Much energy was expended late last week upon the release of the post-mortem of Labor's election failure.
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The review, as expected, painted a dismal picture of a party that, as one commentator put it, "had too much to say and didn't know how to say it".
The report set out the significant challenge for new leader Anthony Albanese if Labor wants to have even a chance of winning the next election, comfortably or not.
Albanese would have been very much hoping the post-mortem's release would give him clear air and put all the recriminations of the shock loss behind him.
He used his speech to the National Press Club to outline his response to the review on Friday, in which he pledged to change the "substance" of his party and its policies in the lead-up to the next federal election.
"I'm not interested in just changing the appearance of the party and its policies - I'm going to change their substance," he said.
This is all well and good, but one of the most glaring omissions throughout the election campaign was a narrative for the Labor Party as it set it sights on leading the country into a safe new era.
Instead, the campaign was a long list of topics which lacked a sense of cohesion.
"Unsurprisingly, the Labor campaign lacked focus, wandering from topic to topic without a clear purpose," the review stated.
There's a reason why Labor is losing its blue-collar voters steadily each election cycle: it has lost sight of its origin story, its reason for existing.
Of course, while the Coalition ran a more disciplined campaign, it also lacks a narrative - other than deriding and opposing Labor. And this has long been the case. It's the reason the Coalition was not expected to win the election, even by its own members. It's a void that now needs to be exploited by Anthony Albanese.
He used his Press Club address to outline themes which would form the base of the party's policy development - jobs and a strong economy, better education and healthcare and so on. He also assured listeners that Labor's foreign policy would remain based on the three policy pillars of "support for multilateralism, regional engagement as well as the US alliance".
But he is yet to mould them into something resembling a centre of gravity.
There's a reason why Labor is losing its blue-collar voters steadily each election cycle: it has lost sight of its origin story, its reason for existing, its role in the future of Australia. These should be the bedrock of whatever comes next - the "renewal project" Mr Albanese set out in his address.
This involves "the release of a series of vision statements that will map out the new directions our policies will be heading in". The new Labor platform is set to be debated and rewritten at a national conference to be held in Canberra in December 2020.
But without a narrative to form the basis of the Labor Party in the future, everything that comes next will be as disordered and confusing as what led to the 2019 election.
Frontbencher Stephen Jones had it right when he set out his own analysis for what went wrong in May.
I think we ran a pretty good opposition over the last three or four years but ran a pretty bad campaign," he told Sky News.
"I think the government is the opposite - they ran a pretty hopeless government and a pretty good campaign."
This could well become the underlying story of Australia's modern politics, unless Labor finds a way to write a new chapter.