Federal elections are fecund sources of lessons for the political class. says Frank Bongiorno from ANU. So what lessons have been learnt from past elections?
From 1993 they learned not to make a big target of yourself as an opposition party. The Coalitions Fightback gave Paul Keating hundreds of pages to work with. It helped produce an iconic moment when Liberal leader John Hewson was unable to explain to television interviewer Mike Willesee how the proposed Goods and Services Tax would affect the price of a birthday cake. Hewson never recovered.
Other election campaigns have also acted as tutorials in how to do, or not to do, federal politics in Australia. The 1984 campaign seems to have particular relevance at present. It was a very long campaign - about as long as the one on which we have just embarked. An early election called by Prime Minister Bob Hawke, it was intended to take advantage of his stellar personal popularity and economic recovery.
Most commentators expected a crushing Labor victory. But the swing from the government was almost 2 per cent. Its majority shrank from 25 to 16 seats in a House of Representatives that had been enlarged from 125 to 148.
A post-election internal Labor review identified the unusual length of the campaign as one of the reasons for this disappointing result. The enduring lesson learned from 1984 was: dont do long election campaigns.
