Next week, Labor will hold its 50th national conference in Adelaide. After the party’s record 94-seat win at last year’s federal election, its members should have plenty to celebrate. Yet since that election, both Labor and the Coalition have watched their support erode, largely in favour of One Nation.

Labor’s national president, Wayne Swan, saw the danger signs last year.

Swan was treasurer in the Rudd-Gillard government, including through the global financial crisis. He was also deputy prime minister, and previously led Wayne Goss’s 1989 Queensland election campaign, ending three decades of conservative reign in the state.

Soon after last year’s landslide, Swan issued a clear-eyed warning that Labor’s victory was “wide but shallow”. Despite its strong showing, he pointed out that Labor had “simply failed to secure strong support from lower-income, lower-educated Australians” – once a core part of its voter base.

At next week’s conference, after eight years in the job, Swan will pass on the party presidency to former federal minister Kate Ellis.

Swan joined us on the podcast to discuss living in a time of “dramatic insecurity”, voter volatility, artificial intelligence (AI) and more.

‘A dramatically different contest’

Asked about his “wide but shallow” warning, Swan said it was prompted by seeing the two major parties win just two-thirds of last year’s vote, while the remainder was already “splintering around the edges”.

Since I made those remarks, of course, we’ve seen the rise of One Nation. And it has eaten the lunch, if you like, of the conservative parties. And the race now is really between Labor on the one hand and a clutch of right-wing parties – including One Nation, the Liberal Party and the National Party – on the other. That’s a dramatically different contest from what we’ve been used to over many years. And it is one in which it’s critically important to secure your base level of support in the community […] So with a majority of 53% or 54% of the two-party vote, in the last election we achieved a record 94 seats. But it wouldn’t take too much of a fall in the primary vote for those seats to evaporate.

Since I made........

© The Conversation