Shoring up Labor's majority

Faced with a razor-thin majority at the next federal election, Kevin Rudd is already planning an aggressive three year campaign to take marginal seats from the Coalition.

Sources within the Labor Party say he has in mind three seats in Queensland in particular – Bowman, Dickson and Herbert – seats that resisted the double figure swings to Labor that characterised the vote in much of Queensland, especially in the north.

All three were held by the Coalition by just a few hundred votes and Labor stategists believe that with the advantage of incumbency, they can be taken next time.

The strategy makes sense because the Coalition needs just ten seats and a swing of 1.5 per cent to take government.

That would give the Coalition and Labor an equal number of seats with the two independents holding the balance of power.

But Labor should be able to consolidate in seats gained like Bennelong, Corangamite, Bass Braddon, Eden Monaro and McEwen. That means in reality the Coalition will need a uniform swing of more than 2.5 per cent to start picking up seats further up the pendulum.

In fact the Coalition itself demonstrated at the last election how well targeted seats can resist swings. Western Australia was a case in point. In a close contest, that would have been critical.

But based on what we have seen so far, a swing to the government is more likely than not in 2010.

Governments in Australia rarely improve their vote. It has happened just six times since the war. Bob Menzies did it three times capatilising on the Labor split in the 1950s and the poor leadership of Arthur Calwell in the 1960s.

John Howard did it twice, in 2001 and 2004.

Paul Keating was the sole Labor leader to achieve a swing in his favour, but that was in 1993 when John Hewson promised a GST from opposition, to this day the greatest example of crazy brave in Australian political history.

So it's rare for governments generally and almost unheard of for Labor. But the early signs nevertheless suggest it will happen in 2010.

Kevin Rudd will be cautious yet efficient. The one key ingredient missing next time around will be risk. The Coalition's best line of attack in 2007 was to warn of the risk under the inexperienced Labor team. "If you believe the country is on the right track, then why risk change?"

Take away that consideration – add three years of Labor's key people gaining experience – and you see why Australians tend to give all new governments a second chance. In fact, you have to go back to the depression in the early 30s for the last example of a one term government in this country.

And even when swings are recorded against governments, they tend to be small. Of the 18 recorded swings against governments since the war, eight were swings of less than 1.4 per cent.

It has been truly remarkable to witness how rapidly the Coalition's aura vanished since the election.

Without John Howard at the top and Peter Costello by his side, the team looked suddenly thin. Costello when he walked away, must have known that would be the impact. His attitude seemed to be that if you didn't want me when the team was alive and well then I'm certainly not going to drag the corpse along in the bad times.

The Coalition frontbench feels and looks like a team in a rebuilding stage. And ironically, this time around, the Liberals suffered more for ill judged factional reasons than Labor did.

To top it off, Brendan Nelson will struggle to persuade the media, and indeed many in his own team, that he is any more than a stop gap leader. His support is wafer thin and the challenge for Malcolm Turnbull is not so much to muster the numbers, but simply to get the timing right.