I have a post at the ABC’s Drumroll on the implications of Cheryl Kernot’s announcement today that she will be contesting the NSW Senate election as an independent.
You can read it here.
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Mark, I am woefully ignorant about how an Independent would set about gathering the support required to successfully campaign for the Senate. If money helps or is needed I’d be glad to donate. What else can one do? I’m on the other side of the country from her. She talks sense. I’ve missed Cheryl from the national scene. Such a pity she seemed to follow her heart rather than her head all those years ago! It’s been good to see her back recently.
I don’t think Kernot’s candidacy will have any effect. I used to be a big admirer of hers, but now I find her – and I’d like to use words that don’t have a misogynist gender bias – but the best I can come up with is carping which probably does have a gender bias, for which I apologise.
She has also become very very boring, but not in a Philip Ruddock kind of way.
$50 that she doesn’t get her deposit back.
You mean she wasn’t even drafted? She has zero chance.
Why does this remind me of the anti-AGW ticket Dr Karl ran on in ’07?
If she directs preferences to the ALP ahead of the Greens then I hope she is ready for the avalance of self righteousness.
Sure, it won’t be as bitter as the stuff directed at her when she was a Labor candidate, but I reckon she’ll finally know what it’s like to be accused of selling out to the dark side ala Meg Lees and the GST (something I don’t think even AD supporters levelled at her when she jumped to major party politics).
@Patricia WA, the short answer is that it’s very difficult for an independent to win in the Senate, unless you’re a high profile candidate in a small state like Harradine in Tassie or Xenophon in SA.
NSW, obviously, is the largest state by population.
Kernot is also disadvantaged by the fact that she’ll appear as a grouped candidate above the line, but without a party label (as she made up her mind, she says, on Tuesday, but party registration takes at least four months).
She may be somewhat advantaged by her media profile, but basically her realistic chances are nil.
What would have been more of a shot is Natasha Stott Despoja taking up the offer to run as an independent in SA with Xenophon’s support.
It might be that Kernot draws some support from The Greens in NSW. The Greens’ chances in NSW are probably their worst out of any state.
Sorry Patricia but I heard about ten minutes of here in two seprate braodcasts and she didn’t say one thing beyond the generic “politics has to be different” and that Rudd and Swan were serial leakers.
Another airhead obviously …
@8 – She’s been doing some serious work in social policy over the last few years since leaving politics. It seems to me you’re rushing to judgement based on a few media grabs, Fran.
I also watched the full interview with Uhlmann on ABC 24 this afternoon, and she impressed.
‘Another’ as well as whom? And on the basis of what? I’ve been listening to Cheryl Kernot since she first entered politics and she is, I can assure you, very far from being an airhead. But if you feel confident about making such a judgement on the basis of ten minutes — minutes that may well have been heavily edited — then there’s no point arguing about it.
Aw, c’mon Mark – that was hardly defamtory.
Truth is a defence, y’know.
So I’m sitting at the candidate draw with a few colleagues, taking notes as the names are announced. And there’s an independant candidate with the same name as my father! And he lives in the same suburb as my father! And his running mate has the same name as my father’s wife…
In other news, the CEC have a breathtaking plan to criss-cross Australia with high-speed rail, and there’s an ungrouped fellow who wants a vehicular ferry service, funded by the states, running Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Norfolk island, Tasmania etc, to encourage young people to take caravanning holidays.
I do so love elections.
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i’m wondering what is cheryl’s purpose in declaring herself to be an independent candidate in such a rush.
its only a couple of weeks before the election.
any one know about this?
Not sure what you mean, kika. Kernot hasn’t been either a candidate or an incumbent for several years, and she is not endorsed by any of the existing parties, so what else could she declare herself on the application form other than an Independent?
P.S. Since candidates cannot actually be officially listed by the AEC until the election has been called, they all have to do it in a rush. It’s just that when they are incumbents, or members of a party that always contests the election and they’re just the latest face, it doesn’t seem like such a rush.
Paul @2: no, you done good. Thanks for your mindfulness.
Um, the Climate Change Coalition as anti-AGW? I guess in the broadest sense of aiming to build policy to work against climate change, but I’m used to seeing “anti-AGW” used to describe people who are arguing that humans have not contributed to climate change at all, which is so not Dr Karl or the CCC.
I’m pretty certain Kernot lobbied Labor to be selected for an upper house vacancy in the NSW parliament within the last four years. She didn’t break her ties to the party when she lost Dickson.
But she can’t declare herself to be a Labor candidate unless she has been endorsed by the party. She hasn’t been.
eta: So, kika – that’s why she has no option other than declaring herself to be an Independent.
Well, I like to think people who want to fight climate change/save the earth are anti- or con- AGW.
Anti-Global Warming activist is obviously a clearer label for such a person, as it’s the denialists who declare their opposition to AGW as a concept. Climate change activist is the most clear description for them.
Anyway, even though I thought they preferenced Labor in the ’07 senate campaign the CCC actually didn’t do that.
What they did was preference the Democrats. I don’t think that did anything to soothe the anxieties of the Greens in what is after all their weakest state for senate elections.
I reckon they would have viewed the election of an AD senator that year as a cruel trick if such a person was voted in with a Fielding-like primary vote.
tigtog, I know that.
I’m looking at this from the Greens’ perspective if she preferences the ALP first.
They’ll say this is a pro-Labor tactic.
Kiki wonders why Kernot bothered to have a go. Perhaps she recognised the weakness of both major parties that have essentially the same economic system. But her success will hinge on this recognition extending to a lot of the voters. Not much chance
Cheryl Kernot may not have been an airhead at her peak but her period in the House of Reps showed that her ambitions exceeded her talents. I agree that “the complex and challenging issues facing us as a nation and a global citizen” are important, but disagree that Kernot is the right person to do much about it (she may have promised to be so at some point in the distant past, but not now). In particular I doubt her capacity to build a team.
There was another one-term MP from Queensland who ran for the Senate in NSW and I predict Kernot will go the same way, i.e. nowhere – and that was before five SOO losses caused Queenslanders to think NSW is a soft touch.
I was under the impression that Climate Change Coalition was a labor-backed green-lite feeder ticket.
nickws, sure – but I was mostly answering kika.
Unless things have changed drastically in her political relations with the ALP, I’d be surprised if she doesn’t preference them first. But who knows – if she wanted endorsement as a Labor candidate and didn’t get it, then maybe she won’t do that. I guess we’ll find out in the next week or so.
@Sam Bauers, the CCC seemed to have a few genuinely decent people as candidates with a whole bunch of other folks mucking up the mechanics of running a party. Where incompetent amateurs and cynical hacks intersected there, I couldn’t begin to guess.
Mark @ 7 – I reckon NSD with Mr X’s support would have had a very good chance of being elected. She still keeps a pretty reasonable media profile.
At the risk of being rapped over the knuckles like a naughty girl for making the point, NSD is a perfect example of a female politician who knew she had to decide, unlike any male politician, between her professional trajectory as a politician and having a family. (Kernot, I think, had one pre-teen or teenage daughter with a highly evolved father, and got into politics late.) One can only hope that if NSD does want to get back into politics the hiatus won’t be the thing that gets in her way, directly or indirectly.
tigtog: my understanding is that because she is standing against officially-endorsed Labor candidates, she’s finished with the ALP and it’s finished with her.
I wish Cheryl would give it a rest. I turn off the televison when I see her. I’m glad she doesn’t live in Qld anymore. I won’t have put her last on the ballot paper.
Andrew E – I suspected as much but hadn’t had a chance to research, or I would have seen this story from yesterday: Kernot to preference Greens, Democrats
I don’t know enough about Betty @ 30 to know where she’s coming from, left or right, so I can’t respond to whatever is her gripe about CK.
Women who go into public life get stereotyped in one way or another, as do men to a lesser extent I suppose. Cheryl has done her share of political manoevring to achieve her past brief span of influence on Australian political life, particularly in her rapid ascendancy to the leadership of the Democrats at the expense of Janet Powell. Her defection to the ALP was, I think, her fatal error. This was where she allowed her heart to rule her head, as I mentioned earlier on this thread, when she was literally seduced into acting against her best interests. That’s my personal take, of course. I think Gareth Evans saw real advantage to the ALP in her defection. What a pity for the people of Dixon they dumped her in 2001 for Peter Dutton! She was fortunate that even then her affaire with Gareth Evans was not publicly revealed until both had left Canberra.
Let’s not forget who shortly thereafter let the cat out of the bag – none other than the charming Laurie Oakes. He claims that outing them
I guess he’s had similar agonising decisions to make before and since then about all sorts of other issues and pollies whose lives he’s had to destroy in the pursuit of journalistic integrity. It’s written into every fibre of his ugly being, isn’t it?
I still think Cheryl Kernot is an intelligent woman who talks sense and still has a contribution to make to the Australian polity. Let’s hope and pray that others like Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard live to fight another day as Kernot is striving to do in these her self-acknowledged final working years.
Ex-democrats don’t have an excellent record in winning elections…
I’m guessing she’ll get 3% of the vote at most.
Patricia @ 32, I don’t think Laurie Oakes would recognise an ethical dilemma if it bit him on the arse. He probably thinks it’s something you eat.
Tigtog’s point about outsiders and factional control is a bit shrewder than some have realised.
We really need a bot-free and human friendly aspect to preselection so that intelligent people get to parliament and not drones..
DI(nr)@ 34 I don’t imagine Oakes will ever eat his words!
As an agnostic I take some comfort in knowing that he is his own Nemesis. The ugliness he sadly sees in all around him and which he reports to the world is his own which is clear to to any fair observer.
I take further comfort from knowing that his victims, those damaged by him, have the opportunity of self reflection and growth, which he will never have. If only Oakes had some redeeming quality like Toad of Toad Hall then I could be let off jury duty and the responsibility to condemn him!
Patricia@32: you’ve smacked yourself in the face with a feminist boomerang.
Kernot’s comments in the decade or so between losing office and now have been all about the media. She’s had her day and the question of how smart she is must be regarded as a separate question.
Put it this way: Julie Bishop is an intelligent person.
PC@11 said:
Then why did she spend here time talking about nothing but vacuous change politics, how the media treated her and who was a “serial leaker”?
She needed to have a message that would grab a headline and instead she signed tu to be another commentator in a crowded field. So instead of offering to cvhange politics she offered more of the very context which authored the politics we have — which is of course exactly what she did last time.
At a purely personal level, whe might well be well-intended, but on this showing she has nothing of value to offer public policy.
I don’t know, because I didn’t hear the broadcast you heard, but I’d guess that that was at least partly because she was responding to questions put to her, and possibly also that what you heard had been edited down from something longer, which is what the media habitually do.
But that’s not the point. It was your lofty dismissal of her as ‘another airhead obviously’ on the basis of ten minutes of radio that I was objecting to, particularly as you don’t appear to know anything about her from earlier times.
I remember her primadonna performance when she was beaten as ALP candidate PC …
About slective editing … everyone knows that if you want to use the media you are only going to get limited space, especially if you are one of the fringe people and so ity’s even more important to stay on message. She should not have allowed any audio that didn’t include what she wanted to say.
e.g.
If someone asks her about Gareth Evans, she simply brishes it aside and sauys: I’m standing because …
But who do you think is leaking?
The real question is who is leaking but who isspeaking about the key issues, which in my opinion are [...]
@40 – if you’re interested in a more comprehensive take, and a thoughtful interview with Kernot, Fran, you could always catch it again on iView.
And it’s hard enough for Gillard to get her message across, so I think your comments on Kernot are just wrong.
That’s correct. Doesn’t matter who you preference; if you run against the Labor ticket, you get expelled. The rule’s even written on the front of the Party card.
OTOH if Kernot runs for the NSW LC in March next year, she might have a decent chance of winning a spot, and she’d be a much better crossbencher than some of the fools and lunatics we’ve got there now.
@42 – Liam, I’d be a bit surprised if she’s been an ALP member for some years now.
Mark Said:
Think about how little time the Greens get to develop an idea in the mainstream media, despite the fact that they are likely to hold the BOP and have been an established party for 25 years. By that yardstick, Kernot’s coverage was massively generous and based almost entirely on her candidacy being a news item on the basis of “where are they now/balst from the past/ Laurie Oakes”.
A candidate who runs on “change politics” who immediately accomodates existing politics in her dealings becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
That she failed to understand something which we here all see slapping us about the head speaks to the grasp of the world and of herself that she has. This isn’t a desire to change politics. It’s a desire to correct her legacy so that the last thing people remember about her isn’t a public tantrum over losing. She really ought to withdraw on greenhouse gas abatement grounds …
Frankly, I have more respect for Mal Meninga, who, mid press-conference, had an epihany, realising he wasn’t up to it and walked out on his candidacy.
And as to Gillard having trouble getting her views across … that would largely because she doesn’t have any distinctive views. And whose fault is that?
I am surprised at the level of personal dislike and disrespect towards Kernot shown here. I heard an interview with her on ABC radio on Friday- what a pleasant contrast to the robots one normally hears. She did good work with the Democrats, they were a credible party at that time. In the ALP she was as much a victim of Beazley~s indecsion as anything else. However, she surely has no chance of getting anywhere near a Senate seat.
Good luck Cheryl – a breath of fresh air and the most charming and human of politicians.
?t would be great to see her again in a leading role in the Senate – along with the Democrats. What a contast to the lot we have now – including most Greens Senators.