By ABC's Jonathan Green
Photo: Labor's next leader should try to take the harder, slower road to government. (Paul Miller: AAP)
Tony Abbott's wrecking ball approach to opposition has been vindicated at the polls, but we can only hope Labor's next leader doesn't try to emulate it, writes Jonathan Green.
The ALP is this week wrestling with the question of who it should cast in the role of Brendan Nelson ... someone to put a brave face on defeat before making way for a leader of true electability.
This was a sequence complicated for the previous Opposition by the intermediary Turnbull phase, a moment that points to another aspect of this cautionary tale, the risk involved for the modern party leader who puts too much faith in intelligent cooperation and constructive bipartisan dialogue.
Poor Malcolm.
And poor Brendan. We tend to forget, but there was a moment in his lingering hyperbole-laced decline when the Nelson personal popularity reached 9 per cent. I only remember this because I've still got the T-shirt (courtesy First Dog on the Moon):
As a leader he was a future sacrifice walking; as Bill Shorten will be, or Anthony Albanese ... whoever it is in the diminished ranks of the Labor caucus who lets ego and wishful thinking overwhelm both commonsense and history, by putting themselves forward as leader. Someone will of course. Someone has to.
But we'll leave Messrs Shorten and Albanese there, savouring the prospect of running the Australian War Memorial or perhaps the National Herbarium by 2020, for it's worth looking more seriously at those other things we have learned in these past few years, beyond the savage impermanence of your party's good will.
There are lessons in the Abbott victory that will tempt the now opposition in this period of its present difficulty, for it is true that we learn from our mistakes; true also that we learn from the success and triumphs of others.
The key lesson in Tony Abbott's triumph is that it was not built on a strong, disciplined five-week campaign. Rather, the Coalition victory last weekend was built on three years of assiduous, constant campaigning; three years spent on a remorseless war footing. Day after day in hard hats and hiviz vests; day after day on the road with simple, sometimes-idiotic-but-always-unwavering messaging.
It was a campaign based on a single principle: the Coalition never accepted the legitimacy of the Gillard government, never mind that it was an entirely reasonable construct formed under the terms of our constitution and providing a thoroughly workable parliamentary majority.
Denying both those things - legitimacy and workability - became the cornerstone of the long Abbott march, a day by day attack that aimed to create an impression of chaos and disorder. And that was the impression the public seems to have been left with: that at last we are rid of not just an unpopular government with whom we had profound ideological disagreement, but a government that simply didn't work.
The last bit just isn't true on any objective measure, but thanks to the effectiveness of Tony Abbott's salesmanship, it has become the accepted reality.
Hand in hand was the tactic of constant negativity. Of never giving the Gillard government - the NDIS being the standout exception - an even, bipartisan break. Three years of aggressive negativity that were only modified through the immediate period before and during the formal campaign, a time when the necessities of marginal, middle-ground electioneering forced the Coalition to assume the policy priorities of Labor in order to diminish any points of awkward, politically confusing difference. Labor did the same of course - think PNG solution - just not as well.
The message from the Coalition was not to be clouded by policy detail or points of debatable disagreement. The message by late August was simply, I am not Kevin Rudd, nor am I the chaotic disaster that preceded him. Policy was by the by.
Labor today may look at all of this, this fatal sequence of politically potent events, and aspire to it. It may take the view that the way forward is to harden up, play the man, be filled with determined and remorseless intent.
Labor may be tempted to focus not on the message of alternative policy and belief, but instead work simply to tear down its opponent through a process of constant campaigning that admits no moment for reflection or misty ideological dreaming.
And that would be a tragedy for us all, the confirmation of a political dialogue that never extends beyond the ruthless cynicism of pure politics, that abandons the soft eccentricity of argument and ideas in favour of the hard arts of denigration and contempt.
After all, that worked for Tony Abbott.
A pity if Labor in opposition is tempted to that path. It would be a tactic that next time we meet to vote might present us with the same sort of choice we endured through the campaign of 2013, a contest between two almost equally delusional schemes of denial.
A choice between a Labor campaign that held out the prospect of rewarding Kevin Rudd for three years of disloyalty and deceit on the simple but utterly bizarre promise that he offered a "new way". Or a Coalition campaign that sought victory for Tony Abbott as a stable defence against dysfunctional chaos, even though it as a chaos that was only a reality because he had worked so hard to create it.
It might be a harder, slower road, but perhaps we could benefit from three years of a government that works steadily to implement an honest program with an opposition that works for three years to contemplate then argue for a rigorously detailed alternative.
It might be better for the health of our politics if the campaigning next time round is left to the campaign.
Jonathan Green is the presenter of Sunday Extra on Radio National and a former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.
