Yes, that was the worst election campaign we’ve seen

The recent election campaign really was amongst the worst in living memory. Here are the figures to prove it.

The table below shows the proportion of the Australian electorate that each major party leader was able to convince to give his (and in one case, her) party their primary vote since 1949. The figures are based on a proportion of all enrolled voters. There have been 25 elections. So there have been 50 ‘performances’ that can be assessed.

The proposition that Tony Abbott has run ‘the best campaign as opposition leader never to win government’ is so ludicrous it is outrageous. He is at position number 39 out of 50.  It is not even as though he turned the loss of John Howard around — he improved this party’s primary vote as a proportion of all Australia’s voters by just .05% over Howard’s 2007 achievement by lifting it from 38.34% to 38.39%.

It could be worse. The only woman to run for prime minister is at the bottom of the list. Interestingly, she is right next to the penultimate contender Mark Latham, one of the people that played a significant part in ruining her campaign.

She dropped the vote by 6.4% from Rudd’s figure of 39.48%. It’s probably not so much her fault, but that of those running her campaign. Her personal campaign performance may have actually prevented an even worse outcome. Who knows?  But at least she is not attempting to perpetuate the myth that she and her party did well.

Of the 25 campaigns run by opposition leaders, Abbott’s is the 19th best out of 25. That is, there have been 18 campaigns by opposition leaders that were better than Abbott’s performance (including six that brought their party into government) and only six campaigns that were worse.

Billy McMahon’s losing campaign to stay on as prime minister won more support from Australians than Abbott’s attempt at the top job. The list of losing Liberal campaigns that score higher than Abbott’s includes Andrew Peacock in 1990, Howard in 1987, John Hewson in 1993 and Billy Sneddon in 1974. Even in the heyday of the Liberal icon, Sir Robert Menzies, most of Arthur Calwell’s, and two of Bert Evatt’s campaigns outshone Abbott’s. Interestingly, Evatt’s 1954 campaign, which still lost, was the eighth-best campaign achievement since 1949.

In campaign terms Abbott has achieved the third-worst performance by any Liberal leader in the past 60 years. Only the Howard campaign in 1998 (which only just hung on to government) and the Howard campaign in 2007 (which did not) were worse campaigns.

*Michael Moore served four terms as a member of the ACT Legislative Assembly and was an independent minister for health from 1998-2001