Five days before the 1974 election, Patrick White, recently awarded our country’s first Nobel Prize for literature, spoke at a rally at the Sydney Opera House. Gough Whitlam and Jorn Utzon, that building’s architect, he said, were both "men of vision who build for the future while not losing sight of the everyday details".

We are less likely these days to pay as much attention as we should to artists. That is a great pity, because to my mind the most incisive analysis of the last election was offered by our only other literary Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee. In a long piece in The New York Review of Books, focused on sharp criticism of the major parties’ refugee policies, Coetzee noted that the contest was "won and lost on arcane issues in the tax code".

Patrick White speaking at the Opera House in support of Gough Whitlam in 1974. Credit:Peter John Moxham/Fairfax Media

The Labor Party is currently engaged in a debate about what went wrong in that campaign. Everybody in the party has their opinions, and in two weeks we’ll get the official version, when Anthony Albanese responds to the party’s election review.

So far, we’ve had some potshots, some shadowboxing around individual legacies, but the only interesting feature is how limp the debate has been. It seems at times as though MPs are arguing only because they know they should.