By John McTernan
If the Brumby government had highlighted its strengths and shown some vision, the result could have been different.
TREASURERS have a hard time when they become premiers. Gordon Brown in Britain, Paul Martin in Canada and now John Brumby in Victoria all succeeded popular, telegenic leaders and all three failed to win a popular mandate in their own right. Is there an iron law that dooms former treasurers to failure?
Any politician who takes over after two or three terms into an administration faces one of the hardest of tests. The most potent election slogan of all is: ''time for a change''. While this can be resisted, international experience shows that all governments have a natural lifespan, with 10 to 12 years the usual outer limit.
Was, therefore, Victorian Labor's defeat on Saturday inevitable?
Not at all. This was an election where the major problem that swinging voters cited in focus groups was myki. If the worst you can be accused of after 11 years in office is the failure of software development by a private contractor, you should be able to win. A better strategy would have yielded a better result.
The first thing is that the key to winning a third or a fourth term is to make the election a choice of two futures, not a referendum on the record of the government - and Labor failed to do this. The need to make choice central is obvious. After 10 or 12 years, almost every voter has at least one grievance with the government, whether it is a minor issue with public transport or a major disagreement with a desal plant.
When these grievances aggregate, the mood for change rises.
The antidote is not traditional retail politics - offering gimmicky policies to pander to different demographics. What is needed is a big vision.
This has two benefits. On the one hand, as Bill Clinton's team once explained to me, you never get credit for your record as a government - voters want to know what you're going to do next. A promise for the future gains credibility from previous delivery, it even gives you a chance to get some modest credit for your achievements.
On the other hand, and even better, it allows you to define your opponent - particularly a small-target conservative. You have a ''plan'', but they have a ''secret plan''. Going positive gains you permission to go negative.
But when you attack, you have to focus on what's really at risk. And it's got to be a big, bold and credible claim.
This leads to the second pillar of a successful strategy - the voters have to believe that the economic growth they are enjoying happened not by chance but by choice. And that a change of government would therefore put jobs at risk.
Voters in marginal seats had come to think that economic growth was like the weather - Victorian Labor had the ideal means to prove otherwise.
John Brumby was the treasurer or premier for the 11 years of the government. He made the big calls that kept Victoria open for business and growing. I've been visiting Melbourne a couple of times a year for the past six years and the one thing that strikes any regular visitor is the scale of the infrastructure spend.
But it passes ordinary Melburnians by, partly because they have no point of comparison but mainly because there's no story being told again and again, making the case for the freeways, the dredging, the new lanes on the West Gate Bridge - affirming them all as being part of a plan.
Labor's strongest card is Brumby, but fearing the label of arrogance they tried to soften him.
Labor has learnt the basic lesson of politics the hard way - you can't make your guy a different person, you can only make them the best person they can be.
So, what's the other side of arrogance? It's authority, making the big decisions for the long term.
Just as Victorians nowadays say ''whatever you say about Jeff Kennett at least he…''
In 30 years' time, they'll be thanking Brumby for the north-south pipeline and the desal plant that together mean that Victoria can grow, despite the pressures of water supply.
That's a true legacy. But it should have been sold every day from July 2007, when he became Premier, until the election.
It's a cliche, but it's true: elections are won in years, not weeks.
Re-election is won by renewal - new faces, new voices, new policies, new means of communication. That's not just because governments themselves get tired, it's also because in the world of 24-hour media we get tired of governments. As a society, we live through telling each other stories. A Labor Party that stopped telling - and selling - its own story wasn't merely absent from the public sphere, it allowed others to define it. And it paid the price.
John McTernan was director of political operations for Tony Blair when he was British prime minister.