Tim Gartrell is the ALP National Secretary. He has held that position since September 2003. Tim is responsible for the Labor campaign and he talks to Laurie about the outcome of the election.

Transcript

LAURIE OAKES: Good morning, welcome to the program.

TIM GARTRELL: Good morning, it's good to be with you.

LAURIE OAKES: Paul Keating said you were no good, what happened?

TIM GARTRELL: People can have their views. Election campaigns are different — this one was a really good one, it's really Kevin Rudd's victory this one.

LAURIE OAKES: Well, let's start off with the state of play, how many seats won and lost, and which ones still in doubt.

TIM GARTRELL: Yeah Laurie, we think at the moment just conservatively that we have gained a net 22 seats, there's six sitting in the balance, and we believe that will … we have an eight seat majority, and in those six we are ahead in most of those, but by a very narrow margin, and with postal votes and pre polls still to come anything could happen.

LAURIE OAKES: What about Bennelong, have you won Bennelong?

TIM GARTRELL: We are very optimistic about Bennelong, but we just want to see how those postals go in Bennelong, but we are very optimistic at picking up Bennelong.

LAURIE OAKES: Now, were you the one who told Kevin Rudd that he had won last night?

TIM GARTRELL: No, the thing about elections these days is the AC website is pretty good. So most people have got a computer at home, or a computer wherever they are, can get a pretty good run of it. I was talking to Kevin throughout the night giving him regular updates. It became obvious pretty early on that there was a big swing on, so there was no real point where we said 'That's it', it became clearer by about eight o'clock, quarter past eight.

LAURIE OAKES: Well it was a big swing, over 6 per cent, how does that compare with previous elections, and election victories?

TIM GARTRELL: This is a historical result for us, particularly in the states of Queensland and New South Wales, and Victoria. This is our highest ever two-party preferred vote in Queensland, Kevin Rudd's home state. It's out highest two-party preferred vote ever in Victoria. In New South Wales and Queensland we now hold a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives from those states. And that is critical for Labor, that has been an 11-and-a-half-year problem for Labor, we now hold a majority of seats in New South Wales and Queensland.

LAURIE OAKES: Before this campaign, things were written about Kevin Rudd, he allegedly he had a temper, a glass jaw. What was he like to work with under the pressure of a campaign?

TIM GARTRELL: This is an interesting point, Laurie, the Government, sorry the former government — I have got to get used to that, have spent the whole of the year whispering, backgrounding, saying Kevin Rudd has got a glass jaw, all this other stuff. They were boasting to people that they could put him through a six-week campaign, and he wouldn't crack. Well I'll leave it to the history writers to decide who cracked in this campaign, it wasn't Kevin Rudd. Kevin Rudd ran a professional campaign, he was an excellent leader, all my dealings with him, he was very calm, and very steady and very focussed. And I think the Government completely underestimated him, there was a huge dose of huberous, they thought they could beat him, they were wrong.

LAURIE OAKES: You did polling all the time, I mean right up till election eve. What did your polling tell you about the reasons for this result?

TIM GARTRELL: There are a number of reasons for this result. The first big reason was the Government's betrayal of voters over WorkChoices. They didn't say they were going to bring WorkChoices in. They got control of the senate and they got arrogant, and they introduced WorkChoices, and that caused a big problem for working families. So that was the first point. And then after that, they started to get huberous, John Howard skited in the Parliament that working families had never been better off. Peter Costello went around saying there was no housing affordability crisis. Mal Brough, who lost his seat, said there was no childcare crisis. When these things happen, when governments start making comments like this, they are doomed.

LAURIE OAKES: Was the 'It's Time' factor very important?

TIM GARTRELL: Look, I don't think it was that big. I mean this Government made its own downfall. This Government told working families they'd never been better off, this government said there was no childcare affordability crisis. It was their attitude and their misuse of public funds, the ridiculous amount of money spent on Government advertising, hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising WorkChoices, a blatant political campaign on WorkChoices, funded by the taxpayers, all of these things added up to a sense that the Government had lost touch, had become arrogant and no longer represented the best party for Australia's future.

LAURIE OAKES: Now how big a factor was John Howard, were people sick of him as most commentators have written?

TIM GARTRELL: The critical thing with John Howard is that people believe that he had lost touch, lost touch with the voters, lost touch with the future. He became … was becoming a man of the past. In this campaign you can only count on a handful of occasions where John Howard really made a case for what he was going to do for Australia's future. He spent countless interviews attacking the Labor Party, negativity, negativity, always attacking us, and always looking back. The 7.30 Report interview in the last week, he spent the whole interview looking back at … having a debate about Labor market deregulation in the '80s, and '90s. So he made no case for the future, it left a huge strategic gap and Kevin Rudd went through that gap with a positive message about Australia's future.

LAURIE OAKES: Would it have made much difference if John Howard had handed over the leadership to Peter Costello last year?

TIM GARTRELL: It would have made a difference, Laurie. The result would have been worst.

LAURIE OAKES: Worse for the Liberal Party?

TIM GARTRELL: Worse for the Liberal Party, yes.

LAURIE OAKES: Why?

TIM GARTRELL: Peter Costello is not liked. If you think John Howard has lost touch, Peter Costello has never been in touch. Australian voters made it very clear in all of the soundings that we took, that one of the biggest problems for this government was not only the retirement of John Howard, not only that John Howard has lost touch and that he was going to retire, but that Peter Costello was next. So my view was that if they had handed over to Peter Costello, they would have had a worse result for last night.

LAURIE OAKES: But Peter Costello will be Opposition Leader, it sounds as though you don't mind that idea at all?

TIM GARTRELL: Well I will be holding Peter Costello to his record, we believe he was one of the major architects of WorkChoices, he was an architect of a lot of the things in the Howard years, he is part of the Government that has just fallen, and he's the guy that was going around telling people that there was no housing affordability crisis. We'll be pointing out to Australian voters if he's the Opposition Leader, what his attitude is to working families.

LAURIE OAKES: What were the important campaign turning points?

TIM GARTRELL: Well like I said before the campaign, WorkChoices, the statement that people had never been better off, the bungled announcement of John Howard's retirement. The disloyalty of Peter Costello to John Howard in the background, that eventually surfaced, but the campaign itself was full of mixed messages, it was 95 percent negative, and there wasn't even one negative, there was about five negatives. There was the debacle of the competing backdrops, 'go for growth' at the start, then the stylised Australian flag, and then the negative bunting, the bright red negative backdrop behind Mr Howard saying 'Don't trust Labor with the economy', 'Don't vote for Labor'. Interestingly, enough in some shots on the television it actually had John Howard standing under the words 'For Labor' in that backdrop. It was a debacle of a campaign from the message point of view.

LAURIE OAKES: Why do you think the Liberals, if their campaign is as bad as you say it was, why did they do it that way? They've been very professional in previous campaigns, very good at it, what went wrong for them?

TIM GARTRELL: I think the problem is that they've become addicted to negativity, addicted to negative campaigning, and their negative campaign wasn't working. So they were trying different negatives all along. They were boasting to people that they would bring Kevin Rudd down, they started attacking his family, they made outrageous allegations about his family's background, they started on that, and they worked through a series of negatives, none of them worked, and they continued on that. The Liberal Party is now a party that campaigns exclusively negatively, and that culminated in the biggest bungle of the campaign, which was the Jackie Kelly racist pamphlets scandal, and that is the pinnacle of the negativity of the Howard years, and it came home to roost.

LAURIE OAKES: Did the campaign matter much, or had people made up their mind long before.

TIM GARTRELL: I think people had made up their mind that they were very interested in Kevin Rudd, but campaigns always matter, and a six-week campaign is always going to matter. Another pivotal moment in the campaign Laurie, was when John Howard stood up at his launch and couldn't resist the chance to go on another spending spree, and he did. And that's when Kevin Rudd struck, and made a very smart strategic call to limit spending, to place us in the … as the best party to manage inflation. In our research, I am not going to talk much about our research, but in our research, shortly after that we crossed the equator on which party was better to manage interest rates. People started to get the message that John Howard was actually a threat and the big spending of the Howard and Costello era was a problem for Australia's economy.

LAURIE OAKES: Final question: Labor's used to losing federal elections, so you know what the Liberals are going through, what do you think this will do to the Liberal Party?

TIM GARTRELL: Well it all depends on whether the party can unite itself, Labor had a difficult period from 2004 until now, we managed to unite ourselves. I predict that the opposite will happen with the Liberal Party. You've seen, people have seen Peter Costello's disloyalty, we've seen the rise of the extreme right of the Liberal Party in New South Wales, they have got one of their star recruits, Alex Hore, coming in. We have seen the problems that has caused Peter Debnam and the New South Wales Liberals. I think we are going to see a divided party that is on the extreme right of Australian politics for now on.

LAURIE OAKES: Mr Gartrell, we are out of time, we thank you and congratulations.

TIM GARTRELL: Thank you, Laurie.