If you want to know why John Howard lost the last federal election, don't pay too much attention to academics.
A couple of marketing experts claim that Labor's "Kevin07" branding strategy, celebrity candidates, appearances on Rove and FM Radio were instrumental to Rudd's win. They apparently also said there was confusion about the Coalition message with Howard's dual messages that the economy was strong but Labor would ruin it.
Katharine Murphy of The Age might be doing them a disservice by inaccurately summarising their findings but if she's right then they are completely wrong.
She also claimed:
The observations of the two researchers are fairly consistent with the feedback from insiders within the Coalition campaign.
Strategists complained in the aftermath of the Rudd election victory that there were substantial difficulties keeping Mr Howard on message during the gruelling seven-week political contest.
REVISIONISM 101
Was the election really won by Kevin07's branding strategy?
The re-writing of history after election results never ceases to surprise. It's all too easy to forget the strengths of the defeated government and to exaggerate the smarts of the victor. Howard had built a very strong majority of support in favour of his odd mix of big government conservatism, popular and occasionally outrageous free spending on some quite random stuff (the Western Oval comes to mind, where's Windy Hill's $50M grant?) and occasionally strongly populist stances on immigration, national security and cultural diversity.
WHAT THEY COULD HAVE DONE
If the government's adviser ranks had have been populated with those more in touch with the Australian heartland rather than Canberra based bureaucrats, they probably would have scrapped WorkChoices, nationalised something (nothing too big, we wouldn't want economic vandalism to get too impactful, maybe an oil refinery, some private hospitals or something), banned the hijab from airports and stopped immigration from countries whose arrivals had a high probability of being engaged in crime. Not exactly a policy stew the OC would enjoy eating but it would probably have been enough for Howard to have won.
THE REALITY OF HOWARD'S DEFEAT
Let us not forget:
■ The Coalition nearly won the election. It seemed like a landslide because Labor had so much ground to make up, but it has only a majority of ten seats. Adam Carr's list of seats tells the story.
Swing required for Labor to lose majority
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
075 Braddon Tas Sid Sidebottom * 51.5
076 Deakin Vic Mike Symon * 51.4
077 Hasluck WA Sharryn Jackson * 51.4
078 Bennelong NSW Maxine McKew * 51.3
079 Bass Tas Jodie Campbell * 51.0
080 Corangamite Vic Darren Cheeseman * 50.8
081 Flynn Qld Chris Trevor * 50.3
082 Solomon NT Damian Hale * 50.2
083 Robertson NSW Belinda Neal * 50.1
■ Beyond a handful of inner-urban seats where issues like David Hicks, Iraq and funding for lesbian amputee puppet-theatre might have been important, the single biggest issue of the election was WorkChoices. That's it. That's why John Howard lost. The (in part quite false) perception of Workchoices as being a purely pro-employer industrial relations policy fractured his connection with many of Howard's battlers who he'd won over in 1996 and basically held onto for the following three elections. To be sure, Howard's 2007 campaign wasn't perfect but some of it, ironically the union bashing part, was very effective. On the flip side, a lot of Rudd's campaign was terrible, some of it good. The best of it was focused on jobs and "working families", the worst of it on climate change which did nothing but boost the Greens party vote.
■ Celebrity candidates are almost always a disaster. Maxine McKew is the exception that proves the rule, the OC has a deep suspicion of all ABC presenters but she did a great job in Bennelong. Mind you, the demographics had very much being trending Labor's way in its suburbs for a very long time. I recall several Labor types discussing the seat in those terms as early as 1998. For every McKew there is a Nicole Cornes, a Cheryl Kernot and more.
■ In the election Howard nearly won, he'd actually outlined that he would be retiring mid-term and even nominated his successor, Australia's Hamlet Peter Costello who didn't have the cojones to smash and grab the leadership when it was sitting there glistening in the hot sun, just waiting to be stolen like a brand new shiny FM stereo with CD in a Sunbury panel van.
Game on.
Click here to Read More on this post...
Click here to display headline summary only...
While we're on the subject of strange old blokes, The Age's criminally convicted cozening columnist (surely there's another c-word we could think of) Lawrence Money has emerged on the blogging scene. Patriots will recall that his criminal offence involved child endangering.
Titan Senator Robert Ray, one of the smartest people to have ever entered the federal Parliament and a Labor moderate patriot who dominated the behind the scenes politics of his time is to retire a couple of months early 
since failed candidate 
