This was not an election we “had to have”. On the face of it, our newly hung parliament might seem to reflect the same anti-incumbent mood that is sweeping many parts of the US, and which put the Tories into minority government in the UK. But we weathered the recession well, with our unemployment roughly half theirs, and comparatively tiny government debt as a proportion of GDP. So it’s not “the economy, stupid”. And the opposition offered little in the way of new policy (mental health funding being an exception) to motivate a change in leadership. Instead, strategic mistakes by the government over the past several months have created a climate where policies that were soundly rejected by the electorate in 2007 have been able to resonate again. I think there are a few lessons that progressive parties, including Labor itself, can draw from the debacle.

1. Don’t panic

Possibly a consequence of spending a decade in opposition, Labor had many first-term priorities. Several of these were symbolic and long overdue; actions like signing Kyoto and issuing the apology were not problematic because they didn’t require detailed explanation to the electorate. But when it came to more complex policies, Labor has done a poor job of communicating the detail and motivation of these plans to the public. They were silent for the better part of a few months on the ETS, letting the media focus on the Liberals as the party was tearing apart. But that silence was a gamble that didn’t pay off when the regressive elements of the opposition managed to roll Turnbull. Abbott started trumpeting about the great big new tax and the electorate, having never been told how an ETS works or why it is superior to the Liberals’ plan of directly paying polluters, began to believe him.

Even then, Labor could have resurrected it by digging in and pointing out that Abbott’s plan was a great big tax too (where else was his money coming from?); that images of freezing pensioners unable to afford electricity were wrong, because they would be fully compensated for price rises by funding from the sale of permits; that the price rises in electricity we were already seeing were not the result of the ETS (obviously, as it hadn’t been passed!) but rather infrastructure upgrades, and so on. There are also the more general arguments about the cost of inaction to us and our grandchildren, and the fact that an ETS would create plenty of jobs, with even the mining industry conceding there would not be a single job lost as a result of it (just slower growth). I don’t recall any of these points being made. Instead we just heard the generic line about climate change being a great challenge for a while, and then the plan was put on ice.

Admittedly, there were some external factors involved. The failure at Copenhagen and a couple of scandals like “Climategate” (all of which later turned out to be storms in teacups) did give Abbott ammunition. But it is hardly as though the international community had previously been a picture of harmonious cooperation on climate change, and it was also not the first time the underlying science had been falsely called into question. The government panicked when they should have had the courage to shepherd people along. Maxine McKew complained last night that this had been a “core belief issue” and greatly damaged Labor’s credibility when they gave it up. I think this was especially true because it was unclear exactly why they did so – because the Liberals wouldn’t support it? Of course they wouldn’t! That’s why people had ejected Howard. If the government really did have to postpone it, they should at least have had some alternative interim policy better than a citizens’ assembly.

This behaviour was repeated with the mining tax. Rudd did stand firm, but again without really making a case for why the tax was needed. I don’t remember hearing about the mining companies’ record high profits; or their investments in mining technology in Australia that make it difficult for them to just vacate the country and set up shop in Bolivia; or the already comparable treatment for petroleum and gas companies; the list continues. The simple Liberal narrative cut through once again and again Labor backed down (although less drastically), after an immensely destabilising change in Prime Minister.

I believe Labor could learn here from John Howard’s success with the GST. This was a very difficult sell. In contrast to Labor’s strong electoral mandate for climate action, Howard had previously explicitly said he would never introduce a GST. When he did propose the GST again, the Liberals took a 5% swing against them in the 1998 election and clung to government with 49% of the popular vote. In contrast to the vague and well-compensated cost of living increases associated with an ETS, a GST would obviously and directly increase the cost of everything you buy on a day-to-day basis. The taxes that were cut to offset the GST were mostly ones like stamp duty that you pay rarely and when you have a big chunk of cash from having sold your house; the states also took a while to deliver those cuts, from memory. But Howard dug in and did enough to convince the minor parties in the Senate that they wouldn’t be destroyed by voting for it, and it was passed. It obviously wasn’t electorally devastating because they won the 2001 election. September 11 and the Tampa were big factors in that but I think that is a lesson in itself: the news cycle will move on and people will cope.Something that appears scary or superb at one point might not even get mentioned in the next campaign (how much did you hear in the last couple of weeks about Labor’s federalisation of health services, which was dominating news a few months ago?) In the long term, it does far more damage to the party brand to back away from core articles of faith.

So: don’t try and legislate everything at once. Pick an issue, prosecute the case, and have a little faith in the public’s ability to understand an explanation instead of just a slogan.

2. Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight

Related to that last point – the need to actively engage with counter-arguments – has been the terrible quality of government advertising recently. The Minerals Council came up with an ad showing specifically how the mining tax would apparently hurt all sorts of target demographics – from miners themselves to suppliers and surrounding communities. It was ‘real people’ talking to the camera and though it was based on a shaky premise (that the mining companies would rather sacrifice entirely their most profitable operations than pay more tax on them), it was powerful. The government vacillated about responding because it would require contravening their own guidelines. After deciding that it was worth taking the political hit there, they produced the most insipid and ineffective ad imaginable. Arty camera angles showing a man talking with a PowerPoint presentation about the “future tax system”. It didn’t even give any details, but advised you to visit a website. I don’t remember the word “mining” appearing in the ad. Most citizens would have been doing well to even figure out that it was an ad about the mining tax, let alone be convinced that it was a good idea.

The government doesn’t necessarily need to spend enormous amounts on ads. The ads just need to be better. They’re only communicating one or two ideas; it’s not that hard. Also, they should be trying to get some allies in these policy battles. The unions came up with some great ads on mining (like the “Tony understands” ads thanking Abbott for understanding that billionaire mining executives were facing all-time highs in the price of yachts and caviar). I’m not saying that the government should be funding union ads or anything like that, but it shows that effective campaigns can come from both sides and needn’t always oppose the government. Climate change is going to be enormously expensive to the insurance industry. Why not bring them into the fight against the miners and power companies that aren’t embracing any change?

3. Don’t move the party too far

One of the election’s most emphatic statements was the increased vote the Greens received. With a House seat, a decisive balance of power in the Senate, and a general increase in first-preference votes, they did extremely well. This was largely a consequence of Labor’s decision, under both Rudd and Gillard, to tack right in search of votes from the “Howard battlers” / “working families”. I think that hunt was largely a mistake for a few reasons, which are probably easier to see in hindsight, but worth summarising.

First, centre-right parties will always do centre-right rhetoric better than a centre-left party trying their best impression. Asylum seeker policy is a good example. Instead of prosecuting the case about 90% of boat arrivals being genuine refugees and the small number of arrivals in comparison to overall population growth (which is the real issue putting pressure on people in Western Sydney and similar places), Labor went with the “Pacific lite” solution. This alienated the left and didn’t win over the right because it’s still not as powerful as Abbott’s short and sharp (if xenophobic) “stop the boats”. I don’t think the solution to conservative dogwhistle politics is chasing them to the right but never getting there anyway; it’s better to persuade centrist voters that they’re being manipulated by a scare campaign.

Second, in creating this sort of a small target, the government made themselves too indistinguishable for their own good. Sure, it meant that nobody could get too worried about tax rises from climate policy; but it also meant that nobody could get inspired by a real climate policy. Deprived of positive reasons to vote for Labor, it was too easy for voters to focus on the non-policy aspects like the treatment of Rudd, the cabinet leaks, and dissatisfaction with state Labor. All governments face intense scrutiny and can never really present that small a target anyway, so I think it is wrong to give up the advantage of legislative gravitas.

Third, the calculation that they could gain votes on the right, without really losing them on the left, was wrong. Labor has lost two seats in this manner – Wilkie is an ex-Green who is certainly not to the right of Labor – and the Greens have expanded their Senate control as well. But looking even further, the number of seats won is not the only metric that defines the election. Liberal politicians and commentators last night repeatedly seized on Labor’s very low primary vote as evidence that they don’t have an electoral mandate to lead. This sort of narrative could weaken their efforts to govern even if they do cobble together an alliance.

The take-home message

I think this lesson ties everything together: the Labor party needs to escape its image of being more concerned with internal politics than policy. I think this portrayal is unfair at the federal level (especially coming from the Liberals, who have undergone their own share of squabbling and regicide) but it certainly resonates with electorates fed up with the revolving-door leadership of state parties. Instead of having a thousand policies, failing to explain them and then jumping along to the next one as soon as attack ads start to make a dent in the polls, they need to pick something they really believe in (and for which there is a strong case), and stick with it. Trying to constantly analyse where the most votes lie has created a paralysis that has actually cost them votes. It also means a weak legacy once their term does end. The US Democrats are likely to suffer in the November midterms but they can be proud of their legislative legacy in healthcare and financial reform, and it’s doubtful that trying to appease the Tea Partiers would have delivered a better electoral result. Politicians are always talking about how they entered Parliament to make a difference, and I think it’s time to start acting like they actually believe that.