Unlike other areas of endeavour, politicians do a poor job of learning from success or failure. That's because winners think they are perfect, and losers usually try to blame someone else.
With a Federal election looming, this is what the politicians probably won't learn from the Brisbane City Council elections.
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Quirk critical of Labor's 'negative style'
Graham Quirk is re-elected Brisbane Lord Mayor with a big majority while Queenslanders show their support for four-year terms to create "more stability". Nine News
To begin, Labor's problems lay not in their messaging but the message itself. In making development an issue - and by that they meant high rise apartments - Labor made a big mistake. There are lots of reasons why this is so. One of them is that they effectively demonised the people living in apartments. That's a great way to get people to vote against you, but Labor candidates spoke about very little else.
Labor strategists no doubt thought development was a green issue, but it is not. In the ward that I know best, the Green vote was highest in areas that have the most apartments. While I may not always agree with them, Green voters aren't stupid. They understood better than Rod Harding that we either have to go up or out to accommodate Mr Harding's extra million residents.
The Green vote in many wards was around 12 per cent, which is massive. However, half of the people voting Green refused to preference either party. Labor didn't get their preferences because it didn't have a green campaign. It had an anti-development campaign, which is a different thing.
This probably cost Labor the wards of Coorparoo, Holland Park, Enoggera, and Northgate. It may well cost them The Gabba as well.
Labor also failed to understand that the smear doesn't work any more. It might get political journalists' knickers in a collective knot, but people hate it. Smearing the Lord mayor with Jackie Trad's Crime and Corruption Commission stunt was a disgrace, and they paid for it.
On the other side of the fence, talk of Labor's "worst result in a century" obscures the fact that there was a swing against the LNP of between 8 per cent and 10 per cent in most wards. Admittedly, some of this was to be expected given the huge swing to the LNP at the last council elections. However, it need not have been so.
The spoils of victory will blind those in LNP headquarters to the fact the campaign was often incoherent and clumsy. There were too many LNP slogans competing with each other. One ad even had one slogan in song while another slogan was in images on the screen.
Another LNP failure was the use of "robocalls", recorded messages from candidates delivered in phone calls, usually at dinner time. To say these drove even LNP supporters wild with anger would be an understatement. They didn't win a single vote, but undoubtedly cost many.
The use of robocalls deprived the LNP of the chance to build a meaningful conversation with voters. Robocalls are just pre-recorded rants by politicians. People don't want to hear from politicians, they want politicians to hear them.
Finally, the LNP also has something to learn from the size of the Green vote. If Labor finds a strategy to get those Green voters to effectively preference them, then a swag of city seats like Everton will fall to the ALP.
Let's see if any of these message seep in.
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