It is easy to blame your enemies when something goes wrong. For many in the ALP, the fact that their party hasn't won a federal election since 1993 is entirely the fault of right-wing commentators in the tabloids and on talkback radio.
In two public speeches over the previous fortnight, Julia Gillard, aspiring Labor leader and its health spokeswoman, has explained her understanding of the conspiracy. The commercial media has an "overwhelming pro-Howard bias", and the Government has "stacked" public bodies such as the ABC and the High Court. According to her, the outcome of all this is that the ALP has lost the debate about Australian culture and values. Her solution is to vigorously "fight the right" and for her party to start talking about its own values.
Gillard's analysis provides a convenient excuse for the failures of the ALP, but it is fundamentally wrong.
To begin with, the ABC after a decade of the Coalition is no different from how it has always been, and the Government has probably appointed to the High Court as many judges who vote Labor as who vote Liberal. A key public institution that Gillard did not mention, our taxpayer-funded universities, continue to be overwhelmingly populated by academics who are anything but right-wing.
If the right really does have the sway Gillard imagines, then it might be expected that this would be reflected in state politics. But it isn't.
Australia has wall-to-wall state Labor governments. The difference is that at the state level the ALP is largely conservative and pragmatic, while federally the left of the ALP has largely taken control of the party's debate about values.
It is not Labor's opponents that are making federal Labor unelectable. It is Labor and its values that are making the party unelectable. And the proof of this is revealed in the attitude Gillard displayed last week.
She made great fun of John Howard as a throwback to the 1950s and "the monocultural world he remembers, of white picket fences shielding white families". In 1988 John Howard's policy statement Future Directions famously featured a father and a mother and their two children standing outside a house surrounded by a picket fence. For as long as Gillard remains obsessed with the colour of the faces and the colour of the fence, there's no hope for Labor.
The images of Future Directions are of three things: a job, a family and a home. Gillard might laugh and think that the desire for those things is old-fashioned, but that just demonstrates how out of touch she is. And if she believes that it is only white Anglo-Saxons that aspire to those things, she is sadly mistaken. From the 1940s to the present, migrants and refugees of every skin colour have come to this country in search of the very things that Gillard scoffs at.
The irony of Labor's situation is that it was once proud to champion the values of prosperity, family and the economic security embodied in a home of one's own. Now it seems that it would prefer not to talk about them.
Certainly the nature of the family has changed since the 1950s, but the reality is that individuals would still prefer to live in a loving and caring family relationship. One of the few groups in society not afraid to discuss the role of the family are the evangelical Christian churches, and it is no coincidence that Labor is profoundly uncomfortable in dealing with them. Rather than trying to understand the rise of the new Christian churches and their attraction to hundreds of thousands of Australians, Labor simply dismisses them as the "religious right".
During the last federal election campaign, the ALP could not counter the claim that the Coalition was the better at handling the economy. So instead, what the ALP did was to imply that any voter concerned with their home mortgage interest rate was only being selfish. There are significant elements of the Labor Party that have always held in contempt the skills of effective economic management, but whether they like it or not, it is the economy that is the source of people's employment.
Joblessness in a household is one of the major causes of family break-up. In her speech to the Fabian Society last week, Gillard did not once mention the economy.
She spoke of the need for Labor to offer "a vision of the future based on values that endure". Eventually Labor will understand that those enduring values are centred on people's work, their family and their home.
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