Thumping election victories can have perverse consequences. One of them is how they create the conditions for hubris and ultimate defeat.<\/p>\n
“The precise moment you believe you’ve mastered politics is when politics masters you,” writes Labor elder Wayne Swan in an essay published by the Chifley Research Centre on Friday.<\/p>\n
In 1993, Paul Keating won the sweetest victory of all in defiance of the punditry with an increased majority.<\/p>\n
“Three years later? Complete devastation. Government to opposition in a single electoral cycle,” recalls Swan.<\/p>\n
When LNP leader Campbell Newman claimed the largest state victory in Queensland history in 2012 he “appeared invincible, untouchable”.<\/p>\n
“By 2015, he was packing boxes in the premier’s office, having lost not just government but his own seat,” Swan writes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00a0Labor elder Wayne Swan has penned a cautionary essay for the party.\u00a0 (ABC News: Matt Roberts)<\/p>\n
Three years to make a case<\/p>\n
Ozymandian stories of triumph rendered void by the “shattered visage” of “boundless and bare” failure are as old as politics itself.<\/p>\n
Percy Shelly’s poem was about an Egyptian pharaoh. Given today’s hyper-partisan, social media distorted reality, the rise and fall of governments happens infinitely faster these days.<\/p>\n
Swan’s cautionary essay is a timely update to the canon and is aimed squarely at Labor’s triumphant class of 2025 \u2014 the 94 jubilant MPs embodying the 134-year-old movement’s biggest majority in 80 years.<\/p>\n
“These seats are instruments of change, not symbols of triumph,” writes Swan.<\/p>\n
“We have three years to demonstrate we deserve to keep them \u2014 three years to prove that Labor governments deliver for the people who elected us.”<\/p>\n
Swan is Labor’s national president and is worried about the party’s declining and “fragile” membership and ballot box support among working Australians, particularly in outer suburbs and the regions.<\/p>\n
Both belie the scale of Labor’s May 3 election majority, he suggests.<\/p>\n
“For too long we have been in denial about low membership in the Labor Party,” he writes.<\/p>\n
“Although we achieved a record two-party preferred vote we should be humble and diligent and recognise that a national primary vote in the mid-thirties demands more work.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Labor has an opening to make change while it is not on a political knife’s edge. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)<\/p>\n
Meanwhile at the roundtable<\/p>\n
Swan’s hand-wringing is the flip-side of the Coalition’s ongoing despair, and it sets a useful frame to consider this week’s economic roundtable.<\/p>\n
The Liberal and National parties are still coming out of their state of shock.<\/p>\n
Condemned, for now, to irrelevance in the national policy conversation, some Liberals privately still worry there may be no saving the Coalition in its current form.<\/p>\n
So much for the union ‘stitch-up’ predicted by the Coalition ahead of the roundtable<\/a><\/p>\n Sally McManus has been feeling a little lonely around the economic reform roundtable this week.<\/p>\n And even if it can be saved, conventional wisdom is that there’s no hope of power until the 2030s.<\/p>\n How robust these assumptions remain may well depend on whether Labor did enough this week to put itself on a sustainable pathway to meet the expectations it has created among voters.<\/p>\n Or whether it will end in disappointment. A do-little outfit that squandered its political capital.<\/p>\n Swan’s argument is that the government will not be re-elected without demonstrable progress on big challenges like housing and the energy transition.<\/p>\n Labor’s next campaign may not have the tailwind of the Trump effect. And without a record of self-made success, its fortunes will be hostage to future events and crises.<\/p>\n Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s roundtable has had mixed reviews, with some pundits quick to dismiss it as a flop.<\/p>\n But that would be to miss the groundwork that has been done.<\/p>\n Loading…Tax reform up in the air<\/p>\n While easy fodder for cynics and lampooners, the 29 hours of discussion and 327 different “contributions” over three days from the Treasurer’s hand-picked temporary cabinet has forced a degree of clarity on several key topics.<\/p>\n As participants dashed for the parliamentary taxi rank, Chalmers on Thursday night listed nearly a dozen “quick wins” for the government to pursue.<\/p>\n