Why do parties have so much trouble learning from past successes and failures?

ELECTION postmortems are a ritual of grieving – a necessary safety valve to contain the damage and internal recrimination that might otherwise break out after a devastating and unexpected election loss. After ceding power to Labor’s Daniel Andrews in late 2014, the Victorian Liberal Party commissioned former party elder Dr David Kemp to “investigate and report on the reasons for the election loss, to advise on how government can be regained in 2018, and how the next period of Liberal (and presumably National Coalition) government can avoid the mistakes, and build on the achievements, of the last.” The final report, delivered in July 2015, echoes a similar, though truncated, review process conducted by the Liberal National Party in Queensland after its January 2015 election loss…

Read the full article