John Hewson wanted to run a totally positive election campaign. But when he put it to a vote of his shadow cabinet, he found himself the lone supporter. The Liberal Party went ahead with negative television advertisements and Hewson spent the last weeks of the 1993 campaign at rowdy rallies, spruiking his Fightback! policies. In the dying days of the campaign, amid a light shower of squishy foodstuffs, Hewson had “the catch of the series”: an egg on the fly, just before it could splatter all over his white shirt.

Hewson saved the egg but lost the election, and the Coalition joined the Labor Party in its less-is-more approach to campaigning. Policy as political communication, which had broadly defined the Liberal Party’s approach between 1985 and 1993, was largely abandoned by both sides. That kind of detail wasn’t the way to win elections; it exposed oppositions needlessly to the scrutiny of the media and the vast resources of government.

Despite the rise of small-target strategies, though, oppositions still liked to boast that they have “the most comprehensive policy plan in living memory,” often with little evidence and a lot of wilful ignorance of their own party’s history. Labor is the latest to make this claim, but with more justification than any opposition since 1993.

Why has Labor abandoned the small-target orthodoxy? The reasons lie in the changing incentives at play in our politics…

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