Has the Australian Labor Party (ALP) lost the plot? The evidence suggests as much after the governing party’s fifth successful leadership coup in 10 years returned Kevin Rudd to the office of Prime Minister on Wednesday.

Half a century ago, Labor was unambiguously the worker’s party run by self-taught men who were overtly anti-intellectual and socially conservative.

With Gough Whitlam’s ascension to the leadership in 1967, the ALP began attracting a growing cohort of university graduates, inspired by progressive social views at odds with those of the party’s original owners.

Much as they would later gentrify rows of workers’ cottages in run-down inner city suburbs, the progressives began occupying and renovating a nineteenth-century party.

The strain between the demands of Labor’s competing constituencies has proved too much. Working-class voters have defected in droves. This year’s federal election will complete a remarkable 20-year transition in Australian politics.

Labor will do relatively well in the latte-belt, but there will be big swings to the Coalition’s Tony Abbott in the middle and outer suburbs – hardly the workers’ revolt the progressives once hoped for.

The parliamentary Labor Party is dominated by members of a professional political class who have little in common with the voters they serve.

More than a third of the 71 Labor members in the House of Representatives have law degrees. In all, 61 are graduates – 85% – compared with 25% in the broader population. Tasmanian Dick Adams is a curiosity, a former meatworker and one of the handful of Labor members with a trade qualification.

In the two policy miscalculations that are likely to cost Labor the election, the softening of mandatory detention for asylum seekers and the introduction of the carbon tax, Labor was playing to the sensitivities of middle-class sophisticates.

Abbott, on the other hand, departed from the sophisticate’s script on climate change and has pledged to turn boats of asylum seekers back when it is safe to do so.

In 1996, the voters of outer suburban seats who swung to John Howard’s Coalition, the so-called Howard battlers, were seen as an aberration. At this election, Abbott appears set to win their votes in larger numbers than before. Until Labor changes its policy settings, the estrangement will continue.

Nick Cater is a senior editorial executive at The Australian newspaper and author of The Lucky Culture and the Rise of an Australian Ruling Class.