Boats Sink Beazley

Newcastle Herald

Monday November 12, 2001

AAP

KIM Beazley believes Labor lost the election the day a Norwegian captain turned his ship towards Australian territory.

John Howard's decision to order SAS troops onto the Tampa and the subsequent stand against asylum seekers clearly dominated the 2001 election campaign.

Asylum seekers and the war against terrorism made it difficult for the Labor Party to gain any political momentum on its pet themes of health, jobs and education.

Those issues caught Mr Beazley in a political bind.

By supporting the Government's tough stand on asylum seekers, he helped shore up Labor's traditional blue-collar support base.

But he struggled to hold many well-off Labor supporters who appeared to abandon the party over boat people and the issue of economic management.

In many respects, the ALP should be cautious about laying all the blame on asylum seekers and the media distraction of war in Afghanistan.

After all, as Mr Beazley often says, voters can walk and chew gum at the same time.

There was no reason they could not concentrate on Knowledge Nation and the war.

Labor did go into the campaign with a deliberate strategy to keep the bulk of its promises secret until the last possible moment.

Had Mr Beazley unveiled more of his party's agenda before the election, he could well have performed better when voters went looking for stability at a time of uncertainty.

For the Government, John Howard's remarkable political turnaround can be pinpointed as far back as the infamous Shane Stone memo following the party's stunning loss in the Ryan by-election, in Brisbane, in March.

The leaked memo from Mr Stone, the federal Liberal Party president, described the Government as mean, tricky and out of touch with the concerns of regular voters.

It sparked a series of political backflips and extra spending from the Government in a desperate bid to re-engage with the community.

The results were clear in late July when the Liberals held on to the suburban Melbourne seat of Aston after a by-election campaign that focused on interest rates and local issues.

The Liberals learned from the Aston campaign.

As they did in 1998, the Liberals ran a strong grass-roots campaign while Mr Howard took control of the broader national agenda.

While Mr Howard pushed his themes of strength, stability and certainty in troubled times, Liberal advertising heavily promoted local candidates and their links to local communities and issues.

In the end, the Liberal victory can be put down to strong marginal seat campaigners, such as Jackie Kelly, Ross Cameron and Pat Farmer in western Sydney, and the likes of Trish Draper in Makin, in Adelaide.

Ms Draper won her ultra-marginal seat with a 2.5% swing, while Mr Cameron and Mr Farmer needed solid pro-Government swings to hold on after a redistribution.

All are in mortgage belt seats where home mortgage rates and economic management may have played as strong a part in their victory as refugees.

On raw figures, Labor knows it has some work to do to recover.

The party's primary vote was running at 38.45%, compared with the 38.7% it polled in its disaster of 1996.

On primary figures, with up to 800,000 postals, absentee and pre-poll votes to be counted, Labor attracted 3.69million first preference votes.

That is about 750,000 fewer primary votes than it won in the 1998 election.

It comes in at about1million fewer primary votes compared with Labor's last federal election victory,in 1993.