“Loyalty is trust and trust is everything. So the rule of existence in Labor remains the same as it ever has been: faction first. Any disloyalty and you go.” Political columnist ANDREW HUGHES explains how the modern Labor Party wins elections. 

One of the biggest differences in federal election 2025 was in party management. 

Labor again underlined why it is the number one party when it comes to organisation, management, structure and team culture. 

This is not to say the Liberals didn’t have good people in their team. They did. They just didn’t have good management. 

So what is good management? It is a combination of factors that differentiate a modern party from one that aspires to be one. 

For Labor gone are the days of national conferences or national executive meetings being shouting matches between the right and left factions, with guest appearances now and again from the centre-right (Kevin Rudd’s faction) and the unaligned (Andrew Leigh, here in the ACT). Those ugly scenes, sometimes played out on national TV, ended up hurting Labor far more at the polls. 

After their wipeout in 1996, followed by the infighting of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, Labor vowed never again and to manage the party far more professionally, like some of the bigger, overseas centre-left parties in Europe and America were already doing. 

This meant rethinking their approaches to everything. Every. Thing. 

Some were minor and backroom focused, yet brought the party into the modern era. One notable feature was the use of database marketing programs to better integrate electorate interactions with campaign strategy at local, state and federal levels. 

Marketing methods and knowledge, especially those on branding and behaviour change, were slowly adopted and integrated into party machines, and now a campaign manager is just as likely to have a marketing and brand campaign background as a political one.

The late and great Neil Lawrence spearheaded this for Labor in the early 2000s and Ted Horton, who went on to formulate the Down, Down campaign for Coles, was his forerunner and opponent for the Liberals. 

Labor went further though. Lessons were learnt from large-scale, behaviour-change political movements, be that Obama’s historic 2008 campaign, which pioneered the use of social media and user content, to methods used in the Arab Spring and the Asian Democracy Movements. These reinforced the need to be dynamic, fresh and unpredictable to all but the electorate who should always know what you stood for. 

Another change was to move to gender parity with candidate selection, which seems common sense considering the electorate profile in Australia. This has been followed by age parity, so the candidate mix closely matches the population as much as possible. 

Occupation parity isn’t there yet, being a union organiser still carries a disproportionate influence on your success as a candidate inside Labor and they’ll need to correct this over time. 

Factional brawls moved online from offline. No more pesky cameras or journos hanging around seedy backrooms in Bankstown. No. Union bosses moved to disappearing messages on messaging apps. As one senior Labor person said to me once: “No vote ever happens in a room where the result isn’t already known.” 

Loyalty is trust and trust is everything. So the rule of existence in Labor remains the same as it ever has been: faction first. Any disloyalty and you go. Either willingly, or through disendorsement, or being surrounded by walls of ice and concrete in party meetings. And why not? 

You are either committed to the cause because you believe in it with every fibre, every word and action, or you can and probably should change careers. Cabinet solidarity has existed for decades in Labor, yet seems to be a new buzzword for the Libs and Nats. 

The “factional assassin” tag Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles received was unfair. Dumped minister Ed Husic had supported others’ demise and knew full well that one day he too would make way for the future in the same way he had benefitted earlier from someone else’s end. 

But don’t be shocked. They are no different to any of the larger commercial brands I’ve ever encountered. In fact, their culture is likely better. I remember once hearing that it was no myth that if you turned up to a certain soft drink maker with a competitor’s beverage in hand it was goodbye time. Or slow career death via ice and concrete walls. Your choice. 

If you want to be at the top, then that comes with a lot of sacrifice, hard work, finding ways to improve, and years of disappointment and let downs. And, yes, pushing the occasional opponent in front of a political bus. 

So Labor is merely reflective of the corporate culture of 2025. With a touch of the Sopranos now and again. 

But this is what it takes. This is why the Liberals, and the Nationals, need to use this time as one of opportunity and reflection, to decide if they can and are willing to make these decisions. These sacrifices. To match Labor in the party management stakes. 

Political tides no longer come in and out on primary votes of 34.5 per cent or less. 

This is 2.0.2.5. The year of new beginnings or the year of sticking with the old and watching that repeat itself until lessons are finally learnt. 

Dr Andrew Hughes lectures at the ANU Research School of Management, where he specialises in political marketing