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Labor's Stages Of Grief

You may think the Australian Labor Party is having a pretty bad time, but it’s actually far worse.

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You may think the Australian Labor Party is having a pretty bad time, but it’s actually far worse.

In the space of a year, Labor has managed to lose a federal election by a margin that would make Kim Jong Un sceptical, lost state elections in Western Australia and Tasmania, and only narrowly hung onto South Australia following a hung parliament. Then Bob Carr announced he was publishing all the diaries he kept as Labor’s Minister for Foreign Affairs; diaries which are set to embarrass the hell out of everyone and lead to a rematch of the in-fighting that got them booted out in the first place.

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Basically, it’s all pretty funny.

But once we stop giggling at their self-inflicted misfortune, we should act like responsible adults and recognise Labor’s perpetual crisis for what it is: a cry for help.

Labor is in the midst of a grieving process, and it’s one that started a very long time ago. Don’t believe it? Then let us examine Labor’s behaviour through the incredibly helpful filter of the Kübler-Ross model, better known as the five stages of grief.

Stage 1: Denial

Denial is the automatic, instinctive response one experiences when faced with something too horrific to contemplate. For Labor, this was its victory in the 2007 federal election. It was a shock to the system after their eight hundred years in opposition, and not one they were ready for. Sure, opposition had been a tough thing to deal with at first, but Labor soon grew used to it, and worked very hard to maintain this comfortable, undemanding position.

This hard work involved making the unelectable Simon Crean Labor leader, replacing him with Mark Latham, a man who made everybody pine for Simon Crean, and then replacing Latham with Kim Beazley, the man who had, at that point in history, already lost two elections as Labor leader. This was not a political party keen to form a government.

So when Kevin Rudd came along and ruined everything by returning them to power, Labor went into denial. And then, like a child testing the boundaries of their parents’ authority, Labor booted Rudd out of the job before his first term was over, just to see what would happen.

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Stage 2: Anger

Labor was finally able to quantify its self-loathing as a proper, ongoing leadership tussle between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. Both sides (but mostly Rudd’s) leaked endlessly to the press, as Rudd tried over and over to shore up support for a leadership spill.

Essentially, Labor’s anger at being in power was channelled into a fight to see who got to not have the power the most.

When the 2010 election led to the country’s first hung parliament in seventy years, the Greens’ Adam Bandt and Andrew Wilkie, as well as independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, agreed to join with Labor to form government.

Labor responded by overturning tables and shouting “What do we have to do to get rid of this thing?”, probably.

Stage 3: Bargaining

Here’s a fun game: what’s Labor’s policy on carbon pricing? Kevin Rudd had promised an emissions trading scheme during the 2007 election campaign, but it was an albatross around his neck, and became a key component of his eventual emission from the leadership. Or omission, whatever. Then Julia Gillard, during the 2010 election campaign, promised there would be no carbon tax. Then in 2011, Gillard introduced a carbon tax. Then in 2013 Rudd got back into office and, staring down the barrel of an election loss, promised to repeal the carbon tax in a move that someone probably convinced him was a show of strength.

This repeated backflip fit perfectly with Labor’s election slogan: “What, you like my watch? You can have this watch, is good watch.”

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For any other government, this would look like the usual populist electioneering, but from Labor it was desperate, straw-clutching bargaining.

Last month, Labor voted against the government’s carbon tax repeal, signalling an erratic, intentionally-destablising approach that they probably read about in sleazy pick-up artist manual The Game.

Stage 4: Depression

Following the 2013 election—in which everyone on the left was satisfied Abbott wouldn’t win because none of them knew anyone who would ever vote for Abbott – Abbott won, and Labor continued its decline.

Thanks to new, complex rules put in place by Kevin Rudd to ensure that nobody could be elected to the Labor leadership unless a jade crystal was placed in the centre of a magic staff at midnight during the vernal equinox, Labor was left with no one in charge, aka Chris Bowen.

Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese both stuck their hands up for the leadership job, and went about the country to convince the party faithful – and they were indescribably faithful at this stage—that they could be entrusted with this political dredging mission.

Convinced that the electorate was sick of Labor in-fighting, Shorten and Albanese attended a series of debates in which they aggressively agreed with one another. Such was the depth of Labor’s depression that the one time they were allowed—nay, required—to challenge one another on the issues, they were too gun-shy to actually do so.

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After correctly guessing how many fingers Tanya Plibersek was holding up behind her back, Shorten was declared Labor’s version of “winner”.

Stage 5: Acceptance

“The problem the Labor Party has is this: when the Labor Party says to voters ‘Trust us, we have your best interests at heart’, the voters don’t trust them. And the voters are right. The Labor Party haven’t demonstrated that they are capable of being trusted with looking after the interests of working people and their families.”

This comment came from Joe Bullock, who just this week won a Senate seat as a Labor candidate.

These comments were made in a speech given last year, and—by a staggering coincidence—emerged in the days leading up to the re-run of the Senate election, necessitated after the AEC lost 1370 votes. (A multi-national naval effort is currently underway off the coast of Perth in search of the votes’ black box signal.)

Although Bullock’s quotes were made in 2013, their current materialisation helpfully signals the last stage in Labor’s grieving period. A public acknowledgement of all Labor’s faults from someone within Labor may not seem like much, but it’s something, and could allow what’s left of the party to move on.

As Labor picks itself up off the ground and dusts itself off, it should not feel too disheartened at its prospects. Overthrowing the government at the next election seems difficult, but isn’t completely impossible. After all, they did it pretty well in 2013.

Follow Lee on Twitter: @leezachariah