Chris Wallace
How To Win An Election
NewSouth Books, 2020
The 2019 Australian election produced a surprise result showing, not for the first time, that every election is there for the winning – including the next one. Labor's surprise loss in 2019, like the Liberal and National parties' defeat in the so-called 'unloseable' 1993 election, showed how careful attention to basic political craft can yield big dividends – and how inattention to it can turn apparently certain favourites into losers. With the vast challenges of climate change and social and economic equity in the post-pandemic world ahead of us, Australia cannot afford any more costly election accidents.
How To Win An Election spells out the ten things a political leader and their party must excel at to maximise the chance of success, and against which they should be accountable between and during elections.
Better performance in even a few of the areas canvassed in this book can change an election outcome, so full attention should be paid to each of them, all the time, every time, without fail, Wallace argues – in real time when it counts. How To Win An Election is a crucial insurance policy against overconfident leaders imposing learner errors on their supporters over and over again, and for getting the best results from Australia's democratic system.
“Ten Commandments for politicians – are you listening Labor? – who have forgotten the basics.”
“How to win an election? You could start by listening to Chris Wallace. She doesn’t have all the answers but ten off the top is a great start.”
About the Author
Chris Wallace is Associate Professor at the 50/50 By 2030 Foundation, University of Canberra. She works in modern and contemporary political, international and global history with special reference to leadership, transnational lives, and transformational change and the information strategies underlying it. She is the National Archives of Australia Cabinet Historian 2020-2021. Wallace's book historicising Australian Labor's shock 2019 federal election loss, How To Win An Election, was published by NewSouth Books, the trade publishing arm of the University of New South Wales Press, in 2020. It will be followed by the book of her ARC DECRA Fellowship project, Diplomatic Triangle: The Caseys in Wartime Washington. She is the author of several books including a biography of maverick Australian feminist Germaine Greer, Greer, Untamed Shrew (1997, 1999); a biography of the then crusading neoliberal policy exponent John Hewson during his Opposition leadership in the early 1990s, Hewson: A Portrait (1993); and an exploration of the intense 30 year-long relationship between Don Bradman and his confidante, journalist Rohan Rivett, The Private Don (2004). Wallace is an associate of the ANU Centre for Digital Humanities Research.
Wallace's doctoral thesis on political biography as political intervention will be published by the University of New South Wales Press in 2022. It examines the identity and motivations of those who wrote biographies of 20th century prime ministers in Australia in the run up to, and during, these prime ministers' terms of office, and the impact on the politicians' career trajectories. In the case of living prime ministers, they and their biographers have been interviewed to explore the dynamics of the subject/biographer relationship.
A first career as an economic and political journalist in the Canberra Press Gallery has contributed to Wallace's success in public-facing scholarly communications, including through The Conversation which has twice named her one of Australia's 'Top Thinkers' (2017 and 2019).
