Labor’s debilitating civil war and dysfunctional, chaotic campaign have been blamed for Kevin Rudd’s loss to Tony Abbott in last September’s federal election.



A campaign review by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) vice-president, Jane Garrett, and the Brisbane city councillor and former Queensland state secretary Milton Dick, which was released on Friday, finds “the single biggest reason voters turned away from Labor was internal party disunity”.

“The decline in Labor's vote that began in late 2009 and culminated on 7 September 2013 occurred against a backdrop of persistent and ultimately debilitating leadership instability,” says the review, which was released after consideration by the ALP national executive.

The review charts the movement in Labor’s two-party preferred vote throughout the power struggle between Julia Gillard and Rudd, and suggests Labor faced a wipeout under Gillard as leader.

It says internal polling in May indicated Labor would hold just 40 federal seats, not the 55 it emerged with after September. The leadership change back to Rudd provided a circuit breaker of sorts, prompting a rebound in the Labor vote, but the party could not sustain the positive trend.

The review also described a Melbourne-based campaign headquarters regularly out of sync with Rudd and his travelling party; and it found the use of overseas consultants – US Democrats engaged for the campaign by Rudd confidant and strategist, Bruce Hawker – “did not add significant value and in some cases was disruptive”.

It says the campaign structure set in place for the federal election was completely disrupted by Labor’s leadership change in June, and the subsequent resignation of key ministerial and backroom talent.

“Campaign staff were largely in place prior to the leadership change in June. The subsequent upheaval saw around half of those staff leaving and needing to be replaced, including a large number of unit directors,” the review says.

“In some cases entire roles were dropped because there were simply not the staff to fill the positions. Nonetheless, once reconstructed it was the largest central campaign team ever.”

There is also a strong implication that Rudd and his travelling coterie either meddled with issues that should have been left to the organisation, or failed to make timely decisions, with consequential impacts on both the national and state campaigns.

“It is important to note that the new prime minister’s office sought to make a number of specific changes to the campaign staffing and structure, including late involvement by overseas consultants. This created some significant disruptions, confusion and inefficiencies within the campaign,” the review says.

“The late decision-making from the travelling party to campaign headquarters also led to some communication challenges with local campaigns,” it says.

“State branches sometimes duplicated work being done centrally and local campaigns didn’t always feel they were across what campaign headquarters and their state branches were doing.”

The review contains 30 recommendations, including one urging Labor to focus on rebuilding its primary vote and decluttering its political brand rather than aligning itself with groups in competition with the ALP for progressive votes.

“The raison d’etre for the Greens party over the last decade has been to attack, undermine and/or colonise the Labor party’s policies with an increasing ferocity, in an attempt to win one or two inner-city seats in Melbourne and Sydney,” the review says.

“The effect has been that these policy objectives have themselves been undermined, attacked and turned into political footballs driven by insular and often circular debate that has proved alienating to the mainstream community.”

“Labor must always welcome and work with the broader progressive movement but can never allow these relationships to compromise our core values, objectives and identity.”

The review urges Labor to put itself more or less on a permanent campaign footing and to deepen expertise in areas such as data mining and “evidence-based” campaign techniques.

The review makes the following key recommendations:

• Ensure the selection of marginal-seat candidates be undertaken as soon as possible;

• Train and establish field operations as soon as possible across Australia;

• Establish a new candidate selection panel to work with local communities to assist with identifying new candidates;

• Develop a new pre-poll campaign