Note: This post was originally published in today’s Crikey email and is cross-posted at Currumbin2Cook. Elsewhere: There’s a good wrap up of the campaign’s third week at The Poll Bludger.
After a scrappy week’s campaigning which featured Beattie’s indecision as to whether there was indeed a health crisis, while Springborg took time off after his father-in-law’s sudden death, Peter Beattie has been clutching at straws to paint himself as the underdog.
Beattie commented to journos that he wasn’t as good a premier as Wayne Goss, suggesting that Labor was still vulnerable to a 1995 style protest vote.
Denis Atkins recently argued in the Courier-Mail that the only protest vote around is the protest of the people of Queensland against the ineffectual Opposition. The weekend polls suggest Atkins is on the money. In two party preferred terms, Newspoll has Labor on 58% while the Sunday Mail’s TNS poll suggests the ALP is at 55%. A Galaxy poll in Saturday’s Courier-Mail of four key Labor marginals, Aspley, Broadwater, Clayfield and Hervey Bay, has a collective 2PP vote for Team Beattie across these for seats of 56%. Party strategists suggest these polls are about right, reflecting closely research on marginals by both parties.
Beattie claims that he can feel the protest vote coming. His political antennae are either sharper than every other Queenslander’s, or he’s making it up as he goes along. 1995 and 1998 were exceptions to the regular Queensland pattern, rather than the rule. The state’s electoral history shows that more often than not, voters deliver very healthy margins indeed to the winning party. The real interest now is in whether Beattie can increase his already swollen majority next weekend.
While the Coalition trundled out John Howard and Mark Vaile as its heavy hitters at its campaign launch yesterday, this is unlikely to set voters on fire. The comparison of Flegg with Howard works only in Beattie’s favour. The Liberals’ likely last shot in the locker to turn around the Beattie landslide that’s rolling towards election day is a controversial ad with a woman claiming that Beattie is responsible for her brother’s death, because of hospital waiting periods. But the focus on this emotive and desperate ad will also highlight the fact that health is not really the biggest issue in this campaign. The big issue is the quality of the Coalition parties.
So Springborg’s the top dog in the underdog stakes?
Weird claim to fame if you ask me.
’sudden death’ is the best way to put it. The MSM including the ABC were particularly insensitive.
As for the latest election ad, it would seem we plumb new depths at each new election. I can’t wait to see some research into the reactions of this appalling ad.
The problem for the coalition is that they have been flogged on a daily basis in question time for three consecutive years because they have been too busy fighting each other to develop any coherent policy.
What happens then is that they just ask the health minister inane questions based on whatever story the ‘Courious Snail’ has decided to run on any given day.
They still haven’t read, let alone understood just what the Blueprint for the Bush entails, or come up with a counter to the Blueprint for the Bush. This has kept the Nats out of town shoring up their own electorates instead of fighting the Government in the Cities and towns of South East Queensland.
The coalition’s response to the Government’s water plan of connecting the Dams in a water grid for the South East of the State was to counter with more dams in even more isolated places and not connected to one another in any coherent way.
That great piece of work was about half a dozen pages in response to about fifty from the Government which once again showed they didn’t have a clue as to what was in the publicly released document from the Government.
Obviously another area that shows how unprepared their work is, would be their policy for people with a Disability. It runs to just over ONE page in length. What a joke the conservatives are with this depth of public policy. Check it out on qldcoalition.org.au for a good belly – laugh. Just don’t even try to take anything from the coalition seriously.
The Coalition also has not bothered to read the Forster Report into Queensland Health either. Otherwise, why would the Coalition policy rave on about Hospital Boards when the Forster report lists consecutively seven reasons not to introduce Hospital Boards. They can read it on the Queensland Health website if they want to know where to find the Forster Review.
Similarly Forster says not to do away with Queensland Health’s zones and disticts but this is exactly what Qldcoalition.org tells us is coalition policy.
It is their laziness that is the biggest problem for the Coalition not the bumbling of the Liberals. The bumbling is a symptom not the cause. The cause is that they haven’t even bothered to find out what the Government is doing let alone come up with an alternative.
The election result should be cause for another good coalition brawl based on what we have seen over the past three years.
Sounds a pretty similar tale of woe to South Oz politics. The Opposition play endless backstabbing power games while in Ranndom the left of centre party carries on pandering to the useless elites and their fads, at the expense of the most vulnerable as usual. This is a typical example here http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,20348915-1246,00.html?from=public_rss
Old Tom Playford would be writhing in his grave at what the current crop of faux concerned elites, have done with his post-war working class suburbs and his SA Housing Trust. The class conscious elites have created their pet white underclass, just as they rooted the blacks. Still what should we care eh? We can retreat further into our leafy suburbs and leave it all in the capable hands of these class experts now.
Naturally in Ranndom they’re big on laura norder statements until it gets down to the nitty gritty of actually policing their outcomes http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,20348771-1246,00.html?from=public_rss
That’s quite right, steve. They’re appalling as an opposition – headline driven and zero smarts and policy development.
The opposition may not be perfect with perfect policies (none have been implemented so judgement is still out there anyway) but the government in QLD are certainly hopeless. One can’t say that Beattie has had Great policies for the last 8 years – look at the poor outcomes. He only reacts himself to what gets published in the Courier Mail or on the news in crisis management mode. How can he say he will now fix things now? He has had his chance. He is the problem. He hardly has confident competent ministers. They won’t even debate the opposition on health or the economy.
Beattie’s biggest challenge in the long run might come from one of his own here http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,20356370-1246,00.html?from=public_rss
Nuclear Mike is about to come over all chilly with those nasty global warming coal miners it seems.