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Faultlines and failures.

Article Excerpt
Having changed leaders and embracing the clarion call for 'generational change' not only of its own parliamentary party but also of the government, the Australian Labor Party's defeat at the hands of John Howard's Coalition in the 2004 federal election has been widely construed as a bitter set-back for the Labor cause.

Such reactions overlook several mitigating factors: the Labor failure at the national level stands in stark contrast to its successes in state and territory politics and, as far as the national two-party vote is concerned, Labor's 2004 defeat is by no means its worst ever result.

By the same token, a closer inspection of the discernible trends in the national vote indicate some major faultlines in both the way the national leadership conducted the 2004 campaign and in the nature of the Labor vote generally. If Mark Latham is to remain party leader, and if Latham and his colleagues wish to make a serious challenge to the Coalition's hold on government in the next election, some of these faults need to be observed and acknowledged lest they re-occur at subsequent elections.

Two major features of the 2004 vote are immediately apparent. First, the Latham-led Labor Party failed to convince voters in outer-metropolitan electorates that it could...

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