Why Labor didn't win

I can tell you why Labor didn't win if you'd like to know.  The answer is easy.  Labor gave up on itself, and therefore the electorate gave up on Labor.  Consider these points:

(a) Climate change was the greatest moral challenge of all time up until early 2010.  Labor gave up on its policy despite a clear mandate to do something about it at the 2007 election.

(b) The Home Insulation Scheme had problems.  Hell yeah, but most government schemes do have problems.  What happens?  The problems are identified and steps are taken to fix them.  Instead Labor gave up on the insulation scheme.

(c) The Henry Report, which was the most important review of the taxation system was written and released to the government and it was given up on.  It wasn't published for over six months, and when it was partially released the government gave up completely on explaining it.  We still haven't had the figures and statistics underlying the conclusions released to this day.  The government implemented about 8 of the 138 recommendations.  So can I say that the government 94% gave up on it.  And the bit that it did decide to go with (Mining Tax) was unpopular and pilloried by the miners and their mates in the Liberal party.

(d) The promise of fixing the health system by midway through 2009 was given up on.  Okay Kruddy got around to doing something about it, but they certainly gave up on the deadline.

(e) after a cumulative effect, of the above bad policies, the government did the ultimate capitulation, and gave up on its leader, resulting in Julia Gillard coming to power.

(f) In the campaign, the government gave up on announcing significant policies, gave up promoting itself, gave up countering ludicrous arguments from the other side, gave up pointing to its fine record in the GFC, and simply reverted to the line that Tony Abbot was a real risk and you should not vote for him.

After all this (and a lot more besides) the electorate gave up on the government.  And fair enough too.

Granted, the opposition gave us a bland and negative campaign consisting of the line that the government was incompetent and we should not vote for them (if there were any other policies used I must have missed them).  Their "action contract" said they'd repay the debt (what debt?  I know the dollar amounts sound impressive, but borrowing 6% of GDP is not a significant level of debt); stop waste (a party wanting to give $75,000 to a couple earning $450,000 a year for paid parental leave cannot lecture us about waste); stop new taxes (see the previous point resulting in a 1.5% tax levy on all big companies that sell us groceries, banking services and petrol and filtering through the economy); bring the budget back to surplus by 2013 (weren't we all going to do that anyway) stop the mining tax (might be a problem with the former unless huge cuts to government services are going to result) and stop the boats (thus ending a whopping 3.4% of the asylum seeker problem).

And yet, with this campaign, Tony Abbott emasculated the ALP, made them lose 15 seats and their majority on the floor of the parliament.

It's no coincidence that most seat losses for the ALP occurred in Queensland.  Kevin Rudd is a Queenslander.

How the ALP can say Gillard ran a great campaign and that if Kruddy was still PM they would have lost another ten seats is beyond me.  It is a case of believing your own spin.  It was Shakespeare that said "and this above all, to thine own self be true".  The ALP needs to take a page out of the folio, learn from the debacle and move forward in the real sense of the term, not the spinning sense.