On the night of the opening ceremony, 24 January, Cyclone Wanda crossed the coast at Double Island Point north of Noosa. It didn’t have the devastating winds of cyclones like Ada and Althea that smashed the Whitsundays in 1970 and Townsville in 1971, and it weakened rapidly, but the monsoonal trough it forced south to Brisbane stayed there for days. Small oscillations in its movement and intensity generated many stretches of drenching rain.

Across Brisbane, 600 millimetres fell on the first three days of competition in Christchurch — twenty-four inches, or two feet, in the language of the time. This was three times the city’s average rainfall for January, its wettest month. On 28 January the trough weakened and retreated north. A drier, cooler air mass from the south finally brought some blue sky to the capital of the Sunshine State.

The river peaked in the early hours of 29 January at a height not seen since 1893. Residents woke to find about 13,000 buildings damaged. Children due back at school that morning got an extra week added to their Christmas holidays.

Across the Tasman in Christchurch, Australia had won a bag of gold medals while the river rose. Raelene Boyle retained the 100 metres sprint title she won in Edinburgh, fourteen-year-old Newcastle schoolgirl Sonya Gray won the women’s 100 metres freestyle and Mexico Olympic champion Mike Wenden the men’s. As the waters receded, Boyle and Gray added the 200 metres to their 100-metre golds and Don Wagstaff completed a double in the diving pool.

The deputy lord mayor reported Brisbane’s promotional T-shirts “were without doubt the most sought-after item at the Games.” Its souvenir match boxes and coasters “were widely distributed and caused much interest.” Sandwiched amid coverage of the floods, the full-page advertisement for Brisbane’s bid in the Christchurch’s main paper, the Press, caused “some concern,” but it was not fatal because “most people realised that occurrences such as these were not the normal thing.”

Whether or not the 1974 flood was abnormal depended on the time scale. The “River City” had not seen a flood as high in the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century it had seen four as high, including three much higher, and a total of eight floods classed as “major” according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s current classification system (3.5 metres at the City Gauge). Only two other “major” floods occurred in the twentieth century, the last in February 1931. This century is different again. The February 2022 flood was Brisbane’s second major flood after the even higher one in January 2011, and a further “minor” one occurred in January 2013.

The inaugural meeting of Brisbane’s Commonwealth Games Committee was held two months before the Christchurch Games. Chaired by lord mayor and sports fan Clem Jones, the meeting was told an application had already been lodged for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games. Business representatives thought the city council’s report on possible venues was technically excellent but lacked ambition. By 1982, they thought, the city “would deserve a sporting complex of world-wide standard.”

Council representatives baulked at the zeal. They “could not commit the City to structures which could become ‘white elephants,’ or to a financial burden which it might be virtually impossible to meet.” After the floods, the committee’s next meeting was deferred, but not for long. Lord Mayor Jones and his deputy flew over the city in the 4KQ helicopter and were “amazed at the number of places which could be regarded as possible sites for the Games.” A sites sub-committee was whisked around nine possible venues in a council bus just three months after the flood’s peak.

The choice narrowed to the Northside versus the Southside. Deputy Mayor Walsh, representing the Chermside ward on the Northside, wanted Marchant Park redeveloped. Mayor Jones, representing the Southside’s Camp Hill ward, liked a site in the new suburb of Nathan, adjacent to the Mt Gravatt Cemetery and Griffith University, which would accept its first students the following year.

In late July, six months after the flood, a decision was reached: the Southside. It would be closer for visitors staying at the Gold Coast and more convenient for residents of the rapidly expanding southern suburbs.

The campaign for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games succeeded, although the likely “phenomenal” cost was much criticised. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, where the Commonwealth Games Federation met to decide the venue for the ’82 Games, Brisbane found itself the only bidder. Montreal’s diabolical financial outcome scared others away.

New lord mayor Frank Sleeman assured Brisbane ratepayers they would pay only for the “bare essentials.” A new stadium would be built in the new suburb, but it would have a permanent grandstand seating just 10,000. “Temporary” seating would accommodate another 48,000. Work began immediately and the venue was first used in late 1975. Two years later, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, it was named the “Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Sports Centre,” or “QEII.”

There was one big problem with siting the main stadium on the top of a hill. One of the signature events at major games, the marathon, traditionally starts and finishes in the stadium. After the local distance-running community rejected a plan for the runners to complete three laps along the nearby South East Freeway, ending with a sharp climb back up to the stadium, organisers agreed to start and finish the race away from the stadium. (It was men’s only; the first women’s marathon was run at the 1986 Games in Edinburgh.)

A flatter, “city” course was mapped, like those becoming popular in places like New York, Chicago and London. For Brisbane, this meant using the river. The new route started and finished on the south bank, opposite the CBD. It headed out through the city and “The Valley,” across Breakfast Creek to the river at Kingsford Smith Drive, then doubled back to the river bank around the University of Queensland. TV cameras would capture the city at its most picturesque, spectators would get accessible viewing spots, runners would appreciate the cool breeze and flat ground in a city that doesn’t have much of it.

Held the day before the closing ceremony, the marathon did not disappoint. Big crowds lined the route. Australian favourite Robert De Castella found himself well behind two Tanzanians who were close to world record pace at the halfway mark. He set off to chase alone, catching Gidamis Shahanga just before they passed a heaving Regatta Hotel, then ran side-by-side with Juma Ikaanga for a kilometre along Coronation Drive (named in 1937 when George VI was crowned). Morning peak hour traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge slowed as commuters tuned car radios to the struggle. Finally, “Deek” made a decisive break and won by twelve seconds.

Building the main stadium for the Commonwealth Games on a hill in the southern suburbs had helped, paradoxically, and indirectly, to re-energise an old conceit. Decades earlier, tourism promotions dubbed Brisbane the “River City.” Soon, the first of several major arts and cultural organisations began setting up on the South Bank. Expo 88 would draw millions of people from the suburbs, the state, the nation and the world to the banks of the big river.

Despite the best intentions, QEII struggled to avoid the fate those Brisbane City Councillors feared: becoming a white elephant. Track and field events take centre stage in Olympic and Commonwealth Games but local athletics events, even the biggest interschool carnivals, attract much smaller crowds at other times.

For a while, in the 1990s and early 2000s, QEII was back in business. On joining the national rugby league competition in the late 1980s, the Brisbane Broncos played at the sport’s traditional home in the city, Lang Park. A few years later, after the temporary seating at QEII was made a little more permanent, they moved there and started drawing Commonwealth Games–like crowds to the renamed “ANZ Stadium.”

Annual State of Origin matches against New South Wales, though, stayed at Lang Park. The regular monster crowds at ANZ declined. Eventually the state government and others decided to revive the old cauldron. The two “Origin” matches played at ANZ in 2001 and 2002 while Lang Park was rebuilt were the last.

In 2003, the Maroons and Broncos returned to the new “Suncorp Stadium.” They have been there ever since, sharing the venue with the Queensland Reds (rugby union) and Brisbane Roar (soccer). Last year, it was at Suncorp that the Matildas played their World Cup quarter-final against France, which ended in that epic, victorious penalty shoot-out.

QEII went back to being a track and field venue, the Queensland Sports and Athletics Centre, “QSAC.” It was used as an evacuation centre during the 2011 floods. After Brisbane won the right to hold the 2032 Olympics, there was a chance it might be revived again as a temporary venue for cricket and AFL while the traditional home of those sports in Queensland, the Gabba, was being remade as the main Olympic stadium at a cost of $2.7 billion.

That was until Monday, when QSAC got an even bigger future. Queensland’s government considered the recommendations of a committee set up to propose further options after the earlier rejection of the Gabba rebuild. The committee recommended that a wholly new stadium be built at Victoria Park, at a cost of over $3 billion, and eventually replace the Gabba as the home of cricket and AFL in Brisbane. Both recommendations were rejected. (Victoria Park was one of the sites rejected by Clem Jones’s 1974 committee.)

The Gabba is going to stay the Gabba, with a modest upgrade. Victoria Park is going to stay Victoria Park.

The winner is… QSAC! The stadium on the hill will rise again to host the track and field events at an Olympic Games fifty years after it staged them for the Commonwealth Games. At a cost of $1.6 billion, permanent seating will be increased to 14,000, and total capacity will touch 40,000 for the period of the Olympics, some way below the 1982 full houses.

The other winner is Suncorp Stadium, with its larger capacity of more than 50,000, which will get the opening and closing ceremonies.

The marathoners? They will surely follow the river again, winding out, back, out and back, sticking to the old, deceptively gentle watercourse that has always drawn people to this place. •

Information about Commonwealth Games planning is taken from Brisbane City Council committee minutes and files, and about the 1974 floods from the Department of Science/Bureau of Meteorology’s “Brisbane Floods January 1974” (AGPS, 1974). Other information drawn from Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (2023), Margaret Cook’s A River with a City Problem (2019) and Jackie Ryan’s We’ll Show the World: Expo 88 (2018), all published by UQP.

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As the party’s former assistant state secretary, Tony Barry, put it ruefully on Saturday night: “The Victorian Liberal Party is where hope goes to die.” Decades of infighting and election failure have hollowed out its membership, leaving it open to branch stackers and reactionary nutters. The Coalition as a whole has less than a third of the seats in the Legislative Assembly and barely a quarter of Victorian seats in the House of Reps.

Unquestionably, Victoria has become a stronghold of the left. But these days, so is Western Australia, and so is South Australia. Federally, so is Tasmania. Labor is back in power in New South Wales — and don’t mention the ACT.

In fact, if you look at voting over recent federal elections, Victoria, along with New South Wales and South Australia, is among the three states closest to the centre of the Australian political spectrum. The odd state out isn’t Victoria. It is Peter Dutton’s home state of Queensland.

Australian Electoral Commission figures

At last year’s federal election, the Coalition won 70 per cent of Queensland’s lower house seats but just 30 per cent of seats across the rest of Australia. Peter Dutton doesn’t need to go to Melbourne to be in alien territory; he’s in it as soon as he leaves his home state.

The Coalition is now down to ten federal seats in Victoria, but it also has just five in Western Australia, three in South Australia, two in Tasmania and none in the ACT or the Northern Territory. Even in New South Wales it is down to sixteen seats, or one in three.

The Coalition’s problem is not Victoria, it is Australia — or at least Australia minus Queensland. To write off a loss like this as due to being in hostile territory would be a huge, self-indulgent blunder that could only damage the Coalition. As the election results showed clearly, it has lost support in every other mainland state.

Yes, it would help if it could fix up the problems of the Victorian Liberal Party. But that can happen only if the federal and state Liberals use their time in opposition to rethink their policies — constructively, to ensure they are “sound and progressive,” as Sir Robert Menzies urged long ago.

This is renovation time. Both the Coalition parties need to remodel themselves into the kind of party that sound and progressive Victorians would want to be part of: the Victorian Nationals have shown the way. And that would similarly reinvigorate both parties in the rest of Australia. The Queensland LNP can’t be allowed to have a veto on federal Liberal and National policies.

Maybe only a Queenslander can explain one puzzling aspect of that state’s electoral behaviour. In Victoria and most other states, people tend to vote the same way at federal and state elections. But a lot of Queenslanders clearly vote different ways.

The Coalition has won a majority of Queensland’s lower house seats at nine of the last ten federal elections. At state level, though, it has won only two of the last ten. In the past thirty years, Labor has  spent more time governing Queensland than it has governing Victoria.

Labor has won all three of Queensland’s most recent state elections, averaging 51.8 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote. Yet it has won only a handful of seats at federal elections, and just 44.5 per cent of the votes.

And that’s not new: it’s been a recurring theme in Queensland’s history, including during Labor’s long twenty-five-year reign from 1934 to 1957. Some Queenslander, please explain. •

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That would be a stunning swing of 8 per cent against Dominic Perrottet’s government — a government one could argue is the most progressive and competent the Coalition has produced in the past decade, certainly relative to its counterparts federally, or in Victoria or Queensland.

Four days later, a Resolve poll for the Sydney Morning Herald came up with roughly similar findings, though on those figures the swing seems to be more like 6.5 per cent. It would still be curtains. The bookies give the Coalition’s last government on the mainland just a 20 per cent chance of holding onto office when the voters deliver judgement on 25 March.

If that proves right, it would be a dramatic illustration of how far the Liberal Party has fallen. At its peak in 2014, the Coalition ran every government in Australia except for South Australia (where it won the election on votes but lost it on the seats) and the ACT (where it hasn’t won an election since 1998).

The Abbott government’s 2014 budget of broken promises marked the turning point. Since then the Coalition has lost one government after another.

Three of those governments fell after a single term. Six months after Abbott’s budget, Victoria led the way, following four years dominated by the Coalition infighting that brought down premier Ted Baillieu. Queensland followed two months later, with premier Campbell Newman, the hero of its 2012 election win, losing his own seat in a 14 per cent statewide swing.

The polls suggested Abbott’s own government would also be booted out after a single term, but Liberal MPs forestalled that by dumping him and installing Malcolm Turnbull to win them the 2016 election.

Coalition governments continued to fall: Northern Territory voters dumped the Country Liberal Party government in 2016, leaving it with just two seats; the following year Mark McGowan began his remarkable reign by ousting the Coalition government in Western Australia.

In South Australia, by contrast, the Liberals finally broke through after sixteen years in opposition to win power in 2018. But that government too lasted just one term, and Labor emphatically returned to power last March — two months before voters finally sent the federal Coalition on its way.

But the NSW Coalition government should surely be less vulnerable. While the Morrison government showed no appetite for tackling climate change, NSW treasurer and energy minister Matt Kean has been a national leader in pushing the pace of decarbonisation. No government in Australia is more subject to integrity watchdogs than the NSW government is to its own ICAC. And, with some exceptions (water, for instance), it has been more a reformist government than a reactionary one. On gambling reform, it is far more progressive than Labor.

But this election cycle has become merciless for the Coalition parties. They began it with seven of Australia’s nine federal, state and territory governments. They now have just two, and if the NSW government falls on 25 March, they will be left with just one.

It’s worth recalling that latest cycle, and what it means for the Coalition parties. South Australia’s Liberal government fell in March last year, the federal Coalition government was voted out in May, and the Victorian Liberals received another thrashing from voters in November. In 2021, the Western Australian Liberals were left with just two seats in the Legislative Assembly and the Nationals replaced them as the official opposition.

2020 saw Queensland’s Labor government re-elected with an increased majority, leaving the Liberals with just five seats in Brisbane. The Labor–Greens government was given a sixth term in the ACT, while in the Northern Territory Labor was re-elected for a second term.

The one victory for the Coalition in that time was in Tasmania, where former premier Peter Gutwein called an early election in 2021 and narrowly retained his majority. If Dominic Perrottet loses in March, Gutwein’s successor, Jeremy Rockliff, will lead Australia’s only Liberal government. He doesn’t have to face the voters until early 2025.

Being out of government makes everything harder for political parties. They have far fewer staffers to call on, few public servants to provide policy assistance, less fundraising power and a bigger challenge finding things out. Talented people don’t waste their energies on a party destined for opposition, so the opposition parties are left with rusted-on supporters and branch stackers’ recruits.

But cycles change. In the last years of the Howard government, Labor controlled every state and territory government in Australia. Then, with the Rudd government still at the peak of its popularity, Western Australians voted out their Labor government. Two years later Victorians did the same, and by early 2014 Labor had only two governments left.

The next political cycle began with the Andrews government taking power in Victoria in November 2014. If the Perrottet government is voted out, that cycle will culminate on 25 March.

But would that also imply that Labor is now at the top of its cycle? That it will be all downhill for Labor from here, and the Coalition will soon start taking back the governments it has lost?

Not necessarily. A looming Coalition revival would be a reasonable expectation if you assumed that its losses of government reflected cyclical factors alone: bad luck, changing political fashions, one-off factors, and in the NSW case, the wear and tear of twelve years in government.

But if that were so, we should be seeing signs of it in the state that was first to switch its allegiance to Labor. And those signs should have been apparent in November’s election there. As we shall see, though, there was little if any sign of a Liberal comeback.

It’s early days yet for the Albanese government. We’ve seen many governments enjoy an extended honeymoon before crashing — the Rudd government, for example — but eight months after the election, all the polls suggest it’s the Coalition that has lost a lot of ground.

Labor won the 21 May election with a tad over 52 per cent of the two-party vote. The latest Resolve poll in Tuesday’s Age/Sydney Morning Herald implied that the figure has jumped to 60 per cent since the election. Peter Dutton’s poll ratings remain far behind Anthony Albanese’s.

In this Labor cycle, the Coalition lost its first state government just eight months after reaching its peak of running seven of the nine governments. But the Coalition’s next cycle might not begin anytime soon.

After New South Wales votes it will be almost a year and a half before the next election anywhere in Australia, and then there will be a bunch of them: the Northern Territory, the ACT and Queensland in the second half of 2024, and then Western Australia, Tasmania and federally in the first half of 2025. While you’d think the Coalition will surely win one of them, it could face a long wait before its own cycle gets going.

Why?

First, since 2000, the Coalition has mostly been in government in Canberra, but Labor has dominated government at state and territory level. So far this century, in the states and territories, Labor has been in power for roughly three-quarters of the time, and the Coalition for just one-quarter. Outside New South Wales and Tasmania, Labor has become the natural party of government, and the Liberals/Nationals/LNP/CLP the natural parties of opposition.

In Victoria, the Coalition has been in power for just four of the past twenty-three years. In Queensland, three. In South Australia, six. In the Northern Territory, five and a half, and in the ACT, the Liberals have had less than two years in office and twenty-one in opposition.

Maybe that’s logical. The federal government’s main jobs are economic management, social security and foreign relations — and on two of those, voters have a conservative bias. The states, by contrast, are mainly responsible for running the services we rely on: hospitals, schools, roads and public transport. On those issues, voters have a bias towards improving services. Keeping the budget in the black seems to have gone out of fashion.

But former NSW premier and federal Liberal president Nick Greiner put it well when he said the Liberals’ problem is that its activist base is well to the right of its voter base. (Just as the Greens’ activist base is well to the left of its voter base.) And the longer a party is out of power, the more deep-seated that becomes. Failure breeds more failure.

Take the ACT Liberals. In its first twelve years of self-government the ACT mostly had Liberal governments. Red Hill pharmacist Kate Carnell was parachuted in to become party leader. She won two elections, presenting a moderate, modern face that Canberra voters could relate to. But in 2001, the Libs lost office, went into opposition, and stayed there.

By 2023, it’s come to feel as though the Labor–Greens coalition is the permanent government of the ACT, and the Liberals are the permanent opposition.

Could the same be happening in Victoria? There, the Coalition parties have won a majority of Victoria’s seats in just one of the last sixteen elections, federal or state. For a Liberal Party that once governed the state alone for twenty-seven years straight, defeat has come to be seen as normal.

The Coalition’s one victory was at the 2010 state election under another moderate, modern Liberal, Ted Baillieu. But in truth they were not ready to govern, were profoundly disunited and had no coherent agenda. When voters turfed them out in 2014, there was little to show for their four years in power.

Love him or loathe him, Daniel Andrews has been full of ambition to do things, above all investing in transport infrastructure and tackling cutting-edge social issues. In 2018 Labor was returned with a massive majority — so large that we all assumed 2022 would see a swing back to the Coalition.

That assumption seemed certain after the government’s mishandling of Covid. It imposed harsh, unpopular lockdowns that effectively closed down Melbourne for eight months, then changed course 180 degrees and dropped all controls as the death toll from Covid soared. More than one in 1000 Victorians have now died of the disease — 76 per cent more than in the rest of Australia.

Surely the 2022 Victorian election should have been the start of a new cycle of Liberal renewal. But no. At face value, the Libs made no progress at all. Labor had fifty-five seats in the old Assembly, the Coalition twenty-seven, and the Greens and independents three each. In the new one, Labor has fifty-six, the Coalition twenty-eight (assuming it retains Narracan at Saturday’s delayed election), and the Greens four. Labor won easily — and while the Nationals gained three seats, the Liberals went backwards.

But there are nuances to that narrative — and in politics, nuances matter. One reason why the Albanese government is riding so high is that it has the freedom of having a clear majority in the House of Representatives. But that majority came so close to being a minority.

If fewer than 500 votes in the relevant booths had changed hands, the Liberals’ Andrew Constance would have won the federal seat of Gilmore from Labor, the Greens’ Steph Hodgins-May would now be the member for Macnamara — and Labor would be a minority government, negotiating every bill with the crossbenches or the Coalition. Small changes, big difference.

For Victoria, nuance one: The pre-election redistribution of boundaries, on the Victorian Electoral Commission’s estimates, gave Labor a net gain of three seats (because Melbourne had grown rapidly, and Labor held most of the seats with swollen enrolments). That was the real starting point: so Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two. Not much difference, sure, but there was some movement the Coalition’s way, however inadequate.

Nuance two: As in the federal election, Labor was lucky. A shift of just 350 votes in the relevant booths would have seen the Greens take Northcote and the Liberals win Pakenham and Bass. Instead of the seats going from 58–26–4 to 56–28–4, they would have ended up as 53–30–5. Not much difference there either, but it would have shown clear movement from Labor to the Coalition.

Nuance three: On the votes, there certainly was movement. For the eighty-six seats contested by both sides at the last two elections, Labor’s share of the two-party-preferred vote fell from 57.5 per cent in 2018 to 54.8 per cent this time. That’s a swing of 2.7 per cent to the Coalition.

But in the twenty-five marginal seats — those where the election is decided — it was a very different story. The average swing from Labor to the Coalition there was just 0.3 per cent. The Coalition won four seats that were notionally Labor’s on the new boundaries (Caulfield, Hawthorn, Nepean and Morwell), while Labor won three seats that were notionally the Coalition’s (Bayswater, Bass and Glen Waverley).

(Labor also lost Richmond to the Greens and the Coalition won Shepparton from independent Suzanna Sheed. That’s why, in net terms, Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two).

Mostly, the big swings to the Coalition were in safe Labor seats in Melbourne’s western and northern suburbs, where it had no chance of winning: seats like Greenvale (15.1 per cent swing to the Liberals), Mill Park (13.5), St Albans (12.4), Thomastown (11.4) and Kororoit (11.1).

Across the nineteen middle and outer suburbs northwest of the Yarra, the average swing to the Coalition was 7.1 per cent. But it won none of them, and even after those swings, only two of them were even mildly marginal.

To win a majority in the Assembly, the Coalition needed to make a net gain of nineteen seats. On the traditional pendulum, admittedly a rough measure, that required a swing of 10.4 per cent.

At the 2026 election, to win a majority, it will need to make a net gain of seventeen seats. On the pendulum, that would require a swing of 8.1 per cent. No opposition has gained a swing of that size since 1955, when Labor split in two.

The start of a cycle that will see Australia swing back to Coalition governments? I think not.

At this election, twelve Labor seats were marginal against the Coalition. At the 2026 election, only eight will be. Most of the seats it needs to gain to win office will need to be won by swings of 6 to 10 per cent.

These are normally classified as “fairly safe” seats. If Labor is still riding high with voters in 2026, they won’t be threatened. But if it loses support in the next four years, as governments often do in their third terms, some could come under threat. Labor would have far more territory to defend.

Nuance four: A significant development was lost in the focus on Labor’s triumph and the Liberals’ woes. This election saw the Greens almost double their territory. Richmond was the only seat they picked up, but they came close to winning five other seats: Northcote (lost by 0.2 per cent), Pascoe Vale (2.0), Preston (2.1), Footscray (4.2) and Albert Park (4.5).

One in ten seats in the Assembly, all in the inner suburbs, are now either held by the Greens or within their reach. That’s a position they’ve never been in before, anywhere in Australia.

In the Legislative Council, they now hold the balance of power, winning four seats, up from one in 2018. Labor will have to negotiate with them on any legislation the Coalition opposes.

Their first-preference vote rose just slightly, from 10.7 per cent to 11.5. But there’s a simple reason for that which media commentators ignored: at this election there were three times as many minor-party candidates as last time. Animal Justice and Family First ran in every seat, and the Freedom Party in most of them. Those candidates took votes from all other parties. As the table shows, the minor parties’ vote more than doubled, from 5.2 per cent last time to 11.7 per cent.

Note: while the independents’ vote fell by 0.6 per cent, the Liberals by 0.8 per cent and Labor’s by 5.8 per cent, the Greens’ vote rose by 0.8 per cent. They clearly did the best of the major players.

We can compare apples with apples by looking at the vote for the three main parties after minor-party preferences. The comparison is limited by the fact that only in twenty-seven seats were Labor, Liberals and Greens in the final three in both 2018 and 2022 and the commission distributed everyone else’s preferences between them. (The VEC has promised that this time it will eventually distribute all preferences in all seats. Thank you, at last.)

When just Labor, Liberals and Greens were left in those twenty-seven seats, the Liberal vote was unchanged from 2018. But Labor’s vote was down 3.2 per cent, while the Greens’ vote rose by 3.2 per cent. In the new marginal seats of Footscray, Pascoe Vale and Preston, the swing from Labor to Greens was three times that size.

But isn’t that just because the Liberals changed their preferences from Labor to Greens? No. These are three-party figures: the Liberal preferences hadn’t been distributed at this stage. And note: when they were, they didn’t change the outcome in a single seat, not even Richmond. As the VEC has repeatedly shown, most inner-suburban Liberals don’t follow their party’s how-to-vote card.

Where Liberal preferences were distributed, they lifted the Greens’ two-party vote by an average of 4.5 per cent. The Greens were slowly expanding their territory even when the Liberals preferenced Labor, but in 2026 that 4.5 per cent would make it far easier for them to keep doing so. And conversely, Labor would breathe a huge sigh of relief if the Liberals preferenced them instead.

In war and politics, they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Helping the Greens win Labor seats brings the Coalition no closer to government, as the Greens would always support Labor. But making Labor fight on two fronts dilutes its campaign resources: and of Labor’s thirteen most marginal seats after this election, in five its opponent is the Greens. If the Liberals redirect preferences to Labor in 2026, the only one Labor need worry about would be Northcote.

The Greens often declare war on themselves, and do or say silly things that discourage you from taking them seriously. But they have stood up for principles that matter to many Australians — tackling climate change seriously, treating refugees humanely, ending persecution of whistleblowers — which is why they have become the first party since Federation to establish itself as a lasting independent alternative to the two major parties.

The Country Party, now the Nationals, began as an independent group but abandoned that to form what has been a permanent coalition with the Liberals. In the last term of the NSW Coalition government, their one public stand on principle seemed to be to defend the interests of land developers against koalas.

The DLP and the Australian Democrats each lasted a generation and won significant support as independent alternatives to the two majors. But neither established a territorial base that could win them lower house seats, and eventually they withered away.

The Greens have carved out their own territory by making themselves the party of young voters in the inner suburbs. In those nine seats in inner Melbourne, they won 38.7 per cent of the three-party vote this time, ahead of Labor with 38.4 per cent and the Liberals with 22.9 per cent. At the federal election, they also won all three seats in inner Brisbane.

And the young, and the inner suburbs, just keep growing. It’s a good constituency to have.

New South Wales has become the Greens’ weakest state. At the federal election they polled just 10 per cent there, compared with 13.3 per cent in the rest of Australia. While they are now competitive in nine state seats in Melbourne, in 2019 they were competitive in just two seats in Sydney (Balmain and Newtown, both safe Green seats) and two in the hippie north of the state (winning Ballina, just losing Lismore). This state election will test them too.

For Victoria, the bottom line is that the Liberals have lost not only the 2022 election but probably the 2026 one as well. What happens then will be determined by the events of the next four years, and how voters respond to them. But things would have to go very badly for Labor for the Coalition to emerge with a majority.

For Australia, the bottom line is that if the Coalition loses what many see as its best government of recent years then it could be a long road back to power. And if the Greens’ MPs, senators and activists manage to avoid alienating their potential voters, it’s possible that the ACT will not be the only parliament in which the successor to a Labor government is a Labor–Greens one. •

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Both men had diverged sharply from Liberal orthodoxy: Gorton having supported the decriminalisation of cannabis and Fraser advocating a republic and better treatment of refugees. But the latest “shock” resignation — that of former Queensland premier Campbell Newman from the Liberal National Party — elicits surprise for another reason, based on his having presided over one of the most spectacular political failures in recent history.

Newman might nominally have been a party elder and member of the LNP’s inner circle since his government’s defeat in 2015, but he has remained a walking reminder of the failure of the LNP project — the merger in 2008 of the Liberal Party and the Nationals in Queensland.

Only in the highly decentralised Queensland were the city-based Liberals subservient to the rural Nationals (formerly the Country Party) within the Coalition. Tensions grew in the 1980s under the Nationals premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who contrived to force the Liberals out of government before sabotaging the Coalition’s hopes in the 1987 federal election with his “Joh for PM” campaign.

A merged party has always been resisted elsewhere in Australia on the grounds that it ran the risk of enabling far-right parties to emerge if the Nationals were perceived to be abandoning their rural base. But it seemed simpler in Queensland where, its proponents argued, a merger would prevent the three-cornered Labor–National–Liberal contests that were so damaging for the conservative parties.

The reality has been somewhat different. Since the merger, the LNP has won just one election — an extraordinary landslide in 2012, in which it obtained 49.6 per cent of first preferences and left Labor with just seven seats in a house of eighty-nine. Just as spectacular, however, was the LNP’s defeat at the next election, when it lost thirty-four seats. There was no mystery about the cause: it was one of the most inept governments in Australian history. Having commanded a majority in a single-house parliament that most parties wouldn’t dare dream about, it squandered the opportunity — and much of the blame rested with Newman and the ministry he chose.

Newman’s resignation statement appeared to be aimed at the federal Coalition as much as the LNP, although he seized on a weekend by-election result in the safe Labor seat of Stretton, tweeting: “LNP Primary vote in Stretton in 2015 election ‘disaster’ 37.9%. Six and a half years on in 2021 it’s 32.6%.” The Stretton vote of 37.9 per cent, you’ll have guessed, was recorded at the end of Newman’s premiership.

Newman also declared that the Palaszczuk government’s response to the pandemic was “the last straw” and accused the Coalition of abandoning its principles in federal and state politics across Australia. He was, he added, “dismayed that the political wing has failed to stand up for our core values of fiscal responsibility, smaller government, support for small business, the elimination of red tape and the defence of free speech and liberty.” He indicated a possible return to politics via the Senate, possibly as an independent or in a new party.

Quite apart from its electoral failures, the party he is leaving is suffering from internal turmoil. Squabbling within the party organisation undermined former leader Deb Frecklington in the crucial final weeks of the 2020 election, which saw the party end up with just 35.9 per cent of the vote.

Other states have looked at the merger with distaste, and it is unlikely to be emulated outside Queensland and the Northern Territory (where the party has long been a single entity). The merger has also had an impact on the Coalition in Canberra, its machinations having been instrumental in the coup that returned Barnaby Joyce to the Nationals leadership.

Unless his resignation blast is just bluster from an aggrieved warrior, it might well be that Campbell Newman, the son of two former Liberal ministers, will set out to do at the next federal election what Bjelke-Petersen tried in 1987. But it’s hard to see a “Cam for PM” campaign ending any differently from the risible shambles launched by his colourful Queensland predecessor — though its potential for disruption remains very real. •

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Is 3.8 per cent a lot? In July 2018 a 3.7 per cent swing to Labor in another Queensland seat, Longman, produced a flurry of excitement in the media, with scribes overlaying the figure onto the pendulum to produce horror stories for the government. The Liberal party room took note, and that contributed to prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s demise the following month.

Why are we not witnessing similar hysteria today?

Longman dramatists would argue that it was a reasonably marginal electorate, while Groom isn’t, and that the big drop in the Liberal National Party’s primary vote (which mostly went to One Nation) made it a big story. Perhaps, but the swing to Labor after preferences, which is all that really matters, was only 3.7 cent. Most of that One Nation vote (some 68 per cent) ended up in the LNP’s two-party-preferred vote.

Some of the Longman histrionics came from Turnbull’s Liberal enemies manipulating journalists. As well, there was an election due within a year, the government was trailing in opinion polls, and the by-election result slotted in nicely. Note that the previous December the NSW seat of Bennelong had seen a bigger swing, 4.8 per cent, to Labor, but the popular take-out from that was all about Liberal John Alexander’s safely retaining it. Still, putting 4.8 per cent onto the pendulum would’ve been even more fun.

In New England (New South Wales) a couple of months earlier, Barnaby Joyce had picked up a 7.2 per cent swing. Woah. But no one applied that to the other side of the pendulum, or declared the government headed for a landslide re-election.

Longman just worked in a narrative sense. A government, headed for defeat, suffers swing at by-election, reinforcing what we already knew. Yes, it meant ignoring Braddon (Tasmania), held on the same day, which produced a tiny swing to Labor of 0.1 per cent. Hey, Queensland is more important at election time than the Apple Isle.

You ever get the feeling so much election commentary is a bit silly?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: by-elections are grotesquely over-interpreted in this country. And in the mother country; in fact, that’s where we get it from.

What can we say about Groom? The Greens didn’t run, and that’s a first at a by-election going right back to when Tony Abbott won Warringah in 1994. (We’ve had thirty by-elections since then.) Why they made that decision isn’t obvious; they would presumably have received more than 4 per cent and qualified for public funding. (They got 8 per cent at the last general election.)

In fact, Groom was contested by only four candidates, which is very low by contemporary standards (though in the early days of Federation it would have been high). The last time a by-election field was that small was in Wentworth in 1995, when former Liberal leader John Hewson left politics.

The Liberal Democrats candidate came last, which was kind of predictable if we remember (as we should from time to time) that 90-odd per cent of Australians aren’t as interested in politics as we are. Hardly anyone outside the political bubble would have more than vaguely heard of that minor party, and the other one in the contest, Sustainable Australia, while enjoying even less exposure, at least has a name that can appeal viscerally. Greens weren’t running, remember.

Like Bullet Train for Australia (2013–17), the name is worth a per cent or two. Sustainable Australia, for those who dig a bit deeper, is somewhat anti-immigration, which is perhaps icing on the cake. It’s a bit like Family First used to be (although appealing to very different types of voters); you didn’t have to be religious to find the name appealing. In 2017 Family First merged with Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives, and for some stupid reason dropped their own name in favour of his.

Australian Conservatives was a name from hell. And Liberal Democrats is just bland, but at least has the potential advantage of being easily confused with the Liberal Party. As David Leyonhjelm discovered in 2014. •

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The latest of the relatively few opinion polls have the parties’ primary votes similar to last time, with one exception. Labor recorded 35.4 per cent in 2017, the Liberal National Party 33.7, One Nation 13.7 and the Greens 10. Last night’s election-eve Newspoll (which got it very close last time) has the numbers respectively at 37, 36, 10 and 11. The rising tide slightly lifting both major parties comes from the decline of One Nation.

Actually, those numbers don’t tell the half of it. One Nation ran in only sixty-one electorates in 2017; now it’s contesting ninety out of ninety-three. If Newspoll’s 10 per cent is about right (like all good pollsters, it takes account of the number of seats contested by a party) then even allowing for the fact that the sixty-one were in relatively friendly territory, we’re looking at a party whose support has crashed.

The drop in One Nation votes — and what it means for the major parties — should be one site of seat-by-seat drama tonight. Three years ago the party made it into twenty-one two-candidate-preferred contests; this time many or perhaps most of those will be Labor–LNP counts — and some of them will throw up surprises.

Speaking of 10 per cent: as Tim Colebatch’s post-election sums suggested last time, that was also roughly the impact of One Nation’s how-to-vote cards on its preference flows in 2017. Kevin Bonham reckons those cards probably altered the result in just one seat, Pumicestone, in favour of the LNP, and maybe helped Labor in Aspley.

But One Nation’s policy of (mostly) preferencing against sitting MPs pushed seats closer to the 50–50 spot, meaning most of today’s margins, for both parties, are not as slender as they appear.

We can illustrate this with Labor’s most marginal seat, Townsville. If One Nation had preferenced Labor instead of the LNP three years ago, assuming that 10 per cent effect, the incumbent’s margin today would be about 2.4 per cent rather than 0.4. If One Nation had not run at all, or had handed out double-sided how-to-vote cards, we could split the difference and estimate Labor’s margin at 1.4 per cent. (This is not a prediction about Townsville, by the way.)

So the minor party’s demise is good for Labor in seats they hold. In fact it’s good for Labor everywhere, because this time One Nation is preferencing the LNP ahead of Labor virtually across the board.

So who’s going to win? Newspoll estimates that Labor has 51.5 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, which seems reasonable from those numbers. But major-party primary votes as low as these make estimates particularly rubbery. Most observers are expecting that the LNP will, for the second election in a row, do better swing-wise outside the densely populated southeast. Voters living in close proximity to other voters are more likely to embrace the heavy hand of the government’s Covid-19 restrictions; areas reliant on tourism are particularly feeling the effects of closed borders.

By the way, premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s controversial former deputy Jackie Trad looks gone for all money in South Brisbane. LNP how-to-vote cards alone would finish her off if the primary votes of 2017 were replicated (the LNP preferenced Trad ahead of the Greens in 2017, but not this time), so she needs a friendly swing on primary votes to survive. Polling has her going backwards. •

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A couple of days later Roy Morgan reported high support among Victorians for stage four lockdown measures.

And on Monday, the Australian’s Newspoll reported a lopsided response to its question about an area of conflict between the two spheres: a great big 80 per cent of respondents believe that “premiers should have the authority to close borders or restrict entry of Australians who live in other states.” Now, the wording is a bit once-removed — almost going to the constitutionality of these measures rather than whether premiers should act on such authority — but it’s a reasonable indicator of a high level of comfort with state and territory border closures.

(Respondents would probably be particularly supportive of their own jurisdiction’s decisions, and a state breakdown of these numbers, for Western Australia and Queensland in particular, would be illuminating.)

Now public goodwill, even if it can never be close to unanimous, is important for compliance. For this reason alone, authorities will be happy with these survey findings.

But what else does the widespread community support tell us?

One thing it certainly doesn’t indicate is that the federal, state and territory governments have adopted the “correct” approach. Any judgement on that question belongs in the future, when the pandemic is actually “over,” perhaps via international studies comparing various indices.

And in this situation, more than most, we would hope that government decisions are not driven by public opinion. On the evidence, they reflect technocratic and health considerations, although the rhetoric has at times wandered into demagogy. (Yes, I’m looking again at Labor premiers in the two big outlier states, Queensland and Western Australia, one of whom faces an election next month, and the other early next year.)

Much of the public approval would flow regardless of particular Covid-19 strategies. The wartime analogy is only a little overused: around the planet, heightened insecurity is driving many people further into the arms of governments and leading many to rediscover the value of collective action and community. Extreme outliers like the United States and Brazil, and perhaps Britain, where governments have ostentatiously made a mess of it, are exceptions to the rule.

And the longer-term politics? It would be a mistake to assume that governments will earn the undying gratitude of their communities. Voters are fickle and unsentimental, and memories can be short: policies that are unpopular when they are introduced — John Howard’s GST, for example — might subsequently receive a tick. For the inverse, see Kevin Rudd’s GFC stimulus, widely supported across the community, which eventually came to be seen as emblematic of Labor’s supposed fiscal recklessness.

But undeniably, as NT first minister Michael Gunner can attest, the short-term politics remain excellent for incumbents. Surveying voting intentions is notoriously difficult in the Northern Territory, and diseconomies of scale (its population is less than half Tasmania’s and smaller than Canberra’s) make opinion polls a rarity. Still, the few polls published suggest, tentatively, that by the time last month’s election took place the Labor government had made big gains on its position only months before.

But let’s return to that Essential question: “How would you rate your state government’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak?” Back in early May, Queensland’s Labor government attracted the lowest total “good” rating out of the five states surveyed (Tasmania was left out). Last week, while the other four states registered drops in approval, Queensland shot up to 73 per cent, coming in second after Western Australia.

You might call this fortuitous, with that election in October. Or maybe it’s the result of closing the borders (with the two most heavy-handed states being the most approved of). And perhaps it’s also because the election is approaching, and voters are turning their minds to what will be at stake.

Polls this year have had the opposition Liberal National Party slightly ahead in Queensland, on 52 per cent after preferences in June and 51 per cent on 30 July. But it will be surprising if the Palaszczuk government doesn’t enter the official campaign with a lead. And, given the opposition’s less-than-enthusiastic support for the government’s pandemic measures, it will also be surprising if Labor doesn’t prevail on 31 October.

What you can be sure of is that Annastacia Palaszczuk, like Michael Gunner before her, will do her best to make it all about the virus. Not about a job well done (elections are always about the future, and this pandemic is not close to being over) but about the dangers of changing strategy, of throwing away the results of all this sacrifice.

Way back in 1987, in the midst of the balance-of-payments crisis, Bob Hawke’s federal government employed the re-election theme Let’s Stick Together. Among the John Singleton–supplied lyrics were these: “Nobody ever got anywhere changing horses in midstream … Together, let’s stick together (repeat chorus)…”

That seems like a pretty useful message for incumbents in the time of Covid-19. •

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One of the book’s themes is that southern governments, whether state or national, are a long way away, and politicians and bureaucrats often know very little about the vast region they have nominal responsibility for. The sharp electoral swings against the Labor Party in northern Queensland seats certainly drew national attention to the region, confirming the widespread conviction that provincial Queensland is both distinctive and different.

Megarrity highlights the strong sense of regional identity in the Kimberley, the Top End and particularly North Queensland, which has hosted movements urging for a separate state since the nineteenth century. Even when the passion for separation subsides, there remains a continuing sense of being ignored and neglected.

Climate has always played a part in northerners’ sense of difference, and understandably so. The monsoonal swing from wet to dry and back again is not at all like the weather people experience in the temperate south. And in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was real uncertainty about the ability of white people to live and thrive north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Megarrity deftly deals with these abiding concerns.

And then there is politics. The recent election results will confirm in many minds that provincial Queensland is inimitably conservative. This was the view cemented in southern awareness by the long, idiosyncratic twenty-year reign of Joh Bjelke-Petersen between 1968 and 1987. But that twenty-year period obscures the longer-term electoral power of the Labor Party, which had governed without a break from 1915 to 1957 — only faltering when it split and the conservative Democratic Labor Party was born — and for twenty-five of the past thirty years. Megarrity astutely assesses the shifting political scene, and his observations of local politics, which he well understands, are particularly useful.

Townsville is of special interest at the moment because the electorate in which it sits, Herbert, was one of the seats won back from Labor by the Coalition. But the city’s political history is not what might be expected. It was at the centre of what was known as the “red north,” a reflection of its radical left-wing history rather than the colour of the locals’ sun-burnished necks. Fred Patterson, a local lawyer, won a neighbouring state seat in the 1940s as a communist and held it for two terms. Right up until the 1960s the powerful union movement was dominated by a group of capable communists who commanded a majority on the local Trades and Labour Council.

Both Megarrity and Richard Martin, in The Gulf Country, deal with the multifaceted question of race. In direct and indirect ways since the earliest years of colonial government, this has been the means by which the north has significantly influenced national politics. Settlement had begun and had taken root in the temperate south, and for many years the north was seen as a challenge for the other Australian colonies, which nominally exercised sovereignty there. The same challenge fell to the new federal government when it assumed control of South Australia’s Northern Territory. Of equal concern was the fact that the north reached far into the tropics, and into the neighbourhood of both Melanesian and Southeast Asian communities that demographically dwarfed Australia. An early enthusiasm for trade with the region gave way to a fear of invasion in the late nineteenth century.

But that was just the beginning. For generations white Australia fantasised ineffectually about peopling the north. Some doubted the capacity of white women to flourish in the tropics, and worried that men were already preponderant there. But when lonely men cohabited with non-European partners of whatever provenance, an equal anxiety arose about their “half-caste” offspring and the decline of the white race. And while everyone agreed that the north desperately needed people, those who did arrive were often undesirable.

Federation itself reflected these fears. The Pacific islanders were deported and even Italians who had moved into the cane fields were treated with hostility. But of even greater concern were the large populations of Chinese in North Queensland and the Territory, and the Japanese attracted to pearl diving in Broome and on Thursday Island. At the time of Federation, North Australia was a multiracial society and arguably a successful one.

Richard Martin’s book is the more sharply focused of the two, concentrating on the Gulf country in and around Burketown. It is, he explains, one of the most remote parts of the continent and one of the least known, “a place where Australia’s frontier past still feels alive.” Frontier violence and racial conflict take up much of his story, enlivened by valuable oral history collected over the years Martin spent in the region. An interesting chapter deals with Chinese families who have lived in the country since the nineteenth century and have in many cases married into the Aboriginal community.

Two important ideas emerge from Martin’s book. The first is that historical racial tension obscures the shared experiences and common identification with place — what he calls the overlapping senses of connection and belonging — that black and white residents have in common. As he says, the story he tells is “in many ways a shared story about the specificity, density and complexity of home in postcolonial Australia.” His second observation is that right now, across the north, Aboriginal communities are living on traditional land held under native title. It is their future that will determine how the north fares. Mining, with its fly-in fly-out workers, will be of far less importance. •

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Since the Great War — the “war to end all wars” — had broken out three years earlier, conscription for overseas service had proved to be the most divisive issue among Australians. Hughes, a short, fiery Welsh-born former trade union leader, had been expelled by the Labor Party for arguing in favour. Along with twenty-three Labor supporters, he had joined the conservatives and retained the prime ministership.

Having lost the first conscription referendum as Labor leader, he now threw himself with gusto into a second campaign. Rotten eggs and unripe fruit were common missiles used by his assailants at increasingly rowdy public meetings, and Hughes took to carrying a pistol.

Queensland’s Labor premier, T.J. Ryan, a trade unionist and Irishman, despised Labor turncoats like Hughes. Ryan saw the war as yet another example of British imperialism, and became Hughes’s most vocal opponent. He told the Queensland parliament that the “conscriptionists” wanted to hand the “young democracy of Australia” to “capitalists” and “exploiters.” He attacked the federal government’s War Precautions Act as an attempt to “destroy unionism” and impose censorship. Hughes himself, often known for rash acts, took part in a raid on the Queensland government printing office in what proved a fruitless attempt to grab all copies of Ryan’s speech.

Two days later, on 29 November, Hughes set out to address pro-conscription rallies in Toowoomba and Warwick. When his train drew in at the elegant sandstone Warwick Railway Station, his supporters accompanied him to the platform. Sergeant Kenny, the senior Queensland police officer present, was standing by Hughes as he addressed the crowd when an egg struck the prime minister’s hat and another broke in front of him. Hughes demanded the arrest of the culprits, Irish-born brothers Bart and Pat Brosnan, and jumped down into the crowd when Pat gave him the finger.

Luckily for the brothers, who were well known to local police, Hughes had left his pistol on the train. The men were removed from the platform, with Bart bleeding heavily, having been punched in the face by Hughes supporters. Neither was arrested, though Pat spent a night in the lock-up before being released with a ten shilling fine for creating a disturbance.

The Warwick Egg Incident took just thirteen minutes, after which Hughes resumed his train journey to Sydney. At Wallangarra, he sent a telegram to the Queensland commissioner of police stating that Sergeant Kenny had refused to arrest the “two prominent ringleaders” for “a deliberate and violent breach” of Commonwealth law. Kenny told Hughes that “he recognised the laws of Queensland only.”

At subsequent rallies in New South Wales, Hughes embellished the Warwick Egg Incident, using it as evidence of the lengths to which supporters of the Queensland premier would go — even though eggs were often thrown at public meetings by both pro- and anti-conscriptionists. An official Queensland Police inquiry found that, apart from the egg, there had been no assault on Hughes. Hughes’s biographer, L.F. Fitzhardinge, concluded that Hughes was “well over the edge of hysteria, losing control of himself.”

On his return to Sydney, a furious Hughes portrayed both Premier Ryan and the Queensland Police Force as Sinn Feiners (members of the group opposed to the British rule of Ireland) and radical trade unionists, and promptly established a Commonwealth Police Force to offer personal protection to the prime minister and other ministers, and to protect federal property and ports, where left-wing wharfies were a powerful force.

Hughes lost the second conscription referendum just a fortnight later. The “no” majority had grown from 72,476 to 166,588 votes, and only two states, Western Australia and Tasmania, voted in favour, along with the federal territories.

The Warwick Egg Incident, well known in Queensland, is almost unheard of anywhere else in the nation. The incident is re-enacted on special occasions, with relatives of the Brosnan brothers in attendance. For many, it remains an amusing parable of a proud Queensland country town not succumbing to prime ministerial bullying.

It is also a reminder of an era when public meetings mattered, and politicians had to face the electorate, rather than hiding behind minders and security officers. While the railway station now only services freight, it is still possible to visit the site of this notable event in Australian history, the catalyst for the creation of what is now called the Australian Federal Police. •

This is an edited extract from Where History Happened: The Hidden Past of Australia’s Towns and Places, by Peter Spearritt (NLA Publishing, $39.99).

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In recent years the statistical picture has been complicated by the increasing tendency for Labor and the Coalition to sit out by-elections in each other’s safe seats. Where a genuine Labor–Coalition contest takes place, the size of the swing can depend on whether the seat is held by the government or by the opposition. Examining twenty-seven relevant by-elections in opposition-held seats since Federation, election-watcher Kevin Bonham finds a median swing of just over 1 per cent to the opposition, although that median embraces a very wide range of movement.

With the contests in Perth and Fremantle effectively Labor versus Greens, the results (likely Labor wins) are unlikely to tell us much about the state of the nation. In Mayo, recent SA election results might have augured poorly for Rebekha Sharkie (Centre Alliance, ex–Nick Xenophon Team) but local polling suggests that she is the favourite. Malcolm Turnbull has a little, but not a lot, riding on the result. A win would be nice, but a loss can easily be spun as the normal result for a government attempting to regain a seat in a by-election.

Braddon in Tasmania, held by 2.2 per cent, is the sort of seat that should favour a Labor opposition pursuing an equality and fairness agenda; it certainly doesn’t contain many voters consulting their accountants about the tax rate on $200,000 or more. The Liberals did extremely well here in the state election, but local experts point to a long history of contrasting state and federal voting behaviour, and the poker machine issue was also a live one in that poll. A Labor loss would be unwelcome, but could almost plausibly be filed under “Tasmania is different.” When Bob Hawke took government in 1983, he didn’t win a single seat on the island.

Most interest will focus on the Queensland seat of Longman, won by Labor in 2016 with the assistance of One Nation preferences, an anomaly not to be repeated this time. Hence, its margin of 0.8 of one per cent is probably artificial, and it may be that Labor itself needs a “real” swing to hold the seat. But it would be unwise to exaggerate the capacity of One Nation to control its preferences. In 2016, with the party card directing preferences away from Coalition incumbent Wyatt Roy, 56 per cent followed that advice but 44 per cent preferenced Roy regardless. Granted, more will be inclined to follow a pro-conservative card this time, but experience suggests that 70 per cent compliance is a likely maximum, which would still put the seat back in Coalition hands if nothing else changed.

It will possibly assist the preference flow to the Coalition if, as expected, more One Nation activists are available to distribute how-to-vote cards than would be the case in a general election, when resources must be spread across the vast state. If there is a donkey vote to be secured, it will be Labor’s, for Susan Lamb appears above the Coalition candidate on the ballot paper. (In Braddon, the Liberals are the donkey beneficiaries.)

Of the ten most marginal Coalition seats in the nation, five are in Queensland, and it is difficult to envisage a path to government for Labor that doesn’t involve increasing its stocks in that state. It might be contended that if Labor can’t prevail in Longman in the congenial anti-government atmosphere of a by-election (against a government that’s been trailing in national polls for most of its term), questions should be raised as to how it would achieve the necessary swing in the more demanding environment of a general election.

The state breakdown of Labor’s national poll lead is positive for the party. Indeed, the authoritative BludgerTrack identifies a movement to federal Labor of more than 5 per cent in Queensland since the 2016 election, a trend reinforced in the recent Fairfax/Ipsos poll reporting a two-party-preferred 52–48 in Labor’s favour in the state. Polling in Longman suggests a much closer contest, and the by-election will to some extent be a further test of the credibility of individual seat polling, following flawed predictions in the federal seat of Batman and the state seat of Darling Range in Western Australia.

Of course, it might be argued that Longman is different and that a general swing across the state may not be reflected in this particular seat: possible, but not obviously persuasive. There is some suggestion that voters may seek to punish Lamb for mishandling her original nomination and Bill Shorten for his hubris in declaring his members free of problems with their citizenship. If this factor is in play, Lamb may need to generate some level of sympathy for the strained family circumstances that led to her problematic nomination.

A more worrying possibility for Labor is not that Longman is different, but that Queensland is different, and that predicted levels of Labor support fail to materialise when the hypothetical of a polling question is replaced by the reality of a ballot paper. That has certainly been the case in previous elections, in which federal Labor has underperformed relative to opinion poll numbers. Only three times since 1949 has the party won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in the state, and on only six occasions has it won a majority of seats. At present it holds just eight out of the state’s thirty House of Representatives seats.

Queensland has long been federal Labor’s boulevard of broken dreams. Bill Shorten will be hoping that a nightmare can be avoided. ●

The post Is Queensland different? appeared first on Inside Story.

Preference counts by the Electoral Commission of Queensland decisively torpedo the theory repeatedly advanced by the Australian — without any evidence — that One Nation’s decision to preference against sitting members in most seats cost the LNP the election.

The actual counts show that One Nation voters took little notice of their party’s how-to-vote card, if they ever saw it. But unlike last year’s federal election, when Pauline Hanson’s supporters split their preferences almost evenly between the two major parties, this election saw them consistently prefer the Coalition.

In the small number of seats where One Nation officially directed preferences to Labor, the election results show 58 per cent of its voters ignored the ticket, and instead gave their preferences to the LNP. Only 42 per cent went to Labor.

In the seats where the party directed preferences to the LNP, 68.5 per cent did so, while the other 31.5 per cent, almost one in three, preferenced Labor.

A 180-degree difference in voting directions made only a small difference to what voters did. The numbers imply that only one in ten One Nation voters followed the party ticket, with the other 90 per cent doing as they pleased.

Why? Queensland is a big state, and One Nation is a relatively small party; with 1669 polling booths to cover, many, maybe most, of its voters probably never saw its how-to-vote card. But even if they did, these voters are rebels against authority. They would not follow their party’s directions ahead of their own wishes — and they weren’t alone in that.

Every party saw large-scale defections from its how-to-vote cards. LNP voters are much more inclined to stay in line, but in the seats of Logan and Thuringowa, where party HQ directed them to preference Labor ahead of One Nation (because its candidates were seen as unsavoury), half of them preferenced One Nation anyway. In the seats where the LNP preferenced One Nation, almost 30 per cent of its voters rebelled. Labor preferenced the LNP over One Nation in every seat, but 35 per cent of its voters broke ranks to make Pauline Hanson’s party their second choice.

Mostly, One Nation voters backed the conservative side. In all, their preferences were distributed in forty seats, and most of those preferences ended up with the LNP in thirty-seven of them. The three exceptions were in Hinchinbrook, where they favoured Katter’s Australian Party; Noosa, where they went to independent Sandy Bolton; and Redlands, where 50.9 per cent went to Labor and 49.1 per cent to the LNP.

(Even that might understate the pro-LNP tendency. By the time One Nation preferences were distributed in Redlands, many came from voters whose first preference had gone to former LNP member Peter Dowling — the MP who lost preselection in 2014 after sending a woman a photo of his penis in a wine glass. Most of his supporters never accepted his dismissal by party HQ; it would be no surprise if they put his replacement last. It’s possible that most of One Nation’s own voters in Redlands put the LNP ahead of Labor.)

What is remarkable is that, despite a record 31 per cent of Queensland voting for minor parties and independents — 13.7 per cent for One Nation and 2.3 per cent for its electoral ally, Katter’s Australian Party, 10 per cent for the Greens, and almost 5 per cent for the rest — their preferences had very little impact on the outcome.

In all, the figures show that eighty-four of the ninety-three seats were won by the party that topped the poll on primary votes. Preferences changed the outcome in just nine seats:

● The LNP lost four (Aspley, Gaven, McConnel and Mansfield) to Labor on Green preferences, and one (Maiwar) to the Greens on Labor preferences.

● Labor lost two (Burdekin and Pumicestone) to the LNP on One Nation preferences, and one (Mirani) to One Nation on LNP preferences.

● The LNP lost Hinchinbrook to Katter’s Australian Party on preferences from Labor and One Nation alike.

In a first-past-the-post system, the LNP would have won three more seats, but Labor would still have won government, with a majority of one, and three friendly crossbenchers. This was an election in which preferences largely cancelled each other out.

One Nation came third behind the major parties in thirty-three seats and, overall, its voters gave 65 per cent of their preferences to the LNP. The Greens came third in twenty-seven seats, and its voters gave 76 per cent of their preferences to Labor.

In the three Brisbane seats the Australian claimed One Nation preferences “handed to Labor,” the results reveal that, in fact, 53.3 per cent of One Nation preferences went to the Coalition, 30.3 per cent to Labor and 16.3 per cent to the Greens. As 25 per cent of Green preferences then went to the LNP, it’s safe to say that the LNP ended up with at least 57.5 per cent of One Nation preferences in the three seats, and probably more.

Even in the north Queensland seat of Burdekin, where One Nation was officially directing preferences to Labor, 62 per cent of its voters preferenced the sitting LNP member Dale Last, allowing him to come from 1600 votes behind Labor to snatch a narrow win.

The really decisive figures in this election were the first-preference votes. Labor won 35.4 per cent of the votes, the LNP 33.7 per cent. More than anything else, that explains how Labor won the election. ●

The post Queensland: a final note on preferences appeared first on Inside Story.

It may seem overblown to say that Labor’s win was unequivocal. It attracted only 35.4 per cent of the vote, not normally a winning number. In a proportional representation system like New Zealand’s, it would have won only thirty-five seats in an expanded ninety-five-member parliament. (One Nation would have won thirteen and the Greens ten, instead of getting one each.) But in a system of single-member electorates, with the voters having plenty of choices, 35.4 per cent of the vote gave Labor forty-eight seats, a three-seat majority in a parliament of ninety-three seats.

In the end, only Townsville was really close, with Labor holding on by 214 votes. At last year’s federal election, late counting of postal, pre-poll and absentee votes swung Queensland seats like Flynn and Capricornia to the Liberal National Party. That didn’t happen this time; the LNP vote rose overall, but Labor pulled clear in the seats that mattered.

Is this telling us that Labor has regained the momentum across Australia? This year it has won a sweeping victory in Western Australia, won re-election in Queensland, and even attracted a swing, relative to last year’s federal vote, of 5.3 per cent in the recent Northcote by-election in inner Melbourne.

From late 2010 to early 2014, Labor hardly won an election outside the Australian Capital Territory. Since the Turnbull government scraped home last July, Labor has won every election: taking government in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and holding it in Queensland and the ACT. Are voters taking out their frustration with the Turnbull government on its state partners?

In a sense, Annastacia Palaszczuk’s was a normal victory. Since the fall of the Bjelke-Petersen government, the state has reverted to its old pattern of voting Labor at state elections and Coalition at federal ones. Between 1990 and 2020, the Coalition will have spent just five years in government in Brisbane, and twenty-five in opposition, the worst record of any major party anywhere in Australia. Even the ACT Liberals have spent more time in government.

This loss reflects an extraordinary shift since Campbell Newman’s record landslide win in 2012. Newman’s arrogant, elite-driven style of government saw him lose thirty-six seats, and power, after just one term. The LNP has now lost further ground, with its vote shrinking from 41.3 per cent in 2015 to 33.7 per cent now. One Nation is only part of its problem.

In another sense, the result is extraordinary. Take out the ACT, where Labor and the Greens have won five elections in a row and are now rusted-on as the government. Take out South Australia, where Labor has lost the last two elections on the votes, but won them on the seats. Since the 2007 election, Labor lost power everywhere else — Western Australia (2008), Victoria (2010), New South Wales (2011), Queensland (2012), the Northern Territory (2012), Federal (2013) and Tasmania (2014) — yet it went on to win back power in Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory after a single term, and on the latest EMRS poll this week in Hobart’s Mercury, the Tasmanian Liberal government looks like being the next one-termer, with just 34 per cent of the vote now, down from 51 per cent at the 2014 election.

On that poll’s findings, the government Tasmanians elect early next year will be a minority government. Labor too has just 34 per cent of the vote (up 7 per cent from 2014), the Greens 17 per cent, Jacqui Lambie’s party 8 per cent and others 7 per cent. Are Labor and the Greens ready to form a harmonious coalition government in Tasmania — or is that politically impossible?

South Australia, too, goes to the polls early next year. While the bookies have the Liberals as favourites, that too will almost certainly be a minority government — assuming that, in the three-party contest, both sides preference Nick Xenophon’s SA-BEST rather than each other. If Xenophon sticks to his pledge to form no coalitions and sit on the crossbenches, it will be a novel and possibly unstable experiment, whichever side “wins.”

The Andrews government in Victoria will face the voters in November, and the infrequent polls are coming up with very different results. The latest, by Essential Research, gives Labor a 52–48 lead, whereas polling by Galaxy and ReachTel in the first half of the year for the rabidly anti-Labor Herald Sun reported the Coalition with landslide leads, 53–47 and 54–46 respectively. I suspect the odds are more like 50–50.

The next NSW election is not until March 2019. Two recent polls, by ReachTel for Fairfax and Essential for the Guardian, suggest that Gladys Berejiklian has won back some ground after Mike Baird’s premiership imploded. They report the Coalition’s two-party lead as 52–48 and 51–49 respectively, suggesting that Labor is certainly in the contest.

Then there’s the Turnbull government. Believe it or not, it’s still less than halfway through its term. Yet even the punters (who tend to overstate Coalition chances) have Labor as odds-on to unseat it when the next election is held. Except in the ACT, and perhaps Western Australia, it’s an unstable political environment for governments all over Australia.

Queensland’s election was unusual in another way: it delivered a majority government. But only just, and only because the system of electing MPs in single-member electorates favours the major parties over contenders from the fringes.

The Greens exploited Labor’s ambivalence over the Adani coal mine to win 10 per cent of the vote, their best result in a Queensland state election. Yet they won just 1 per cent of the seats — the new inner-suburban seat of Maiwar, taken from the Liberals — and were competitive in only two other seats. It’s interesting to note that all three seats, although adjoining, are in separate federal electorates.

Katter’s Australian Party picked up the coastal seat of Hinchinbrook, giving it the complete set of the three state seats that roughly make up Bob Katter’s federal seat of Kennedy. But it won nothing else, and theirs was not the brand that rebellious voters were looking for outside Katter country.

That brand was One Nation. Its 13.7 per cent vote is misleading; it stood in only two-thirds of the seats, and Pauline Hanson is correct in saying that her party averaged 20 per cent of the votes where it stood. (Of course, the seats it bypassed were mainly in inner/middle Brisbane and the Gold Coast, where it has little support. Hanson herself won just 2 per cent of the Senate vote last year in inner Brisbane.)

But even in its best areas, One Nation’s primary vote was too low for it to top the poll anywhere. To win seats, it needed preferences. Its best vote was 34.4 per cent in Lockyer, the seat Pauline Hanson almost won in 2015. But to overtake the LNP, it needed Labor preferences — and while most Labor voters in 2015 ignored the ticket and preferenced Hanson, not this time. Throughout the state, Labor put One Nation last on its how-to-vote cards.

That meant any gains One Nation made had to be in Labor seats, on LNP preferences. They proved to be unreliable. In Mirani, where central and north Queensland merge, LNP preferences pushed One Nation’s Steve Andrew ahead of Labor to win the seat. But in Logan, its next best prospect, Hanson’s candidate was former Hell’s Angels bikie Steve Bannon — so the Liberals preferenced Labor.

In Thuringowa, the LNP directed preferences to One Nation’s candidate, sex shop owner Mark Thornton, but many Liberal voters deserted the ticket, and preferenced Labor. In Maryborough and Keppel, the preference flows from the Coalition must have been tighter — no details have yet been released — but not tight enough. Labor won both seats by 2.5 and 3.1 per cent respectively. One Nation finished second in twenty seats, but these were its two closest misses. And in this game, silver medals don’t matter.

The decision to direct LNP preferences to One Nation in most seats where it mattered ended up giving only one seat to Hanson’s party. What about the quid pro quo? Did One Nation preferences help the LNP?

No, screams the Australian, once again blaming One Nation for any losses by its favourite party in Queensland. It claims that One Nation preferences “handed” three seats to Labor — Aspley, Mansfield and Redlands — yet provides no evidence. Nor could it: no preference counts have been released. At last year’s federal election, most One Nation voters ignored the party ticket (indeed, probably never saw it) and did what they liked. Whatever the how-to-vote ticket said, they split their preferences roughly 50–50.

Seat by seat, the LNP’s share of those preferences last year varied from 58 per cent in Maranoa to 43.5 per cent in Longman. Longman was the only seat where One Nation’s how-to-vote card decided the outcome, pushing Labor above former junior minister Wyatt Roy. (Preferences from One Nation voters gave Labor a paper-thin victory in Herbert — but that choice was made by the voters, not the party, which issued a split ticket.)

At this election, excluding the One Nation vote, the Coalition was trailing Labor in all of Aspley, Mansfield and Redlands. To win any of them, it probably needed 60 to 70 per cent of One Nation preferences. Last year, One Nation couldn’t deliver that even in a safe outback seat like Maranoa, even when it directed preferences to the Coalition. Yes, it’s a bigger party now, and its preferences may be more disciplined, but where’s the evidence?

It wasn’t there in the inland north Queensland seat of Burdekin, where One Nation directed preferences to Labor. Yet its voters’ preferences clearly flowed to the LNP’s sitting member, Dale Last, pushing him above Labor to take the seat. The Oz didn’t even notice that.

In almost two-thirds of the seats it contested, One Nation in fact directed preferences to the LNP ahead of Labor. The only seat in which its preference directions clearly changed the result was Pumicestone, between Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast, where they gave the seat to the LNP. It’s possible that that also happened in Bundaberg. The Oz didn’t report any of those facts.

Nor did it report the obvious explanation for the LNP’s defeat: since 2015, it has lost six of its eleven seats in Brisbane, two from the redistribution, and four at the election. It now holds just five seats in and around the Queensland capital; Labor and the Greens hold thirty-six. No party can hope to run Queensland with such a puny base in Brisbane.

Mark the contrast. In Brisbane and the Gold Coast, the LNP lost four seats, and gained none. North of Brisbane, the party lost two seats — Hinchinbrook to the Katter party, Noosa to a local independent, Sandy Bolton — but picked up three: Bundaberg, Burdekin and Nicklin.

It didn’t lose the election in regional Queensland. It lost the election in Brisbane — and many believe its decision to give preferences to One Nation was one reason for that. It is in Brisbane that it needs to lift its vote. A decision by the Turnbull government to help fund the Cross River Rail project would be a good start.

The federal Coalition needs to scrape off the barnacles, and start again. There is no left-wing or right-wing infrastructure. Voters turn off when the PM and his ministers argue that any major projects proposed by Labor state governments are bad, and deserve no federal funds, while any proposed by Coalition state governments are good, and deserve billions. I’m sure most voters would welcome ministers being capable of speaking for a minute without attacking Labor. The PM himself should lead the way. •

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Those who have been watching the key seats most closely have Labor on the cusp of majority government. Tasmanian election analyst Kevin Bonham offers the most detailed and up-to-date assessment on his excellent blog, where he now credits Labor with forty-five of the ninety-three seats, with chances in five more still undecided. The LNP has thirty-eight, the crossbench four, with six seats still in doubt.

From Bonham’s summary of what we know now, the most likely outcome in each seat implies that Labor would finish with forty-seven to the LNP’s forty, with six crossbenchers: three from Katter’s Australian Party, one each from One Nation and the Greens, and one independent.

The ABC’s seat-by-seat summary implies a similar outcome, although it has a slightly different list of seats in doubt. And William Bowe, aka the Poll Bludger, has a slightly different list again, but hit the middle of his range of possibilities and that too gives you a one-seat Labor majority.

Yet none of these experts is declaring yet. And nobody can, because on Tuesday the Electoral Commission of Queensland took down all its counts of the two-party vote in each seat, and what we have learnt since has been through word of mouth.

Even the first-preference counts posted by Thursday night were surprisingly incomplete, with thousands of votes still to count in lineball seats such as Townsville and Gaven. And some of those seats are very close, and in some we don’t know who will be the two final candidates, let alone who will win.

Labor could end up falling just short. Or it could end up with a majority big enough to be cosy but comfortable. Since election night, the LNP has narrowed Labor’s overall lead on first-preference votes from 2.9 per cent to 1.8 per cent (Labor 35.6 per cent, LNP 33.8). Yet in several key seats, Labor has gained ground in this week’s counting.

So what do we know so far, and what still remains in doubt?

Brisbane has turned left. The redistribution converted the seats of Mount Ommaney and Mansfield from marginal LNP seats into marginal Labor ones, and the voters confirmed that on Saturday. Labor also took Redlands from the LNP, and either Labor or the Greens — more likely the latter — will win the new inner-suburban seat of Maiwar, created from one former LNP seat and one former Labor seat around the University of Queensland.

When the commission removed the two-party counts, Labor also led narrowly in the LNP’s outer northern suburban seat of Aspley, and it has only gained in counting since. The experts have added that to its pile of wins. And while earlier this week it looked in serious danger in Macalister from controversial child abuse campaigner Hetty Johnston, that danger appears to have passed with Johnston sinking on postal votes.

If the experts are right, it’s a staggering outcome. On a broad definition of Brisbane and its rural fringe, Labor and the Greens have won thirty-six seats to the Coalition’s five: Tim Nicholls’s inner northern seat of Clayfield, and the suburban seats of Moggill, Everton, Chatsworth and Oodgeroo.

We’ve heard lots of noise from federal Coalition MPs in the bush screaming that One Nation is a threat. But Brisbane is where they lost the election. Ignore that reality, and they’ll keep losing.

Outside Brisbane, the outcome was the reverse. On the Gold Coast, Labor might have broken the LNP’s monopoly of seats by taking the hinterland seat of Gaven, around Nerang, where it held a slender lead when the two-party count went underground. But the city’s other ten seats all voted for the LNP. The party now has twice as many MPs from the Gold Coast as from Brisbane.

On the Sunshine Coast, it regained Buderim from Steve Dickson, its former member who defected to become One Nation’s state leader, and reclaimed Nicklin, formerly held by independent Peter Wellington. Its own seat of Noosa fell to former local councillor Sandy Bolton, an independent who works in disability care and directed her own preferences to Labor. But of the eight MPs from the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland, she will be the only one not sitting in the LNP room.

Labor didn’t have a good election in regional Queensland. It lost Bundaberg to the LNP and Mirani (along the coast between Rockhampton and Mackay) to One Nation, and it looks likely to see Burdekin, one of the seats it “gained” in the redistribution, stick with the LNP. It almost lost Rockhampton to the city’s pro-Adani mayor, Margaret Strelow, but appears to have held on, with Strelow conceding on Thursday that she is unlikely to win.

Labor did regain Cairns from defector Rob Pyne, running as an independent, and the Cape York seat of Cook, where it had expelled former MP Billy Gordon for not disclosing his previous criminal history, and much else. It might help to unseat the LNP from Hinchinbrook, another very close seat where it looks like Katter’s Australian Party, with 21 per cent of the vote, might win the seat on everyone else’s preferences.

Labor has also held the suburban Townsville seat of Thuringowa, which, in a previous article, I speculated could become One Nation’s second acquisition. I was wrong. I had forgotten that on Saturday night, the commission briefly published two-party voting figures that showed Labor retaining the seat comfortably — presumably because LNP voters refused to follow the party’s how-to-vote card, which directed them to preference One Nation’s Mark Thornton, the sex shop owner who joked on Facebook about domestic violence.

But these are small comforts. If the experts are right, Labor will have just eleven of the fifty-two seats outside the capital. It will be the government of Brisbane, facing the opposition of regional Queensland. This divided country is splitting even further apart. ⦁

The post In Queensland, the count continues appeared first on Inside Story.

On paper, there’s a statewide two-party-preferred swing to Labor of around 1.5 per cent (putting it at 52.5 per cent compared to the Coalition’s 47.5). But the recent change from optional preferential voting to full compulsory preferential voting, or CPV, makes that figure a bit misleading. Had the 2015 election been held under CPV, Labor’s after-preferences vote that year would have been a percentage point or two higher, which implies a swing of approximately zero on Saturday. Around five seats will change hands, give or take several.

But below the surface there was drama aplenty, much of it driven, as Tim Colebatch noted yesterday, by a 10 per cent drop in major-party first-preference support. Combined with CPV, this made preferences crucial — arguably more important than ever before. At time of writing, counting in several electorates is still volatile, with candidates dropping in and out of the two-candidate-preferred tallies.

Because preferences mattered so much, how-to-vote cards did too. Labor’s policy of putting One Nation last made it all but impossible for the minor party to emerge victorious from a two-candidate-preferred count against the LNP. This narrowed down the potential One Nation gains to electorates where Labor was the chief major-party competitor. The LNP generally obliged with One Nation–friendly cards, but the minor party simply didn’t attract the support to be competitive in more than a few contests. (At time of writing, One Nation’s seat haul seems to be between zero and two.)

Labor did preference Katter’s Australian Party, and so did the LNP and One Nation. That’s a major reason why it looks to have outperformed One Nation.

LNP cards, meanwhile, boosted Labor against the Greens. Deputy premier Jackie Trad, for example, has the Brisbane South LNP candidate to thank for her survival against the Greens challenge. One Nation’s cards, preferencing against sitting MPs in most of the electorates it contested, would have had some impact, although the extent to which the party attracted the volunteers it needed to thrust those bits of paper into voters’ hands isn’t known. In a seat like Aspley, where One Nation preferenced the Labor candidate (who is currently ahead in the count), it might have made the difference.

One Nation underperformed dreadfully against general expectations in Western Australia earlier this year, and the pattern was repeated on Saturday. Our increasingly facile mainstream media finds Pauline Hanson irresistible; a television show or newspaper, having made the decision to splash her around, feels the need to justify the coverages by overstating One Nation’s chances of electoral success. Even those supposedly efficient distillers of information, the betting markets, fell for the hype.

And because the tropes of Australian political commentary run like clockwork, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is being blamed for this result. But while the state–federal electoral dynamics are undeniable — the presence of a party in government in either sphere tends to damage the election chances of its colleagues in the other — popularity or performance is ony a minor variable. Queensland Labor’s — and Victorian, South Australian and Tasmanian Labor’s — best election results since Federation were recorded during John Howard’s long reign as prime minister.

Which brings us to the topic of the next federal election, likely to be held late next year. At the 2016 poll, the two states that recorded the smallest swings to federal Labor, Queensland and Victoria, were the ones that had elected state Labor governments during the previous federal term. The survival of the Palaszczuk government last weekend will boost the federal Coalition’s stocks in that state at the next federal contest. Peter Dutton, who may well be prime minister by then, and who survived in 2016 with a 1.6 per cent margin, can breathe a sigh of relief. An LNP victory on Saturday would have been bad news for his chances of survival.

And finally, Queensland, having returned to CPV, may provide a glimpse of the future of federal elections. In particular, the north and west of the state, where major-party support is particularly low, provide fertile ground for minor parties and independents. CPV (compared to optional preferential) increases the likelihood of candidates with modest primary support leap-frogging several others to victory. Queensland’s statewide major-party vote of about 70 per cent on the weekend is not far below current national polling figures (which hover around the mid seventies).

Until now, Australia has only used CPV in the context of high major-party support. Over recent decades that support has declined, and if the trend continues we can expect to see the multiple three- or four-way contests that Queensland exhibited — with candidates slipping in and out of the two-candidate-preferred counts, the commission recasting preference allocations, and recasting again, over the course of long counts — become an increasingly common feature of national elections. (It already happens in small numbers, and usually involves the Greens.)

And how-to-vote cards, which large proportions of the voting population blindly follow, will become ever more powerful. Which is why we can expect increased discussion of banning how-to-vote cards. ⦁

The post What Queensland tells us about the future appeared first on Inside Story.

The most likely outcome is a repeat of the last three years. Labor will form another minority government, this time with more crossbenchers, and with fewer Liberal National Party MPs on the opposition benches. But that is no certainty.

At the end of counting, on my bottom line, nineteen of the ninety-three seats were too close to call — that’s one in five. Other observers were a shade bolder: Ben Raue in the Guardian had thirteen seats in doubt; the ABC’s Antony Green had fifteen. I’ve never seen an election like this.

(On Sunday morning, Antony got very bold, chanced his arm, and predicted that Labor would end up with forty-eight seats and a narrow majority. But it wasn’t clear how he came to that conclusion, which seems at odds with the predictions on the ABC website’s guide to the results.)

Even my take might prove too bold. Among the seventy-four seats that I marked down for one side or the other — Labor forty, LNP thirty-two, and Katter’s Australian Party two — there are fourteen for which we either have no figures for the two-party-preferred vote, or have figures that could be overturned as a third party fights its way into the final two. They also include three seats in which the LNP’s lead at the close of counting was just 1 to 1.5 per cent. One in every three seats is in some measure of doubt. That is extraordinary.

(With new figures posted on Sunday afternoon, I would update my call to: Labor forty-one seats, LNP thirty-six, with two seats for Katter, one independent, Sandy Bolton, in Noosa — and thirteen still too close to call, some because they are close in the conventional way, and some because we can’t be sure who the two final candidates will be.)

It’s not impossible that the LNP vote could surge as postal and pre-poll votes are counted, bringing it close to Labor’s tally in seats and making it a viable contender to govern. At this point, however, that seems unlikely.

What we can say is that:

• Labor won on the votes. It has clearly outpolled the LNP, by 36.0 per cent to 33.1 per cent, on the ABC’s tally. It is almost certain to be the biggest party in the new parliament.

• As expected, it was as if two different elections were held in the state. In the southeast (Brisbane, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast), Labor won significant swings, the LNP lost three or four seats, and the Greens surged right across Brisbane. But along the coast, Labor has lost up to four seats to the LNP, One Nation and independents, while the LNP at worst could lose one (Hinchinbrook).

• One Nation won lots of votes, but probably only one seat, and maybe none at all. In seat after seat, it won 20 to 30 per cent of the votes, but — unlike at last year’s Senate election — it didn’t attract the preferences it needed to convert primary votes into majorities. On last night’s figures, it will finish in the top two in fifteen to twenty seats — but Labor and Green preferences went strongly to the LNP, while the LNP preferences seem to have been diluted by rebellious voters.

• Labor’s ambivalence over the Adani coalmine saw the Greens win 10 per cent of the votes, and probably one seat — Maiwar in inner Brisbane, a new seat formed by merging parts of Mount Coot-tha and Indooroopilly — while narrowly losing their other two target seats. It is worth noting: in those three seats, on first preferences, the Greens won a landslide average swing of 9.1 per cent from both major parties.

• The Katter brand remains strong in North Queensland. Despite all the focus on One Nation, Katter’s Australian Party held its two seats with increased majorities, and could sneak a third in Hinchinbrook.

• Independents are back. Former Noosa councillor Sandy Bolton appears set to win Noosa from the LNP. Pro-Adani Rockhampton mayor Margaret Strelow, rejected at the Labor preselection, decided to appeal to the voters, and is on course to have her appeal upheld. Campaigner against child abuse Hetty Johnston has a fifty–fifty chance of upsetting Labor in the outer-suburban seat of Macalister. But former Labor MP Rob Pyne, who moved to the crossbenches to campaign for legal abortions, has probably lost Cairns to his old team.

• In all, 31 per cent of Queenslanders voted for someone other than the major parties, up from 21 per cent last time. That’s even more than in the One Nation surge in 1998, and this time it went in both directions. The voters are not happy, Blue.

• Once again, the best polls were spot-on. The final Newspoll was almost identical to the actual outcome. The final Galaxy poll was only slightly different. Australians don’t appreciate how good our polling companies are at their job.

More votes are being counted as I write, and some seats could become clearer tonight. But in a critical mass of seats, the result is unlikely to be clear until the closing date for postal votes next week, when preferences are formally distributed.

In more than ten seats, it is not yet clear who the final two candidates will be. That alone makes it difficult to predict results with certainty. It is clear that, as in the federal election, a lot of voters have disregarded their party how-to-vote cards. It appears that many One Nation voters have ignored the party’s direction to give preferences against the sitting member, of either side, and that many LNP voters have refused to give preferences to One Nation.

The question of whether the LNP’s refusal to close the door to deals with One Nation cost it the election will be debated a lot over the next year. But it is important to bear in mind that Labor has led in virtually every opinion poll since the 2015 election. One can argue fairly that, in refusing to rule out forming a government with One Nation, LNP leader Tim Nicholls was at least honest with voters — whereas in ruling out forming a government with any other party, premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was not.

If Labor falls just short of a majority of seats, will Palaszczuk then rule out any arrangement with the Greens, sympathetic independents, or even the Katter party, to allow her to stay in office? I suspect she will find a convenient excuse to change her mind.

It is not likely that Nicholls will have the same option, but it’s too early to rule it out. The next ten days will be interesting.

The post An extraordinary vote in Queensland appeared first on Inside Story.

In the midst of this tumult, Premier Palaszczuk visited her grandmother (and duly tweeted) and then, with media arrayed, called at Government House with news that an early election would be held on 25 November. No, Grandparents Day is not a big thing up north. But the Crown still is. One wonders what its representatives felt about a premier leaking her election decision to a Sunday tabloid before advising the governor.

Unlike the weather, this election promises to be anything but hot. Queensland politics have been rather subdued over the life of the Palaszczuk government: quite a contrast to the stormy days of the decline and fall of the Bligh government (victim to a 15 per cent swing) and the demise of the brief bulldozer that was the Newman government (stopped in its tracks by a 14 per cent swing). The one exception to a flat landscape of 50–50 polling across this term, and the one diversion from discussion of the merits of a “do-nothing” government, has been the recrudescence of One Nation in its ancestral home.

One reason for this quietude lies in the genetics of a government that lacked a gestation period. After the 2012 election, Labor had just seven seats: fewer than a Toyota Tarago, as the joke went. Entering the last election, that rump hardly dared to imagine it could win. But win it did, and entered office with little in the way of a positive agenda.

It did know what it didn’t want to be: a Newman-style bulldozer. The Liberal National Party, newly in opposition, understandably adopted a similar motto. But in pledging to neither raise taxes nor cut services, the government painted itself into a fiscal corner, limiting its ability to advance needed infrastructure. Even where it could have enacted progressive values costlessly, it tiptoed. A push to decriminalise abortion came to nought. Campaign finance reform was limited to real-time disclosure, and a promise to ban property developer donations has been washed away by the caretaker period.

One big issue — the Adani coal mine — has divided urbane electors and conservationists from regional workers and development interests. But even it has been, like a seam of coal itself, a slow burner. Adani’s inability to raise the necessary finance has ensured that.

Little wonder, then, that attention in Queensland has focused on political process rather than substantive policy. A messy part of that process has been the consigning of several Labor MPs to the crossbench. After navigating those rocky shoals, the government has sought to make a virtue of its quiescence. “Stability” is the mantra.

The premier told us on Sunday that she had no option but to end early election speculation… by acceding to it. A similar pirouette didn’t end well for Mrs May in Britain. So Ms Palaszczuk has also run the “no one wants an election spoiling their school holidays.” Her government could have run until early May.

Such rhetoric takes a certain chutzpah. Just last year, Labor and the LNP alike begged electors to pass a referendum not only to lengthen the parliamentary term to four years, but also to fix the election date. As St Augustine once put it, “Lord make me chaste: just not yet.” Indeed, going to the polls in 2017 rather than 2018 means that the next term will be less than three years.

Meanwhile, en route to India, Queensland’s other female political impresario was caught off-guard. Pauline Hanson tweeted that the early election was a “cowardly” attempt to catch One Nation on the hop. Shades of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who was in Disneyland when Bob Hawke called the 1987 election that buried his “Joh 4 PM” putsch. If Ms Hanson had a sense of electoral history, she might enjoy the analogy with her hero, if not its omen.

Major party slogans were ready for spruiking, however. Labor’s “Putting Queenslanders First” almost revels in hokeyness. The LNP’s “Build a Better Queensland” sprinkles alliteration on blandness. With the withering of federalism, the jurisdiction of state governments, along with their ability to attract talented candidates, declines inexorably. And with it declines the sense of their power.

The real interest lies not in the major parties and their slogans, but in the fortunes and preferences of the major-minor parties. The Greens will poll steadily as usual, while targeting a couple of inner-Brisbane seats. But the lack of an upper house and of proportional representation means that Queensland’s system configures them as a preference cow for Labor. Indeed, in a bid to mop up Green preferences, the government rammed through compulsory preferential voting during one night in April 2016.

This less-than-principled gambit may yet backfire, given One Nation’s subsequent re-emergence. One Nation learnt a lesson in Western Australia, and so it will not openly play footsie with the LNP. It has far better prospects of winning seats than the Greens, and thereby of holding the balance of power if the LNP’s vote holds up. (In spite of the Newman government massacre in 2015, the LNP polled 41 per cent of first preferences, 4 per cent more than Labor.)

In short, this election campaign is of interest for reasons of process rather than substance. Will the government be marked down for the hypocrisy of campaigning for longer, fixed terms and then running early? How will compulsory preferential voting pan out? Will electors back Labor’s meta-appeal (“stability”) or will the cards fall on the conservative side?

In this, Queensland is not alone. National politics, for some years now, has been mired in process — such as leadership speculation and coups — rather than substance. The 2016 federal election itself was an early election, a double dissolution called not so much to decide the bills that triggered it as to shake up the Senate with new voting laws. Deeper issues — like climate change or tax reform — are stalemated. 2017 has been dominated by litigation about two process matters, the “plebisurvey” and the MP disqualification cases.

Not since the mid 70s has litigation so dominated the Canberra stage. But that was at the height of the Whitlam government, which sought to crash through constitutional barriers to enact its positive agenda. Today’s litigation is negative and purely about process. It is hard to imagine the Whitlam (or Fraser) government baulking at a parliamentary vote on marriage equality.

Political process is important. But it shouldn’t be the main game, in Queensland or anywhere else. ●

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If recently polled primary-voting intentions were replicated on election day, either side could have a big win in the ninety-three-strong chamber. But One Nation, registering in the high teens in the polls, is in with a chance for several seats, and that makes a hung parliament less unlikely than hung parliaments usually are.

With such low combined major-party support (currently around 65 per cent) the pollsters’ two-party-preferred estimates are also more rubbery than usual — and at the last state election they turned out to have very high levels of elasticity.

The sky-high One Nation support makes preferences especially unpredictable. They will most likely favour the Liberal National Party overall, but by how much will depend on the party’s how-to-vote cards.

Last year the Palaszczuk government changed the voting system for the state’s single house from optional preferential voting, or OPV, back to full compulsory preferential. The last Labor premier, Anna Bligh, publicly contemplated the same move during her final term, and for the same reason: to ensure Greens votes returned to Labor via preferences.

Under OPV, around half of all voters didn’t number every square. When those ballot papers had a “1” next to a party that had no chance of being elected, they ended up “exhausting” — that is, not being part of the final two-candidate-preferred count.

The introduction of OPV in Queensland in 1992 made three-cornered contests (Labor versus Liberal versus National) even more damaging for the Coalition parties. To begin with, anyway. The growth in Greens support, and the amalgamation of the Liberal and National parties in 2008, changed that, and since then Labor has unquestionably been the casualty of the “O” in OPV.

Many tens of thousands of left-of-centre voters were putting a “1” next to Greens candidates and not allocating preferences. Labor’s decision to revert to the pre-1992 system, as cynical and undesirable as it was, made partisan sense on paper; if the 2015 election, for example, had run under the new rules, a Labor majority rather than a hung parliament would have been the likely result.

But the governor’s ink was barely dry on the legislation when One Nation staged a revival in Queensland. Whoops.

Because One Nation takes more support from the LNP than from Labor, its revival could have quite severely damaged the LNP if OPV had remained in operation. But CPV — compulsory preferential voting — came to opposition leader Tim Nicholls’s rescue!

Up to a point, at least. The result also depends on One Nation’s how-to-vote cards. If, for example, they preference the LNP across the board (and if the LNP doesn’t suffer collateral damage from an exchange of preferences), Nicholls’s Christmas will indeed have arrived a month early. One Nation will, in effect, have turned thousands of Labor votes (after preferences) into LNP ones.

Thanks to Labor’s how-to-vote cards, CPV also makes it less likely that One Nation will take seats from the LNP, or win seats from Labor that the LNP would otherwise have taken.

As a general rule, CPV is more advantageous than OPV for independents and minor parties (hence its easy passage through the hung parliament last year) because major parties routinely place them ahead of the opposing major party on their how-to-vote cards. CPV ensures no votes exhaust, thus assisting four of the five sitting crossbenchers who are running for re-election.

(Another way of looking at it is that CPV simply renders incomplete votes invalid. Watch out for a big jump in informality at this election.)

The exception to that rule is One Nation, the party of the other recontesting crossbencher. In Queensland and elsewhere, Labor puts its centre-right opponents ahead of One Nation on how-to-vote cards. In this way, CPV will damage One Nation’s chances in LNP–One Nation contests.

We don’t know what the LNP will do with One Nation on their how-to-vote cards. If the LNP does preference One Nation ahead of Labor in some electorates, and if its major opponent in those seats is Labor, then CPV will assist One Nation.

And if One Nation’s polling power endures until election day, the difference between its preferencing one side or the other in any electorate will probably make, on average, around a 2 per cent difference to two-party-preferred outcomes.

If election analysts are very lucky, One Nation will obligingly do all three — preferencing Labor in some electorates, LNP in some and neither in others, ideally in roughly equal numbers. But, as the WA Liberals found out in March, facilitating those friendly cards requires a delicate public balance.

If does all rather hurt the head. Betting markets currently favour the LNP somewhat, but that’ll chop and change with the opinion polls.

And then there is the matter of the next federal election, which Labor is odds-on to win. One of the unarguable dynamics of Australian politics is that state governments, loved or loathed, tend to drag down support for their federal party counterparts. At the last federal election, for example, Labor performed worst, swing-wise, in the two states where it had taken government after the 2013 federal contest — Victoria and Queensland.

If Annastacia Palaszczuk is still premier at the end of this year, that’ll be good news for the LNP’s chances of retaining its marginal federal seats at the next federal election. On draft redistribution boundaries, four electorates are held by the federal LNP by margins of 2 per cent or less.

One of those is Dickson, whose sitting member is one Peter Craig Dutton. An LNP win next month will bode poorly for his chances of survival beyond the next federal election.

The immigration minister tends to divide opinion, particularly among the political class. Mixed feelings might be the order of the night on 25 November. ●

The post Perplexing the poll-watchers appeared first on Inside Story.

The usual deflection – that state elections are fought on local issues – simply doesn’t wash here. National issues, including the attempt to cut Sunday penalty rates and the distribution of GST revenues, figured high on voters’ lists of concerns. Federal and state issues also intersected with the Barnett government’s proposed privatisation of Western Power, which coincided damagingly with the federal debate about energy insecurity and rising power prices.

The Liberal Party had long been aware of the problems facing the government and its decidedly unpopular leader, Colin Barnett. With its private polling pointing to a train wreck, the swing of almost 16 per cent came as no surprise. “We saw it coming, no doubt about that. But there was nothing we could do,” a senior Liberal told me.

Of course, a key factor was the sudden downturn in the WA economy after the end of the mining investment bonanza, to which Barnett owed his eight-plus years as premier. The preference deal with One Nation, an act of pure desperation, backfired spectacularly among both Liberal and One Nation supporters – and the Nationals, at whose expense the deal was done, remain furious, with deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce making no attempt to conceal his disgust.

The Liberals in the west, down to just thirteen seats in the Legislative Assembly (having lost eighteen), are numbed by the magnitude of the defeat, even if it was predicted. The election of former treasurer Mike Nahan as leader looks like a holding operation rather than a step towards the future. Nahan will be seventy at the time of the next election.

Party members remain angry that repeated attempts during the last term of government failed to remove Barnett, whose approval rating –in freefall since the 2013 election – had plummeted to just 28 per cent by late last year. At the time, the mild-mannered Labor leader, Mark McGowan, was enjoying a rating of 46 per cent.

With another round of poor federal polling for Malcolm Turnbull and the Coalition, the take-out messages from the west are both ominous and confusing. Western Australia has been the strongest state for the Liberals in recent federal elections, so the local setback is shaking national confidence.

Despite the strains in the Coalition caused by the One Nation dalliance, the prime minister is refusing to rule out a similar deal at the next federal election – a stance that has infuriated many in the party. Backbencher Tim Wilson was bluntest, calling One Nation “crazy.” Another federal Liberal MP, Andrew Hastie, weighed in with a warning that Western Australia, his home state, can no longer be taken for granted. According to Hastie, the state’s share of the GST must be increased.

Tony Abbott and other conservatives are publicly urging Turnbull to move to the right to counter the growing threat from One Nation. But other figures – including Wilson, a former human rights commissioner – take the opposite view. “The Liberal–National Coalition is at its best when it starts from its centre-right mainstream base and reaches into the mainstream middle – not when it legitimises the fringes,” Wilson said on the day after the WA election.

On the other side of the country, the outcome in the west almost certainly rules out an early election in Queensland this year. Labor is hoping One Nation will unravel in its home state by 2018, a view encouraged both by past experience and by the chaotic and contradictory campaign the party ran in Western Australia. The opposition Liberal National Party faces dilemmas posed by the possibility that One Nation will make inroads into its voter base. Should it seek to accommodate One Nation or oppose it? And will it be tempted by a preference deal in Labor-held seats?

For his part, Malcolm Turnbull is working to shore up his own position – but in a way that could be counterproductive. Shedding the Mr Reasonable tag, he has adopted a harsher, shriller tone, stepping up personal attacks on opposition leader Bill Shorten and the trade union movement generally. Coupled with his support for cutting Sunday penalty rates, this might serve his primary purpose of keeping the business community onside; but the generally unfavourable reaction suggests this might come at the expense of electoral support.

The prime minister needs to deliver more than ever to the business community – hence his championing of corporate tax cuts – because his power base there is all that stands between him and a restive conservative base in the parliamentary party. Whether this is good policy or merely a sop to his friends is debatable. Certainly, among economists there is considerable scepticism as to whether the cuts will actually work to deliver the much-vaunted jobs and growth.

The forthcoming budget will be a further test for the prime minister and for treasurer Scott Morrison. The ill-fated 2014 budget ruined the careers of Abbott and treasurer Joe Hockey, who ignored at their peril the maxim that politics is the art of the possible. Whether this year’s budget fares any better – and Turnbull’s hopes of retaining support from the big end of town and Liberal donors ride on it – remains to be seen. Morrison’s one-speed style of debate is scarcely adaptable to the negotiating table and Turnbull will have to consider concessions that won’t go down well with his power base.

On top of all this, another worry lingers in the minds of Liberals: the prime minister’s political judgement, as evidenced by his decision to call the 2016 double dissolution election that produced a Senate just as intractable, and perhaps even more so, than the old one. The Liberals, increasingly uneasy, are beginning to see another disaster looming, just as they did in the west but seemed powerless to avert. Truly, all the makings of a bitter and protracted winter of discontent are in place. •

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Other things struck me as I read. In the very first chapter, for instance, Bligh notes the immense size of the state she was born in and governed for almost five years. Queensland, she reminded me, is big enough to comfortably accommodate Texas twice over. Not a patch on Western Australia but that only serves to strengthen the impact of the imagery. Australia is a bloody big country, and its two resource-dependent colossi are parts the rest of us can ill afford to ignore, particularly now that global demand for their coal and iron ore is plummeting.

I was also keenly aware that, without crucial reforms during the Whitlam era, we might never have heard of this Anna Bligh who has broken through walls and crashed into fortresses. Brought up in Burleigh Heads, an unprepossessing seaside suburb of mangroves and fibro cottages soon to be transmogrified into a hub of Queensland’s glitzy Gold Coast, in a family of modest means with more than its fair share of troubles, she was an unlikely prospect for university education. But two of the Whitlam government’s initiatives changed all that. The first was the supporting mother’s benefit of 1973, which enabled Bligh’s determined young mother to end an unhappy marriage and set up house on her own, with all four children in tow. The second was the government’s abolition of tertiary education fees, making it possible for Bligh to undertake a Queensland University arts degree five years later.

And as I kept reading it came forcibly home to me what a salutary impact Whitlam’s government, for all its troubles, had on the nation. It was nice, too, to recall how many of our current leaders benefited from that free education, even those eager to impose prohibitive costs and indebtedness on university aspirants today. Nor could I help but be overwhelmed by the changes that have occurred for women, many of which were facilitated by Whitlam’s program, even if they were already gaining momentum before he was elected. For what was seen in the seventies as some aberrant form of outrageous female ratbaggery took off like wildfire in this blatantly sexist country, lighting the way for women who came after, women like Anna Bligh. As with Queensland’s size, this should be bleeding obvious, but in a sense it isn’t. It took a generation after women’s liberation, feminism’s “second wave,” hit Australia for a woman to become prime minister, and nearly that long for it to be normal for women to be cabinet ministers, party leaders, governors and state premiers.

And yet when we marched the streets demanding equal pay, childcare, safe abortion and the like, the possibility of women holding such positions seemed a distant goal – too improbable to dream of, in fact. For it’s important to remember that to begin with the women’s movement was uncomfortable with the notion of power, until we reluctantly concluded that not a great deal could be achieved without it. The question then became who was going to wield it and why. We took this question very seriously, but still our imagination failed us – the power we tentatively acceded to was small cheese compared with the leadership to be enjoyed by the coming generation. The walls that were breached (or broken, as Bligh would have it) were in the higher ranks of the public service; we scarcely imagined heading a government, and the corporate world, for most us, was beyond contemplation.

Then, in September 1975, two months before Whitlam was dismissed, women from across the political spectrum gathered in Canberra for the government-sponsored women and politics conference, a key – though much-excoriated and now virtually forgotten – event that did much to foster women’s participation in the party system. And then, after its resounding defeat in December 1975, Labor began devising programs for affirmative action, both within its ranks and for governing, if it were ever returned to power.

Women in leadership is the overarching theme of Bligh’s memoir. As she states in her preface, “I’ve tried to capture some of what it’s like to be a leader, especially as a woman; to lead through times of peril and times of change; the lived experience of shaping history; and facing the unthinkable and unknowable.” To her great credit, and unlike many current male politicians, her blooding began in grassroots protests and organisations, with a spell in the women’s rights office of the student union at Queensland University, and later at a women’s refuge.

Her Labor affiliation came later, and with it she brought first-hand experience of women’s issues and, after a stint in Sydney, broad-based community work. On her return to Queensland she worked in the women’s policy unit under Wayne Goss, and then in the enterprise bargaining unit in the state’s industrial relations department. The move towards representing Labor in Queensland’s unicameral parliament came when her friend and mentor, Anne Warner, resigned her South Brisbane seat and encouraged Bligh to run for preselection.

Putting herself forward for this position didn’t come easily, and Bligh makes it graphically clear that with every step along the way towards leadership there were moments of high trepidation. Nor did these cease when, having achieved the goal, she was faced with its curly challenges. She comes across as unusually reflective and self-critical for someone in public life – an undoubted strength that she never let cripple her. Once she was in, she was in, and she gave it her all. Fortunately she had a family that provided the necessary back-up. Her mother Frances Tancred, her husband Greg Withers and her two sons, Joseph and Oliver, afforded the kind of support men in politics take for granted and even today only a few women can rely on. How different this is from the general experience of women of my generation, whose entry into public life, as activists, bureaucrats and, later, politicians, all too often spelled the end of intimate relationships.

After preselection came rapid advancement. When Wayne Goss’s Labor government was defeated and Peter Beattie took over as opposition leader, Bligh was appointed to the shadow cabinet with a watching brief on public works and public administration. With the return of Labor in 1998 following a one-term Liberal Country Party government, Bligh was a cabinet member, responsible for family, youth and disability services. She initiated a commission of inquiry into child abuse in Queensland institutions, arguably the first in the country. In 2001 she was education minister, overseeing a long-overdue overhaul of the state education system; in 2004 the arts were added to her portfolio; by 2005 she was Beattie’s deputy, responsible for finance, treasury, infrastructure and state development, essentially in charge of upgrading the long-neglected infrastructure in the two-Texas state. In 2007, after Beattie’s resignation, she was elected unopposed by the caucus and sworn in as premier just as the world’s developed economies were about to be gutted by the global financial crisis.

It was a difficult time to head a government that was already somewhat on the nose. Australians are more aware today of how the GFC served to shrink government revenues, and even with a raging Chinese demand for its coal Queensland was perilously short of money. Still, Bligh faced the electorate and won, the first Australian woman to be elected a state premier. After that she took what appeared to be the only option available, the standard recourse in our market economies, and that was to privatise many of Queensland’s assets, ever a risky and unpopular measure. Thus she led her government to its catastrophic defeat in the March 2012 election.

Yet the high point of Bligh’s premiership had come not much more than a year earlier, when she had led the state through the worst floods in Queensland’s recorded history. At the start of the deluge the state’s disaster management centre went into action, with Bligh at the helm, giving communities critical, hourly information about the movement of waters in their neighbourhoods. But no one at emergency headquarters could credit the reports that the main street of Toowoomba, centre of the Darling Downs and perched on top of a mountain, was in flood, as was the whole of the Lockyer Valley, with waters rushing towards Brisbane. When Brisbane’s river overflowed a restaurant was ripped from its moorings and transformed into a missile threatening the Storey Bridge until at the last minute it was heroically stopped. Finally the waters receded and people began cleaning up the mud and debris and what was left of their houses, but the rains came again and with them another flooding. Several times Bligh and her deputy risked their lives to be with the stricken people. At that moment premier Anna Bligh was their darling.

But the moment didn’t last. Years of Labor, anger over privatisations; the electorate was unforgiving. The Brits tossing out Churchill after the war comes to mind, even if the parallel is a little overdrawn. After seventeen strenuous years, Bligh resigned her South Brisbane seat; she needed a rest and time with her family. The boys were at university and there were plans to move to Sydney, where Greg grew up. For the first time in perhaps too long, Bligh could relax, travel and enjoy herself. But the reprieve was shortlived. Not long after settling into her new life she was diagnosed with cancer of the parotid gland and underwent a debilitating course of treatment that took a year of her life at the same time as it extended it. She was lucky; the tumour hadn’t spread, and after a full recovery she went to work for the community again, this time as chief executive of the YWCA in New South Wales.

End of story, so far. What did I take from it? Admiration for the narrator, certainly. More: genuine affection, although we have never met. It would be hard not to like Anna Bligh. Warm and unafraid to take the mickey out of herself, she is like Julia Gillard – and, also like Gillard, she is one of a generation of extremely accomplished women who took the baton our generation handed them (there goes another metaphor) and ran with it all the way to the next finishing line. She is gracious enough to acknowledge that she hasn’t run the race alone, that she couldn’t have done it without the support of family, friends, mentors, colleagues, staff, the party and the electorate. Yet the one group she hasn’t given due credit to are those who crashed through walls well before her and were “bruised and bloodied” in ways she could scarcely imagine, yet for whom the rewards have been few.

I’m speaking of pioneers of the second wave, women like Shulamith Firestone, who died young and crazed and alone in a walk-up tenement apartment; of Kate Millett, who suffers bouts of what others have defined as mental illness but she describes as resulting from years of social disapproval; of our own Pat Eatock, who has recently left us. I’m speaking about the poverty, loneliness and suicides that have afflicted so many – too many – of those pioneers. They were radicals, and served the function that radicals always serve, to bring to public attention ideas that seem utterly outlandish when first uttered yet prove to be prophetic, part of the coming zeitgeist, but rarely to share in the victory.

A woman is premier of Queensland again. It looks like we may have a woman in the White House. It may be churlish of me to insist that women like these, Bligh and Gillard and Palaszczuk, and even Hillary Clinton, splendid as they are and the hope of so many of us, have a debt to pay, a debt that, sadly, many have no idea of and few have even begun to acknowledge. A woman tells her story, but that’s my problem with women’s stories, when, as has happened so often down the millennia, they come adrift from the whole of our history. •

The post Anna Bligh, the story so far appeared first on Inside Story.

In January, less than three years after winning power with a historic majority, premier Campbell Newman was spectacularly ejected from office in Queensland. But while his government has gone, Newman’s controversial appointment of Tim Carmody as chief justice in July last year continues to be a running sore for the state’s judiciary. Many senior judges and legal figures view as intolerable the prospect of Carmody’s remaining in office until his mandatory retirement, at the age of seventy, in twelve years’ time.

Recent developments, which have plunged the Queensland judiciary into renewed public rancour, can’t be fully appreciated without an understanding of the circumstances of Carmody’s appointment as chief justice. I have previously written a detailed account for Inside Story, so here I will simply recall the fact that when Carmody was sworn in as chief justice he was surrounded by chairs left empty by every single serving member of the Supreme Court, all of whom had boycotted the ceremony. It would take a person possessed of exceptional qualities to overcome such an inauspicious start.

Nine months on, it is clear that any attempt Carmody has made to win the respect of his colleagues has failed. Indeed, if the claims made against him are to be believed, he has only managed to antagonise them further and confirm his unsuitability for the post. Just a few days into the New Year a Guardian report unfavourably compared the number of published decisions Carmody had made during his six months as chief justice (three) with the number managed by his predecessor Paul de Jersey during the previous six months (twenty). It was de Jersey’s appointment as state governor that cleared the way for Carmody’s rapid elevation from the position of chief magistrate, which he had held for less than a year. The Guardian also highlighted the number of Carmody’s decisions overturned by the Court of Appeal.

On 23 March, the president of the Court of Appeal, Justice Margaret McMurdo, released a statement correcting press reports that she was opposed to televised court proceedings, a matter under review by a committee of judges at Carmody’s instigation. She revealed that although the chief justice had publicly announced his support for televised proceedings, he had vacated the role of committee chair, citing “time pressures and other demands.” McMurdo herself has taken on chairing of the committee and responsibility for its forthcoming public consultation.

All this was just the smouldering background to an incendiary valedictory speech given by Justice Alan Wilson on 26 March to mark his retirement from the Supreme Court. Carmody was overseas, but in the audience were judges from all the Queensland courts, as well as members of the federal judiciary who are based in Queensland, including Justices Kiefel and Keane of the High Court of Australia.

To describe Wilson’s remarks about the chief justice simply as a parting shot would be grossly inadequate. His staggering volley of missiles described in detail the dispiriting effect on the state’s judiciary of “being publicly represented by a chief justice for whom most now lack all respect” and cited four features of Carmody’s tenure by way of explanation. First, there was the matter of the amount of casework performed by the chief justice. Wilson claimed that Carmody had not sat on a hearing since 15 February and “has withdrawn himself from all published court calendars, so nobody knows when or whether he intends sitting again.” He also pointed to Carmody’s absence from trial division sittings in Brisbane and his professed intention to sit only occasionally in the Court of Appeal.

Second, Wilson revealed that Carmody had sacked Justice John Byrne from the post of senior judge administrator, the head of the Trial Division, and had only reversed the decision after an outcry from the other members of the court. Third, and perhaps most damaging of all, Wilson claimed that Carmody had attempted to depart from the longstanding protocol under which judges are appointed to sit on the Court of Disputed Returns in strict order of seniority. That court decides disputes that arise in the wake of state elections – and such disputes were a very live possibility given the closeness of the vote in some seats in January. Last, said Wilson, Carmody had referred collectively to his colleagues as “snakes” and “scum” and failed to treat them with civility or courtesy.

Carmody’s initial response to these criticisms was to reject them outright. He also made the unexpected observation that Wilson’s behaviour was “the best argument yet for an independent judicial commission.” Whether the chief justice meant a commission to handle judicial appointments or one to deal with judicial misconduct was unclear. The latter seems illogical given Wilson’s imminent departure from the court. As for the former, many critics have already cited Carmody’s own elevation to the state’s highest judicial office as evidence of the need for a more formal and depoliticised appointment process overseen by an independent commission.

After his return from Papua New Guinea, Carmody wrote to the presidents of the Queensland Bar Association and the Queensland Law Society expressing a preference that Wilson’s allegations “be discussed and resolved internally within the judiciary and legal profession… rather than damaging the institutional reputation of the judiciary through the public airing of grievances.” But since the claims had been made in public some response in kind was required, and so Carmody’s letter was also sent to the Courier-Mail for publication.

It is curious that the chief justice thought he could adopt this strategy and yet confine himself to addressing just two of the criticisms. Surprisingly, he made no reference whatsoever to Wilson’s claim that he had sacked the senior judge administrator and then reversed the decision under pressure from the other judges. Nor did he respond to the claim that he had made derogatory references about his judicial colleagues. These omissions from Carmody’s own defence were seized on by Terry O’Gorman of the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties, who has called on the chief justice to provide the facts of what occurred.

O’Gorman and other members of the profession have also challenged the adequacy of Carmody’s detailed response to the other two criticisms. Barristers Stephen Keim and Alex McKean have unpicked the chief justice’s defence of his sitting arrangements, highlighting inconsistencies between information in his engagement calendar and the dates he discusses in his letter. They argue that he hadn’t adequately communicated his intentions beyond advising some members of staff in the court registry, and concluded that – even on the most favourable tally – the chief justice appears to have had a “significant period away from the coalface” and looks likely to spend just eighteen weeks in court during the eight-month period to November.

But this was as nothing compared to the questions raised by Carmody’s attempted clarification of the matter of the Court of Disputed Returns. Carmody correctly stated that section 137 of the Electoral Act (Qld) vests the power of constituting that court in the chief justice. But he asserted that a departure from the protocol whereby senior judges are automatically appointed to this body may be justified in cases where sticking to the protocol would not “ensure the appearance of neutrality.” It is this statement that has generated great disquiet.

Given that the appointments did eventually follow the protocol, O’Gorman has asked the chief justice to explain why he thought the choice of those particular individuals – both of them senior judges – might have failed to “ensure the appearance of neutrality”? Keim and McKean have suggested that Carmody doesn’t deserve much credit for eventually sticking to the protocol, given that he did so on the very day the Electoral Commission announced it would not be seeking a Court of Disputed Returns hearing into the result in the seat of Ferny Grove, which was hugely important to securing Labor’s narrow victory in the state election. They also query the value of a protocol that the chief justice says “must yield to the circumstances of the day” and express dissatisfaction about his failure to respond to Wilson’s related allegations that he attempted to speak privately with one of the nominated judges about his “unresolved concerns.”

The whole business, in other words, is a lamentable mess. A highly respected figure has made scathing criticisms of Queensland’s highest judicial officer to a large audience made up of members of the state and national judiciaries, and these criticisms are now on the public record (on the website of the Supreme Court’s own library, no less). The chief justice has offered a partial defence that is viewed by most observers as seriously inadequate. The president of the Bar Association, Mr Shane Doyle QC, has felt unable to respond to Carmody’s request for the organisation’s assistance in bringing the “destabilisation” to an end with anything more than an assurance that his organisation “is attempting to fully understand the circumstances which give rise to the present issues, and will seek to contribute to a mature and constructive resolution of those issues in whatever way is possible.”

Despite those careful words, the affair has riven the Bar Association. Just a day before Wilson’s valedictory remarks, Peter Davis QC – who resigned as the association’s president over the government’s handling of the consultations before Carmody’s appointment – was presented with life membership of the association. In a fiery acceptance speech he accused the association of suffering from “identity crisis” and severely criticised its attendance at Carmody’s swearing-in.

Judges talk a lot about the importance of public confidence in the courts, which is essential to their power and authority in the community. At the time he was appointed, the fears that Carmody was not up to the job – deepened by his ill-advised acknowledgement that he was rarely “the smartest lawyer in the room” – led to predictions that the new chief justice would damage that confidence. Rarely have such fears been so swiftly or dramatically borne out. With a divided legal profession looking with dismay on a demoralised and fractious judiciary, how can public respect and faith in the courts not be suffering?

But what is to be done? The new premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, whose infant government is clinging to power in the wake of Billy Gordon’s expulsion from the Labor Party, has little time for a replay of the public bitterness that accompanied Carmody’s appointment in 2014. With palpable exasperation, she declared that “enough is enough... the time has come now for there to be stability.” This is about all she can do, for any attempt by the government to resolve the tensions between the judges risks being seen as an interference in the independence of the judiciary – one of the gravest criticisms of the Newman government’s conduct.

As in other Australian jurisdictions, Queensland’s constitution provides that judges may only be removed by the governor-in-council on an address by the Legislative Assembly for “proved misbehaviour justifying removal from the office” or “proved incapacity to perform the duties of the office.” Such a move would be the culmination of a complex process involving an investigation by a specially constituted tribunal. No one – not even his most trenchant critics – has suggested that the chief justice has engaged in any conduct that might be viewed as “misbehaviour” supporting the case for his removal under the constitution.

Instead, the talk is all about Carmody facing up to the fact that his position is simply untenable and making what Graeme Orr calls “a face-saving exit.” To be frank, it is hard to believe this is possible. The reputational damage that Carmody has weathered since his appointment was announced ensures that his departure would simply be an “exit.” This may explain his remarkable tenaciousness in the face of criticism that would wilt many others. He has nothing to lose and everything to prove.

In his letter to the Bar Association and the Law Society, Carmody declared that he would not be “bullied out of judicial office.” And there, as they say, is the rub. If he won’t go, then no one can force him to. The trashing of his reputation only succeeds as a strategy to bring about his departure if he lets it. If, as appears to be the case, he chooses to dig in, then no one wins and everyone – the chief justice, the other judges and the court, the profession and the community – loses from the public airing of grievances over his leadership, no matter how legitimate those may be.

Security of judicial tenure has been integral to the institutional independence of the judiciary since the Act of Settlement was enacted by the English parliament in 1700. It is the ancestor of those provisions in Australia’s national, state and territory constitutions that protect judges from the threat of political interference or removal. Carmody’s plight is distinctive because it is his colleagues who want him gone. Yet they possess no constitutional power, let alone mechanism, to bring about that result.

Nor, to be blunt, should they. Judicial independence, as the High Court’s Justice Dyson Heydon reminded us before his retirement, includes independence from other judges. Heydon was discussing the reasoning process when judges decide cases together on an appellate court, and insisted that judges should be on guard against blandishments from colleagues designed to obtain agreement to outcomes with which they might otherwise disagree. The dire impasse in the Supreme Court of Queensland is, of course, entirely outside the dynamics of normal judicial decision-making, but the core of the principle holds: judges should be free from interference in the performance of their duties.

There is a certain irony in invoking the principle of judicial independence in defence of Tim Carmody. Both before and after his appointment as chief justice it has been alleged that he was unacceptably close to government and also, in respect of the recent Court of Disputed Returns claim, that he was prepared to upset established processes designed to ensure judicial impartiality. It also offers no solution to the enormous problem of what Wilson called “the current experiment” of having a chief justice who “frankly admits” he lacks the legal ability necessary to attract the respect of those serving alongside and under him. As Orr says, the Supreme Court “is in a terrible bind.” Its members not only view Carmody as ill-equipped for his office but also resent him for a range of specific reasons, the validity of which he has been unable to convincingly dispel. Rail as they might, however, the judges are stuck with him.

The lesson from all this, of course, is that it is vital to get things right at the time of appointment. With judicial tenure secure except in the most extreme cases, it is important that those selected for judicial office are unquestionably able and respected. This doesn’t mean that the power of appointment should simply be abdicated by the executive to the judiciary and the legal profession. Sitting judges should not be left to choose their colleagues and successors, lest they, unconsciously or otherwise, prefer the appointment of those persons with experiences and backgrounds similar to their own. That would slow the development of a more diverse judiciary in Australian courts.

It does mean, however, that governments should approach the task of appointment with earnest good faith and a willingness to consult and listen. Instead, Premier Newman and his attorney-general capped off a turbulent relationship with the Queensland legal profession by appointing Tim Carmody as the state’s chief justice with full knowledge of how that would be received and the reasons why.

His government has been consigned to history, but Queensland is still in the grip of Newman’s most contentious legacy – his decision to use the opportunity to appoint a new chief justice as a deliberate provocation to the state’s judiciary. It may be small comfort to Carmody’s critics and offer no resolution to the simmering tensions that persist in the Supreme Court, but the political cost Newman incurred for that decision is the best guarantee we have that governments will not approach future appointments in the same spirit. •

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We saw that dramatically illustrated in the Queensland election result. Apart from Morgan, the pollsters predicted the two-party-preferred vote would be LNP 52 per cent, Labor 48 per cent. The actual outcome, on Antony Green’s estimate, was very different: LNP 49, Labor 51.

As Peter Brent explained in Inside Story immediately after the election, this wasn’t because the pollsters got their polling wrong: Queenslanders voted exactly as they had told the final Galaxy Poll they would.

So what went wrong? The pollsters tripped themselves up by assuming that preferences would flow as they had at the last Queensland election in 2012. In fact, the preference flows this time were very different, as this summary shows:

2012 Queensland election
Preferences to Labor – 27%
Preferences to the LNP – 22%
Preferences exhausted – 51%

2015 Queensland election
Preferences to Labor – 48%
Preferences to the LNP – 16%
Preferences exhausted – 36%

Why? One reason is that Queensland, like New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, has made preferences optional. This means the polls in those states now include two unknowns: how many voters will cast preferences, and whom they will flow to.

In 2012, the plague-on-both-your-houses voters mostly sat on the fence. This time, hostility to the Newman government saw a huge shift of second preferences to Labor, enough to give it an extra 3 per cent of the vote.

A second factor, as Green explains, was unique to Queensland. In 2012, the biggest minor party was Katter’s Australia Party, which didn’t allocate preferences. This time, the Katter party stood in only eleven seats, and its share of the vote slid from 11.5 per cent to just 1.9 per cent. In 2015 the Greens were the biggest minor party, with 8.4 per cent, and their preferences flowed strongly to Labor.

If you tell a pollster you plan to vote for a minor party or independent, he or she will always ask you which way your preferences will go. But in recent times, most have just filed away that information, and instead used the actual preference distributions from the previous election. That’s because, at some elections, it had proved to be a better guide.

Not any more: this was the second election in ten weeks where the old rule had been overturned. In Victoria, the Fairfax Ipsos poll in the Age correctly predicted a Labor victory by 52–48 in two-party terms – but only because it went back to the old system of using the voters’ stated preferences rather than those from the previous poll.

The Age found the preference flows from the last election implied a 50–50 result: too close to call. Ipsos’s polling of first preferences was mostly accurate – apart from sharply overstating the Greens’ vote, and understating Labor’s – but the usual methodology would have given the wrong result, mainly because, as the table shows, between 2010 and 2014 preference flows shifted Labor’s way:

2010 Victorian election
Preferences to Labor – 64%
Preferences to Coalition – 36%

2014 Victorian election
Preferences to Labor – 70%
Preferences to Coalition – 30%

The shift in preferences gave Labor an extra 1.1 per cent of the vote – and majority government. Had preferences flowed as they did in 2010, the Liberals would have won Bentleigh, Carrum, Frankston and, probably, Prahran. The eighty-eight seats would have been split, with forty-four to Labor, forty-two Coalition, one Green and one independent. Labor would have had to form an unstable minority government.

The Greens contributed part of the surge in Labor’s vote, with 82 per cent of Green voters giving preferences to Labor. But even voters for parties of the religious right split their preferences in all directions, despite their how-to-vote cards directing them to the Coalition.

With New South Wales facing an election on 28 March, and the Abbott government to face the voters within eighteen months, what’s the moral to keep in mind when we read the polls?

First, if a new government drives voters offside, it will suffer on election day not only on first preferences, but also on second preferences – and they can be just as deadly. The Queensland and Victorian results show the polls can no longer assume that people will deliver preferences at the next election as they did last time. No formula is perfect, but trusting people when they say where they will direct their preferences is more reliable than trusting them to do what they did last time.

The latest Newspoll, released on Tuesday 24 February, repeats the mistake it made in Queensland. It reports voters’ first preferences as:

Coalition 38 per cent (down 7.6 per cent from the 2013 election)
Labor 38 per cent (up 4.6 per cent)
Greens 12 per cent (up 3.3 per cent)
Others 12 per cent (down 0.4 per cent)

It then groups the Greens and others together, and allocates 60 per cent of their vote to Labor and 40 per cent to the Coalition, roughly matching the 62/38 split of their preferences at the 2013 election, to come up with a two-party-preferred vote of 53 per cent Labor, 47 per cent Coalition. That’s a swing of 6.5 per cent – yet the swing from Coalition to Labor and the Greens is almost 8 per cent. 

Even if you treat the Greens and others separately, and assume no change in preferences, the poll numbers point to a 54/46 split. (In 2013, Labor won 83 per cent of Greens preferences, the Coalition won 53 per cent of the rest.) And the assumption that preferences would be unchanged is, as we have seen, unsound.

Any poll that continues to rely on preference splits from 2013 is likely to overstate the Coalition’s two-party vote, as Newspoll and Galaxy did in Queensland. The same will be true for New South Wales.

Second, while the NSW election looks unlikely to be as close as those in South Australia, Victoria and Queensland, remember the uncertainty about whether voters will give preferences to any party at all. In 2007 and 2011, most NSW voters for smaller parties just voted 1. Will they do so again? And if not, will they choose to punish Mike Baird for disappointing them – or reward him for delivering on their hopes for better government? •

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By this time it was clear that Labor had won forty-four of the Legislative Assembly’s eighty-nine seats and could rely on the support of independent MP Peter Wellington. Not only had Labor taken power, but the results are unlikely to be anywhere near as dire as the pundits had predicted. Given that all of Australia’s political jurisdictions – every state and territory and the nation as a whole – have experienced minority government over the past twenty years, this sort of panic peddling might have had its day.

Most of the minority governments during those two decades were stable and productive, and some provided a platform for the formation of successful majority administrations. Victorian premier Steve Bracks described his three years as a minority premier as “one of the best periods of government that I had.” Among the few that weren’t so successful was Rob Borbidge’s 1996–98 conservative coalition in Queensland, which stumbled along with the support of independent MP Liz Cunningham.

The instability of Australia’s best-known minority government, Julia Gillard’s, was the product of unresolved Labor leadership issues rather than the lack of a majority in the House of Representatives (or in the Senate). In fact, Gillard was notably successful in getting her legislation through the parliament, something that her majority successor has repeatedly failed to do.

In Queensland’s case, it might also be argued that its citizens actually benefit from minority government. Why? This is the only state without an upper house, which severely limits the avenues by which legislation can be reviewed and improved. Like the Spanish Inquisition, though, no one expects elections to produce minority administrations, so it might be a long wait before we have another government that has to negotiate rather than assert. Perhaps a more permanent constitutional arrangement is needed to improve accountability.

One heretical option would be to reintroduce a second chamber to the Queensland parliament. The idea was extensively canvassed at a conference less than a decade ago (its proceedings, including an excellent chapter by Colin A. Hughes, were published as Restraining Elective Dictatorship: The Upper House Solution?) and is worth reconsidering in light of the experience of the past three years.

Upper houses are not a panacea for achieving accountable government, of course. Evidence from Australia’s six bicameral legislatures is mixed – some have done it well but some haven’t – and even the most careful constitutional design can’t guarantee appropriate behaviour. Political parties will still tend to dominate. But Queensland’s record, especially under premiers Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Campbell Newman, suggest that a “unicameral” parliament starts with a disadvantage.

Before we consider what an extra chamber might look like, it’s useful to go back to the events that led to the abolition of Queensland’s upper house.

When Queensland was excised from New South Wales in 1859 it was a fully fledged colony with representative and responsible government. Members of the upper house of its parliament, the Legislative Council, were appointed by the governor-in-council for life. While its committees occasionally did useful accountability work, it was hostile to progressive legislation and obstructive of reforming governments.

The Ryan Labor government held an unsuccessful referendum to abolish the council in 1917. Five years later, the Theodore Labor administration controversially succeeded in legislating away the upper house. After a bungled attempt by a conservative government to reconstitute it in 1931, another Labor government amended the constitution in 1934 to entrench unicameralism. From that point on, an upper house could not be recreated except by referendum. No serious attempt has been made to restore the Legislative Council since then, and it is interesting that Tony Fitzgerald’s landmark 1989 report on corruption and government administration made no recommendation on the matter.

Anyone advocating for Queensland to abandon unicameralism has two large hurdles to clear: how to design the Legislative Council and how to convince a majority of the electorate to support the necessary referendum to create it. The nineteenth-century rationale for upper houses was simple: to defend property interests by stopping “radical” legislation, such as votes for women. In this century, the only defensible rationale is to enhance the accountability of the executive arm of government.

Any new chamber in Queensland would need to be large enough to discharge its functions effectively. Twenty-five members would be the bare minimum. Election would be by optional preferential proportional representation. If the state were to be divided into five regions electing five members each this would yield a quota of 16.6 per cent, which is on the high side (in an ordinary Senate election the quota is 14.3 per cent), but the alternative whole-of-state method would produce a very low quota of 3.8 per cent and enable people with little electoral support to win seats.

The council would need a very robust and independent committee system with the capacity to compel ministers to appear. Apart from a leader of government business, no ministers would sit in the council, but assembly ministers should be able to address it and answer questions. To provide an appropriate career path, the chairs of standing committees should receive ministerial salaries.

The council would have no authority over money bills but would have a capacity to delay legislation for six months to permit scrutiny from inside and outside parliament. It is imperative that members of the council would not undertake constituency work; their job is to advance the public interest, not the interests of individuals or interest groups. One way to achieve this is to allocate them parliamentary but not electorate offices.

Would either of the big parties be prepared to cede authority by reintroducing an upper house? Ironically, it would be in their own interests to have a restraining legislative hand to protect them against electorally damaging enthusiasms. When that restraint is absent – in a unicameral system or when a government controls both houses – the results can rebound.

Two quick examples illustrate the problem. When John Howard’s government obtained a Senate majority in 2005 it proved a poisoned chalice, opening the way for WorkChoices to pass through parliament. That bout of ideological enthusiasm cost him government in 2007. And there is also little doubt that Campbell Newman’s recent remarkable defeat was caused by a public backlash against his unrestrained style of aggressive leadership. When the state parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Committee was making things uncomfortable for the government-friendly acting chair of the Crime and Corruption Commission, for instance, the premier simply dissolved the committee.

Any referendum to reintroduce an upper house would need multi-partisan support. But an even bigger obstacle would be a cynical electorate reluctant to vote for more politicians. It might be possible to reduce the Legislative Assembly’s numbers to eighty-one as compensation, but any further reduction in the lower house would encounter regional resistance.

Apparently the independent Mr Wellington is keen on a bill of rights. But is that a sufficient reform agenda to secure greater executive accountability in Queensland? •

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Tuesday 10 February was the last day for postal votes to be received and counted. (Perhaps a few were trickling in from outer Peru.) Short of recounts and double checking of ballots, the results appear clear. Labor has forty-four seats, including the unresolved seat of Ferny Grove, plus the support of long-term independent Peter Wellington; the Liberal National Party has forty-two; and the Katter Party has two.

Campbell Newman has had the unenviable (and unusual) role of acting as a “zombie” caretaker premier, having lost his own seat ten days ago. No one should be manacled to that role indefinitely. He has resigned, but that resignation is not taking effect until a new premier is appointed.

The convention is for the governor to consult LNP leader Lawrence Springborg and his opposite number, Labor’s Palaszczuk, about their ability to form government. The Ferny Grove result will probably end up in the court of disputed returns because the Palmer United Party candidate, an undischarged bankrupt, was ineligible to “be a candidate and be elected a member” under the Parliament of Queensland Act. In a politically understandable gambit, Springborg argues he should be appointed caretaker premier for the next several months. The LNP would rather the public became used to “Premier” Springborg than to “Premier” Palaszczuk.

The rather large insect in this ointment is that the LNP has only forty-two seats. With counting complete, Labor plus Peter Wellington adds up to forty-five, a majority. Springborg could only reign as caretaker premier by not calling together parliament, a move that would be virtually without precedent. The whole point of an election is to renew parliament democratically.

Any court case over Ferny Grove will take at least a month. There is a guaranteed right to appeal that decision on points of law and that could be taken up by any party to the case. And if the outcome is a by-election, that would take a month. If all these “ifs” fall its way, the LNP might then do a deal with the Katter Party to garner a majority.

To lay out this scenario – a caretaker LNP administration, governing without the support of parliament for some months, unable to make any significant decisions – is to see how little stability it offers.

The caretaker conventions, covering a period in which governments undertake not to make major decisions, evolved to cover the month to six weeks between a parliament being dissolved and a majority of the newly elected MPs coalescing to form a new administration. It wasn’t designed to enable a government that has lost its majority to hold onto formal power for months, unable to make any contentious decisions or pass legislation.

Much has been said about Ferny Grove and a “likely” fresh election. Having studied electoral law for twenty years, it seems to me that the LNP has an uphill legal argument to force a re-election on the good burghers of Ferny Grove.

Those who voted for the Palmer United Party candidate in Ferny Grove did so fully entitled to express a preference between Labor and the LNP. With optional preferential voting we have the fairest voting system, in terms of maximising citizen choice, in the world.

Under preferential voting, according to the High Court (in Re Wood 1988), if a losing candidate is subsequently disqualified the election is not affected. The best argument the LNP lawyers have is to argue that anyone who simply voted “1” for Palmer might have voted LNP had the Palmer candidate not been on the ballot. They then need to argue that there were many more of them than Labor’s winning margin of over 400 votes.

The Electoral Commission has said it will refer the matter to the Court of Disputed Returns. It’s a reasonable, if unusual, position to take. The LNP will at least not have to pay the costs. Fair enough; this is a legal issue that concerns all Queenslanders. The law and precedent is clear that the member for Ferny Grove, like any other MP, is entitled to sit, vote and represent that constituency until such time as he is  unseated by a court.

So far, after a short campaign, we have not been in caretaker mode longer than at a national election. No one has a crystal ball, but in politics the numbers, finally, are all. •

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But last weekend it was reversed. On current counting, the swing, this time to Labor, again rounds out to 14 (or at least 13) per cent. The 51-ish per cent vote isn’t enough to reinstall a comfortable Labor majority, but it has delivered a probable Labor government under Annastacia Palaszczuk, either in its own right or relying on minor parties and independents.

This result caught most observers (including me), and certainly the betting markets, who at close of betting put the odds at around 15 per cent, by surprise. (Not Professor Brian Costar, who hails from the state and recently assessed a Labor win as a distinct possibility.)

Why did it come as a shock?

One reason is dry and technical: the published opinion polls didn’t tell us to expect it. They have been misleading us. For how long we don’t know, but the pollsters underestimated the extent of preference flows to Labor, by quite a lot, and this made a substantial difference to their published two-party-preferred numbers.

Most political polling outfits ask respondents who will get their number 1 vote, and then attempt to estimate two-party-preferred figures from those results. When preferences are optional and the total major-party vote share low, as in Queensland recently, this is challenging. Electors can be influenced by how-to-vote cards, and the exhaustion rate (when a minor party or independent vote doesn’t make it, in preferences, to either major party) is not knowable.

Take the final Galaxy poll of the campaign, collected over Tuesday to Thursday of the final week and published in the Courier-Mail on Saturday. It measured LNP support at 41 per cent, with Labor on 37, Greens 8, Palmer United Party 4 and Katter’s Australian Party 2.

At this point in counting, the actual election results are 41.5, 37.8, 8.2, 1.8 and 4.9 respectively. So Galaxy’s reading was very close to the result, though they understated both major parties’ support a smidgen, and Labor’s by a bit more than the LNP’s. (We don’t know what the unrounded Galaxy numbers were, of course.)

But Galaxy estimated, from its numbers, that Labor’s two-party-preferred vote would be 48 per cent, yet it seems to have come in at 50 or 51 per cent. Like Newspoll and most of the others, it estimated two-party-preferred using preference flows at the last election, in 2012. And preferences favoured Labor a lot more this time.

At the 2012 election, pollsters, using 2009 flows, erred in the other direction, but for such a one-sided election it didn’t matter as much. When the result hovers around 50–50, a few per cent makes all the difference. (The alternative to pollsters estimating preferences is asking respondents which side will get their eventual preferences. This has also proved problematic.)

When the votes are analysed it will be particularly interesting to see what proportion of Palmer United Party voters simply voted 1, and where the preferences of those who numbered other boxes went. PUP wasn’t around for the last state election, and pollsters may have used its federal 2013 flows (with an allowance for exhaustion) in their calculations.

But at the federal election PUP issued how-to-vote cards recommending the Coalition ahead of Labor in every electorate, while this time it favoured neither side. Wrongly assuming its preferences would favour the LNP could account for a per cent or so of the aggregate preference gap. (Is it possible that Newman’s “just vote one” message to third-party voters, designed to minimise Labor’s preference advantage, resonated most with those who would otherwise have preferenced the LNP? Just a thought; we’ll never know the answer.)

The upshot is that the opinion polls, while perhaps hinting the election might be close, didn’t warn us that a cliffhanger, or a Labor win, was on the way. (This was the opposite of Victoria in November, where the Coalition would have had to defy the opinion polls to survive.) If you had added 2 or 3 per cent to Labor support in the published Queensland surveys over the last year or two, general expectations of Saturday’s outcome would have been very different.

Still, even if the final polls had put Labor on 50 or 51 per cent, some (okay, me) would have been sceptical about the possibility of a change of government. From such a massive victory last time, it seemed unlikely. Governments don’t lose after one term, do they?

It’s true that a Coalition one did in Victoria two months ago, but that’s a Labor state, having returned Labor two-party-preferred majorities at eleven of the last thirteen federal elections – even at the big 1996 and 2013 Labor losses.

Queensland works the other way. It is fundamentally conservative, only rarely voting Labor federally. It last gave the national party wins in 2007, 1990, 1961 and before that 1943.

So why was the LNP’s record majority wiped out on Saturday?

Had the swing to Labor “only” been the 11 per cent the opinion polls predicted, some explanation would still be needed. A correction after such a big win last time was inevitable, but of that size?

Some of the credit must go to the government’s actions over the last three years. As Brisbane lord mayor, Newman had a reputation as a moderate, a centrist. As premier he was something else, rather reminiscent of the Bjelke-Petersen era: intolerant of dissent, combative and hamfisted. And all that fiscal slashing and burning.

But this was not the first new government to go back on its election promises, to deliver bitter medicine and blame it on the profligacy of the just-defeated rabble. Most seem to do okay.

I believe the most important single factor in the result was the 2013 federal election outcome. If the Rudd Labor government had somehow managed to hold on seventeen months ago, conservatives would still be governing in Queensland (and, for that matter, in Victoria, and they would be in power in South Australia).

Recent decades have seen clear, discernible state–federal electoral dynamics. The election of the Howard government in 1996 was followed by the demise of almost wall-to-wall Coalition governments and huge state and territory Labor re-elections. Federal Labor’s return to office eleven and a half years later was followed by unexpectedly poor performances by state and federal Labor, beginning in Western Australia and the Northern Territory in 2008.

So the absence of a Labor federal government and the presence of a Coalition one is chiefly responsible for the big turnaround of state parties’ fortunes. Following the September 2013 election, opinion polls in every state moved in Labor’s favour.

The unpopularity of those respective governments is icing on this cake. Julia Gillard was much disliked, particularly in Queensland, in March 2012, and now Tony Abbott’s toxicity levels are high.

The broad parameters of electoral contests are out of the players’ hands. It is the height of silliness to declare the winner of every electoral contest the superior campaigner, which doesn’t stop many commentators doing just that.

But even adjusting for rubbery preferences, the Queensland result for Labor was at the higher end of opinion polling over the last year. This contrasts, for example, with Victoria last November, when the 52–48 election outcome was closer than nearly all opinion polls over the previous twelve months.

In the southern state, the tales of brilliant Labor campaigning in the final week didn’t quite gel with the narrowing of the opinion polls in that period. But in Queensland it is reasonable to believe Labor did something right (and/or the LNP something wrong) in January.

Brilliant campaigning can’t produce a 14 per cent swing, but it might turn a 12 per cent one into a 14 per cent one, and, more to the point, it might shift votes in the right electorates.

And given the closeness of the Queensland outcome, many things might have made the difference between success and failure. Newman’s desperate warning that electorates that didn’t vote LNP would miss out on largesse, tick. His advising journalists to Google for evidence of bikie links to Labor, tick.

The general expectation of an LNP victory, facilitating a protest vote. The dire levels of Abbott’s unpopularity, with the most recent contribution, his Prince Philip fiasco. Privatisation. Tick, tick, tick.

When the result was so close, there are many “what if?”s. (One in the opposite direction might be: would Palaszczuk be preparing to be sworn in as majority Labor leader if not for her last-minute GST gaffe?)

Anyway, next month it’s New South Wales’s turn. It would take an even more serious opinion poll adjustment to produce an upset there, but all the same 31 January would have provoked some jitters in Mike Baird’s Coalition government.

And in Canberra, as Abbott’s leadership teeters, colleagues from his home state would be watching particularly closely. •

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The recent statewide polls (the latest from ReachTEL on 20 January) have the Liberal National Party on 52 per cent to Labor’s 48 per cent. Although this is a big swing from the 2012 election result, when a split of 63–37 gave the LNP seventy-eight seats out of eighty-nine, those figures suggest that the government will just hang on.

But Queensland is different, and two factors mean that statewide polls based on two-party-preferred figures may not anticipate the final result as accurately as they do in other jurisdictions. First, Queensland’s electoral geography is highly regionalised, which means this election will be won in Brisbane and the northern coastal cities of Townsville and Cairns. Second, since 1992 Queenslanders have had the option of simply numbering one square on their ballot papers, and 70 per cent of voters have chosen to do exactly that. This renders the concept of the two-party-preferred vote almost meaningless.

How did a government that won such a large victory less than three years ago come to be fighting for its life? In brief, it’s because the LNP and the premier have behaved as though they were elected in 1982 rather than 2012.

An indifference to government accountability, a trampling of civil liberties, dubious judicial appointments, questionable campaign fundraising methods, the weakening of the Crime and Corruption Commission, and a blurring of the distinction between the executive and parliament – all these are reminiscent of the reign of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. So much so that the government earned a public rebuke from Tony Fitzgerald QC, the man who led the commission of inquiry into that earlier period of corruption, in the last few days of the campaign.

The premier’s personal style, meanwhile, has been aggressive and arrogant. (The Electrical Trades Union is full of “grubs and liars,” he said in June last year.) While he has toned down his language in recent months, Newman’s election mantra of “Strong team. Strong plan. Stronger Queensland” can easily be interpreted as authoritarian and backward-looking rather than positive. This is because the Queensland electorate of today is very different from the one that gave Joh and his “strong” regime their memorable victories. It has doubled in size, is more urbanised and metropolitanised, is more ethnically and culturally diverse, is better educated (the proportion of bachelor degree–holders has doubled since 1991) and is better served by a more critical (largely online) media.

The government has downplayed its earlier agenda to the extent of banishing the controversial attorney-general, Jarrod Bleijie, to the electoral backblocks. It is now stressing its “strong” economic credentials, but more as promise than performance. Queensland’s trend unemployment is 6.6 per cent, significantly worse than the 5.5 per cent rate when Newman came to office, and better only than Tasmania’s performance. Regional variations could be influential, too, with unemployment running at 8 per cent in the key cities of Townsville and Cairns (and youth unemployment at a very high 21 per cent in the former), where the high dollar has hit the tourism industry.

Other measures are also worrying. Gross domestic income fell 1 per cent over the 2013–14 financial year, the second-highest decline in the country. Overall, the CommSec State of the States January 2015 report rates Queensland fifth for economic performance among the eight states and territories.

Undeterred, the government promises a rosy economic future based on coal seam gas exports, but its predictions on that front seem overly optimistic. It claims, for example, that new coalmines in the Galilee Basin will directly create 27,000 new jobs, but an Australia Institute analysis puts the likely figure at 9280.

The result tomorrow? Electoral arithmetic is heavily weighted against the possibility that Labor can harvest the thirty-six extra seats it needs to form government, but let’s see how they might do it. There are forty seats in Brisbane, of which the party holds only four; given that the swing against the LNP is likely to be strongest in the southeastern corner, that tally could increase to a total of thirty-five. Of the seven seats in the far north, Labor could take five, bringing the total to forty, still five short of the magic forty-five.

The climb from the last base camp to the pinnacle is always the toughest, so here we must venture into the mists of preferences. In what looks like a polarising election, the minor and micro parties will not do well. The Katter caper has run its course and the PUPs have rarely ventured out of their kennels. Some polls have the Greens on 9 per cent, undoubtedly an exaggeration, but given that 50 per cent of the party’s voters allocate at least some preferences, its increased support will assist Labor in very close contests.

To win, the opposition must gain a swing in the order of 12 per cent. Impossible, I hear you say, but the LNP gained a swing of nearly 17 per cent in 2012 and Labor gained 17 per cent and 19 per cent in two by-elections in 2014. The current Australian electorate is grumpy and volatile and Queenslanders have a history of being among the most volatile of all.

Federal issues played a part in the defeat of the Coalition government in Victoria last November. A Courier-Mail Galaxy poll published on 12 January 2015 reported that “almost one in three voters are poised to vote against the LNP… because of federal factors” – especially suggestions that the GST be broadened – and this was before the prime minister’s mad monarchist moment sparked unhelpful leadership speculation.

So, while the cautious prediction must be that Labor will fall a little short of victory, there’s just a chance of a very nasty surprise for the LNP this weekend. •

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They are part of the Electoral Amendment Reform Bill 2013 which, as the LNP has about 90 per cent of the seats in the state’s single house of parliament, stands an excellent chance of becoming law.

The press release is here and the bill here.

The Electoral Act as it currently stands here.

Guarding against impersonation has been a thorny issue ever since the evolution of mass voting. In the very old days, in the United Kingdom, there was no problem because only the wealthy few men could vote, everyone knew who they were and voting was open. There was not even a written electoral roll.

This changed with the 1832 “Reform Act” which among other things expanded voting rights and laid out the procedure for producing the first codified rolls. When the Australian colonies began holding elections from the 1840s (in NSW) this was the procedure they inherited.

The risk of “personation” (as it was called then and some purists insist on doing today), or at least the perception of a risk, was ever present. Voting certificates, which electors got from the government in advance, were tried from time to time but were a hassle and expensive.

Like much of the argy-bargy around aspects of vote-enabling, the argument has long divided along “left” and “right” (or “progressive” and “conservative”) lines. People who don’t have voter ID are more likely to be poor and are more likely to vote left-of-centre.

In America, where the states determine who and how people vote for national elections, a slew of Republican administrations introduced voter ID laws between 2010 and 2012. There are several variations, as you can see here.

Political parties spend too much time playing politics with matters like this, damaging the public’s trust in electoral processes for, in the end, very little partisan gain.

It’s the fact of people being disenfranchised that matters, not their political persuasion.

The simple logistics of organising fraud along such lines in any meaningful way make it untenable. The numbers required would be large, and it’s never known in advance which electorates will be the closest ones.

After South Australia’s 2010 election someone wrote a letter to the state’s electoral commission and a newspaper claiming to (along with their family) have cast 159 fraudulent votes. The full letter has not, as far as I know, ever been published; but the available excerpts can be found on pages EM47–48 of this JSCEM transcript.

He or she wrote they “did this simply by using careful research and planning. The research provided names of those who could not vote, would not be voting, or needed assistance to vote.”

Writing a letter is easy, and no proof of anything. As far as I know they didn’t provide the list of people they impersonated, which would have added weight to their claim.

Like anonymously claiming to have poisoned a product in a supermarket, it’s just a form of vandalism, anti-social behaviour.

(The letter claimed “Our activities may or may not have influenced the outcome of the election” but 159 votes could not have changed the overall result.)

I understand why some people have an instinctive desire for the system to be less lax around the question of identification. But there is always a a trade-off between ID requirements and robbing people of their right to vote.

The way some, including politicians, jumped on the South Australian letter as “evidence” for something was worrying, and people who knowingly overstate the “problem” and consciously encourage lack of trust in the electoral process deserve contempt.

Anyway, Queensland’s “acceptable forms of ID,” according to the press release, will be:

• Current driver licence
• Current Australian passport
• Voter identification letter issued by the ECQ [Electoral Commission of Queensland] • Recent account or notice issued by a public utility [or] • Identification card issued by the Commonwealth or a State as evidence of the person’s entitlement to a financial benefit (eg. a Commonwealth seniors health card, Medicare card, pensioner concession card).

According to the Attorney-General’s office, that letter from the ECQ would be a recent standard piece of correspondence from the commission, for example verifying that an elector who has moved residence has had their details changed.

So what does happen when a person gives a name to the official, and that name is on the roll, but the person doesn’t have appropriate ID?

They “will be required to make a declaration vote, similar to people who vote outside of their electorate on polling day”. That is, they will fill in and sign a declaration, and put it, and their filled-in ballot paper, in an envelope. The details will be checked and if all is well their vote will be counted.

The checking, presumably, will be of the signature, and perhaps date of birth. And that no one else has voted under that name.

Technically, this procedure doesn’t guard against the 2010 South Australian claimed fraud, but in reality the requirement to fill in a form, and interact more fully with an official, would be a strong disincentive.

It makes voting a bigger hassle for people without ID, which would be more of an issue under a voluntary voting system.

But, importantly, it requires no further action of the voter. That is, after they leave the polling station they don’t have to do anything more (which is not the case with, for example, provisional voting).

That, in my humble opinion, is fine thing.

Without more knowledge of the planned procedure, this legislation seems a reasonable compromise between inclusiveness and integrity.

It might even indicate the Queensland government is driven, in this particular change, by concerns about integrity and not simple partisan advantage.

Fancy that. •

The post Voter ID coming to Queensland appeared first on Inside Story.

BY CLOSE of polling on Saturday night, long-suffering Queenslanders had endured sixty days of electoral campaigning. In addition to all the usuals, we saw a candidate disendorsed for drink driving, another for dressing up as a pirate at a swingers’ party (and we’re not talking swinging voters here) and the manager of an allegedly pornographic website surviving only because the ballot papers had already been printed. The citizens of Ashgrove were deluged with visits from a multitude of political hotshots and showered with more leaflets than were handed out during the French Revolution. In fact, the voters had not seen such political hootin’ and a’hollering since Blazing Saddles hit the big screen in 1974.

And to what effect? In January the opinion polls had the Liberal National Party on 60 per cent of the two party-preferred vote and Labor on 40 per cent. With votes still being counted, the result currently rests at LNP 62 per cent and Labor 38 per cent. If we allow for the sampling error in the January poll then the net effect of the campaign could well have been zero.

Over four decades ago political scientist Don Aitkin conducted the first thorough survey of the political attitudes and behaviour of Australians and found that formal election campaigns do not cause “great movements” in the electorate. This year another political scientist, Ian McAllister, analysed data from the past twenty years of election surveys conducted by the Australian National University and found that, while election campaigns are important to the political process, they generally don’t move voters. As the political scientist Murray Goot observed in a survey of “electioneering” in Australia, “the contribution of any campaign is always open to question: a party might improve its position, notwithstanding a poor campaign; or it might lose ground despite a good campaign…”

What this means is that much of the energy expended and the money spent by the parties and interest groups in Queensland over the past two months could have been saved. Why, then, do the parties do it? Because that’s what they are programmed to do. It really is as simple as that.

As soon as the devastating result became obvious the recriminations began, primarily over Labor’s campaign against Campbell Newman in relation to donations he received from property developers while he was lord mayor of Brisbane. Labor mishandled it badly, not least by including Newman’s wife, Lisa, in its attacks. And the defeatist TV ads of the last week of the campaign, which pleaded with voters not to give Campbell Newman “too much power,” were equally deserving of criticism. But the calls from some quarters for Queensland Labor to rethink its campaigning style are a little beside the point – the causes of the defeat were much longer term.

Former premier Peter Beattie and others have predicted that Labor will be out of office for at least three terms. To be reduced to seven members in a parliament of eighty-nine will certainly be character building for the Labor politicians. (Since the party does not have enough members to constitute a shadow ministry, why not follow the LNP precedent and appoint spokespeople who are not in parliament?) But comparisons with the long period of opposition that followed the heavy defeat in 1957 are misleading. That defeat also spawned a splinter party (the Democratic Labor Party), which siphoned votes from Labor and transferred them to the Coalition by way of second preferences. As well, between 1957 and 1981 the Queensland Labor organisation was highly dysfunctional and preoccupied with internal ructions rather than winning parliamentary elections.

The LNP’s sheer numerical dominance should see it safe for two terms. But with a large number of new MPs who were preselected in the expectation that they would never win, all of Premier Campbell’s military experience will be needed to keep the government benches in line. The LNP frontbench is not brimming with political talent and there is a strong prospect of inexperienced or inept cabinet ministers getting themselves into trouble. The relationship between the premier and party president Bruce McIver (who has a history of interfering in the affairs of the parliamentary party) is likely to resemble two bulls in a paddock.

The LNP was not a marriage of true minds; it was a hostile takeover of the Liberals by the Nationals, and internal tensions remain. The fireworks will start when federal candidates need to be chosen for the 2013 election. Small “l” Liberal will need to watch out because the agrarians will be after them. Over the coal seam gas industry, meanwhile, the new government will somehow have to reconcile two of its core constituencies – farmers and miners.

Queensland politics will be interesting again. •

Brian Costar is Professor of Politics at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research.

The post Wipeout 2012 appeared first on Inside Story.

WHEN Shane Knuth defected from the Liberal National Party to join Bob Katter’s newly formed Australian Party in October last year, he told the Sunday Mail that he could no longer tolerate being forced to support policies that ran counter to the interests of his constituency. “True democracy,” said the member for Dalrymple, meant representing the views of the electorate.

A speech Knuth made in May last year gives an indication of what he believes is at stake. “When I was first elected member for Charters Towers in 2004, Moranbah was a town that thrived on a deep sense of community involvement and social participation,” he told state parliament. “The whole town was involved in whatever was happening. But the mining boom saw a massive increase in a non-residential workforce which has resulted in a decline in social interaction and community participation.” Knuth called on the government to oppose current plans for a 100 per cent fly-in fly-out workforce at the Caval Ridge mine.

As the Mackay Daily Mercury reported in September, the plan went ahead regardless:

Queensland Mining Communities president and Moranbah Action Group chairwoman Kelly Vea said yesterday's announcement was a “slap in the face” for the region. “Our community has donated hundreds of hours to being a constructive stakeholder in this process... and it is clear the government has simply acted as a rubber stamp for BMA's $50 billion money tree in the Caval Ridge Mine.”

The state election campaign in Queensland has exposed sharp discrepancies between the views of the major parties and those of the people they purport to represent. Major parties are cumbersome vehicles, of course. They have to incorporate a wide spectrum of opinion within their own ranks while conveying a unified message to the public, and to maintain a consistent set of agendas in rapidly changing circumstances. Any contradictory signs, any veering from the declared line on a major issue, becomes grounds for attack from the opposition.

In this atmosphere, being on message is largely an exercise in avoidance: of issues that may be problematic, language that may offend, views that may conflict with the agreed position. In policy terms, it is easier to attack than to advocate. Once a significant policy has been declared, it is up for challenge from all directions and can become a liability, potentially fatal to the party’s chances at the next election. For a party member to make a statement in contravention of the established policy position is not free speech but a form of treachery.

Last week, Knuth once again found himself compelled to speak out against his party, but at least he had the freedom to do so. His problem this time round was not an intractable policy environment, but one so volatile it was taking impulsive lurches in unpredictable directions – in this case, Bob Katter’s decision to release a campaign advertisement caricaturing gay marriage. Along with Darren Hunt (representative for Cairns), Damian Byrnes (Mulgrave), and Brendan Fitzgerald (Barron River), Knuth voiced his unhappiness about the advertisement publicly.

These four have in common a strong commitment to community and social welfare. Hunt is a former police officer who has been a director of emergency services, Byrnes is a medical practitioner with experience in the reserve defence forces, Fitzgerald has a focus on mental health, disability and child protection, and Knuth was shadow communities and disabilities minister during his time with the Liberal National Party.

The biographies of the seventy-three candidates standing for Katter's Australian Party display an impressive array of qualifications and experience, and some surprising examples of principle-based boundary crossing. Will Keys (Ipswich) is a former general manager at Coles Myer who “finds it completely irresponsible for our governments to allow 85 per cent of the retail dollar to be channelled through two corporations.” Peter Pyke (Toowoomba North), a former state Labor MP, believes that the major parties can no longer operate according to genuine democratic principles.

Democracy is a recurrent keyword in the candidates’ statements, and the issues that unite them include opposition to the sale of state assets, opposition to the Coles/Woolworths retail duopoly, commitment to transport infrastructure that serves remote areas and to regional hospitals and schools, the revival of local industry and agriculture, a moratorium on coal-seam gas mining, and restrictions on foreign investment. These concerns are widely shared in the electorate and the two major parties have manifestly failed to respond to them convincingly.

In an unusually even-handed move, the Brisbane Courier Mail pronounced that both major parties were avoiding the issues Queenslanders most wanted addressed, and proposed to abandon the campaign buses for a more grassroots approach to reporting. By and large it has kept to this resolve, and its coverage has been significantly more thoughtful than at the last federal and state elections. Much of the rural press didn’t even bother to express disaffection; their election coverage has been minimal, and largely devoted to local independents.

Anna Bligh’s government has become irreversibly associated with the sale of assets and the advancement of the coal-seam gas industry, and the Liberal National Party is, if anything, likely to go further in the same direction. Both parties talk constantly about transport infrastructure, but their capacity to deliver better services is severely restricted; neither can find a way to resolve the big picture of statewide transport needs in a way that balances economic and social imperatives. Both are bound by the orthodoxies of global free trade and investment, so neither has the flexibility to adjust policy settings to serve the priorities of local trade and industry. It’s the two-speed economy, stupid. But they are vehicles suited only to the terrain of the freeway, and if the opposition does take government on Saturday it will inherit the legacy of bitterness and cynicism in the regional electorates.

When small-town high streets are boarding up, people in remote areas lack access to essential services and whole regions are held hostage to international corporations whose commitment to Queensland extends no further than their profit margins, Katter and his team may have got their policy settings much better tuned to the urgencies of the moment.

They started out in this election campaign with high expectations, claiming that they were all set to be the alternative government, or at least the next opposition, and mustered an extensive field of high-quality candidates only seven months after the party was formally established. Peter Pyke was impressed with the two-day induction program they were offered, which included lectures from leading economics commentators and political theorists. “I was startled by that,” he says. “As an ALP candidate, I had never been treated to such an informative exercise.”

For Pyke, who left school at fifteen to be trained as an electrician and subsequently had a career in the police force, education has become “a life-long passion” and integral to his own political philosophy. More education, less regulation is his formula for a well-ordered civil society, and he is influenced in this view by the writings of Geoffrey de Q. Walker on the rule of law. Another influence is John Keane’s The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), with its portrayal of the democratic ideal as “a potent form of wishful thinking” that, in its origins, “required human beings to think of themselves afresh, to live as they had never before lived.”

There is a whiff of this radical sense of purpose in the way Pyke talks. He’s proud of serving a political leader who wants to turn back the rivers – a reference to Katter’s advocacy of the Bradfield irrigation scheme for which Peter Beattie also showed some enthusiasm during his time as premier. There is a vision of Queensland as restored to the thriving agriculture terrain it once was, and as a newly conceived social economy, with an increased and better distributed population, vibrant local government and diversified local commerce. Campbell Newman’s notions of “Can Do” Queensland are tame by comparison.

It is easy to stereotype minor party fervour as wacky and naive, but where the mainstream alternative is an exhausted realpolitik, incapable of refreshing its own responses to the major challenges of the times, an injection of catalytic energy is called for. But Katter himself isn’t making it easy for journalists and commentators to take his new enterprise seriously. On one level, a touch of carnival has always been part of the style. There’s an element of role play: the wide-brimmed hat, the permanent grimace, and the tendency to talk as if he is literally spitting chips, casting himself as the only spokesperson for sanity in a mad world.

One of the first campaign stunts was the acquisition of a London double-decker, whose arrival was guaranteed to upstage that of any other party’s bus on the campaign trail, especially when it was belting out rock ’n’ roll. The chosen anthems were AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top” (Katter’s tongue is rarely out of the cheek), and “Bad Boys,” recorded by the party’s state leader Aidan McLindon, who spent some of his teenage years as lead singer with a post-punk band. Media coverage of the Katmobile went up a notch when Pyke was driving it through the centre of Toowoomba and was copped for noise pollution by a vigilant police officer. As a former officer himself, and one given to whistle-blowing, Pyke has had contentious relations with some branches of the Queensland police, but he professes a special respect for the Toowoomba force. He had a meeting with them the following day and drafted an agreement. “Noise abatement legislation is so broad you could drive a double-decker bus through it,” he says. (Or not?) “Robust electioneering has to be allowed.”

THAT principle came under another order of pressure with the release of the “gay marriage” advertisement. Political campaign advertising has surely become one of the most dismal forms of public communication, but this hit a new low. It was crass and, more unexpectedly given Katter’s parliamentary experience, politically obtuse: it distracted attention from a whole raft of industrial and economic issues on which he and his candidates were well equipped to make the running. Whatever did he think he was doing?

If the goal was publicity at any price, he may have achieved it. The ABC alone must have given several dozen free runs of the video over the next forty-eight hours in order to illustrate the expressions of condemnation coming from all sides. If Katter was trying to create a further spin on the underdog story, he was likewise successful. Every commentator in the business was taking a free kick at him. But Katter, for all his pantomime country ways, is a sophisticated man who should surely have been aware that recalling the worst tactics of One Nation was not going to help his party’s cause. It was a betrayal of the genuine ethic of public and community service that motivates the majority of his candidates. Yet he appears entirely unembarrassed at the response, and McLindon has given an assurance that they have every intention of putting more cats among the pigeons.

There are cultural issues here, and in particular issues of taste. If it was Katter’s idea of a joke (and I strongly suspect it was), Les Patterson might appreciate the humour. Both Katter and McLindon have track records as stunt men. McLindon got his first real dose of media attention when he gatecrashed the 2005 Big Brother final with his band and gave the contestants a tongue-lashing for allowing themselves to be exploited before an audience of voyeurs. The crash-or-crash through approach has something to be said for it in an environment where no one is prepared to speak out, but it’s a risky principle to combine with any earnest agenda for the future of Queensland.

Katter is, among other things, a walking paradox, an old school right-winger stumbling through an election campaign on two left feet, and his misjudgement here is a reminder of why minor parties tend to fail their most earnest supporters. There is such a thing as discipline in politics, and if the major parties exercise it to the extent of suffocation, minor parties – especially new ones – just don’t have enough of it. Another paradox may be emerging here: the party that fought so hard to have Katter’s name restored to the ballot papers may find he is its greatest liability.

Less than a week before the election, there is no clear indication of how the party’s chances have been affected by the ad, but Shane Knuth has a fair chance of retaining the seat he won by a 5.2 per cent margin in 2009. His nearest rival then was a One Nation candidate. In another irony, Aidan McLindon won the seat of Beaudesert against Pauline Hanson in 2009. In both electorates, voters have surely given enough indication that they do not want a return of One Nation politics. •

The post The double-decker election campaign appeared first on Inside Story.

IMAGINE Bob the Builder declaring that he’d had enough of the freedom of Bobsville and wanted the reins of the outlying areas as well, right up to the borders. Plausible scenario, or a case of gonzo script-writing? Well, something like that storyline gripped Queensland politics last week, as Brisbane’s Lord Mayor Campbell Newman executed a swift coup d’etât against the state Liberal National Party’s parliamentary leadership, announcing he will seek the premiership from outside parliament. Formally, the LNP has recycled an erstwhile leader, Jeff Seeney, but Seeney is happily portraying himself as a puppet to Newman’s puppeteer.

Newman’s manoeuvre has attracted every imaginable reaction, from initial bewilderment and guffawing comparisons with the Joh-for-PM experiment to more neutral but still astonished adjectives such as “audacious.” This week has brought the predictable honeymoon, celebrated by News Ltd’s Courier-Mail and Sunday Mail in headlines such as “Can He Do It? Yes He Can!” (Apologies, reader, I did not invent the concept of politics-as-childish-metaphor.)

Will it succeed? Time will not only tell, but as W.H. Auden reminded us, “Time only knows the price we have to pay.” Time, in this case, could be measured in many months. An election need not be held until June 2012, and recent speculation that Premier Anna Bligh would call a snap poll to capitalise on opposition instability has proved ill-founded.

The Labor administration, led by Bligh since late 2007, entered its thirteenth calendar year adrift in the midst of a protracted economic slump and electoral dissatisfaction. Then, down came the rains and, like Incy-Wincy, the government climbed up the spout again. The performance of its ministers, and especially Bligh, during the floods and cyclone – in tandem with the tendency of disasters to engender community spirit and remind us that government isn’t such a bad thing – saw a rapid revitalisation of electoral respect, especially as measured in the latest Newspoll.

Some say the premier cannot call an unduly early election without appearing completely opportunistic. After all, she only recently pledged to avoid electioneering until the rebuilding was complete. Yet any breach of faith by Bligh has already been outflanked by a double breach committed by Newman. Just two months ago he promised not only to serve the final year of his second four-year term as mayor (council elections are due in March 2012), but also to run again for that position.

Bligh, however, is unavoidably in Campbell’s stew. Newman is already on the state hustings – even before resigning as mayor – and the media is already allocating online space to the “Queensland election.” In the febrility of such campaigning, normal governmental processes will only be able to last so long.

The premier needs to wait-and-see: to wait out Newman’s honeymoon and to see if an inevitably tough budget will be received as responsible rather than mean-spirited. More significantly, Labor has to trust that structural flaws will appear in the LNP’s unprecedented arrangements. It must hope that Newman will make policy demands that the LNP party room can’t accommodate, or that Seeney will make pronouncements in parliament that Newman repudiates.

In searching for an analogy for a leader-outside-parliament like this one, electoral expert Antony Green had to reach into Canadian practice. There, party leaders are elected by a “closed primary” of party members, and can therefore be any party member, although the leader is quickly found a seat in parliament if need be.

A better analogy is the directly elected executive. Newman’s political career has been forged in direct, mayoral elections, and this deeply shapes his methods and presumptions. His whole approach channels the United States’ style of direct appeal to “the people,” with bare lip-service to the traditions of party democracy, let alone parliamentary government.

A core element of our British inheritance is the principle of cabinet government. The premier is first amongst equals and responsible to parliament; the office of opposition leader, and his shadow cabinet, mirrors those roles. Of course, parliamentary democracy weakened over the early twentieth century, and was more or less supplanted by strong party democracy. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in unicameral Queensland. In recent decades party democracy itself has weakened, through a mixture of ideological drift, eroding party bases and a media suffering from a very short attention span. On the 1997 reckoning of American political scientist Bernard Manin, ours has become an age of “audience democracy,” a personalisation of politics in the form of a focus on the individual and above all the leader. It is almost as if mass democracy became too complex, so we are returning to the more colourful, and discretionary, ways of monarchical power.

If this makes Newman a politician of the times, it is not without risk. The possibility of splits between Newman, as leader in waiting, and parliamentary leader Seeney or his party room, is the most obvious. In a sane world, dissension within a party should be accepted as natural, even healthy. But Newman’s authority within the state party is not organic, and he lacks even the representative mandate of having been elected as an MP.

A host of other formal impediments flow from the awkwardness of the position Newman has created. The most obvious is that he will take the profile of party leader without the salary. He will not even receive an MP’s pay or electoral allowance. Newman has already insisted that the party machine, or rather its donors, make that good. Seeney, meanwhile, will possess the resources and staff of the leader’s office. In Queensland, this even includes public money for policy advertising, to partly offset government advertising. Newman will want the puppet strings to be taut.

An irreducible element of responsible government is the opposition’s role in holding the government to account. Ventriloquism may have to occur during Question Time. Labor MPs will be able to attack Newman under the absolute freedom of parliamentary speech; Newman will not only have no right of reply, he will enjoy no such counter-freedom. He and the party director will also have to be careful in using any threats to enforce party solidarity; while a parliamentary leader is permitted to insist on cabinet solidarity, outsiders from the party machine are technically in contempt if they threaten pre-selections to limit MP dissent.

Comparisons between Newman’s move and the (ill-fated) Joh-for-PM tilt of 1987 – when Premier Bjelke-Petersen sought to mount a Queensland takeover of the federal Nationals and the Coalition from outside parliament – are wishful thinking by Laborites. Newman’s is less a hostile takeover and more a case of a party being merged into one man’s ego and bandwagon.

A more enlightening parallel lies in Kevin Rudd’s deposal. In both instances, a party that had been cruising in the polls for a long time encountered leadership wobbles. This precipitated a putsch from within the machine (rather than the party room) on the back of limited internal polling. Et voilà! A new leader, minted overnight, not out of any policy debate or difference, but from assumptions about style.

Except there is one difference. Gillard entered promising a consensual style within her party and cabinet; she is a creature of party democracy and compromise. Newman enters demanding complete control. Indeed, without it the arrangement may founder. The fűhrerprinzip is not only the internal logic of his manoeuvre, it is the external logic as well.

Newman’s appeal begins and ends in the energetic “Can-Do Campbell” slogan, a slogan he has played on for years as mayor. It owes as much to perceptions (his background as an army engineer, his direct manner of speech) as reality. (Newman’s drive has been for big infrastructure, projects, especially those involving tunnelling, to address Brisbane’s traffic snarls. One of these is now bankrupt and residents have experienced years of rate increases well above the CPI.)

Will Newman succeed? For the sake of what is left of parliamentary and party democracy, we might hope not. Certainly, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of multiple leaderships. The Green Party of Aoteoroa/New Zealand, for instance, has accommodated, simultaneously, leaders within and outside the parliamentary team. But that is on a genuine, long-term, co-leadership model.

On the other hand Labor, at heart, is as weak in Queensland as elsewhere. The volatility of the post-flood polls implies no renaissance for the government. Political lore, pre-dating Professor Manin, has it that Queensland is particularly susceptible to the “strongman” leader. The state has urbanised dramatically in the decades since Bjelke-Petersen, but even Beattie’s success owed something to playing up to that role. Bligh is intelligent, if bureaucratic, with her roots in community organisations and the public service. Newman radiates blokeyness. One suspects Newman will succeed but, as Auden said, “If I could tell you, I would let you know.” •

The post Over the top with Campbell Newman appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s almost seventy years since an Australian federal government held power without a majority in the House of Representatives. But minority governments have been much more common in the states and territories, particularly over the past two decades. Since 1990, minority governments have held office for at least a short period in all six states and in both territories. Tasmania, Western Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory are currently governed by parties that don’t have an absolute majority of MPs.

Over the past week in Inside Story we’ve published articles about three well-known minority governments – Victoria’s (1999–2002), South Australia’s (2002–06) and Tasmania’s (since March this year). Each of the three was – or, in Tasmania’s case, has so far been – more successful than expected, and in at least one case significant long-term parliamentary reform has resulted. Some other minority governments have been just as successful; a few have ended in failure and acrimony. Drawing heavily on two sources – Brian Costar and Jennifer Curtin’s book, Rebels with a Cause: Independents in Australian Politics, and Gareth Griffith’s report for the NSW Parliamentary Library Research Service, Minority Governments in Australia 1989–2009: Accords, Charters and Agreements – here’s an overview of those governments.

Tasmania: Uneasy alliances

This two-decade period opens and closes with minority governments in the same state, Tasmania – the first headed by Michael Field and the latest by David Bartlett.

For seven years from 1982 Robin Gray had headed a majority Liberal government that’s best remembered for its promise to dam the Franklin River. At the state election in May 1989, well after that battle was over, the Liberals lost their absolute majority and five Green Independents – among them Bob Brown, then a Tasmanian MP – took the balance of power. Not surprisingly, the Greens refused to support Gray, instead signing an accord with the Labor Party that gave opposition leader Michael Field the numbers he needed to govern. “When an attempt to bribe a Labor member to cross the floor – and save Gray’s government – was exposed, the political atmosphere became superheated,” write Costar and Curtin. “Gray lost a confidence motion on 29 June, resigned and was replaced by Michael Field.” They go on:

In hindsight, the accord contained the seeds of its own destruction by being too detailed and prescriptive. The Greens demanded too much and Labor was naive to believe it could deliver on those demands… Of the accord’s seventeen discrete clauses only one dealt exclusively with parliamentary reform. Ten clauses made very specific environmental demands. Section 9, for example, stated that “the state export woodchip quota will not exceed 2.8889 million tonnes per annum.” Other sections dealt with independents’ access to ministers and public servants which, while reasonable in themselves, were presented in an uncompromising tone. Some demands, such as the one that called for the “abolition of subsidised liquor to ministers,” were relatively trivial.

De facto independent leader Bob Brown was correct to state in the foreword to the accord that the Greens had gained “access to and influence on the whole range of government decisions” but, by being so concerned with detail, the document betrayed a lack of necessary trust between the parties.

The parliamentary reforms spelt out in the accord were less detailed than the other clauses but equally ambitious. Foreshadowing themes that run through many of the agreements struck by independents and small parties in similar circumstances, they included “a total review of parliamentary procedures and standing orders,” “the creation of new parliamentary committees including estimates committees,” a provision guaranteeing Green Independent members “pre-cabinet consultation on legislation” and another promising consultation on appointments to selection panels for heads of public service departments. Little of this program was locked in during the life of the accord.

The agreement’s successes included significant improvements in coastal management and marine parks, but the growing hostility between the independents and Labor limited the scope and longevity of reforms. According to the political scientist Steven Reynolds, the accord broke down “over issues of forestry management, bringing to a head clashes that began with education policy issues not long after the accord was signed. It was formally dissolved in September 1991 when the ALP increased export woodchip quotas in specific violation of the accord.” The Greens continued to support Field’s government over his opposition counterpart until the February 1992 election, which Labor lost.

Four years later, the Tasmanian parliament once again lacked a majority party. Liberal leader Ray Groom had promised during the campaign that he would only head a majority government, and Labor also refused to enter into an agreement with the Greens. Groom resigned and his deputy, Tony Rundle, took over and came to a workable arrangement with the Greens that allowed the Liberals to take power. Griffith writes:

This second period of minority government was not based on either an accord or even a “confidence and supply agreement.” Instead, it was founded on the twin rocks of the personality differences between the Labor and Greens leaders (Michael Field and Christine Milne), on one side, and on an “open door” policy adopted by Premier Rundle towards the Greens, on the other. This policy permitted the minor party to pursue its agenda on such issues as an apology for Indigenous Tasmanians and homosexual law reform.

In an attempt to gain a majority, Rundle announced a snap election in July 1998. The major parties had already combined forces to reduce the size of the Legislative Assembly from thirty-five to twenty-five members; this made it more difficult for minor parties by raising the required quota of votes under Tasmania’s voting system from 12.5 per cent to 16.7 per cent. Rundle lost the election and was succeeded as premier by Labor’s Jim Bacon. “Despite achieving some policy outcomes favourable to the Greens,” write Costar and Curtin, “the Tasmanian accord came to be associated with political instability; its foundering provided a pretext for the major parties to entrench their dominance.”

Despite the reduced parliament, the Greens once again managed to capture the balance of power earlier this year. Although the Labor premier, David Bartlett, had ruled out minority government during the campaign, the post-election negotiations eventually led to a novel outcome: no formal agreement between Labor and the Greens as a party; two Green MPs to sit in the Labor cabinet; and the government reliant on the support of the Greens inside cabinet and at least one Green outside cabinet to pass its legislation. Kate Crowley discussed the agreement, and its success to date, last Monday in Inside Story.

New South Wales: The fabulous fiftieth

As the first Labor–Green accord in Tasmania was breaking down, Nick Greiner’s government in New South Wales suddenly found itself without a majority. After a crushing defeat for Labor in 1988, the Liberal–National Coalition had seemed assured of victory in May 1991. But the final result, Coalition forty-nine, Labor Party forty-six, and four independents, gave one of the independents – Tony Windsor, John Hatton, Clover Moore or Peter Macdonald – the power to extend Greiner’s period in office. Windsor declared his support for the government. But the situation quickly became more complicated when the Liberal Party lost a by-election and the government needed the support of at least two more MPs. Greiner began negotiating with the other three independents about the terms under which they might support his government, and the outcome was a memorandum of understanding, signed on 31 October 1991. According to Costar and Curtin:

Like Tasmania’s accord, the NSW agreement was a very detailed and specific document. But almost all of its nineteen pages sought to enhance accountability of the government to parliament and people; it was policy-prescriptive only in the legal and constitutional areas of freedom of information, the powers of the ombudsman and the auditor-general, defamation laws and whistleblower protection. Significantly the memo had nothing to say about regional and rural New South Wales, reflecting the fact that Moore and Macdonald held Sydney seats and Hatton, while he represented a regional constituency, had made his parliamentary reputation as an anti-corruption campaigner.

Among the reforms implemented under the agreement were a referendum on four-year parliamentary terms (which was held and passed), a referendum on independence of the judiciary (also passed) and the introduction of parliamentary estimates committees and whistleblower protection for public servants. Indeed, argues the political scientist Rodney Smith in his book Against the Machines: Minor Parties and Independents in New South Wales, “most of the reforms were achieved in some part, easily making the ‘fabulous fiftieth parliament’ the period in which independents played the greatest legislative role since 1910.”

In a speech in June 2003, independent MP Clover Moore acknowledged the reforms of parliamentary procedures during this period, but added, “Since the return of majority government following the 1995 election, some of the parliamentary reforms we achieved have been watered down or effectively set aside” – a point also made by NSW parliamentary researchers David Clune and Gareth Griffith in their book, Decision and Deliberation: The Parliament of NSW, 1856–2003.

Unlike the fate suffered by premiers Field and Rundle in Tasmania, it wasn’t a breakdown in the minority government’s relations with the non-party MPs that eventually brought down the government – or at least not directly. Costar and Curtin take up the story:

In October 1991 the former education minister, Terry Metherell, who had not been included in the new Greiner cabinet, resigned from the Liberal Party to sit as an independent. He later accepted an unadvertised position with the Environment Protection Authority, precipitating a by-election in his seat of Davidson that was won easily by the Liberal candidate. Greiner was accused of subverting normal public-service recruitment procedures to induce Metherell’s resignation and improve the government’s position in parliament. The independents insisted on referring the matter to ICAC, the Independent Commission Against Corruption, and threatened to support a no-confidence motion if the premier did not stand aside. For its part, ICAC ruled Greiner’s behaviour to be “corrupt” (a finding that was later overturned by the NSW Supreme Court) and he was forced to resign; his successor, John Fahey, presided over a minority government supported by the independents until the Coalition narrowly lost the 1995 election.

The circumstances of the 1995 election revealed the level of hostility towards the independents in both major parties. Greiner (now out of parliament) wrote personally to all voters in the electorates of Manly, Bligh and South Coast urging them not to support the independents, describing the trio as the power “alcoholics” of NSW politics. “Dirty tricks” campaigns were alleged to have taken place in Bligh and Manly, and Clover Moore described the campaign as the “nastiest” she had experienced. With the election result in the balance (Labor eventually won by one seat), the major parties seriously considered contriving another election rather than dealing with the independents.

The amount of vitriol heaped on the independents by the major parties and sections of the media suggests that they might well have achieved their accountability objectives. Certainly the success of the referendums on four-year parliaments and judicial independence put at the 1995 election suggests this was the case. The referendums were part of the independents’ agenda and, despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the major parties, they secured Yes votes of 66 per cent and 76 per cent respectively.

Queensland: Two very different independents

After thirty-three years in opposition, Labor returned to power in Queensland in 1989. Three years later, with the corruption of the Bjelke-Petersen years still fresh in people’s minds, Premier Wayne Goss and his colleagues won a second election. The expectation was that Labor would win for a third time at the July 1995 election. Partly as a result of its controversial plan to build a freeway through an environmentally sensitive corridor in Brisbane, though, Labor lost nine seats, giving it a majority of just one over the combined numbers of the Coalition and the newly elected independent, Liz Cunningham. Labor had won the seat of Mundingburra by just fourteen votes; after the inevitable challenge and several months in the Court of Disputed Returns, the Liberal candidate Frank Tanti won the seat at a by-election in February 1996.

“For the first time in the state’s history,” writes the political scientist John Wanna, “a single independent held the balance of power between two equally matched opponents. Parliament as an institution began to matter, for the first time in living memory.” That one member of parliament was Liz Cunningham, who – at a media conference convened under a large tree in Gladstone – declared her support for the Coalition and its leader, Rob Borbidge, on confidence motions and supply but reserved the right to vote on all other legislation as she saw fit. She sought no specific policy commitments from the Coalition but did receive additional staff.

Cunningham argued that her decision was justified for three reasons: it avoided another election; the Coalition had polled over 53 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote; and the agreement between herself and the government was “best for my local electorate and for the state as a whole…” As Costar and Curtin write, “Unlike the Tasmanian Greens, who had Labor over a barrel and knew it, Cunningham installed a Coalition government largely because she sympathised with its conservative social agenda and was prepared to hand it an executive blank cheque.”

Cunningham didn’t demand increased accountability and the Coalition didn’t offer it. In fact, write Costar and Curtin, “The Borbidge government proved controversial and cavalier in its notions of accountability. When the parliament passed a no-confidence vote in the attorney-general in August 1997, for example, the premier backed his colleague’s refusal to resign.” They go on:

Despite numerous gaffes and controversies the parliament ran full term, but the 1998 Queensland state election was to prove one of the most dramatic in modern Australian politics. In the best debut electoral performance by any new party since Labor began entering the colonial parliaments in the 1890s, the newly formed Pauline Hanson’s One Nation won eleven seats – five from the National Party and six from Labor. By winning six seats from the Liberals, the Labor Party, now led by Peter Beattie, emerged with 44 seats to the Coalition’s 42. Two independents were elected: Cunningham, again, and first-timer Peter Wellington, who won Nicklin from the Nationals and with whom Beattie began negotiations to form a minority government. These discussions culminated in a six-page letter of understanding from Beattie to Wellington dated 25 June 1998.

As Antony Green observed, “The only alternative would have been a ramshackle coalition of Liberal, National, One Nation and several independents. Wellington chose to back stability…” Reform of parliament, an ongoing budget surplus and detailed guidelines for ministerial travel and expenses were among the requests he made in return for his support. Beattie refused another proposal – the introduction of citizen-initiated referendums – but promised to hold community cabinet meetings outside Brisbane. Although he didn’t get everything he wanted, Wellington agreed to support Labor, and the new government stuck to its side of the bargain.

Wellington believes that minority government worked well. “[O]ne thing that happened was that every minister was on their toes, every shadow minister was on their toes, and every member of parliament was in parliament,” he told ABC Radio National’s The National Interest recently. “There was a real sort of hands-on, ‘We have to really understand what we are doing.’ But I suppose I was sort of in a desperate situation because my electorate was very conservative, and I’m thinking, ‘Well, I think I’ve done the right thing, but let’s see what happens in the next election, I may not be here after then.’”

He was back after the next election (and is still in parliament) but in the meantime the circumstances had changed. Beattie gained a parliamentary majority of one seat after a by-election in November 1998 and Wellington no longer held the balance of power.

The Australian Capital Territory: Hare-Clark on a Robson rotation

Earlier in 1998 voters in the Australian Capital Territory had gone to the polls faced with a choice between the incumbent chief minister, Kate Carnell, and the Labor opposition leader, Wayne Berry. Minority government had been a fact of life in the territory since it had gained self-government; legislation put forward by a cabinet of four government MPs was negotiated case-by-case through the Assembly. But this election yielded an even more interesting situation.

The succession of minority governments partly reflects the territory’s relatively small population, but more important is its unusual electoral system – initially the modified d’Hondt system and, since 1995, the Hare-Clark proportional representation system, which also operates in Tasmania. Candidates’ names are “rotated” on the ballot paper (using the Robson rotation method, to avoid the influence of the donkey vote) and how-to-vote cards cannot be distributed within a hundred metres of polling booths. Combined, these features tend to dilute the influence of parties over the composition of the Assembly. As the political scientist David L. Hughes writes, “Voters are more likely to choose their own combinations of individual candidates, rather than follow a strict party line in allocating preferences. As a result, the public profile of a candidate is very important, independents have a greater chance of election, and there is much greater competition between candidates within a party.”

Both major parties emerged from the 1998 election with six seats, with the balance held by the ACT Greens (one), the Osborne Independent Group (two), and the Moore Independents (one). To break the deadlock, Carnell offered the sole Moore Independent, Michael Moore, the job of health, housing and community services minister in a Liberal government. Moore negotiated an “unprecedented” arrangement with Carnell, “binding him to the conventions of collective cabinet solidarity only in relation to his own portfolio areas and the annual budget bills,” write Costar and Curtin.

This experiment in government was partly prompted by the findings of the Review of the Governance of the ACT, released in the same month, which had recommended increasing the number of ministers from four to five and pondered the possibility of “a looser coalition arrangement that would enable some cross-benchers to serve as ministers.”

One of Moore’s priorities was drug law reform, and in late 1999 his legislation to establish supervised drug-injecting rooms was passed by the Assembly. Although Carnell resigned in October 2000, Moore remained health minister until he retired from parliament in 2002. “I have achieved more in the three and a half years that I spent as a minister than the years I spent on the cross benches…” he said in 2001. “I make no bones about it, it was a trade-off and in accepting a ministry I did lose some of my independence, but not all of it by any means.” The Liberals continued as a minority government until the 2004 election, when Labor surprised observers by taking power in its own right.

As Norman Abjorensen argued in Inside Story last November, “it was probably an anomaly that the sixth assembly elections in 2004 returned the first majority government to the territory in its twenty years of self-government, an outcome that the champions of Hare-Clark had argued was next to impossible. But an exceptionally popular chief minister, Jon Stanhope, and an especially inept Liberal opposition delivered just that.”

Abjorensen’s article was published to coincide with the first anniversary of the ACT’s return to minority government – a Labor government with Greens backing – at the 2008 election. Labor won seven of the seventeen seats at that election and, with the Liberals holding six seats, needed the support of the four Green members to pass its legislation. The result was an agreement that included the Greens member Shane Rattenbury’s becoming Assembly speaker, and a series of parliamentary and policy reforms. Abjorensen wrote:

Parliamentary reform has ranked high on the Greens’ agenda and forms the first part of its two-part agreement with Labor. A key plank is the adoption of the Latimer House Principles on probity and accountability, so named after a Commonwealth conference at Latimer House, London, in 2004. At the root of the principles is a commitment to ensuring that the executive is held fully and firmly accountable to parliament, and that decision-making is transparent and takes proper regard of civil society.

The Labor Party does not pretend the relationship is an easy one. “They are not a party like us; they are four individuals,” says a senior party figure. “They are really a series of interest groups. And their staff come from those groups, so we have to keep very close tabs on what is happening, because the ground shifts.” Another common complaint from Labor is that the Greens are “manipulated” by the Liberals into thinking that government is a monolith and that ministers have only to snap their fingers to get action. Meredith Hunter [the ACT Greens’ leader] denies this, arguing that the Greens’ long-term deep community roots ensure an appreciation of government decision-making and that the Greens are under no illusions as to the complexities of government.

The second part of the agreement focuses on policy and – under the headings of climate change and energy, transport, waste, water, planning, housing, small business, justice, education and health – progress against stated objectives is regularly discussed not just between leaders but among all four Greens and the ministers they shadow. The state of play is then reported on the Greens’ website.

Another nine months later the relationship still seems in good shape.

Victoria: Prelude to a landslide

“The Kennett government went to the polls in September 1999 in a seemingly invincible position,” write Costar and Curtin. “As in New South Wales in 1995, the election result was a cliffhanger. Strong swings to Labor in country Victoria and the election of a third independent, Craig Ingram, in Gippsland East produced a hung parliament, the Coalition securing forty-three seats to Labor’s forty-one with the three independents holding the balance of power. The inconclusive result was complicated by the fact that the sitting member for Frankston East had died on polling day, triggering a supplementary election four weeks after the poll.”

The result, as Brian Costar and David Hayward described recently in Inside Story, was a minority Bracks Labor government with the support of the three independents. At the suggestion of a former premier of Victoria, Joan Kirner, one of the independents, Susan Davies, contacted Premier Peter Beattie and independent MP Peter Wellington in Queensland to obtain a copy of their 1998 agreement, on which the three then based their Independents’ Charter.

“This issue of the balance of power caused me some significant anxieties and significant grief,” said the third of the independents, Russell Savage, at a conference the following year. “Susan very quickly came up with an idea that was quite brilliant and that was to have a Charter and that would get the media off our backs… It is very easy to succumb to the obvious – well let’s get some significant development in our electorate… We believed that… was immoral because it was exactly how the Kennett-style government worked.” The independents had negotiated with both leaders, but found Kennett intransigent on key points.

Government accountability (including a restoration of the independence of the auditor-general), parliamentary reform and the rejuvenation of rural Victoria were the key elements of the agreement with Bracks. Costar and Hayward’s article recounts the three-year relationship between government and independents, and Labor’s growing popularity in the lead-up to the 2002 state election.

“The Frankston East result had revealed a change in electoral mood,” observes Antony Green, “and over the next eight months Labor won two extra-ordinary by-election victories, first winning the Burwood seat of former Premier Kennett, and later winning the rural Benalla seat previously held by Nationals leader and Deputy Premier Pat McNamara. The good news continued for Labor and at the 2002 election, Labor won its greatest ever victory in Victoria, for the first time winning a clear majority in the Legislative Council.”

Not surprisingly, the independents became less influential after 2002. “But they had managed to lock in a number of important parliamentary and electoral reforms, the most noteworthy being the changes to the Legislative Council, which have now become accepted policy,“ write Costar and Hayward. “Despite dire predictions, Victorian government and politics did not descend into instability or gridlock.” When he was asked to comment on that period on ABC Radio National’s The National Interest recently, Steve Bracks said:

I rate that as one of the best periods of government that I had of the period right through the eight years, and the three terms. We had to be on our toes, there was a lot of accountability, but also we had to explain properly what legislation meant, and what it meant to the broader public. Not just simply driving through your agenda because it happened to be a matter on which you were elected on, but to keep explaining, keep consulting, keep working it through. I enjoyed the periods on each parliamentary session where I sat down with the three independents and worked through the legislative agenda, where we’re going, providing support and assistance in understanding better the legislation so they could make decisions. So, in some ways, it was a moderation on your own party and I found that quite useful.

One of the three independents, Craig Ingram, still sits in the Victorian parliament. He told the Age this week, “Most of the outstanding reforms of parliament came as the result of minority governments. We got a significant change of direction in spending towards the regions. The most positive thing about this federal election is that there will be much greater focus on regional Australia.” During that period passenger trains returned to the Bairnsdale line (which runs into Ingram’s electorate), water allocations to the Snowy River and the Gippsland Lakes were increased, and the government promised that the Mitchell River would not be dammed. But another of the independents, Russell Savage, was less fortunate. “He speaks bitterly about betrayal as Labor broke its promises to him,” reports the Age. “Passenger trains never came back to Mildura. Its hospital remained in private hands, and then Labor chose the Mallee for a toxic dump, sealing his defeat in 2006. He has some pithy advice for Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott. ‘Don’t trust anything they say – get them to put it in writing,’ he says. ‘Watch your back all the time – from both sides.’”

South Australia: Shifting alliances

Minorities were a feature of South Australian politics throughout this period. Between 1989 and 1993 Labor formed a minority government with two “Independent Labor” members, losing to the Liberals in 1993. Four years later, an election swing forced the Liberals to rely on the support of a National MP and two independents to retain government over the period 1997–2002.

It’s at this point that the situation became even more interesting. After the February 2002 state election the House of Assembly had twenty-three Labor members, twenty Liberals and four independents. Labor needed the support of just one of those independents to take office. “When parliament resumed on 5 March 2002 [Liberal leader Rob] Kerin nominated independent Rory McEwen as Speaker and opposition leader Mike Rann nominated independent Peter Lewis,” write Costar and Curtin. “Lewis won in a secret ballot twenty-five votes to twenty-two.” They go on:

Peter Lewis had been a Liberal member of parliament for over twenty years. Since the 1970s he had been a gadfly within his party, advocating parliamentary reform and various rural and irrigation policies. Eventually – on 5 July 2000 – he was expelled from the Liberal party room, and he resigned from the party in October. Lewis contested his seat of Hammond at the 2002 election under the banner of the Community Leadership Independence Coalition and defeated the Liberal candidate by 822 votes. Prior to the poll Lewis gave contradictory indications of which party he might support in a hung parliament…

Between polling day and the first meeting of the new parliament, Peter Lewis negotiated a Compact for Good Government with the Labor Party. The compact drew heavily on agreements in other states and included mechanisms to improve ministerial accountability, reform parliament and assist rural South Australia. What was different in Lewis’s compact was his insistence that the government “pass an Act of Parliament and make other such arrangements as deemed necessary by the Speaker [Lewis] to meet such costs and facilitating such processes as may be involved in any aspects of the work related to the establishment of a Constitutional Convention…” The Convention was held in August 2003 and made a number of recommendations to be considered by the state parliament.

But the most remarkable of Rann’s initiatives was to appoint another independent, Rory McEwen, as his trade minister. Like Michael Moore in the ACT, McEwen remained an independent and was free to criticise the government of which he was a member. Norman Abjorensen described the events surrounding McEwen’s appointment, and the appointment of another non-Labor MP to Rann’s ministry, in a recent article for Inside Story.

Western Australia: The coalition that wasn’t

In early August 2008 the Labor WA premier, Alan Carpenter, called an early election for 6 September 2008. Unexpectedly, the election resulted in a hung parliament – twenty-eight Labor MPs, twenty-four Liberals, four Nationals and three independents. Since he’d taken over the leadership of the National Party in 2005, leader Brendon Grylls had pursued greater independence from the Liberal Party, and during the campaign he ruled out any Coalition agreement. Suddenly, with a hung parliament, Grylls and at least one independent were in a position to dictate terms.

The terms for winning National Party support were relatively simple: Labor or the Liberals needed to accept Grylls’s “royalties for the regions” plan, which had featured in the party’s election campaigning. Twenty-five per cent of the state’s mining and onshore petroleum royalties would be returned to regional Western Australia for use in infrastructure and community services via various programs. After a week of negotiations with both parties, Grylls struck his deal – essentially an informal coalition agreement – with the Liberal leader, Colin Barnett.

To add the necessary extra MP, the Liberals appointed one of the independents, Elizabeth Constable, as education, tourism and women’s interests minister. According to Gareth Griffith, she didn’t enter into a formal agreement with the new government, but it might be significant that the Liberals hadn’t contested her seat of Churchlands at the election. Griffith continues: “The other two independent members (Janet Woollard and John Bowler), who have not accepted government or parliamentary positions, have supported the Liberal minority government in the main. Indeed, it was not until 6 May 2009 that the government lost its first vote on the floor of the Assembly…”

Like Rory McEwen and Karlene Maywald in South Australia, National Party ministers in Barnett’s government are free of the usual cabinet constraints in relation to certain issues. Naturally enough, in the WA case these relate mainly to regional issues, although matters of “conscience” are also covered by the agreement.

Northern Territory: The devil in the detail

In August 2009 a member of the NT parliament, Alison Anderson, resigned from the Labor Party over its Indigenous affairs policies, depriving the government of its majority. Ten days later the chief minister, Paul Henderson, struck a deal with the other NT independent, Gerry Wood, who would stay on the cross benches but support the government on supply and no-confidence motions. In return, the government pledged to honour the terms of a written agreement with the MP. According to Griffith:

The terms of this agreement are wide ranging, including substantial parliamentary and constitutional reforms, as well as other policy measures. Perhaps the most interesting constitutional aspect is the agreement to establish a cross-party Council of Territory Cooperation, comprising two government members, two opposition members and at least one independent. Among its objects would be to enhance inclusion and transparency in decision making. The Council would be empowered to conduct inquiries, either referred to it from the Assembly or self-referred, and to make recommendations on matters of public importance.

The government also agreed to reform parliamentary procedures, including reform of question time to allow more non-government questions.

An appendix to the agreement sets out specific policy commitments under a series of headings that indicate the level of detail in the document. These include prison location, caravan legislation, property law reform, lands and planning issues, the environment protection authority, public housing, natural resources and the environment, a strategic Indigenous housing and infrastructure program, youth, rural area issues, special education, local government and “miscellaneous.” Writing earlier this year, Griffith says that the implementation of this program “remains in its early stages.”

AS THESE examples show, the states and territories have already explored many of the relationships that could develop between the Gillard government and the Greens and independents over the next three years. As the prime minister made clear on the 7.30 Report earlier this week, the government is already looking at the experience of at least two states, South Australia and Victoria, and Steve Bracks was an adviser to Labor during the recent negotiations with the three independents. Bracks’s experience – and those of a remarkably high proportion of the state and territory minority governments – suggest that Labor might not be facing quite as fraught an experience over the next three years as many commentators have predicted. •

The post The fabulous fiftieth NSW parliament, and other minority governments appeared first on Inside Story.

SINCE his “rock star” reception in a South East Queensland primary school on day one of the election campaign, Tony Abbott seems to have had a dream run in this part of the country. At the Liberal campaign launch in Brisbane last weekend, his message was essentially: “You can have the Howard government back again, no worries.” As a skilled salesman, he wouldn’t use a pitch like that unless he was convinced the customers were ready to take the goods to the checkout. But although the signs are that Queensland has been leading the way in a strong turn against Labor, the electorate here is in an unstable mood, responding to issues that pull in contrary directions.

As both major parties chase the vote in the south-east sector, a bid to secede from Queensland is under way in the north, led by Bob Katter. The move attracted 98 per cent support among delegates at a recent meeting of the local government association. A street poll conducted by the Warwick Daily News in the state’s south found, not surprisingly, a balance of opinion falling just as heavily the other way. Whatever will please the resource-rich north, it seems, will displease the population-rich south. From a government point of view, this is a no-win situation. Both state and federal governments are Labor at present, so it is Labor that is taking the flack.

On specific policy issues, the state is also both literally and metaphorically a minefield. Take the Toowoomba bypass, for example. The proposal for a second highway over the range has been on the agenda for decades, and the escalating activity associated with mining ventures in the Surat Basin has given a new urgency to the demand for its completion. The problem is cost.

The most recent estimate from the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland puts this between $1.3 and $1.8 billion, and the consensus figure in the local press is $1.7 billion. The Howard government committed $33.25 million, but the state government was unable to broker a viable funding deal and abandoned the project. Abbott’s recent pledge of further support is being widely reported at $700 million and treated as if it is tantamount to a go-ahead. “Abbott: I’ll Build Toowoomba Bypass” was a headline quote on the front page of Queensland Country Life. Given the actual funding breakdown in the formal Coalition commitment, Abbott may indeed be doing it himself. Just $50 million is allocated for 2011, $80 million in 2012, and $150 million in 2013–14. The remaining $420 million is for the next term of office, in 2014–15.

Curiously, Abbott has not had to field questions about the logical relationship between the funding shortfall for the bypass and the proposal for a resource super-profits tax. Siding with the mining companies in the stand-off that claimed Rudd’s scalp has so far left him unscathed, though it is a high-risk strategy, especially in Queensland.

A groundswell of local animosity is building against the dominance of mining interests in the Surat Basin. This is led by farmers who are concerned about the loss of prime agricultural land. A billboard with the slogan “Coal for Breakfast” is mounted on the Warrego Highway on the outskirts of Dalby. Unprecedented alliances are being forged between the farming community and environmentalists. Drew Hutton, formerly a candidate for the Queensland Greens, has resigned his party membership to devote himself full-time to the campaign against the expansion of coal seam gas ventures. Protesters have set up a blockade at Tara in the Darling Downs, to prevent further seismic testing for a gas pipeline.

The ongoing furore over groundwater contamination from the underground coal gasification plant at Kingaroy demonstrates how readily public trust in the mining companies can give way, and how much resentment seethes beneath the dependency relationship. Attitudes to the industry as a whole are volatile and ambivalent. When Xstrata responded to the proposed tax with the threat to suspend work on its open-cut coal project at Wandoan, the public outcry over the loss of jobs went against the Rudd government, but Xstrata’s own tactics could backfire. Threats do not generate goodwill and reminders of total dependency do not support the industry rhetoric of partnership and mutual respect.

This conundrum was highlighted in the mining industry’s most recent anti-tax advertisements, which featured an assortment of people being knocked flying: an elderly woman drinking a cup of tea, a waiter carrying a tray, a woman with a bag of shopping. The accompanying jingle, “You’re gonna get whacked” unintentionally carried a double message: you’ll get whacked by the tax, but we’re the hitmen. How helpful is it for the Coalition to be associated – even aligned – with this kind of intimidation?

Simon Bennison, who authorised the campaign on behalf of the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies, has devoted much of his energy for the past few years to getting state government approval processes fast-tracked in Western Australia. The state government in Queensland, however, is being roundly condemned for too readily giving the go-ahead to experiments in underground coal gasification and coal seam gas. The electoral dramaturgy works against incumbent governments, who must serve as the scapegoats for public ambivalence and resentment over what is essentially an irresolvable dilemma.

So far, the Coalition is managing to sustain a profoundly contradictory position without having to respond to any hard questions. But if he wins the election, Abbott will find himself in deep waters. He will be faced with a set of issues for which there is no clear resolution, and which have the potential to generate a heated backlash, whichever way his government decides to manage them. •

The post Policy minefields appeared first on Inside Story.

WITH THE growing number and influence of independent and small-party MPs in Australian parliaments from the mid 1980s, an important new ingredient emerged in state and territory politics: charters negotiated between independent MPs (or, in one case, the Greens) and the major parties as a precondition for supporting a minority government.

These charters usually committed the governing party to a range of parliamentary initiatives to promote executive accountability and honesty; in return, the independents undertook not to bring down the government by voting against supply or confidence motions. The independents reserved their right to consider all other legislation on its merits and to vote accordingly. Sometimes the charters imposed policy demands on the government; improved rural infrastructure and services, and environmental protection are recurrent themes. Seven of these charters involved independent MPs – in Tasmania, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and the Northern Territory. An eighth agreement, this time between two political parties – the Greens and Labor in the Australian Capital Territory – was examined by Inside Story’s Norman Abjorensen in this article published last November.

The trailblazer, the 1989 Tasmanian Parliamentary Accord, was a little different from most of those that followed. The independent signatories, who called themselves the Green independents, could also be regarded as a political party; and, more importantly, the accord was dominated by very prescriptive environmental policy demands. Each of the charters discussed in this article was the product of the local political circumstances in which the major parties had to deal with minorities to secure parliamentary support to form government. In Tasmania’s case the Liberal government of Robin Gray had lost its absolute majority at the election of May 1989 and five Green independents held the balance of power. The Greens were reluctant to support Gray because of his environmental record, but the premier refused to resign and intimated that he might call a second election. His resolve was not weakened by the publication of the Labor–Green accord on 29 May 1989 and he insisted on his right to meet the parliament as premier. When an attempt to bribe a Labor member to cross the floor – and save Gray’s government – was exposed, the political atmosphere became superheated. Gray lost a confidence motion on 29 June, resigned, and was replaced by Michael Field.

Field himself was to lose office in 1991 because of the collapse of the accord and the withdrawal of Green support. In hindsight, the accord contained the seeds of its own destruction by being too detailed and prescriptive. The Greens demanded too much and Labor was naive to believe it could deliver on those demands. The agreement was a product of Labor’s keenness to return to office after seven years in opposition and the Greens’ eagerness to lock in as many conservation goals as they could as quickly as possible. Of the accord’s seventeen discrete clauses only one dealt exclusively with parliamentary reform. Ten clauses made very specific environmental demands; Section 9, for example, stated that “the state export woodchip quota will not exceed 2.8889 million tonnes per annum.” Other sections dealt with independents’ access to ministers and public servants which, while reasonable in themselves, were presented in an uncompromising tone. Some demands, such as the one that called for the “abolition of subsidised liquor to ministers,” were relatively trivial. De facto independent leader Bob Brown was correct to state in the foreword to the accord that the Greens had gained “access to and influence on the whole range of government decisions” but, by being so concerned with detail, the document betrayed a lack of necessary trust between the parties.

After a term of majority Liberal government, a minority Liberal administration supported by the Greens suffered the same fate in 1998 as Field’s government had seven years earlier. Stung by these experiences, the major parties combined to reduce the size of the Legislative Assembly from thirty-five to twenty-five members which, under Tasmania’s proportional voting system, disadvantaged minor parties by raising the required quota for election from 12.5 per cent to 16.7 per cent. Despite achieving some policy outcomes favourable to the Greens, the Tasmanian accord came to be associated with political instability; its foundering provided a pretext for the major parties to entrench their dominance – until last weekend’s election, that is, when the question of a Green–major party accord became a live one again.

SEEMINGLY dominant, too, was Nick Greiner’s Liberal–National government in New South Wales as it faced an election in May 1991, but here the result would also give independents considerable leverage. The 1988 state election result had been disastrous for Labor and few doubted that Greiner would be re-elected at the 1991 poll. Yet the election produced a lower house in which the Coalition held forty-nine seats to the Labor Party’s forty-six, with four independents. Although one of the independents, Tony Windsor, declared himself in support of the government, the Liberal Party then lost a court-ordered by-election, robbing the government of its majority. Premier Greiner entered into lengthy negotiations with the other three independents (John Hatton, Clover Moore and Peter Macdonald) about the terms on which they might support the government. The result was a memorandum of understanding, signed on 31 October 1991. Like Tasmania’s accord, this was a very detailed and specific document. But almost all of its nineteen pages sought to enhance accountability of the government to parliament and people; it was policy-prescriptive only in the legal and constitutional areas of freedom of information, the powers of the ombudsman and the auditor-general, defamation laws and whistleblower protection. Significantly the memo had nothing to say about regional and rural New South Wales, reflecting the fact that Moore and Macdonald held Sydney seats and Hatton, while he represented a regional constituency, had made his parliamentary reputation as an anti-corruption campaigner.

Somewhat ironically, corruption was to terminate Greiner’s premiership. In October 1991 the former education minister Terry Metherell, who had not been included in the new cabinet, resigned from the Liberal Party to sit as an independent. He later accepted an unadvertised position with the Environment Protection Authority, precipitating a by-election that was won easily by the Liberal candidate. Greiner was accused of subverting normal public-service recruitment procedures to induce Metherell’s resignation and improve the government’s position in parliament. The independents insisted on referring the matter to ICAC, the Independent Commission Against Corruption, and threatened to support a no-confidence motion if the premier did not stand aside. For its part, ICAC ruled Greiner’s behaviour to be “corrupt” (a finding that was later overturned by the NSW Supreme Court) and he was forced to resign; his successor, John Fahey, presided over a minority government supported by the independents until the Coalition narrowly lost the 1995 election.

The circumstances of the 1995 election revealed the level of hostility towards the independents in both major parties. Greiner (now out of parliament) wrote personally to all voters in the electorates of Manly, Bligh and South Coast urging them not to support the independents, describing the trio as the power “alcoholics” of NSW politics. “Dirty tricks” campaigns were alleged to have taken place in Bligh and Manly, and Clover Moore described the campaign as the “nastiest” she had experienced. With the election result in the balance (Labor eventually won by one seat), the major parties seriously considered contriving another election rather than dealing with the independents.

The amount of vitriol heaped on the independents by the major parties and sections of the media suggests that they might well have achieved their accountability objectives. Certainly the success of the referendums on four-year parliaments and judicial independence put at the 1995 election indicates this was the case. The referendums were part of the independents’ agenda and, despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the major parties, they secured Yes votes of 66 per cent and 76 per cent respectively. Nevertheless, Clover Moore lamented that as soon as majority government returned to New South Wales after 1995 “most of the parliamentary reforms we achieved have been watered down or effectively set aside.” She explained that, while the independents hoped their reforms would change the “culture of the parliament,” their impact was overwhelmed by the “more powerful culture of the major parties, especially the Labor Party…”

IF THERE were devils to be found in the detail of the Tasmanian and NSW agreements, the same could not be said of the 1996 compact between the independent member for the Queensland seat of Gladstone, Liz Cunningham, and the leader of the National–Liberal Coalition, Rob Borbidge – for the simple reason that the agreement contained almost no detail. In fact it was hardly an “agreement” at all, for Cunningham declared her support for a minority Coalition government by way of a two-page statement read to the media from under a tree near her electorate office.

The circumstances leading to this arrangement were unusual and controversial. With the collapse of the Bjelke-Petersen regime in the wake of a royal commission into corruption, the Labor Party won the 1989 election in a landslide – its first victory since 1956. The 1989 result was replicated by Premier Wayne Goss and his colleagues in 1992. But at the July 1995 election, partly as a consequence of alienating environmentalists by planning a freeway through an ecologically sensitive corridor, Labor lost nine seats. The government emerged with a bare one-seat majority over the Coalition and the newly elected independent, Liz Cunningham. Then the Liberal Party successfully challenged the result in the seat of Mundingburra, which Labor had won by fourteen votes, and the Liberal candidate Frank Tanti won the seat at the subsequent by-election.

The result in Mundingburra robbed Labor of its parliamentary majority and handed the balance of power to Cunningham. In her statement declaring support for Borbidge as premier, Cunningham pledged her vote on confidence motions and supply but reserved her right to vote on all other legislation as she saw fit. Significantly, she did not demand accountability or policy commitments from the Coalition in return for her support, though she did receive additional staffing entitlements. Instead she defended her decision on the grounds that another election was best avoided, that the Coalition had polled over 53 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote (and voters had confirmed this result in Mundingburra) and that she believed the agreement between herself and the government was “best for my local electorate and for the state as a whole…” In expanding on the last point she cited such existing problems as a leaking roof at a local hospital. Unlike the Tasmanian Greens, who had Labor over a barrel and knew it, Cunningham installed a Coalition government largely because she sympathised with its conservative social agenda and was prepared to hand it an executive blank cheque.

The Borbidge government proved controversial and cavalier in its notions of accountability. When the parliament passed a no-confidence vote in the attorney-general in August 1997, for example, the premier backed his colleague’s refusal to resign. Despite numerous gaffes and controversies the parliament ran full term, but the 1998 state election was to prove one of the most dramatic in modern Australian politics. In the best debut electoral performance by any party since Labor began entering the colonial parliaments in the 1890s, the newly formed Pauline Hanson’s One Nation won eleven seats – five from the National Party and six from Labor. By winning six seats from the Liberals, the Labor Party, now led by Peter Beattie, emerged with forty-four seats to the Coalition’s thirty-two. Two independents were returned: Cunningham, again, and first-timer Peter Wellington, who won Nicklin from the Nationals and with whom Beattie began negotiations to form a minority government. These discussions culminated in a six-page letter of understanding from Beattie to Wellington dated 25 June 1998.

In contrast to the Cunningham compact, this agreement required Beattie to pledge the government to reform parliament, maintain a budget surplus and, reflecting recent scandals, issue and enforce detailed guidelines for ministerial credit cards, travel and expenses. Beattie did not agree to Wellington’s desire to implement citizen-initiated referendums, however, promising instead to hold regular “community cabinet meetings.” Despite this disagreement, sufficient mutual trust had been established that on the same day he received Beattie’s letter, Wellington agreed to support a Labor minority government on the usual terms, though Cunningham complained that Wellington had “jumped the gun” in sealing the contract with Beattie before exhausting all other options.

PARLIAMENTARY reforms were also the key to the agreement between Peter Lewis and the Labor Party in South Australia after the February 2002 state election produced a House of Assembly of twenty-three Labor members, twenty Liberals and four independents. Labor needed the support of just one of the independents to turn out the Liberal government of Premier Rob Kerin. When parliament resumed on 5 March Kerin nominated independent Rory McEwen as Speaker, and opposition leader Mike Rann nominated independent Peter Lewis. Lewis won in a secret ballot twenty-five votes to twenty-two.

Peter Lewis had been a Liberal member of parliament for over twenty years. Since the 1970s he had been a gadfly within his party, advocating parliamentary reform and various rural and irrigation policies. Eventually – on 5 July 2000 – he was expelled from the party room, and he resigned from the party in October. Lewis contested his seat of Hammond at the 2002 election under the banner of the Community Leadership Independence Coalition and defeated the Liberal candidate by 822 votes. Prior to the poll Lewis gave contradictory indications of which party he might support in a hung parliament. An article in the Adelaide Advertiser on 28 January 2002 reported that he “would support a Labor government if its major priority was parliamentary reform,” yet when asked by a reporter from the same paper two days before the poll whether he was intending to support the Labor Party, Lewis replied: “You can quote me. That’s bullshit… clear, unequivocal, hot, green, sloppy, fresh bullshit. I’m not into forming government with Labor.” Nevertheless he listed the Labor candidate second on his how-to-vote card. In a later civil case in which the Liberal Party tried unsuccessfully to have his election voided on the grounds that he misled voters, a Supreme Court judge described Lewis as “a man of high principle… at times impetuous and single minded. I must treat his evidence with caution…”

On 13 February 2002 Lewis announced that he would support a Labor government. He defended this “extraordinarily painful decision” in a statement to parliament subsequent to his election as Speaker. He highlighted his desire to provide stability and certainty of government but also said that he was angered by the Liberal Party’s “arrogant” assumption that he would automatically support its bid to continue in power. He also expressed concern at “the lack of ministerial accountability and parliamentary standards” and the spread of the “parasitic weed broomrape” over pasture land. Following Lewis’s statement the Liberal government lost a confidence vote twenty-three to twenty-two; Lewis did not vote.

Between polling day and the first meeting of the new parliament, Peter Lewis negotiated a Compact for Good Government with the Labor Party. The compact drew heavily on agreements in other states and included mechanisms to improve ministerial accountability, reform parliament and assist rural South Australia. What was different in Lewis’s compact was his insistence that the government “pass an Act of Parliament and make other such arrangements as deemed necessary by the Speaker [Lewis] to meet such costs and facilitating such processes as may be involved in any aspects of the work related to the establishment of a Constitutional Convention…” The convention was held in August 2003 and made a number of recommendations to be considered by the state parliament.

OF THE AGREEMENTS between independents and governing parties, the best-documented is the charter that brought to an end the colourful, controversial Kennett era in Victorian politics. Drawing on earlier agreements but heavily influenced by the specifics of the impact of Kennett’s government during the 1990s, the 1999 Independents’ Charter Victoria unexpectedly handed government to Labor under its new leader, Steve Bracks.

A Liberal–National Coalition led by Jeff Kennett had won the 1992 Victorian state election in a landslide following an unprecedented decade of Labor government. The 1992 result was confirmed in 1996, but at that election there were early signs of the shift in voter support that would take place in 1999. In the north-western rural seat of Mildura, Russell Savage became the first independent member elected to the Legislative Assembly since 1976, and independent candidates in other rural and regional electorates performed strongly. The following year another independent, Susan Davies, won a by-election in rural West Gippsland. But the Kennett government went to the polls in September 1999 in a seemingly invincible position. As in New South Wales in 1995, the election result was a cliffhanger. Strong swings to Labor in country Victoria and the election of a third independent, Craig Ingram, in Gippsland East produced a hung parliament, the Coalition securing forty-three seats to Labor’s forty-one, with the three independents holding the balance of power. The inconclusive result was complicated by the fact that the sitting Liberal member for Frankston East had died on polling day, triggering a supplementary election four weeks after the poll.

The month between polling day and the Frankston East “deferred election” was tense and dramatic. Susan Davies set the tone two days after the election when she told Kennett he should resign. Had her advice been accepted, the Coalition may well have retained government because Kennett’s aggressive political style was unsuited to negotiating with the independents. On the advice of a former premier of Victoria, Joan Kirner, Davies contacted the Queensland premier Peter Beattie and independent Peter Wellington to obtain a copy of their 1998 agreement, which served as a template for what became the Independents’ Charter Victoria. This document went through a number of drafts but, like its Queensland model, emphasised principles rather than details. Accountability of government, parliamentary reform and the social and economic rejuvenation of rural Victoria were the main themes.

For the three independent MPs, drafting the charter was easier than negotiating with the major parties and deciding which of them they would install in government. Premier Kennett wasted no time in putting pressure on them by telling the high-rating radio station 3AW on 23 September that they should support him because they held “conservative” electorates. Tension between the Coalition parties was evident when Kennett insisted on meeting with the independents without the National Party leader, Pat McNamara. Kennett’s negotiating tactic was to try to separate the newly elected Ingram from the other two. He offered the speakership to each of them and then later only to Savage and Ingram. In the midst of the negotiations Kennett also offered the speakership to a member of the National Party. Meetings were held between the independents and the party leaders before Labor and the Coalition were presented with the draft charter on 27 September, when the outcomes in several seats were still uncertain.

None of the participants in the negotiations expected the 1999 election to produce such a fluid political environment. The Liberal Party was in shock; Labor had not anticipated forming government; the independents were in the unexpected (and perhaps unwelcome) position of having to decide the next government. There was no shortage of unofficial advisers to the independents as a myriad of groups and individuals put forward interested and disinterested suggestions. Rating agency Standard & Poor’s (an enthusiastic supporter of the Kennett government’s neoliberal economic policies) issued a news release on 28 September that, while not overtly supporting either major party, warned against future temptation “to turn to pork-barrel politics to address the concerns of rural voters… and the independents…” The agency also observed: “A Labor minority government would also have to contend with a coalition majority in the Upper House.”

Upper house reform soon emerged as a critical issue in the negotiations between the independents and the party leaders. Lawyers and constitutional experts convinced the independents that they could best achieve and sustain their accountability objectives by altering the structure of the Legislative Council with a Senate-type proportional voting system. This presented the independents with a dilemma: the Labor Party had long supported electoral reform to the upper house, but a Labor government could not achieve it because of its minority position in the Council; whereas the Liberal Party, and especially Kennett, was on record as opposing proportional voting but had the upper house majority needed to deliver it. As Susan Davies later said, had Kennett given way on upper house reform the independents would have been under great pressure to support a minority Coalition government.

Kennett was maladroit in his detailed negotiations over the contents of the draft charter. His major problem was that accepting much of what the independents demanded, such as restoring the powers of the auditor-general, would mean repudiating policies he had vigorously advocated over the previous seven years. Labor was advantaged by the fact that most of the contents of the charter was settled Labor policy. Kennett’s strong, decisive but non-consultative leadership style proved wanting when he was required to negotiate and compromise with the independents. He restricted his negotiating team to a group of four – himself, deputy premier Pat McNamara and the two deputy party leaders – and as late as 30 September had not shown the draft of the charter to his party room.

Throughout the negotiations Kennett regularly contacted Savage and Ingram but not Davies, whereas Bracks left all three to their own deliberations. Kennett seriously misread the allegiances of the independents – believing, wrongly, that Davies was a lost cause for the Coalition, and underestimating Savage’s hostility. When Savage was first elected in 1996, the premier had directed Coalition members not to socialise with him and in a later parliamentary exchange called him a “fuckwit.” Kennett made the mistake of trying to alter individual clauses of the charter rather than, as the independents insisted, responding to the document as a whole. The formal Coalition response delivered on 12 October was a detailed document of eighteen pages with a further twelve pages of attachments. Kennett committed to the establishment of a Constitutional Commission to report on possible parliamentary reform, but did not commit to acting on its recommendations. Indeed he stated that “the Coalition is of the view that the options for parliamentary change [in relation to the Legislative Council] put forward by the ALP are fundamentally flawed…,” thereby rejecting a key plank of the independents’ reform agenda. On the other key issue, rural reconstruction, much of the response was given over to a tendentious defence of past Coalition policies.

The independents could be forgiven for concluding that Kennett would rather have gone into opposition than accept the constraints of minority government. Or perhaps he was so confident that Savage and perhaps Ingram would not be prepared to alienate their conservative rural constituencies by installing Labor that he believed he could afford to be obdurate on some points and secure a freer hand in government.

The opposition leader, Steve Bracks, also responded to the independents on 12 October. “I support the Charter in its entirety…” he told them, going on to detail how a Labor government would implement its terms. Having received the responses of the government and the opposition, the independents announced that they would give their decision at 11am on Monday 18 October, two days after the Frankston East supplementary election. On 13 October the Labor Party sent a memorandum of understanding to the independents which sought to establish a formal relationship between them. Davies and Ingram had a meeting with Bracks and his deputy John Thwaites at Parliament House on the eve of the Frankston East election at which Ingram, who had kept his own counsel up to this point, said he would support Labor if it won the next day’s poll. Susan Davies recalls what transpired after the meeting ended:

I was half-way down Victoria Parade when I got a call from Bracks on the mobile. He said he wanted me to come back to parliament. He was pretty pushy. He didn’t usually sound like that. I went back.

Bracks and Thwaites had a memorandum of understanding which they wanted Craig to sign there and then. Craig was going to be out of reach up the Snowy [River] over the weekend. He didn’t want to leave them with a signed document which was only going to be relevant if they won Frankston East and they wanted a signed document as early as possible if that was the outcome.

I took it. I drove home with the memorandum of understanding in my glovebox. It was a very strange feeling. I wasn’t going to sign it until I knew what was happening in Frankston East, and said I would only sign then if there was a clear indisputable result. Craig told me to keep it safe and rip it up if the result went the other way.

Labor won Frankston East decisively. On the following day Bracks’s senior adviser flew by light plane to Newhaven airport, where Davies signed the memorandum. The adviser then flew on to Mildura and collected Savage’s signature and then back to Frankston where Bracks, who was attending a celebratory barbecue, affixed his signature. It had been a month of unprecedented high drama which concluded with the installation of the first minority Labor government in Victoria since 1947.

THE LATEST of the agreements involving independent MPs and large parties involves Gerry Wood MP and the governing Labor Party in the Northern Territory. Struck in August last year after the resignation of Alison Anderson from Labor, it shares a potentially fatal flaw with the first case we discussed, the Green–Labor agreement in Tasmania in 1989. It is overly detailed (thirty-seven projects, many in Mr Wood’s electorate, are listed) and is likely to suffer the same fate as its predecessor.

The majority of the charters we’ve discussed were intended – by the independent signatories, at least – to increase the accountability of executive government. Did they achieve that objective? Alas, Clover Moore’s pessimistic appraisal of New South Wales after the return of majority government in 1995 holds true for the other jurisdictions as well. “Accountability independents” discovered that changing parliamentary cultures, especially in the lower houses, was to prove much more difficult than changing governments. Why? As the author of a recent study of the House of Lords explains, “even true democrats [once] in government will find it hard to prioritise a parliamentary reform which will involve their work being scrutinised more closely.”

This is not to suggest that the various independent charters did not bring about important reforms – most notably in Victoria, where the upper house was thoroughly renovated in 2003. The difficulty lies in making the reforms durable when governments regain parliamentary majorities and no longer need to accommodate minorities. The further development of an “accountability culture” in upper houses presents the best option for durable reform. The independents may come to be seen as “pathfinders” in putting issues and reforms like these on the political agenda, to be pursued and entrenched by those who follow. •

The post Re-entering chartered waters? appeared first on Inside Story.

ANNA BLIGH’s victory in the Queensland state election has proved an acute embarrassment to the Olympian pundits of the Australian national media. Uncritically following News Ltd’s lead, the national print and electronic media announced on election day that Bligh was facing possible defeat or a hung parliament. The Australian said she was in “a knife-edge fight for survival”; the Australian Financial Review said the election was “a cliffhanger”; the Sydney Morning Herald said it was “too close to call.”

As polling closed the ABC’s Queensland political reporter told viewers that the result could be decided by postal votes, that it could be days before the result was known, and that a hung parliament was a possibility. These words had hardly gone to air when the magnitude of the media’s misjudgement became apparent.

There had been a swing against Bligh’s Labor government, but not nearly enough to threaten its firm grip on power. Bligh was returned with a reduced but comfortable majority of some eighteen seats. Lacklustre opposition leader Lawrence Springborg made an early and gracious concession and announced his departure from the leadership.

Newspaper readers looking for some explanation of the media’s failure were hardly assisted by the Monday papers. The Australian published an article headed “How victory was seized from defeat.” It was clumsy attempted self-justification: the fact that newspapers predicted that Bligh was facing possible defeat in no way showed that she had somehow turned a loss into a victory.

Her victory was a personal and political triumph – a reality which the media seemed reluctant to acknowledge. Bligh had led Labor to a remarkable fourth successive election victory; she became the first incumbent woman premier to be elected in her own right; she had overcome the distractions of a deteriorating economy, devastating floods, a catastrophic coastal oil slick and a billionaire backing the opposition campaign.

The losers were the media. Among other things, they generally overestimated the appeal of the recent shotgun marriage of the Liberal and National Parties in Queensland; they also ignored the small but significant advantage Labor gained from last year’s Queensland redistribution (thank God for the ABC’s Antony Green). Nor, with the honorable exception of the Australian’s Tony Koch, did they understand the political importance of recent pay rises granted public servants including teachers, nurses and policemen in shoring up support for the Labor government.

But perhaps more importantly the media’s Queensland election debacle exposed two disturbing aspects of contemporary Australian political journalism. The first is the apparent spin that is put on the interpretation of events by News Limited papers; the second is the strong tendency of other media to follow their lead – especially when they have the empirical support of polls commissioned by News Limited.

News Limited political journalism is overwhelming anti-Labor in spirit and this tendency is reflected across its newspapers. So the company generally interpreted the Queensland election campaign to the disadvantage of Bligh, highlighting opposition claims that Bligh was wrong about the economy and that she was slow to react to the floods and the oil slick. These claims quickly became the orthodox narrative of the campaign and Bligh was universally judged to be “in trouble.”

The polls News Limited commissioned throughout the campaign certainly showed a swing against Labor. But the final poll put Labor behind in the two-party preferred vote by an insignificant 49.9 per cent to 50.1 per cent. The accompanying report in the Australian commented: “If the five percentage point swing since the last election was replicated uniformly across Queensland Labor would lose thirteen of the seats it is notionally deemed to hold after a recent redistribution. On that basis Ms Bligh would be left with a five-seat majority in parliament”.

Nevertheless the headline declared Bligh in a knife-edge fight for survival and the rest of the media, lacking polls of their own, echoed News Limited’s line, reinforcing the perception that Bligh was in deep trouble facing possible defeat or a hung parliament.

What the News Limited poll report ignored was Antony Green’s point that since the redistribution it was going to take a swing of 7.6 per cent to take eighteen seats from Labor and give victory to the Opposition. A uniform five per cent swing would not be enough.

In fact the News Limited poll was wide of the mark: the swing against Labor was 4.3 per cent and Ms Bligh was left with an eighteen-seat majority. She lost six seats and the LNP gained seven, leaving Labor holding fifty-two seats to the LNP’s thirty-three. Despite the News Limited spin that the election was too close to call and that Springborg was in with a chance, the facts were that it was not too close to call and that Springborg was never a serious chance.

Nevertheless the rest of the national media followed the News Limited line and echoed its frankly self-serving and misleading analysis. It was a dismal performance all round.

In the Australian’s unapologetic coverage of the election result it was hard to find any reference to the fact that mid-campaign, in a masterly distraction, a News Limited tabloid rushed into print with what it claimed were raunchy pictures of One Nation candidate Pauline Hanson in the 1970s. In small print at the bottom of page eight there was a passing acknowledgement that the claim was “erroneous” (although the offending newspaper had published a belated apology to Ms Hanson).

For a newspaper that delights in highlighting the swineries of other newspaper groups it was a strange, small and grudging confession that spoke volumes about the standards of care, accuracy and ethics in News Limited journalism. •

The post News Limited’s knife-edge election appeared first on Inside Story.

THE LAST THREE opinion polls, each recording a two party preferred vote of 51 per cent for the Liberal National Party and 49 per cent for the Labor Party, suggest that this Saturday’s Queensland election will be much closer than expected. Three scenarios are possible: the return of the eleven-year-old Labor government with a substantially reduced majority; the election of an LNP government; or a hung parliament in which the government will depend on small party and independent members.

The problem for the newly formed LNP is that it is trailing behind it two dead cats: the very bad defeats in 2006 and 2003. To secure the premiership, two-time loser Lawrence Springborg needs a swing of nearly 8 per cent and a gain of twenty-two seats. This is a big mountain to climb and while he is in sight of the summit he is not there yet.

A key determinant of this election is whether voters in Brisbane will accept the LNP as a truly new conservative party or reject it as a thinly disguised National Party – with all the historical baggage that brings with it. Springborg cannot win the election unless he can improve the LNP’s abysmal performance in the capital city, where it holds only one seat out of thirty-eight.

Fifty-one percent of the vote is a swing of 6 per cent on the combined conservative vote in 2006 – impressive, but not enough to take the twenty-two seats needed to form government. A uniform 6 per cent swing would see the ALP lose sixteen seats, producing a parliament of:

ALP: 47 seats
LNP: 39
Others: 3

But the swing may not be uniform because of the highly regional politics of Queensland, which the opinion polls are not reflecting. Labor could successfully defend some very marginal Brisbane seats and lose regional seats which are beyond the 6 per cent margin, for example. •

Update, Friday 20 March: Another Galaxy poll, another 51–49 two-party preferred split in favour of the LNP. So tomorrow’s result will depend on regional variations and the extent to which Greens voters choose to take up the option of allocating their preferences, and preference Labor.

PODCAST | Brian Costar talks to Peter Clarke about the election issues

REPORT | Peter Mares in Far North Queensland

The post Close, but not close enough appeared first on Inside Story.

AT FIRST, after my plane touched down in Far North Queensland, I couldn’t see much evidence of either financial or climatic turbulence. Towering banks of purple-grey cloud clung to the forested slopes that surround Cairns, but there wasn’t even a tail wind from cyclone Hamish, which was whipping up ferocious seas to the south. My flight from Melbourne had been full and Cairns international airport appeared to be a hive of noise and activity. Disembarking passengers were directed to the terminal through a makeshift walkway of shipping containers, opened out at both ends like empty tin cans and joined together to shield us from tropical downpours. The occasional break between containers gave a glimpse of an army of workers in fluorescent shirts and white hard hats, labouring away on a $200 million airport upgrade. “Three million reasons to build a better airport,” the signs said.

But in Cairns itself those projected visitor numbers look like a legacy of sunnier economic days. The cafes, gift shops and tour businesses clustered along the Cairns Esplanade are quiet, as is the wharf, the departure point for trips to the Great Barrier Reef. Eighty-thirty in the morning should be rush hour here, as passengers are welcomed aboard the formidable “reef fleet,” a collection of giant catamarans, half-day cruisers and small, specialised dive boats. There are gaggles of Asian and European tourists, but no big crowds. Steve, a ship’s captain with passable Japanese, tells me that there used to be no off-season for reef trips. His 400-seat vessel would be full to capacity every day. Now it’s hit and miss, and the big catamaran often heads out half empty.

Over at Big Cat Green Island Reef Cruises the general manager, Kim Thomas, agrees. He’s been running reef trips for twenty-one years and still comes to the wharf every morning to see his boats leave. He says 60 per cent capacity is breakeven for his business, so with boats only half full he’s “going backwards.” Thomas has only seen it this bad once before, during the 1989 pilots strike. “We had a fair idea that couldn’t go on for ever,” he says. But with the global financial crisis, he is not sure there is an end in sight: “I don’t believe we’ve seen the worst of this yet.”

I am in Cairns recording a program on the Queensland election for Radio National’s The National Interest, and that means getting a sense of how the region is weathering the economic slowdown. Tourism is the economic engine of Cairns and surrounding communities, and Rob Gaison from Tourism Tropical North Queensland says the industry creates thirty thousand jobs and is the driver of the construction industry and skilled trades. In June last year, long before the full impact of the global financial crisis, tourism was hit hard by Qantas’s decision to scale back direct flights from Tokyo and cancel direct flights from Osaka. The weekly number direct flights from Japan fell from seventeen to seven, representing a potential loss of 100,000 Japanese visitors per year.

Gaison estimates that two thousand jobs have gone in hospitality and tourism so far, though most have been casual positions held by backpackers on working holiday visas. Only a year ago tourist operators in Far North Queensland were crying out for extra foreign labour and lobbying the federal government for a guest worker program for the industry. The change was “so quick,” says Gaison. Although the industry planned for a downturn after Qantas cut flights in June, he says, no one anticipated that “the floor would collapse beneath everybody” when the global financial crisis hit in September.

Desley Boyle, Labor MP for Cairns and tourism minister in the Bligh government, also expects things to get worse before they get better. She says there is a lot of fear in the local community about the future of the tourism industry, and she’s hoping that this will encourage voters to back Labor’s “jobs-focused election policy.” But Boyle claims she is not confident of retaining her seat, which has been in Labor hands since 1904: “As I’ve got into bed a few nights of this campaign, I’ve thought to myself, Desley, you could be suddenly retired.”

Wherever I go in Cairns, I see Desley Boyle’s election posters – and most of them have been altered by a local political activist who has stencilled the words “Yacht Club” across the MP’s hairline in a typographical tiara. “We have a new yacht club in Cairns that has better facilities than the old one had,” says Boyle defensively. Nevertheless she admits that the old yacht club was “much loved by some old locals who enjoyed a cheap beer on the balcony looking out over the inlet” and “they are very angry that the building is gone.” She expects the issue to cost her votes on Saturday.

As a colleague from ABC Far North Queensland pointed out to me, the demise of the old yacht club is symbolic of the changing nature of the city. The wealth generated by tourism, the emergence of a plethora of small business operators, the northward migration of well-heeled retirees following the sun – all are fundamentally changing the character of Cairns. “It was a very blue collar city all those years ago and it isn’t any more,” says Boyle, with a note of nostalgia in her voice. “Some of the blue collar workers are being pushed out… and we’ve got a lot of new people in town who don’t have any political allegiance or any history of Queensland politics. We think that is putting more and more pressure on the Labor vote in the city and is probably the main reason why I think that it is going to be a very tight call.”

Joel Harrop, the Liberal National Party candidate for Cairns, is certainly banking on demographic change to work in his favour. We meet at the Cairns Base Hospital, an imposing building occupying waterfront land on the Cairns esplanade. In the hallway an Aboriginal kid is playing with a five fingered balloon made from a surgical glove; outside, Indigenous families sit in the spreading shade of tropical trees whose dangling air roots a reminder that the Esplanade parkland was reclaimed from swampy mangroves. The hospital is a major local issue in the campaign. Labor is expanding the facility to create 168 extra beds and introduce new services, like radiation oncology, which are currently only available in Townsville or Brisbane. The upgrade is financed with $530 million raised from the sale of a ninety-nine year lease on the Cairns airport to a consortium of banks. The airport was previously owned and operated by a government corporation, the Cairns Port Authority, and some locals questions the value of the sale, since some of the $78 million in annual revenue from the airport was used to promote tourism in the region.

The Liberal National Party has promised to build a brand new hospital, at a cost of at least $1 billion. Labor says the only way the LNP could be fund its promise would be to sell the prime waterfront land to developers. Desley Boyle says this would be like selling “a sacred site.” But Harrop says Labor’s redevelopment is a “short term plan” and Cairns “needs a world class tertiary health care facility.”

A former army officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, Harrop is young, eager and clean cut. Like all LNP candidates out on the campaign trail, he wears the regulation uniform – a blue party polo shirt adorned on the breast with the yellow and white LNP logo. Harrop declares himself to be “a true Liberal National,” having joined the LNP after last year’s amalgamation and having never been a member of either of its constituent parties. He says that voters are “fed up and frustrated with not being listened to” by the “Labor dynasty” in Cairns, and he thinks southern migrants to the region are likely to support the LNP too. “A friend of mine from Melbourne recently told me that the Cairns Base Hospital reminded him of the Dandenong Hospital back in the seventies,” he says. Harrop says such people will not tolerate substandard services, “which is what we have here in Cairns.”

If Joel Harrop scores an upset and unseats Desley Boyle in Cairns then Labor will almost certainly lose office in Queensland. Labor holds Cairns by an 8 per cent margin, and the swing Harrop needs is roughly equivalent to the statewide swing the LNP needs to capture twenty-two seats from Labor and govern in its own right. Such a result would turn other Labor strongholds in Far North Queensland into marginals. Labor holds the vast electorate of Cook, which covers Cape York, by more than 11 per cent, and it holds Mulgrave, which stretches south from the edge of Cairns, by almost 10 per cent. But, as with the Cairns yacht club, there is anger at Brisbane’s perceived failure to listen to the far north’s concerns over local issues in both electorates. Resentment at Labor’s decision to replace retiring MP and main roads minister Warren Pitt with his son, Curtis Pitt, could dent Labor’s vote in Mulgrave. (According to a reader’s comment on the Cairns Post election blog, Labor has not even bothered to print new election posters. Since the posters don’t have a picture, just a name, “Curtis” stickers have simply been plastered over the name “Warren.”) In Cook, there is lingering bitterness over the forced amalgamations of local councils, particularly around the tourist town of Port Douglas.

An LNP victory in Queensland seems an unlikely outcome, but – as the party’s environment spokesman David Gibson tells me – the required 8 per cent is smaller than the swing that tipped Labor from office in Western Australia last year. I meet Gibson on the SkyRail cable car, where he is campaigning in support of Wendy Richardson, LNP candidate for Barron River, the party’s most likely win in the region. It’s one of the ten seats in Queensland that Labor holds by less than 5 per cent and can afford to lose without losing government.

Barron River stretches north from the suburbs of Cairns. Thanks to a redistribution, it takes in the exclusive resort of Palm Cove – an addition that is unlikely to boost the Labor vote. To the west the electorate stretches up into the Cairns hinterland around the “rainforest village” of Kuranda, where the Greens vote is particularly strong. As the Sky Rail climbs up to Kuranda, the cable cars almost graze the rainforest canopy, and the ride affords a spectacular view of much of the electorate. It passes over the river from which the seat takes its name, and over the falls, which are in full flood thanks to the wet. But like the Cairns wharf, the Sky Rail is quiet. Patronage is down 20 per cent on last year, and operating hours have been cut back to reduce power bills.

When I ask Wendy Richardson what she would do to revive tourism in the middle of a global financial crisis she talks about the “common sense decisions” needed to “make the path as easy as possible for business and tourism entrepreneurs” who are often “confounded at the last minute by some bureaucratic issue.” In practice this means reviewing Labor’s 2031 statutory plan for the Cairns region, which aims to limit the city’s urban footprint and preserve its natural assets. Richardson says it is “extremely important” to protect the environment, but she says the 2031 plan was “a rush job” and is full of “grave mistakes.”

Driving to the base of the Sky Rail I had passed through lush stands of sugar cane on the outskirts of Cairns. I put it to Wendy Richardson that the 2031 plan would also make it difficult for her farmers on the urban fringe to subdivide their land and cash in on development if and when the tourism revives. “Certainly we need to be looking at what that all involves,” she says.

The future of the 2031 plan is one of the key points of local difference between the LNP and Labor. Another is Labor’s plan to protect the Great Barrier Reef by reducing fertiliser and pesticide run-off from farms. Richardson says “we need to look very carefully before we have knee jerk reactions and blame only farmers” for reef damage. “The last thing farmers want to do is pay for fertiliser only to see it washed down the creek and out to sea.”

Wendy Richardson is keen to present herself as a protector of the environment. “I don’t think anybody could represent this electorate who didn’t at least have a tinge of green,” she says. In Cairns, Labor’s Desley Boyle expressed an almost identical sentiment: “I am a very green person myself. You’ve got to be when you live in Cairns and you’re surrounded by the barrier reef on the one side and the world heritage rainforest on the other.”

The Greens won 13.3 per cent of the primary vote in Barron River in 2006 and their preferences secured a surprise victory for Labor. Under Queensland’s system of optional preferential voting, electors can choose to “just vote one” but the sitting Labor member, Steve Wettenhall, knows Green preferences will be required again if he is to survive in 2009. He is urges people who vote Green “to use their second preference wisely.”

Barron River Greens candidate Sarah Isaacs thinks that Labor’s environmental policies are better than the LNP’s, but she believes Labor would not have taken action on issues like restricting urban development and reef run-off without the electoral pressure exerted by the Greens. When I visit Isaacs at her home near Koah, west of Kuranda, I have to abandon my hire car on the main road and wait for her to collect me in her small, rather worse-for-wear four wheel drive. The rough dirt road to her mudbrick house crosses seven creek beds in three kilometres, two of which are flowing fast. Isaacs consults the weather report every evening to decide whether to leave her car out on the main road in case it rains heavily overnight. “If the creeks rise then it’s easier to get through by bicycle,” she says. Together with a dial-up internet connection, running an election campaign from her isolated small farm is a challenging task.

THE QUEENSLAND ELECTION will ultimately be decided around Brisbane and on the Gold and Sunshine coasts, where the majority of seats are located. But if the LNP can make inroads in the far north then their task in the Southeast corner of the state will be that much easier.

Labor holds four of the five seats in Far North Queensland – Cairns, Barron River, Mulgrave and Cook. (Locals were quick to correct me when I inflated the list by adding in Labor’s seats around Townsville. Townsville, I was quickly informed, is “north” Queensland, not “far north.”) The only non-Labor seat in the “far north” (although it stretches as far south to the Mackay hinterland) is the new seat of Dalrymple (created from the abolished seats of Tablelands and Charters Towers). It will be contested between the two incumbents, the LNP’s Shane Knuth (Charters Towers) and Queensland’s last remaining One Nation MP, Rosa Lee Long (Tablelands).

Long has built a reputation for herself as a staunch defender of “northern” interests in the “southern” parliament in Brisbane. “Every parliamentary sitting she’ll ask the tough questions of government and stand up for the people on the Tableland,” says Gavin King, chief of staff at the Cairns Post. “She’s a stark contrast to what Labor MPs do in Brisbane.” The Cairns Post has done Hansard searches to show how rarely Labor MPs from Far North Queensland speak in parliament. “Apart from Dorothy Dixers directed towards Labor government ministers, you would be hard pressed to find a Labor member asking as serious and tough question of their own government.”

The sense that the region is ignored by the government “down south” is palpable. Locals are quick to remind blow-ins like me that Brisbane is closer to Melbourne than to it is to Cairns. As Labor’s Desley Boyle puts it, antagonism towards the south is “a permanent state of mind.” According to Boyle, “In regional Queensland we always have that view that the south-east corner think they run the state, and of course we say dreadful things about people in Canberra, and the triangle of Sydney and Melbourne.” Whether or not such parochialism will actually cost Labor votes at the election remains to be seen, but certainly the LNP is hoping that it can cash in on the sentiment.

“I think Far North Queensland is going to be the lynchpin for the election and if these seats go down we will win government” says Joel Harrop. “Will we get there? I just don’t know, but there is so much anger in the region at being ignored. Brisbane ignoring Cairns is not acceptable.” •

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JUST OVER a century ago Australia’s two non-Labor political parties – Alfred Deakin’s Liberals and George Reid’s Anti-Socialists – merged to form the Fusion Party. The new party was dominated by economic conservatives and suffered a heavy electoral defeat at the hands of the young Labor Party the following year. Nearly one hundred years later, last July, another pair of non-Labor parties merged, this time in Queensland, to produce the Liberal National Party, or LNP. The new party is dominated by social conservatives, and at the state election held on 21 March 2009…

That’s where the LNP leadership hopes the historical parallels will end. But will they? The task facing the opposition in Queensland is daunting: to form a majority government – leader Lawrence Springborg has ruled out negotiating a minority administration – it must secure a swing of 8.3 per cent and take an additional twenty-two seats from the government. In the last Newspoll survey published before premier Anna Bligh announced the election, Labor led the LNP 57 per cent to 43 per cent on a two-party preferred basis. (A new Newspoll, published in the Australian on 24 February, was not large enough to tell us anything useful.) Almost anything is possible in electoral politics, but an added impediment to an LNP win is that it must pick up seats in Brisbane, where it now holds a single, solitary district. It is in this respect that the brutal politics of the 2008 merger may prove fatal.

There was talk of amalgamating Australia’s non-Labor parties from the time the Country Party – later to become the National Party – came on the scene during the Great War. As well as talk there was action: the two parties were blended in South Australia from 1932 to 1975, Queensland in the 1920s and 1930s and in the Northern Territory from 1974. When the federal coalition lost five consecutive elections after 1983, people in both parties promoted amalgamation as a solution, but they were never able to argue convincingly that a single party would win more votes than the two parties exchanging preferences.

Successive leaders of the bigger of the two, the Liberal Party, have generally favoured merger, while Nationals leaders have opposed it. In Queensland, however, the positions were reversed: the Nationals have been much bigger than the Liberals, who have only eight seats in the eighty-nine member single-house parliament, and have been enthusiastic amalgamators for years. The Liberal Party has been divided on the question, with its progressive factions aghast at the Nationals’ history of authoritarian social conservatism but its right wing much more accommodating.

The merger issue has been on the political agenda in Queensland for the simple reason that over the past twenty years the conservative parties have been in office – and only as an unstable minority government – for just thirty months. Relations between the two have oscillated between grudging tolerance and outright electoral warfare, and the Liberals have had the worst of it. The party has never recovered from the acrimonious break-up of the longstanding state coalition in 1983. And complicating the picture is the fact that the local Liberals are the more successful of the two parties in federal electoral contests.

The two serious attempts to create a single non-Labor party in 1993 and 2006 both failed, the second because John Howard, prime minister at the time, did not want the Liberal brand diluted in Queensland. After Howard’s successful intervention the Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce called the plan a “dead duck.”

The duck, however, was to fly again only two years later. What caused the resurrection? The federal coalition lost the November 2007 election and the prime minister his seat. Queensland was central to a victory which meant that all Australia’s jurisdictions had Labor governments for the first time in history. At the local level the Liberals had hoisted a white flag, declining to contest the Central Brisbane by-election. Not long after, despite spending up big, the party failed to win a single seat at the Gold Coast City Council elections. These results were a severe blow to anti-merger Liberals who had long argued that only a stand-alone “liberal” party could win seats in the vital south-east of the state.

In January 2008 the Nationals’ parliamentary leader, Jeff Seeney, was overthrown by former leader Lawrence Springborg, a man who had led his party to two earlier election defeats. “The Borg” is a more aggressive politician than Seeney and had been mightily impressed when he visited Canada in 2003 to observe the creation of an amalgamated Conservative Party. Partly because it does not have ideologically based factions, once the leadership of the National Party decides on a political strategy it can carry it out without internal resistance – as it did in this case, quickly drafting a constitution for a new “Liberal National Party.”

The Liberals fell to public faction fighting. Party president Bruce Spence was pro-merger, Liberal senator George Brandis called it “a bad idea” and a former party president denounced it as “a sellout of the Liberal Party to the Nationals.” But despite the opposition the urge to merge became unstoppable. The new party was formed on 26 July 2008 on terms very favourable to the National Party.

The merger urgers comprehensively out-manoeuvred their opponents. They guaranteed the preselections of all federal members and senators for the next election, thereby neutralising a potential group of opponents. They conducted a ballot of branch members of both parties which showed such majority support that opponents could be labelled “undemocratic.” And, in a final move to placate Liberal sceptics, they agreed that the new party would be the Queensland Division of the Liberal Party of Australia and would have an “affiliation” with the federal National Party.

The political and financial bankruptcy of the state Liberal Party made the amalgamators’ task all the easier. The party was racked with destructive factionalism, was $1.5 million in debt and had little prospect of fundraising from a business community that was generally pro-merger. Over the previous two decades the Queensland Liberals had been in chronic decline, eventually falling below the critical mass necessary to sustain itself as an independent party. Its weakness was starkly illustrated when it made a last ditch attempt to install a former Howard government minister, Mal Brough, as LNP president. Despite insisting that this was a non-negotiable condition, the Liberals buckled when the National Party refused to compromise.

AND NOW, on 21 March 2009, the Liberal National Party will face its first electoral test. Whether the first will also be the last depends on the outcome: a victory or a narrow defeat will vindicate the amalgamation strategy; a poor result will be followed by recriminations and a possible divorce.

Labor has been in government for eleven years. Queensland is beset by serious infrastructure deficiencies in water, health and transport infrastructure. The economic downturn has cost the state its triple A credit rating (though, given their role in the US financial meltdown, the credibility of rating agencies is probably triple D). What impact the economic crisis and the Rudd government’s stimulus package will have is uncertain because of the uncharted party terrain we are in. Labor has gained a slight advantage from the 2008 electoral redistribution but may be disadvantaged by the system of optional preferential voting. Former Premier Peter Beattie made much of telling electors to “just vote one” at the last two elections, but if too many Green voters do so this time Ms Bligh might be caught short of vital preferences.

The LNP has problems of its own: twenty-two seats and a swing of 8.3 per cent is a big challenge. And we can expect Labor to label the new party as the bad old National Party in flimsy disguise. Since the election will be won and lost in Brisbane, that alone could be a deciding factor, and if it is then Ms Bligh will become the first woman to lead her party to a state election victory. •

The current Queenland parliament

Labor – 58 seats
National – 17 seats
Liberals – 8 seats
Independents – 4 seats
One Nation – 1 seat
Green – 1 seat (elected as Labor)

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