Victorian Labor has used a tightly held submission to a review of the May election result to argue for states to have more input into the national campaign, arguing a “one size fits all” approach was a key reason for the party’s bruising election loss.
Labor sources familiar with a submission prepared by the Victorian branch for the review being conducted by Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson say it is understood to focus on the national campaign’s failure to broach the differences between the states as part of its overall messaging.
The branch is advocating for each state to have more say in the strategies and policies that are developed and taken to an election, rather than having policies developed in Canberra and “farmed out” to the states to sell in a campaign.
While not explicitly mentioned in the submission, the complaint is understood to be in reference to the difficulty the party had over the Adani coalmine as it sought to balance the concerns of blue-collar workers, particularly in the mining industry, and progressive voters in inner-city areas.
Guardian Australia understands that the submission suggests individual branches have more input into the party’s policy development to ensure no state is “exposed” by a particular policy as a result.
One source suggested that had this been in place before the May election, the Queensland branch may have enforced a different policy on the Adani coalmine and ensured climate change action was framed as a driver of jobs growth rather than a moral issue.
Another suggested that because of the desire to minimise the risk of leaks, the state branches were largely kept in the dark about policies until they were announced nationally.
Details of the submission come after the former leader Bill Shorten took responsibility for the election loss, saying he acknowledged the party’s tax policies, particularly on franking credits, had allowed for an effective scare campaign against a change of government.
He also expressed regret that federal Labor was not seen as fighting for working people.
“It pains me to realise after the election that I’d misread some of the mood in Queensland and Western Australia. There they saw some of our policies as being green-left, not for the worker, not for working people,” Shorten said on Sunday.
“That pains me because I’ve spent my adult life standing up for working-class people, standing up for workers, standing up for a better deal for them. I was at Beaconsfield (mine) but it pains me to realise at the last election our presentation meant that some people felt we weren’t putting jobs first and foremost in everything we did.”
The May election saw Labor’s primary vote slump to 26.68% in Queensland and 29.8% in WA, with the party bleeding support to One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party in traditional working-class areas.
Nationally, the primary vote of 33.3% was Labor’s worst result in 85 years.
In Victoria, Labor secured 36.86% of the primary vote and won the seats of Corangamite and Dunkley, which had been made notionally Labor by a redistribution.
Ahead of the election, party strategists had been confident that Labor could pick up a handful of additional seats in Victoria that would make up for the lack of any gains in Queensland.
The party was also hopeful of winning up to three seats from the Coalition in WA, but swings did not eventuate.
On Monday the opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, said he believed the mea culpa from Shorten was “appropriate”, but said he also accepted “collective responsibility” for the result.
He said that the party was listening to the concerns of Queenslanders, and pledged to do “much better” at the next election.
“We have to start right here in Queensland, we need to do better in Western Australia, we need to do better in our outer suburbs and in our regions, and I am determined to put forward a positive agenda for Labor.”
Albanese said that Labor recognised the “scale of the defeat” suffered at the 18 May poll, and the review would look at the policies developed over the past six years.
“Between 2013 and 2019 we almost treated it like one term. In 2016, there wasn’t a reassessment of policies that we took to that election, and so we continued to build on six years of policies,” Albanese said.
“What we’ve done at this time is recognise the scale of the defeat, which was significant, (and) recognise we’ve lost three elections in a row and we need to do better.”
The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, said that despite Shorten’s comments on where Labor went wrong, the party remained wedded to its policies.
“Labor may have changed their leader, but they haven’t changed their policies,” he said.
The review by Weatherill and Emerson is expected to be delivered to the party’s national executive next month, with parts of it to be made public.
Albanese will then release a series of “vision statements” that will underpin the policies he will take to the next election.
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