From today’s Crikey email:
Queensland Liberal National Party leader Lawrence Springborg – often accused by his Labor opponents of being a policy free zone – was quick out of the blocks on Monday, making an announcement about trail bike tracks. The self-styled Borg, having intimated last year in his rebranding exercise that he’d soon have the solution to all Queensland’s problems in the key domains of health, education and transport, has retreated to a small policy, small target approach.
This stance is justified by the economic situation, and a whole lot of the rhetoric the Queensland Nationals have been spouting for decades about low taxes and the evils of debt. But actually the game is being played this way because the hard work of policy formulation simply hasn’t been done, and because the LNP’s idea of a successful campaign strategy is to wait for Anna Bligh’s Labor government to fall over of its own accord. All Springborg has to do, the thinking goes, is look bright and shiny and new, and the “unified conservative force” will find its own path to victory.
The Borg’s trail bike bonanza, though, didn’t exactly make a huge splash in the press. And what reaction it did get showed some elementary political steps hadn’t been taken by his office – such as alerting relevant interest groups and anticipating their comments. The trouble with bite sized policy is that while it’s supposed to sound positive and uncontroversial to the general public, there are always groups who care deeply about the area and who may bite back.
But probably of more significance was an apparently throwaway comment the Borg made during Monday’s launch. For reasons which are rather obscure, he started talking up the possibility of former Minister Mal Brough running for a Labor held state seat. This is quite bizarre – because Springborg and the Nats relished the opportunity at the time of the amalgamation to destroy Brough’s career during his ill fated incumbency as Liberal Party President.
Sources Crikey has spoken to rule out any possibility that the Borg has seriously approached Brough. It would appear instead that the LNP’s polling suggests continued weakness and scepticism among urban and outer suburban Liberal voters – whose support the opposition desperately needs to be within even a mile of toppling Bligh. But Springborg has adopted a strange way of seeking to win these electors over. Just as with his trail bike announcement, he’s failed to anticipate the response – it’s more likely than not that this remark will re-open old wounds, and smoke some disillusioned Liberals out of the closet and back into the public gaze. Just what the opposition leader doesn’t need on his ride to putative victory.
Resistamce is futile you will be assimulated
Wasn’t the latest polling dreadful in any case? Jeez, I remember Borg turning up in 1989, when only 21 or so, touted then as the future.
The guy’s like the old gag about Brazil: he has potential – and always will.
Queensland politics is quite depressing isn’t it. Labor flounders about in power and the opposition flounders about in… powerlessness.
I have been most impressed with the quality of the brawling and factional infighting since the merger. It seems to be performed with renewed vigour.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24888618-5006786,00.html
“ome elementary political steps hadn’t been taken by his office”
Because they ain’t got the Rolodex. Remember Bennelong when Howard had 4 uni students prepare letters to every constituent with an Asian sounding name in the phone book along the lines of “I value the contribution China has made to the world …” and then sent them to Vietnamnese Japanese, Malaysian, Thai and Korean voters?
You know, none of those nations have any problem with China, not at all (!).
And all McKew had to do was reach for the Rolodex and get in touch with the local community organizations – the ones that the ALP has spent decades building links to while the Tory’s barely acknowledged their existence.
Keating was right. The Tory’s aren’t a political party, they’re an outfit.
Trail bike paths will substantially reduce congestion on rural roads. Another brilliant policy from the Borg.
Well, I can’t say I’m all that surprised that the LNP aren’t really acting within the system, instead choosing to act against it, but what do we really expect?
If were looking for some policy from the LNP, maybe we should be talking to Clive Palmer instead of Lawrence Springborg? Adding once again to my ever growing distaste for this coming election and its near inevitable result, I now have to undoubtedly have to endure an annoying local campaign in my home seat fueled by the aforementioned rich person’s son. Urgh, when will this just end.
PinkyOz
The LNP folk are out in force today that’s for sure! Sitting on every second street corner in the hot sun.
Clive Palmer’s son in running in Nudgee against Neil Roberts. Safe Labor since its creation in 1960, Roberts has a margin of 18%. Palmer’s election is unlikely.
Running in Redcliffe for the LNP is Bill Gollan, a used car salesman, who resides on the wrong side of the Bridge at Brighton. Yet the Redcliffe throw-aways record him as ‘choosing to live in Redcliffe’. Perhaps after the election?
“The LNP folk are out in force today that’s for sure! Sitting on every second street corner in the hot sun.”
Think they will tire of that behaviour very quickly when they realise that the early election panic is all being driven by the Liberal National Party and their cheersquad at the Courier Mail.
Yep, just cause News Limited writers say there’ll be an election in February doesn’t make it so.
Lefty E @ 2 – yep, the Borg’s been in parliament for 20 years. I’ve noticed Anna’s been reminding everyone of that recently, and querying what he’s achieved over two decades.
Incidentally, his birthday is a day after mine, so I’m happy at any rate that you can be 41 and still be “young”, “fresh” and “new”
Yep, 20 years of being ‘the future’. I remember seeing his head in the C-M way back then adn thinking “wow, someone my age is in parliament”. Then again, those were the days when Russell Cooper was “young blood”, invigorating the class of ’68 geriatrics in the NP.
The one I felt sorry for was Bill, cant remember his last name, wouldnt post if it I could though; kinda liked him actually, NP nerd that was he was.
He was our age, graduated hons in ’89 and got a plum job up as a QLD NP Ministerial adviser – about 10 minutes before the bunker was overrun on Dec 2. have never seem him since… wonder what he’s up to.
Ah, remembered the name, and found him. He ended up working for John Anderson when he was Deputy PM.
That makes sense….
Shock, horror, surprise, surprise… longish-term ex-headoffice-CFMEU staffer gets selected as candidate for safe-ish Labor seat …. Mary Carroll .
Could be interesting how she manages the Greens preferences issue, cos on the 2006 sitting member’s numbers, half a Brough-sized leakage from labor to green, (the Ronan Lee type ex-laborite constituency as it were, it’s an already verdant electorate, and if such a constituency has developed, it would be here) would see the seat going to preferences. A similar leak from tory to green would see greens harvesting tory preferences, a bit of an unknown/ unreported quantity since it’s usually been the greens whose preferences get counted and reported.
If the Greens really think the seat is winnable, and realise Tory preferences are The Only Way to get there, and work with the LNP to shift the seat, that labor safe-ishness could evaporate, but it’s a very unlikely if: as the above post suggests, the Borgias aren’t much chop at Machiavelli, it’s too much like work for a start, and requires discipline and a modicum of strategic thinking.(The same can probably be said for the Greens, except they aren’t scared of work per se, as in policy development, just the down-and-dirty electoral dealings type work.)
Oh, I nearly forgot, the ex-CFMEU staffer candidate is standing for the LNP, (= on topic), she’s the LNP state party secretary, perhaps even the brains of the outfit, might just have a head for preference matters, as above.
what a joke of an electoral system. there’s not even a senate. the greens could win 12% of the vote or more and not get a single seat – ever. I hate it.
danni, interesting theory but I’d have thought the the goal at the next election for the Greens might have been to fight the Tories and retain Indooroopilly. Plot yourself a graph of all the newspolls in Queensland since 2001 with a running trendline and it will show you exactly how badly the Liberal National vote has fallen away since about August last year. It will only take about an hour or so as the Queensland Newspolls only come out every quarter with an extra couple thrown in just before each election.The results will astound you.
A policy for those active, who can stay fit and healthy riding a bicycle somewhere else, other that a main road or pedestrian path.
Steve, Hopefully Ms Carroll’s media monitor service (aka auto-googling) has picked up her mention here and, as party secretary, she will also pick-up on your suggestion about getting modern, professional and scientific about keeping up their end of the representative democracy deal: the provision of a credible alternative as a bulwark against incompetence, tyrrany, and corruption in government.
I don’t need them charts to tell me folks think the lnp are only gammon, that getting the borgias a bus and a helicopter to help convince themselves with the make-believe that they are electioneering is a bad joke. It’s just plausible that Uncle Clive was prepared to spend so much on his son’s education, and there’s probably a tax deduction there anyway: surely the LNP MP is an endangered species, and the party itself is a registered
basket casecharity.Which doesn’t worry me in the slightest, except it bodes ill for any chance of good governenece when the opposition is a joke. Catch the video stream for state parliament sometime and you’ll see just how ill boding can get.
I assumed the Ronan Lee/Indooripilly thing was preliminary to him being given top spot on the greens queensland senate ticket, harvesting the 12% yeti mentions, tho Ms Waters might have something to say about that, and we might see a new blood sport as the greens tear themselves apart over it, much to labor’s glee.
danny,it boggles my mind as to how someone like that was office manager for the CFMEU. Is it a case of a lefty turned right or a Tory posing as a lefty. I’m sure it was a happy and healthy working environment during her tenure with the CFMEU if she now finds herself fitting in with hardcore tories as state secretary of the Liberal National Party.
Steve: maybe it’s retaliation for the way the tories managed to get their Manchurian candidate, Agent Krudd, installed. You gotta give them marks for long term planning, getting him to join the party at 15 was very deep cover. The way they managed t
(cont.)…(t)o get the end-game maneuvres financed by the unions was fiendishly clever, and getting Johnnie off the hook, out of the house, and onto his pension plan, while allowing the left to think they won Bennelong was the icing. They knew the financial tsunami was coming, Costello told us, and they just didn’t want to be holding the bags when it hit, so they took a fall. That last little leafletting caper on the eve of the election was a bit overkill, but they couldn’t take any chances of winning I suppose.