but not an unfair one; the 2001 campaign was planned on the basis that Australians hated and would continue to hate the GST, for example, which had nearly lost the 1998 election for the Government. In the 2004 campaign, meanwhile, Latham did a good job of neutralising the national security issue which had proved so dominant in 2001, but failed to judge the extent to which the real battleground would be the economy. [pp.282-283]
Like I said, it’s a good read but not a great read — three and a half stars.