I have struggled to find anything good to say about Brumby, and his overt policies and covert politicking frequently madden me.

As a Greens voter he has given me cause to think the unthinkable – Would I preference Baillieu over Brumby? At least in the upper house, I feel like I have no choice. As far as climate change goes, which is at the top of my ‘reasons to vote’ list, Brumby could not get any worse, frankly. I’d love to know if there is any policy in this regard that he hasn’t managed to kneecap, water down, or plain abandon.

Anyone up for a drive in a six cylinder car on a brand spanking new freeway to visit some not-yet-quite-protected old growth carbon-sink, I mean forest?

Anyone familiar with the political science literature knows that attempts to demonstrate any posited strong correlation between state and federal partisan choices over time falls down very quickly – even in New South Wales where it’s long been political myth that the strongest case can be made. In part that’s because there are two few cases of actual partisan change in elections over much of the postwar period

Its silly to included Menzies in any analysis of our post-modernising political system. He belongs to the old days of rusted on voters, ideological politics and gerrymandered electorates. Baby Boomers show much weaker partisan loyalties than their Geezer Doomer parents.

There is some possibility of a kind of tactical balancing voting between state and federal jurisdictions, but within the federal polity. We’ve certainly seen it in the HoR v SEN (which is a “states house”) since 1972.

My theory is that state jurisdictions will tend to show a permanent bias towards the ALP for an indefinite period. Mainly because ALP state govts are in the business of being Santas with the welfare state. Most demographics nowadays favour govt handouts. So the ALP is reaping the political benefits.

The LN/P will still win the odd election, if it tacks to the Left of the ALP on economic issues eg the NSW LN/P did so in the electricity privatisation debate and has gained in popularity. Or if the corruption and incompetence of state ALPs becomes to obvious to be bearable.

But the most likely explanation for the recent swing towards the LN/P in the states is the most likely explanation for all swings: the state ALPs are suffering from recessional phase of the electoral pendulum.

The wall-to-wall ALP state govt era started in 2002. It is now late 2008. So most state ALP govts are well into their second or third terms. That is approaching the median term for any govt in post-Menzies AUS. Mumble lays out the stats:

The year 1970 can be seen as the beginning of modern politics, with reasonably fair boundaries and bipartisan professionalism.

The average tenure of all governments elected since 1970 rounds out to seven years. We know that statistic: it’s the seven-year “itch” in a marriage, the average time in one residence…It’s human nature, and electoral behaviour is mainly about the voters, not the politicians.

If we throw in the states and ignore the governments in power today, in the past 35 years we have seen three one-term governments, eight two-term governments, seven three-termers, two four-termers and one five-term government.

So two terms has been the most common life-span of a government, followed by three terms. At the two extremes, short and long governments are rare.

It’s called electoral gravity: re-election just gets harder.

/

That is political reality in a post-ideological era, kind of boring isnt it? Also not good for pundits who make profits from pontificating on policies. As mumble says: “Elections rarely turn on those things commentators talk about.” (Thats why there are so few jobs for political pundits.)

Few punters give a damn about political brand loyalty these days. Once in a while they like to throw the bums out, just for a change.

Tyro Rex! So!! you will feed you newborn infant child this recycled water will you? And while your there, lets hear your answer to the condition of the pipes, Oh the pipes the pipes have it! Oh danny boy. Now was that, .008ppm ?

Dear Mr Berghofer,

I don’t have a newborn infant child so the question is moot. But the answer is yes, and I will drink it myself, the water will be perfectly safe. The stories in the Australian are lies. At best unscientific misrepresentation.

So uhh … Colonel … what you’re telling me is that polluting our precious bodily fluids is some sort of communist plot? Shall we go to code red and launch the Air Wing?

Do I look all rancid and clotted? You look at me, Jack. Eh? Look, eh? And I drink a lot of water, you know. I’m what you might call a water man, Jack – that’s what I am. And I can swear to you, my boy, swear to you, that there’s nothing wrong with my bodily fluids. Not a thing, Jackie.

Interesting, Lefty E. But as a counterpoint to the current vogue for non-boring pollies. Two words: Jeff Kennett. Come to think of it, Joh B-P, Russ Hinze etc. were fairly colourful too. That was part of their insidious modus operandi. “The Joke” was on us!

And in WA we had the Daily Double of Sir Charles and Richard Court for the Libs, while on Labor we had Brian Burke.

I observed how ironic and probably painful that scenario was, and got the impression there really was no-one else here other than overseas vendors at that level of enterprise capability (sic). One might ask what citec was all about.

What? There are several local integrators active in Brisbane – of varying quality.

CITEC is a complete joke. They pay peanuts, and barely get gerbils, let alone monkeys.

OzEmail wrote an entirely new LOGIN.CMD file (in the shareware on the cover disc of a 95 APC magazine), which had the effect that a user would automatically, and without the need for further modification, be connected to OzEmail as an ISP

Crude but effective, huh?
Take note of the respondent name, google that with turnbull, packer, kennedy, if you’re at all curious.
But for our purposes

In April 2003, WebCentral was awarded a $20.3m Managed Internet Service (MIS) contract with Education Queensland. Within a period of 90 days, WebCentral along with partners Dimension Data and Sun Microsystems, implemented email, web hosting, content filtered web browsing, virus scanning and a customised portal to 1,350 schools – on time and on budget…In 2000, the founders raised $11m without losing control of the company by selling 49.4% of WebCentral to listed company FTR Limited..

My local member at that time was education minister, had carriage of that contract. You can find out who FTR was, ie into whose deep pockets a fair swag of Qld Education Department $$$ was going to go.
I observed how ironic and probably painful that scenario was, and got the impression there really was no-one else here other than overseas vendors at that level of enterprise capability (sic). One might ask what citec was all about.
“the founders” did very well indeed for a few early bulletin board types. When the www came along, and websites were strange and wonderful things, for which bornagain used car salesman types were getting away with charging a fortune for putting together, powerup, as it then was, put together a “website in a box” product which looked like it would cut everybody’s lunch.

Danny – yeah OK that’s a fair point, but actually I think that trogdolyte labour in retreat except for NSW. As a displaced NSWman I must say I find the whole ‘Smart State’ schtick amusing, especially as my employment specialisation is in the field of ICT. I can tell you for a fact that government IT projects (and QLD IT is dominated by Government, unlike in Sydney where in 15 years I rarely did any Government work) are complete time-wasting resource-burners which will never deliver what was promised, and still blow their budgets. In my view they should sweep half the vendors out of the place (esp. software vendors, replace them with open source equivalents) and sack every single IT manager who hasn’t delivered a successful project in the last 6 months. You meet so many talentless dills in those roles – and you know, they prefer to staff their projects with similarly talentless dills. In my view they can cut their IT budgets by 25% and actually deliver 50% better results if only they went about things even half-way right. But try telling anyone in Government that.