Even if you’re not a local, you might have noticed that it’s been raining in Brisbane a lot recently. Anna Bligh’s taken advantage of fuller dams to execute a backflip on recycled water and to delay the Traveston Dam. These were two issues that the LNP had been making some running on lately, in the first instance aided and abetted by a quite disgraceful campaign about the supposed dangers of water recycling in the pages of, you guessed it, The Australian.
I think the first is bad policy - and it doesn’t give us much hope that Bligh is capable of either holding her nerve in the face of political shenanigans or of practising what she preaches about infrastructure and long term planning. It’s certainly not difficult to envisage the dam levels dropping back down in a few years time, and the whole point of this plan was to ensure continuity of water supply in such an eventuality. The work that has already been done has effectively been wasted.
Traveston is a different kettle of fish. In my view, it was always ill thought out and I’ve long thought it was mainly there to serve as a wedge between Brisbane voters and the Nationals before the 2006 election. I was surprised that Beattie ever went ahead with it after it had played its political purpose. In theory, the change to the scheduling of environmental mitigation measures is a good thing, but environmental concerns as well as its dubious contribution to water supply should actually have seen it canned rather than delayed.
Writing in Crikey today, Richard Farmer appears to think Bligh has executed a cunning political maneouvre. I can’t see it. Continue reading ‘Bligh’s big water backdown’
The Poll Bludger has the numbers on the latest Nielsen poll for Victoria. Labor leads on the 2PP 55-45.
The Age trumpets this result as Victorian Labor “defying the national trend”. No doubt other papers are saying the same - I haven’t looked.
I’ve been arguing for a while that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that there is a national trend against Labor, and that in fact thinking about disparate polls in seven different jurisdictions with differing political histories, cultures and current circumstances as constituting a trend makes little sense. My contention for a long time has been that elections are unrepeatable and singular events and that epistemologically we can know much less about electoral behaviour and find grounds for prediction with much less certainty than we think. Political behaviour follows few laws and a lot of conclusions reached after the fact are questionable.
But there is a sort of reflexivity feedback loop built into the way we think about politics and the way polls are reported. Particularly at state level - where polls are few and far between - one poll which struggles to form a series can have a large impact on perceptions, and thus the interpretations of the public and the press and the morale of politicians and “momentum”.
Continue reading ‘The truth of polls and the epistemology of politics’
This morning the Queensland Liberal-National Party’s latest television advertisement hit the airwaves, jostling for our attention with Amber Higlett’s early news show on Channel Nine. The ad can also be viewed here.
The ad features Laurence Springborg declaring his pride in presiding over the formation of “the LNP” as the first step towards “change in Queensland”. Said change will include things to do with schools, employment, housing and hospitals, and also making Queensland a place “where roads are planned for future growth”.
Two interesting things strike me about the advertisement.
Continue reading ‘Don’t mention the Nationals (or the Liberals, or the environment)’
Daylight saving has begun in some Southern states, but here in sunny Queensland, our political masters have decreed that we’re having none of it, despite government commissioned research which shows 60% in favour and 69% in the South East Corner.
When Anna Bligh became premier, she was quick to rule out daylight saving - a decision which was supposed to symbolise, well, decisiveness and a desire to govern for the cows and the blinds that might fade as well as for pesky urbanites.
It’s not looking like such a good call now. LNP members were instructed by the Borg’s office to avoid the subject when questioned, and flicking the switch to daylight saving would be a deft wedge to expose divisions between the Nats and the Libs in the LNP, as well as to highlight the lack of Brisbane representation on the LNP front bench.
The other day I pointed to ludicrously misreported Galaxy polling showing federal Labor improving its vote in Queensland. Yesterday, the other bit of the Galaxy Poll was published in the Courier-Mail showing state Labor going backwards in Queensland. (Although actually, it only shows this if the comparison is with February - the last three polls show the 2PP bouncing around 52% for Labor and the margin of error isn’t stated. But as usual all the focus is on preferred Premier - where, of course, Anna Bligh is still ahead - but not by so much.)
Richard Farmer has pinged what the national News Limited polling pundits haven’t noticed - the movement in inconsistent directions (although the trend in both cases is weak) shows that their current narrative of “balancing” Labor’s federal dominance by turning on state Labor.
Incidentally, Lawrence Springborg shouldn’t get cocky (heh! bad pun!) about all the good news from the meejah. Continue reading ‘Left right hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing’
I’m planning at some stage in the reasonably near future to write a longish post about Anna Bligh’s prospects (and I wouldn’t comment on Mike Rann’s, not being a resident of South Australia, and thus I don’t think able to assess them with any authority). But there’s a bit of an indicator of the trend from Newspoll which finds a dead heat in South Australia (50-50 down from 54-46 in the last quarterly poll) and only a slight advantage to Labor in Queensland (51-49 down from 55-45).
However, I don’t buy the whole “balancing state and federal governments” argument. States have political cycles of their own which are substantially independent of federal swings of the pendulum. In Queensland, changes of government are very rare, with only six since 1915. That might give you some idea of why Peter Beattie hung on in 2006 when by rights (and he knew it) he should have lost. And the LNP is still looking quite messy. Aside from the internal shenanigans associated with the Nats takeover, Lawrence Springborg has made a couple of big mistakes by not following up on his teaser campaign with any substantial policy in areas such as infrastructure, health and education and by going relatively silent since his great conservative union was kinda consummated. The Borg is now back in a no policy, carping oppo leader zone - with internal rumblings. So I think 2009 in Queensland is still Labor’s to lose.
Continue reading ‘Labor takes a hit in the polls in Queensland and South Australia’
Some very mixed signals were sent over the weekend about the future of the Nationals. Their huge defeat in Lyne will have been disheartening, not so much because it happened, but because Rob Oakeshott won so overwhelmingly with a primary of 64%. The result will encourage Indepedents to try to cherry pick their remaining nine seats. Outside Queensland, where the LNP deal will protect sitting members from Liberal competition and where their three seats are reasonably safe against Labor, the Nats also face potential threats from the Liberal Party when seats fall vacant, and there are some seats which are also potentially vulnerable to Labor. But in the meantime, Labor’s majority in the Reps over the Coalition has increased, and Brendan Nelson can’t take much comfort from a poor campaign in Mayo where the Liberal Party only just held off a challenge from The Greens in a blue-ribbon seat.
But over in the West, Brendon Grylls’ strategy has worked a treat, with the Nats improving their vote and holding the balance of power in both houses. At state level, agrarian socialism and the politics of pork barrelling and extortionate negotiation seems to be a viable strategy for the party. So both Warren Truss and Barnaby Joyce have been contemplating an exit from the federal Coalition. As Andrew Bartlett points out, this is pretty weird for two Queenslanders who are supporting a merged entity at state level. The Nats, of course, don’t see the dissonance, because they’ve effectively swallowed up the Queensland Libs, and are happily preselecting their own members as LNP candidates in state seats which the Liberals had a better chance of winning in, and claiming that the “new face of Queensland” comprises a frontbench where the Borg has only one Brisbane member. Meanwhile, some former Liberals sit on the sidelines, hoping to resurrect their party if the LNP bombs at its first electoral outing when Anna Bligh goes to the polls.
Continue reading ‘Nationals resurgent or dead?’
Denying former Liberal leader Bruce Flegg the shadow treasury spot as payback for his opposition to the amalgamation wasn’t a good start for Lawrence Springborg’s vision of the LNP as one happy Pineapple Party. Now it’s being revealed that some moderate Liberals are urging others to stay within the tent only for time being, while in some federal electorates in Brisbane - particularly Rankin - almost all members of the former Liberal Party have refused to join the LNP. If The Borg can’t convince his own ostensible troops in the capital of his bona fides, it suggests his chances of picking up the metropolitan seats he needs for victory rely only on his own charisma and pr efforts. Perhaps the rebranding of portfolios such as “food security” and “housing accessibility” demonstrates his (so far empty) vision for the future? And didn’t he mean “housing affordability”?
But it’s not all happy campers on the Labor side of the aisle either. Anna Bligh’s own left faction has chafed at her call to re-endorse Police Minister Judy Spence, whose seat of Mount Gravatt was abolished in the recent redistribution. The left’s Ros Mclennan, an independent teachers’ union official, has put her hand up for pre-selection.
From my point of view I’d be glad to see Spence go. She’s a “law and order” Minister of the most egregious kind, and as far as most people can tell, her agenda and the Police Union’s can’t be distinguished in any meaningful sense.
So Anna Bligh’s own faction has challenged her to make her rhetoric of renewal a reality, and to clear the frontbenches of non performers. The fact that this is being aired in public, and that it’s happening at all, is not a good sign. Continue reading ‘Liberals find Pineapple Party prickly, while Labor factions are on the move’
Discussion of the Northern Territory election results continues to be framed in terms of its possible implications for WA, where Alan Carpenter also went early. There are at least two problems with this narrative - first that there’s no evidence but only supposition that the NT result was directly related to an early election (and it’s worth pointing out that after all the insta commentary, it’s now being recognised that the result was the second best Territory Labor had ever attained in terms of primary votes). Secondly, I’ve always felt that argument by historical analogy is at best risky - as patterns that might form the basis for prediction are hard to discern just from political history in the absence of quantitative data. It becomes riskier when you start assuming that what appears (and it only does appear) to be the case in one jurisdiction can unproblematically be the basis for an inference to what might occur in another. The number of qualifiers I’ve felt obliged to use here might be a bit of a clue to the logical force of any such arguments.
Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that politicians think this way, and often seek to learn from campaigns and tactics that appear to have worked elsewhere in the past. There’s a whole mini-industry now, for instance, of importing Australian political consultants to work on and direct British campaigns. One thing I’m surprised no one (to my knowledge anyway) has mentioned is the fact that Alan Carpenter is obviously taking a leaf or two from Peter Beattie’s campaign book.
Continue reading ‘Is Alan Carpenter the new Peter Beattie?’
I note that Brian Costar has been thinking along similar lines to me and Andrew Bartlett on the subject of the formation of the Liberal National Party. He’s put his finger on the key challenge for the Borg and his crew, who haven’t had any amalgamation bounce if today’s Galaxy Poll is to be believed:
The new party is almost certainly to be more conservative than the pre-existing Liberal party – especially on social issues – and this might not prove attractive to the urban middle classes, who are certainly more numerous in Queensland than when Bjelke-Petersen mis-governed the state. Unless the party can harvest Brisbane seats from Labor it will not win government.
Continue reading ‘Queenslandism II’
Nelson gives hope and comfort to Mal Brough:
Dr Nelson - who supported a merger, but wanted voters to see a Liberal as president if the Nationals’ Lawrence Springborg was to be leader - yesterday defended Mr Brough. “I do believe Mal Brough has a future in politics if that is what he chooses to pursue,” Dr Nelson said.
Nice to see Brendan, in a spirit of solidarity, indicating that bumbling incompetence is no barrier to high office in the Liberal Party. But Mal’s problem is that he’s president of a party that doesn’t exist, but might still want a career in politics, but refuses to join the LNP. Continue reading ‘Brendan Nelson’s intervention’
Monash academics Nick Dyrenrfurth and Paul Strangio in retelling the story of the “fusion” of the non-Labor parties at the end of the first decade of federation make an explicit comparison with the formation of the Liberal National Party in Queensland a hundred years later.
The Deakinite Liberals of 1909 entered into fusion in a spirit of sorrow rather than enthusiasm. One declared: “I feel very strongly that we are about to make a mistake and yet, I am sorry to say, I see no possible way of preventing it.” The Age, self-appointed guardian of Liberal-Protectionist faith, was dismayed by coalescence: “Fusion is not a political blend in which liberalism and conservatism give and take, fusion is a sort of political boa constrictor (that) has swallowed liberalism whole.”
Writing in Crikey on Friday, Richard Farmer believed he had cut to the heart of the reasons why the foundation of the Pineapple Party has been accompanied by so many alarums and such bitterness:
Underlying the problem is clearly the impossibility of combining liberal thought, free market believers, Neanderthal agrarian socialism and intolerant social conservatives.
Incidentally, one might note that exactly the same problem has been evident in the post-Howardian Liberal Party, absent the dead hand of Howard himself and the glue of office.
In Queensland, of course, the political traditions and electoral and social geography of the state make both the free market strand and the social liberals very much minority constituencies, and there’s no doubt they will now be swamped by the social conservatives and the agrarian socialists within the LNP. This, of course, raises the question of whether ideology matters, a question posed by Andrew Bartlett in commentary on the contemporary Queensland fusion. Continue reading ‘Queenslandism’
Bernard Keane has a pretty good take on the latest machinations on the Pineapple Party, where The Borg has resolutely refused to allow any compromise on the presidency issue, leading some Liberals feeling (correctly) that the whole thing is just a Nationals takeover. He’s also right to highlight the influence of the Santo Santoro faction, who have now transferred their machinations to the Liberal National Party, since they were unable to achieve their aims in the Liberals. That’s very bad news potentially for the merged entity, because that mob are masters of the art of sacrificing electability for self-serving power grabs.
Where Keane’s article isn’t quite so astute is the claim that:
At this point, they may be relying on Nationals intransigence to wreck the deal.
Continue reading ‘Pineapple Party latest’
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