'We are on the right side of history on this argument,' says George Wright in frank election postmortem at press club

Labor’s national secretary, George Wright, has urged his parliamentary colleagues to persist with carbon pricing, declaring that the policy positions the party on the right side of history, climate science and economics.

Wright used a frank campaign postmortem at the National Press Club on Tuesday to express his view that Labor – having “bled” on the carbon pricing issue – should stick with the policy during the transition to opposition. He said Labor party members felt strongly that Labor should hold the line on carbon pricing.

“We are on the right side of history on this argument, we are on the right side of science on this argument, we are on the right side of economics on this argument and on the right side of preserving for the long term our living standards,” Wright said in response to a question about whether the party should fight, or accept the new government’s agenda on this issue.

He argued that the response to Tony Abbott’s proposed repeal of Labor’s clean energy package was a matter for the shadow cabinet, but he added: “We are on the right side [of this argument] and I think we should stay there.”

Wright’s public advice to Labor’s parliamentarians comes as the opposition is determining how to respond to the repeal proposal once parliament sits.

Labor went to the election promising to end the fixed-price period of the carbon regime, and move more quickly to an emissions trading scheme with a cap on emissions and a floating price.

Post-election, senior party figures have insisted publicly that carbon pricing remains a key part of the agenda, although internal views are mixed. No decisions have yet been taken by senior ministers about how to proceed on specifics.

Returning to the topic of the election campaign, Wright told the press club that Labor had fared better in September under Rudd’s leadership than it would have without the leadership change. However, he said “in retrospect” Rudd should have gone to the polls sooner because the initial honeymoon which put Labor back in contention against Abbott could not, in the end, be sustained.

He also paid tribute to Julia Gillard’s toughness, and said history would be kinder to the former prime minister than the contemporary reading. That said, he spoke of having frank conversations with her about the state of Labor’s poor opinion polling before Labor switched back to Rudd. He said he had given her his assessment “straight”, and she had deserved to “get it straight”.

Wright said the 2013 campaign was certainly not perfect, but the ALP had held it together; he also argued that the infrastructure and campaign apparatus built up behind the defeat would sustain the ALP during opposition, and through a period of rebuilding.

He pointed to advances behind the scenes in micro-targeting, direct communications, digital campaigning and the crowdsourcing of micro donations as “green shoots” – institutional bedrock for election campaigns in the future. “We live to fight another day, and fight we will,” Wright said.

He said Labor could shrug off the defeat and get back into government quickly if it hit pause on the “indulgence” and “navel gazing” of the past several years. Caucus would need to be serious about changing a culture that put self-interest before the interests of voters and supporters.

His critique was direct. Wright joked that a strong interest while a university student in “gothic horror” had equipped him well for a management role in the ALP.

He said the internal culture would not be changed by public admonishment by either himself, or by the new Labor leader, Bill Shorten – by “finger waving”. “It can only be addressed by people realising that we’re actually there to represent something more than ourselves,” he said.

Wright said the point wasn’t that Labor lost an election in 2013 – the point was Labor had lost government. He made a comparison with the Whitlam government, which he said had not lost the policy argument; the policies were welcome, and endured. It had lost the competency argument with the public.

Wright also praised his Liberal party counterpart, Brian Loughnane’s disciplined orderly campaign, and also backed his recent call for reform of the Senate voting system. He said Labor would “absolutely support” an inquiry by the joint standing committee on electoral matters in the wake of a federal election which delivered stronger than usual micro-party representation in the Senate due in large part to intricate preference swaps.

“I think it does need to be looked at,” Wright said.