Evil genius? 8 secrets of persuasion and power from Albo’s election guru +Labor's dangerous trap

Evil genius? 8 secrets of persuasion and power from Albo’s election guru

“The greatest strategic mind of his generation”.

That’s the label being used to describe Labor’s National Secretary, Paul Erickson.

After orchestrating Morrison’s demise in 2022, Erickson masterminded the ALP’s decimation of Peter Dutton and the Coalition at the last election.

There is no doubt that Erickson – a former union official, ‘working class’ boy from Melbourne’s Pascoe Vale, and the son of a champion race walker (his brother, Chris, is also an Olympic walker) – is good.

The AFR has dubbed him the ‘Prince of Power’ and put him Number 1 on their 2025 list of the most covertly powerful people in Australia.

Indeed, you could forgive conservatives for thinking he’s an evil genius.

But just what is it that makes Erickson so effective?

What can communicators, leaders and campaigners learn from the Labor whiz kid?

Erickson is notoriously private.

But he handed down a post-election postmortem in a speech to the National Press Club, which disappointingly was more spin than substance.

Fortunately, he also sat for a rare profile in AFR Magazine, which has given us more detail and interesting insights into Erickson’s strategies and tactics that have delivered so much success.

A close reading, however, shows that, far from being a genius or possessing magic tricks, Erickson’s success, like Trump’s, is based on superior execution of best-practice communications.

Below, I’ve highlighted eight principles from Erickson’s playbook that can be used by anyone to build influence and authority:

1. Craft a good strategy

The heart of Labor’s winning campaigns is having a good strategy. It all builds from there.

“I think the lesson from 2019 [when Labor lost to Morrison] was that a weak strategy will be defeated by a strong strategy,” Erickson says. “And we had a weak strategy.”

Having a good strategy might seem blindingly obvious.

But today it’s very easy to get lost in tactics, channels and busy work, and to not spend the time creating a clear and coherent communications strategy that lays out a clear roadmap to achieving success.

2. Set one clear success metric

Erickson’s election strategy had one goal: to develop policies that won votes.

The goal wasn’t to make Australia better, to ‘cut through’, to inspire, or to initiate reform; it was about vote-winning.

As the AFR’s profile writer, Ron Mizen notes, Labor’s election policies “had little in the way of economic or structural reform”.

Instead, their policies were packed with “crowd pleasers”: expanding Medicare bulk billing ($8.5 billion), slashing existing HECS/HELP debts ($16 billion), the 5 per cent home deposit scheme for first home buyers, and making free TAFE permanent.

Of course, this opens Labor and Erickson to criticism that this is good politics, but not good policy.

Based on Erickson’s favourite books (see below), I don’t think they care.

They know the name of the game is getting power, and that means winning votes.

What is the singular, tangible winning goal of your communications strategy?

3. Throw to the future

Persuasion and communications operate across three time periods: the past, the present and the future.

Smart communicators operate across all three, but they particularly focus on the future and the choices people face (Labor or Coalition?).

The past is often about blame and beliefs; the future, however, is open and malleable, and therefore perfect ground for persuasion.

The Coalition and Dutton focused on the past: Labor’s economic record and whether Australians were better off than they were three years prior. (As Erickson noted, this only served to focus voters on the past, most notably the economic shortcomings of the Morrison Government.)

But Erickson focused on the future and, specifically, Labor’s “offer for the next three years” (ie the crowd pleasers).

That helped him successfully avoid “a referendum on its [Labor’s] record”.

(Many argue Tony Abbott was a negative campaigner in 2013, but his tricolon of stopping the boats, scrapping the carbon tax, and fixing the budget was still a future-focused promise.)

4. Hammer simple messages relentlessly

From Labor’s strategy and goal, they developed simple key messages. And as Erickson said, they “hammered away” at those messages for months on end.

As I’ve outlined, Labor had clear messages (Albo not risky, Dutton = Trump, Labor won’t cut Medicare); Dutton fluffed his.

Of course, it helps to have talent like Dee Madigan coming up with fantastic slogans for Labor, like ‘He Cuts, You Pay’.

Many people think a few key messages is too simplistic; and even if they do develop good ones, they get bored with them, or think their audience is bored.

But your audience is barely paying attention. So, for your messages to sink in, you need to keep hammering away with them.

5. Play long and short games

As I keep saying, we are all playing two games:

1. Long-term brand building

2. Short-term sales activation

Erickson understands that the persuasion game is not won in the short term alone. You also need to be playing the long game.

He initiated a six-month marathon campaign that began in November 2024 when, at a rally in Adelaide, Albanese announced Labor’s policy of making fee-free TAFE permanent.

The 5-week campaign proper was merely the “final sprint”.

In a fast-paced world, many people focus on short-term wins and overlook the longer-term work of building a brand that drives long-term growth, but can also help trigger short-term action.

6. Master multiple channels

Erickson notes that during election campaigns 20 years ago, you could drop an announcement to the Sunday papers, get it on the evening news, then follow up on morning radio.

There is no “equivalent megaphone these days”.

A fragmented market means you “have to look wider to find that audience” and pump out much more content. Erickson describes it as a “volume war”.

Labor invited social media influencers onto its campaign, and dozens of junior government media advisors flooded social media – including TikTok and Instagram – with “thousands of pieces of content”.

Again, this might not be rocket science, but many people are obsessed with specific channels (LinkedIn, Substack, Insta …).

The evidence, however, clearly shows that the most successful communications campaigns are not focused on one or two channels but run across multiple channels.

7. Get attention at all costs

You can’t convince people if they aren’t even paying attention.

Erickson says it’s so hard to get attention these days that you can’t be boring.

“If you’re boring, you’re dead.”

(He’s obviously talking about Labor’s advertising, rather than its leader!)

8. Learn from lessons

Finally, Erickson said Labor’s win was built on the lessons learnt from its 2019 defeat when it launched an investigation.

Labor sucked it up, faced the truth, and improved.

Based on the current carry on around its own 2025 election review, the Liberal Party isn’t following Labor’s example and will pay the price at subsequent elections.

Similarly, how often do we confront our own truths about what has worked and not worked in our comms, marketing and campaigns?

The genius myth

Like Donald Trump, we like to ascribe success to ‘genius’.

The trap of the genius myth, or the assumption there is a magic formula behind success, is that it lets us off the hook. Hey, we can tell ourselves, we’re not geniuses, so it’s beyond us.

But when you actually analyse success, as I did with Donald Trump, it’s usually grounded in best-practice communications principles that have been executed extremely well over an extended period.

The most apt description of Paul Erickson is not that he’s a ‘generational genius’ or ‘wizard’, but that he was engaged in “meticulous planning” had “unwavering discipline” and rolled out the campaign with “ruthless efficiency”.

***

Labor’s trap – Idealism versus power

Another interesting point from the Erickson profile are the books that have most influenced his views.

In the AFR profile, he cited Robert Caro’s brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes on Lyndon Johnson and The Power Broker, Caro’s biography of New York public servant Robert Moses.

(As a bureaucrat, Moses oversaw the development of famous New York landmarks like the UN Headquarters, RFK Bridge, and Lincoln Center.)

As Mizen notes, the books “share a golden thread; they are about the acquisition and use of power”.

The central premise is that you can’t use power if you don’t have it. So you must get it.

Erickson clearly subscribes to this view.

He argues that Labor is the “only party that changes the country for the better” and “the way to do that is win elections”.

Big Labor reforms, such as Medicare, Erickson argues, can be embedded and endure only if “you keep renewing your mandate and stay in power for long enough”.

Albanese himself has declared that he wants make Labor the natural party of government in Australia.

But through Caro’s books is another theme: the tension between idealism – the desire to make society better – and power.

The great danger, as happened with Robert Moses – who began his career as a brilliant young idealist reformer – is that power becomes the end rather than the means.

Moses, despite all his achievements in building great parks, highways and bridges in New York, ended up an autocratic megalomaniac.

I suspect this is the trap Labor is also falling into.

They have become great at getting power, but don’t know what to do with it … apart from entrenching their power further.

The best way to entrench that power, of course, is to get as many people as possible on the teat of Government by spending, spending, spending.

That’s great for Labor and the direct recipients of this largesse; but for the rest of us, inflation climbs, productivity wanes, growth stalls, taxes increase, and freedoms are strangled by an ever-expanding state.