From today’s Crikey email:
The official Liberal line about the merger you have when you’re not having a merger was that it was necessary to delay even the establishment of an “eminent persons group” until after the Brisbane and Gold Coast elections on Saturday. Eminent persons, along with all other Liberals, were presumably too busy campaigning for Campbell Newman.
It’s now becoming clear just what sort of a furphy this postponement was.
The colour of the cat that’s been let out of this particular bag is easily discernible from the pronouncements frontbencher George Brandis has been making about the Borg’s dream of a “United Conservative Party”. Brandis isn’t alone, of course, in putting a favourable spin on Campbell Newman’s landslide win in Brisbane, but he is just about alone in trying to spin the Libs’ awful performance in their first local government outing on the Gold Coast.
Members of the existing dis-united Liberal Party have reacted predictably to the Gold Coast disaster. Fingers are being pointed at the unpopular State Director, Geoff Greene, and the none too subtle point that Campbell Newman ran his own campaign has been pointedly made. Questions are being asked about the resources plunged into “Team Tate”, and local Liberals kicked out of the party for running against endorsed candidates haven’t been shy in making their feelings clear.
Airing the party’s dirty laundry in the wash-up of the Gold Coast defeat is predictable. Less predictable is Brandis’ desire to spin a message that might have made sense had the Libs done well. One of the key points of contention between the State Libs and the Nats has been over seats on the tourist strip. Once a Nationals bailiwick, demographic change has seen both Labor and the Libs successfully encroach on their traditional territory over successive state elections since the early 90s.
A good Liberal performance in the local elections – where party labels have previously been absent from the ballot – would have reinforced the argument that the Gold Coast was a blue bit of the state, and that the Liberal brand had superior selling power in urban Queensland.
Of course, it hasn’t quite turned out like that.
But Brandis’ performance really does show that the road to a United Conservative Party in Queensland is probably a dead end, as far as many Liberals are concerned. John Howard, in some ways rightly, copped a lot of criticism for failing to intervene in the tortured and byzantine internal politics of the Sunshine State Liberals. There is no doubt that something needs to be done to put the party back on its feet.
It may well be that, despite his own ambivalence about the Liberal brand, Campbell Newman proved a point about the electability of a basically centrist Liberal administration. Voters might agree in theory that a single conservative party is a good thing, but results and policy matter a lot more.
That might be a lesson Brendan Nelson might profitably ponder when he sits down to chat to Queensland’s eminent persons over cornflakes. That, and the fact that it’s unwise to stake your leadership on an amalgamation so publicly condemned by one of your own prominent frontbenchers.
Good stuff. It looks like we won’t know the Gold Coast Mayor till after Easter:
All the other Libs are dead and buried.
One can only wonder where the Libs might be if Labor had actually supported their candidates on the Gold Coast a bit more back in November. As I’ve said before, local Libs like Steve Ciobo won double-digit victories (again) largely because there was so little real opposition (and don’t forget that Murdoch owns the Courier Mail, the Gold Coast Bulletin, The Australian and even the free local weeklies up here).
With the massive influx of younger residents from down south over the past five years, this was a real opportunity to dump the Gold Coast’s image as “a blue bit of the state” once and for all. Even if Labor had lost, the seats would no longer be considered quite so “safe”. I’m those massive (but artificial) margins must have contributed to the Liberals’ over-confidence in the council elections!
PS: I thought they were going to call it the “Conservatives United National Team”? LOL
Whoops! “I’m those massive…” = “I’m SURE those massive…”
Good article, however I have to say that the Gold Coast is more Liberal than the Brisbane City based on past election results. So the point about Campbell and Greene running concurrent campaigns in the Southeast should be emphasised.
Both campaigns had a strong leader and good policies and money to spend. One (Newman) has won emphatically; the other (Greene) has lost just as emphatically.
Not only that but Campbell is 2 from 2 from campaigns he has run away from the Liberal HQ where as Greene is now 0 from 4 after his move to QLD from SA. 2 from 6 if you count the QLD by elections that were never really going to be won by the ALP. Bugs Bunny would have won as a Liberal!
As for the joint party, it will not happen. Maybe a third conservative party will be formed and maybe the Nationals will collapse or merge into (or absorbed by) the Liberals but I don’t see the demise of the Liberal Party in the foreseeable future.
I get the impression that the Nationals would do better if they were independent of the liberals. I don’t see how they could amalgamate… the parties have different underlying philosophies.
The Liberals would do better if they moved away from the Nationals old Conservative ideals and situated themselves as a true soft right progressive party.
Even if there is simply one party or two the problem remains that all that would happen in a merger is that whereas before there were two terrible parties they would simply roll it into one terrible party as the ideals and vision would not change just simply be under another name.
I have a feeling that the Gold Coast campaign come down to who ran it- as pointed out above as opposed to people not liking Liberals. Just lookingg at the ECQ website for the last state election and the one before (if pfranks info is correct)as well as the GCCC election it would seem that Greene is excellent at getting about 1/3 of the vote and that is it.