Labor is founded on adversarialism. It begins with the Marxist assumption that there is a fixed amount of money in the economy, and that its energy should be focussed on attempts to redistribute this to its own favoured groups. Membership of these changes from time to time, but generally they can be seen as whoever has less. Should a miracle happen whereby pensioners and retirees become richer than company directors, it would not faze Labor one bit; they would just reverse their redistribution channels and go on happily from there. It doesn't care how wealthy people get their wealth or what they do with it; the crucial issue for Labor is how to take it away from them.

The Liberal Party has at least a glimmering of understanding that the money supply is not fixed, and can be increased -- or diminished -- via government policy. They show a rudimentary understanding of the fact that some people work harder than others, and some contribute more value to our society than others -- not necessarily the same thing. Their approach is to try and enlarge the pie rather than attempting to make sure that everybody gets exactly the same-sized slice. In short, they understand 20th-Century economics, and have at least one foot in the real world.

Australia regularly shows its collective wisdom in electing Labor governments when unfairness and injustice becomes a major problem, and kicking them out again as soon as the problem is alleviated. Unless and until Labor returns to the real world, this cycle will continue indefinitely.

An interesting article that covers the electoral loss by Labor with perspective.
Further to the points raised by Marko Beljac - there are some causal factors that are not widely acknowledged.
2007 presented hope of reform with the rejection of Workchoices. Yet the campaign against individual contracts, removal of penalty rates, sick leave, annual leave, collective bargaining and other worker rights has been lost and Workchoices introduced by stealth. This can be attributed to the growing number of short term or fixed (individual) contracts offered by employment agencies and labour hire firms. Casual and insecure employment has grown to 50%.
For a worker, moving from short term contract to contract, union membership is pointless as unions have little influence over employment terms or contractual situations and it is financially not a sound proposition when/if unemployed between contracts.
Labor failed to factor in that 50% of the workforce is in insecure employment and under employed.
Understanding that "economy and jobs" were electoral drivers: the use of broad terminology to describe voter concerns without giving credence to causal factors was a significant catalyst for voter mistrust and lack of confidence that Labor had an appreciation of a very large number of people's circumstance or any inclination to make tangible changes or workplace reforms.
Meanwhile unions are losing members and are unable to reverse the damaging effects of individual contracts, ever increasing casualization of the workforce and rise of insecure employment.

'The primary vote of the ALP is now at a post-war low. It won't sustainably get any higher...' and today it fell even further.

Which just goes to show less people today, than at the election, care about the internal machinations of this bunch of dysfunctional wacko wastrels.

And that trend, under 'Power' Bill Shorten will accelerate rather than reverse.

...One "LIKE" for imajulianutter. Exactly correct!

SES

Certainly, the ALP and the unions woefully fail to recognise the dangers of rapidly deteriorating workforce security in Australia and most Western countries. However, that doesn’t explain why the electorate voted for a party that is blatantly committed to destroying permanent employment, worker rights and what is left of the welfare safety net.

The real problem is the media. The electorate is being kept deliberately ignorant of how toxic the neoliberal agenda is and what it is doing to their own and their children’s future employment and financial security. Perhaps when the last permanent job has gone, workhouses and debtors’ prisons have made a return (a development now being seriously looked at by the Greek government) and octogenarians working to support themselves has become a common sight, the electorate might finally wake up to how much the neoliberal media has snowed them.

The article looks at many past and present ideologies which is way off the mark.

There no such scales of political balance about left wing socialism or other, the majority of voters want competence and good policy. Deceitful policy and incompetence is what the ALP delivered with the result they got.

If you want to deliver a healthy social programme you need to be able to pay for it ..... politics are not a field of dreams practice.

The ALP was creating many strawman phoney class wars as their strategy which might work in the UK but they don't work here.