By Peter Hartcher
The federal Labor Party a year ago decided to follow the strategy of NSW Labor, and now it has arrived at the same destination.
The federal party cut down its leader, jettisoned its most idealistic policies, shifted to the right, relied on a negative campaign against its enemy rather than one showcasing its own positive offerings, and imported leadership by focus group.
"All opposition and no leader" ... Tony Abbott needs a more positive strategy. Illustration: Rocco Fazzari
In sum, it was a strategy of "aim low, spin hard". This formula was a proven success in NSW. It had kept Labor in power for 16 years. In the interim, the party feasted on the host body it had infested.
Finally it became impossible to keep distracting the people from the cumulative effect of the slow decay of state services and infrastructure. The corruption became harder to ignore, too.
So when it came to its inevitable end this year, NSW Labor left office with a primary vote of just 24 per cent. A risibly small share, yet well earned.
Just a year after embracing the NSW model, federal Labor has reached about the same level. The Herald's Nielsen poll published last Saturday gave federal Labor a primary vote of 27 per cent.
In the 39-year history of the Nielsen poll series, no major party has ever had a primary vote in the 20s. Gillard lost her majority at the last election with 38 per cent of the primary vote and was forced to negotiate a minority government.
The Nielsen poll suggests the Gillard government has lost a further 11 per cent of the voting public in the year since. Of course, it is a hypothetical exercise - there was no election last Saturday. But it is a guide to public attitudes.
And the focus groups on which Labor relied have also delivered their verdict. Even Labor's own research has found that Gillard has failed to establish any sort of positive relationship with the Australian people.
But where it took NSW Labor 16 years to get to such a low point, it has taken federal Labor just one year.
Why has it been such a rapid descent for Gillard? There are three main reasons. First was her manner of taking power, by unseating the man to whom she had endlessly pledged loyalty. The Labor focus group research showed that Gillard is seen as cold and untrustworthy, as the Herald reported this week. People had the opinion that Gillard had been put in place by factions or unions, while Kevin Rudd had been elected by the people.
Women voters in the focus groups generally welcomed the fact the country has a female leader, but then qualified this by saying they wished it had not happened the way it did or by wishing for a different woman.
Labor applied a state tactic of decapitating the leader to a national government; it evidently does not translate. The person responsible for the trains and the traffic is evidently judged by a different standard than the national leader responsible for the economy and defence. The "faceless men" did not think of that.
And the first impression of Gillard as untrustworthy was only reinforced by her broken promise - "there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead".
The second reason for the speed of the Gillard descent is that voters, especially in NSW and Queensland, had already seen this model of Labor politics at the state level. It was already in ill repute.
Even before Mark Arbib, former NSW Labor general secretary, led the hit on Rudd, the swaggering arrival of the NSW Right in federal Labor had been spotted by the political parties in Canberra. "Arbib is building his army," a Victorian cabinet minister in the Rudd government observed in the months before the coup.
And Malcolm Turnbull recognised the syndrome from across the aisle: "Sussex Street has come to Canberra," the then opposition leader said. He was right, and it asserted itself soon afterwards.
When the NSW and Victorian right joined forces to remove Rudd and transplant Gillard onto the government, the wider public quickly caught on, too.
It is a recurring theme in this story - the voters are smarter than the "faceless men" ever gave them credit for. The third reason is Tony Abbott. His angry oppositionism has been highly effective. A prime minister who has only a dubious legitimacy in the public mind has been unable to defend herself against his bare-knuckled biffo.
He has put aside any pretence at being an alternative prime minister. His budget in reply ignored the budget. His parliamentary speech to welcome the New Zealand Prime Minister was supposed to be a national act but Abbott mischievously turned it into a political one.
He refuses to respond substantively to the actions of the government. He homes in laser-like on the carbon tax and asylum seekers.
Instead of positioning himself as an alternative prime minister, he criss-crosses the country on a stunt-a-day campaign to get his eight seconds a night of footage onto the television airwaves.
As Gillard works her way through her scripted lines and deploys the spousal prop in a transparent effort to warm up her cold image, Abbott calls for a "people's revolt". She gets increasingly confected and he gets increasingly angry.
Abbott the Angry has successfully knocked Gillard down in the public perception. Only 13 per cent of people think that Australia has become "a better place" in the year Gillard has been prime minister, while 51 per cent say it has become "a worse place", according to an Essential Media online poll this week.
Yet consider the objective conditions. In the past year, average wages are up by $21 a week, share prices are 5 per cent higher than they were a year ago and unemployment has fallen from 5.2 per cent to 4.9. Visitors from abroad have difficulty understanding exactly why Australian seem so disgruntled.
But perhaps the most extraordinary indicator of Abbott's triumph over Gillard in public perception is what he has managed to do with the issue of asylum seekers. Another Essential Media poll asked: "Is the issue of how Australia handles asylum seekers more or less important than issues such as managing the economy, education and health services?" An astonishing 50 per cent said it was as important or more important. This is a gut reaction, not a reasoning one.
But this strategy has limits. The people's rejection of Gillard is not an endorsement of Abbott. How could it be? He offers little more than the negation of her. Labor's Anthony Albanese calls him "all opposition and no leader".
It is perhaps no coincidence that the people rate them equally when asked which is their preferred prime minister. In the latest Herald-Nielsen poll, Abbott and Gillard both scored 46 per cent. He has dragged her down to his level.
There are signs that Abbott's approach may have reached what the great Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz called "the culminating point of victory". All successful generals are tempted to continue with a winning strategy, even when it has outlived its usefulness and needs to be reappraised.
"This culminating point in victory is bound to recur in every future war in which the destruction of the enemy cannot be the military aim," Clausewitz wrote. Why can't Abbott aim for the destruction of the enemy?
First, because of the fact that he does not control Parliament and cannot force an election to give real-world effect to his dominance in the polls. There is a clear contradiction between Abbott's dominion over the public mood and his impotence in Parliament.
This week demonstrated it powerfully. Abbott has managed to turn the Australian public against the idea of a carbon tax. Yet when he tried to force Parliament to call a national plebiscite on the carbon tax, he failed immediately. It was a stunt - the outcome of a plebiscite does not bind a government, and Abbott said he would not be bound by it either.
Gillard may be the head of a minority government, but she has so far shown an iron grip on a parliamentary majority.
Of the 151 bills that the Gillard government has supported, 151 have passed the House of Representatives. Abbott has successfully blocked nothing, and successfully proposed nothing.
As the government proceeds to get its signature initiatives through Parliament, Abbott risks looking increasingly ineffectual, full of empty bluster and with nothing else to offer. This week the national broadband network crossed a serious threshold towards becoming reality. The likelihood is that the carbon tax will, too, in the months ahead. Successive losses in Parliament will expose Abbott and demoralise his troops.
Second, because true victory cannot be scored on opinion polls but in a federal election. And to win an election, Abbott will truly need to be an alternative prime minister. If he wants the people to vote "yes" he has to represent something more than "no."
Abbott knows this. His speech today to the Liberal Party's federal council will mark the beginning of a more positive program. He will offer a critique of Labor, but also the outline of an alternative program. He will lay out themes of opportunity and incentive, and speak about tax, debt and welfare, in what a Liberal strategist called "part one of a three-part process". First are the principles, to be given body in part two with broad policies, and finally detailed policies in the approach to an election. This is harder than simple negativity, but essential.
Barry O'Farrell won power for the Liberals in NSW by playing a so-called "small target" game - concentrating his energies on attacking Labor and offering scant policy alternatives of his own. It is tempting for the federal Liberals to follow his example.
But as federal Labor has learnt to its great pain, successful state strategies do not automatically translate to the national level. The stakes are higher, and so are the expectations.
Peter Hartcher is the political editor.