The Australian Council of Trade Unions has appointed a former Queensland state Labor MP, Evan Moorehead, to review its election tactics and advertising campaign, which cost an estimated $25m.
The union movement’s campaign has come under fire since Labor’s disastrous election performance, with some questioning whether the union body ought to be the campaigning arm for federal Labor.
Moorhead was a state MP from 2006 to 2012 and went on to serve as state secretary of the party. He previously worked for the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union.
“Evan’s wisdom and impartiality is respected across the movement,” an ACTU spokesman said. “He has significant campaign experience and an understanding of the union movement, meaning he is well placed to conduct the review.”
The ACTU’s Change the Rules campaign was highly ambitious, bigger than the 2007 Your Rights at Work campaign which helped topple the Howard government and WorkChoices laws. That campaign had a $10m spend.
The peak union body’s television and radio ads featured workers aged 20 to 60 talking about their working life and their difficulties with job insecurity, cost of living pressure and low pay rates. In one ad a young woman talked about having five jobs to make ends meet.
Of the ACTU’s 16 target seats Labor won just Gilmore in NSW, and Dunkley and Corangamite in Victoria. The party lost Bass in Tasmania and Herbert in Queensland, and came up short in every Queensland target (Forde, Capricornia, Flynn, Petrie and Leichhardt).
It failed to win its ambitious targets – the blue-ribbon seats of Kooyong, Higgins, Flinders, Menzies and Deakin – as well as the more low-hanging fruit of Chisholm and La Trobe, all in Victoria.
Tim Lyons, a former assistant secretary of the ACTU, has criticised the campaign as “nebulous” and lamented that targeting blue-ribbon seats was a “hubristic vanity project”.
The ACTU secretary, Sally McManus, defended the campaign, arguing that working people could not pass up the opportunity to fight elections and change laws she said were stacked against working people.
McManus blamed two factors for the loss: Clive Palmer’s huge ad spend and a social media campaign falsely claiming Labor would introduce a death tax.
Moorhead is due to report by July.
