Winning Costs: Labor past, present, and future.
The epilogue to Labor’s shock election loss in 2019 involved a comprehensively damning intra-party review. The Emerson & Weatherill review called for a smaller and more targeted election platform in 2022. Many of Labor’s policies were too easily weaponised and misrepresented by a cunning Coalition government and their attendant stenographers in the press. Some policies were even invented, like the infamous (albeit fictional) “Death Tax”. Certain policies, taken together, carried so much negative baggage for the party, that shedding some of that political dead weight became inevitable. What wasn’t obvious was just how many, and which, policies Labor would shed. In the end the party abandoned most of the politically tarnished policy offerings in an attempt to regain the nation’s trust. Of all contenders who could have assumed the Labor leadership after Bill Shorten’s rein, one might have guessed that Labor-left’s Anthony Albanese was least likely to so totally internalise the electi
