By Melissa Fyfe
THE Brumby government made the fatal mistake of believing it would comfortably win last year's state election, a slip that produced a lacklustre, conservative campaign, strategic errors and few fresh policy ideas, according to Labor's post-mortem examination of its surprise loss in November.
The review, delivered to party officials last night and obtained by The Age, found Labor's senior figures and strategists misread ''brittle'' pre-election polls as positive, underestimated Ted Baillieu and styled a questionable and risky presidential campaign around John Brumby.
Illustration: Ron Tandberg.
''Labor was in a political dogfight from the beginning,'' wrote federal MP Alan Griffin, the review's author. ''It was not six lengths in front only to be mown down in the straight. Rather it was neck-and-neck, all the way to the post. This raises questions as to why Labor ran a conservative campaign, rather than one where it needed to take risks to win,'' he wrote.
The review identified a gap between Labor's rhetoric and the reality for voters, who had ''deep misgivings'' about its performance and sensed arrogance. Facing this, Labor needed to capture voter imagination. Instead, it offered ''relatively bland'' commitments and, with the exception of the year 9 ''boot camp'' policy, ''few riveting, cut-through ideas'', the review found.
''The reason why Labor's support fell away is because it didn't have a strong enough story and it didn't tell that story well enough,'' it said. Advertisements attacking Mr Baillieu were contradictory, lacked conviction and should have run longer, it added.
The review highlighted Labor's cultural problems, rather than singling out Mr Brumby or state secretary Nick Reece, the two men most responsible for the loss. It found ''an enormous churn'' of state secretaries, leading to corporate memory loss and a ''significant level of dysfunction'' in head office in 2008 and 2009. The former secretary, Stephen Newnham, spent $500,000 on market
research that went unused in the election.
The review said the appointment of Mr Reece - who was close to Mr Brumby and a former senior adviser - was a ''significant departure from past practice'', which had head office maintain some independence from the parliamentary leader.
It said Labor's research and advertising program lagged eight months behind, was significantly disrupted by the federal election and was commissioned by strategists who lacked experience.
Labor, which had a swing of 6 per cent against it, went into the campaign with no ''Brisbane line'', a reference to rumours the Menzies government was prepared to abandon the north if Japan invaded in World War II. In political terms, a Brisbane line marks marginal seats a party will take resources from to save others.
Labor's overconfidence, the review said, meant ''a number of hard calls were not made''.
Long-term government had left Labor with a managerial and bureaucratic approach to campaigning, it said. MPs complained the head office ''compliance unit'' - through which all local media releases and campaign material passed - hindered local campaigns.
Labor imposed for itself a fiscal straitjacket by releasing all policies for Treasury analysis by Monday of the last week of the campaign. The opposition ignored this and released $1.6 billion worth of promises, flat-footing the government. Labor hoped the opposition's policy costings would blow up, but the day passed with little media fuss. This was part of a wider problem: the media, the review found, also believed Labor would win and did not properly scrutinise opposition policies.
Mr Griffin analysed the flow of Greens preferences and found that three out of every four votes came back to Labor, regardless of whether the two parties struck a preference deal. He said the analysis showed ''we should not act to meet Greens party demands on the basis of a preference agreement''.
Labor's internal research, revealed in the review, showed three major vote-switching issues in the campaign. The time-for-a-change sentiment was the strongest, followed by public transport and, late in the campaign, financial waste and mismanagement, as the opposition tied cost-of-living pressures to blowouts in the myki ticketing system and the desalination plant.
The review, which received 72 submissions and conducted original research, said that while the time-for-a-change sentiment was an important driver after three Labor terms, the loss was not inevitable for this reason alone. Those in Labor who simply blamed the government's longevity, Mr Griffin said, avoided a deeper analysis of the party's failure and ignored the winning of fourth terms by three other state Labor governments.
It said overcrowding on trains and trams had become a potent symbol of Labor's inability to manage Melbourne's rapid growth. The transport plan came too late and, in the end, was lost in the 2008-2009 summer train chaos, industrial strife and myki. Changing operators from Connex to Metro ''was not the circuit-breaker the government had hoped for''.
Based on Mr Brumby's consistently good results in polls as preferred premier, Labor campaign strategists decided to frame the election on the basis of leadership. But Mr Griffin found preferred premier was not a reliable measure - other research showed voters thought Mr Brumby was more arrogant and less trustworthy than Mr Baillieu.
The Age believes opposition leader Daniel Andrews is likely to welcome the review's 41 recommendations for party reform and is keen to ensure Labor gets access to quality research and more professional campaigning for the next election.