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Winning at all costs: Rudd’s case for courage and conflictTo win, the Labor Party must fully embrace negative campaigning. We will never secure an election victory to deliver our program based simply on the goodness of our hearts.

Politics, properly defined, should be both a positive and a negative equation: to argue for our proposition for how to shape Australia’s future in national security, the economy, individual enterprise, social justice and the environment, as well as to demolish the conservatives’ proposition for the same.

Over the last decade or more, the Labor Party has dedicated the bulk of its political energies to the former, but with insufficient attention to the latter.

By contrast, the Liberal Party has had no such qualms. The Liberals since Hewson have never had a proactive policy vision for Australia’s future. Their single interest has been to destroy whatever policies the previous Labor government has put in place, and to run a continuing negative campaign against everything the Labor Party stands for, with the single objective of obtaining and sustaining political power. Any passing examination of Abbott’s election program for the 2013 federal election, and the subsequent actions taken during his term, demonstrate this central point. The same occurred in both the 2016 and 2019 elections.

The Liberals have campaigned for decades against the Labor Party on the grounds that fiscal stimulus, budget deficits, public debt, public infrastructure investment and industry policy undermine Australia’s economic strength by saddling future generations with unsustainable debt. On this basis, the Liberal Party argued for paying off public debt, a return to budget surpluses, deregulation, small government and low taxes as the basis of their claim to be Australia’s natural economic managers.

We now know this claim to have been a lie from the beginning. The Liberals now report five times the net debt than existed under the last Labor government and seven times the budget deficit, and they have now resumed the core elements of Labor’s national infrastructure plan with the proposed completion of the NBN.

If their critique against the previous Labor government was that we believed in ‘big government’, by contrast the Liberals now believe in ‘giant government’. At the height of the GFC, government expenditure as a proportion of the overall size of the economy peaked at 26 per cent of GDP, whereas in 2020 under the Liberals it reached 35 per cent of GDP.

It requires that we become as brutal in our politics as the Liberals and Murdoch media have been towards us for decades.

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