Perhaps Mal Brough and his more moderate executive will change the outlook of the Liberals and provide them with a chance to succeed for once by offering people something that they would like.

Some readers here seem to think that all farms are huge rural fiefdoms employing hundreds (maybe Kerry Packer’s was). Go visit a family dairy and be in for a shock.

It is Labor and Liberal that truly support big business. Libs are pro the biggest business winning and Labor only wants to support big unionised companies like Coles and Woolies, not the family corner store.

On the desk issue, the actual growers want a single desk. If you local silo/port facilities are owned by one of even 4 companies you can hardly pay the huge freight costs to find the next port to negotiate a price for all your grain. You will have to take what they offer you - in the best interest of their stock brokers - not growers. This is ideologically driven nonsense by the Libs.

Even more groovy is that Cato the Censor was the originator of it’s basic concepts
http://newcrop.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/history/lecture19/lec19.html
The section on Cato is about halfway down.

Whilst he is right in saying the Nats are mostly anti-abortion, anti-gay etc, it is not universal. NSW National Senator Fiona Nash helped push the RU486 Bill through the Senate, and some Nats MPs in NSW and WA have been reasonably enlightened in opposing the standard anti-gay rhetoric. With the ‘Liberals’ now dominated by arch-conservatives in most states and federally, the differences in this area with the Nats is a lot less than it might once have been. If there is a merger, I imagine the differences will diminish fairly quickly.

The Liberals believe in the free market and it is probably in their economics where they are truly liberal. They believe in pure market principles and that the consequences of what happens next are, in the long term, the best outcome.

The Nationals believe greed is a higher order driver than market principles and market power ultimately destroys market theory. The Liberals believe the market will look after you; the Nationals believe, unguided, it will walk over you.

Whilst this is absolutely true, it is also not far from what Labor believes.

However because Labor and Greens often tend to align, they have little care for regional and rural people as demonstrated when they oppose these following things.

The National Party is a party based on agrarian, socialist principles, as can be seen in the single desk for the orderly sale of wheat, drought aid and regional development.

Should the single wheat desk be completely deregulated, absolutely not. That’ll drive many people into poverty. Should it be deregulated? Yes but limited. So about four desks or so, so as not to overly complicate the issue. After the bogus Iraq rorts affair which every country in the world was doing or has done, this blew up but I’m not sure what the ultimate outcome was.

Drought aid - this mostly gets used up by the big farmers that don’t need it and the multiple subsidies that are available on so many things requires way too much red tape. I agree that some of these farms are unviable but not all.

Regional Development - well these communities do lots of studies and then suggest them to the relevant state and federal bodies and all they do is say we’ll do a study and/or say no outright. That’s another stuff you, there is not enough political capital available. I again refer you to all the new roads and tunnels, most of which are losing money and not being used.

As for the merger, in every layman’s eyes from the east coast to the west coast, from the top end to tassie, the libs/nats are the one party. So it makes sense to formalise it.

The party members of each party however are likely to disagree and from a lay perspective it looks like the libs will block the QLD merger but Graham Young’s blog tends to suggest it’ll succeed.

It takes a real idiot like Joyce to take an ironic insult like “Agrarian Socialists” and turn it into a political philosophy.

Agrarian Socialism is the avowed political philosophy of the Qld Nats. Or at least that’s what the one’s I’ve known has always told me. ‘Course it’s a top down kinda socialism.

That IS Barnaby, dude.

Whoops.
>
Still looks like his grandma’s a toad.

This statement is not totally accurate: “The Alliance, formerly known as Reform, was made up largely of people who had been PC supporters until ‘93.”

The Alliance was pretty much stationed in Alberta. While the PC vote did collapse in 1993 (due to the GST), it did recover a bit in 1997 & 2000 in the Western states. The biggest problem was that the Alliance was unable to capture support in the West.

Regardless, Toby is right. Springborg is very enamoured by the Canadian Federal situation and has visited Canada on a “fact-finding” expedition at least once. Canada has a strangely successful history of political mergers. For another successful example see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatchewan_Party Given that the Queensland Libs are apparently insolvent, this seems to be a very relevant example!

*Sam!!!*

Joh is dead, dude.

And the merger arose because the PC vote totally collapsed in 1993 and never recovered in 1997 or 2000. The Alliance, formerly known as Reform, was made up largely of people who had been PC supporters until ‘93. (Comparing the Alliance/Reform to the Nats is totally off the rails - they’re much much more like a grown-up One Nation that moved to the centre. The Canadian version of the Nats merged with the Labour movement in the 30s to form the CCF which became the NDP)

d

I think Barnaby’s editorial accurately sums up his philosophical outlook. However what Barnaby believes and what other members of the National party believe are two different things. Like every political party, the Nats are not a homogenous whole. There are definitely economic rationalist Nats in the party and hardline protectionists as well.

Similarly, there are social liberals and social conservatives in the Liberal party as well as individuals with varying degrees of confidence in markets. The ALP also has a great deal of ideological diversity in its ranks. The extent to which genuine debate can be managed within a modern political party depends largely on leadership and structural frameworks. I don’t think the reason that the Nats (or rather SOME Nats) are opposed to markets is a salient reason for disagreeing with a merger.

Many Liberals like me are opposed to a merger because they believe that the Coalition arrangement is a much better mechanism for uniting non-ALP political forces. The coalition arrangement allows for ideological, geographical and demographic diversity. The multiple problems with the proposed constitution aside, it seems that this merger is largely inspired by the Canadian model with the (laregely eastern) PCs & the (largely western) Alliance merged. In that particular case, there was a merging of two geographical separate entities. In Queensland though, both entities exist within broadly the same space. It’s one thing to reconcile two entities on opposite ends of the country with relatively similar organisational structures, it’s quite another to reconcile two parties with long histories, mutual animosities, relatively different organisational structures etc…

*Adrien!!!*

That IS Barnaby, dude.