Australian Poll Holds Lessons for Labour, Warns Milburn

Gordon Brown needs to learn lessons from Australia's recent general election or face possible defeat, the former cabinet minister Alan Milburn has warned.

Interviewed in Australia, where he worked closely on the victorious campaign of the country's new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, he said that there were "lessons in common" between the political situations in Britain and Australia. "For Britain the lessons are very straightforward. Any party of government has to develop a sense of forward progress and look ready to deal with new challenges," he said. "Elections are all about the future."

Speaking to the Guardian after this weekend's Australian election, in which he was one of the Labor leader's close friends and advisers, Milburn warned that "the hardest thing of all is for a party to renew itself in office and keep on winning".

A close friend of Tony Blair, he is believed to be unhappy at Labour's failure to hold a contested leadership election earlier this year.

In remarks some may interpret as aimed at Brown, he said that Australia's longstanding prime minister, John Howard, lost because his government had "developed a sense of invincibility" after 11 years in power. "There was a sense of tiredness and staleness and it was not until the election was called that his Liberal party tried to find any sense of forward momentum and new policy," he said.

Milburn has been in regular contact with Rudd since he took over as leader of Australia's Labor party last year. He has advised him on campaign strategy and speeches, celebrating a landslide victory on Saturday night with the new PM at his headquarters in Brisbane. He attributed Labor's victory, which leaves Australia's conservative coalition out of power at federal and state level across the country, to its leader's "strong sense that he had to be the change". He was "a man with a plan, fresh ideas and new energy who captured the mood of the country," he said.

He said he became "good friends" with Rudd after leaving government for the second time in 2005 - a move that did not rule out talk that he might challenge Brown for the Labour leadership once Blair stood down. Earlier this year he and fellow former minister Charles Clarke launched a website, The 2020 Vision, which they said was aimed at creating a policy debate about Labour's future. At the time, the pair denied that they wanted to "cause trouble for anybody" by intervening in the leadership election but the site was widely seen as a direct and an unsuccessful warning to their party about the implications of a Brown premiership.