Tag Archive for 'privatisation'

Queensland Labor: How low can Bligh go?

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in Politics, Polls and Queensland
. 20 Comments

The Poll Bludger has all the figures on a disastrous Galaxy poll for Queensland Labor. The 59-41 two party preferred in favour of the LNP isn’t so significant in the context of optional preferential voting, where many voters don’t preference past their first choice, but a 48-31-13 split in favour of the LNP, Labor and The Greens respectively should really have the ALP very worried indeed.

While the election is a long time away, Labor’s polling has been appalling since very shortly after Anna Bligh’s government was returned, with the vastly unpopular privatisations being accurately seen as a symbol of a fundamental loss of public trust in state Labor. To return to a position where they’re even competitive would probably require both a new leader and a reversal of the asset sales decision.

The Greens’ primary vote should be very encouraging for them – it’s very high in the Queensland context, and a lot of it would be concentrated in marginal Brisbane and coastal Labor seats. I would imagine that a lot of Labor’s primary has moved straight over to the LNP, and that The Greens’ increase in support is probably coming from the more ideologically committed segment of the ALP vote. With the primary vote all important in Queensland, the rational move for the ALP if it were to pursue a save the furniture strategy would be to go to the left to rebuild its primary and maximise preference flow. Don’t hold your breath, though. We’re more likely to see more hard hat bluster.

2010: Bye bye Bligh?

Published
by
Mark
3 months ago
in Politics and Queensland
. 32 Comments

Back in August, I had this to say about Anna Bligh’s Labor regime in Queensland:

Anna Bligh’s credibility was one of the few things the ALP had going for it in the March state election. Her opposition to the dictates of ratings agencies was a hallmark message. The announcement after Labor squeaked back in that the fuel subsidy would go, that public sector wages would effectively be frozen and jobs disappeared through efficiency dividends, and, particularly, the plans for the sell off of state assets have seen the trust the electorate had in Bligh collapse.

I also wrote, commenting on her efforts to turn the situation around:

But the public aren’t inclined to credit her for decisive action — because the basis of trust that existed between citizens and their Premier has already dissipated.

At the time, I was met with some scepticism in comments. At the end of the year, I think it’s pretty clear that Bligh’s regime has the smell of death about it. Anyone who doubts that should have a look at Graham Young’s latest polling [links to posts on quant and qual respectively].

Bligh’s woes have been compounded by the departure of her chief of staff, Mike Kaiser. His replacement, Nicole Scurrah, is something of a policy wonk, and it’s difficult to see any semblance of a political strategy from the (shrinking) Bligh camp, beyond toughing it out and proclaiming the virtues of ‘tough decisions’. Hiring Bernie Fraser on 2 and a half grand a day to pacify the unions was a waste of money, and the partial backdown on the privatisations (now to be 50 and 99 year leases instead of full sales) has not stemmed the tide of public and union anger.

The last month or so has seen serious discussions within the party, caucus and unions about removing Bligh. It’s important to recall here that Bligh has alienated many on the left, both in caucus and in left unions, and also in the faction’s rank and file. There’s a host of intra-factional bad will, which is somewhat tangential to the broader consensus forming that removing Bligh is the only way to give Labor any chance at electoral survival, but which has its own effects.

Monday saw reports of moves to convene a special party conference to reverse the privatisation push. This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the machinations going on at the moment, some of which are described in an article by Andrew Crook in today’s Crikey [paywalled]. Continue reading ‘2010: Bye bye Bligh?’

Quiggin on Bligh’s arguments for privatisation

Published
by
Mark
4 months, 3 weeks ago
in Economics, Politics and Queensland
. 32 Comments

John Quiggin has posted a withering critique of the arguments that Anna Bligh has put forward for her privatisation program.

The Bligh’s government’s original case for the asset sales announced in the June budget was that the state’s finances had deteriorated drastically since the previous assessment at the time of the March election, as part of the generally declining outlook for the world economy. That argument has collapsed as the Australian and global economies have strengthened with the result that the Queensland state budget managed a surplus for 2008-09, as opposed to the projected $500 million deficit.

It would be possible to argue for some (though not all) of the proposed privatisations on the grounds of economic efficiency, but of course arguments of this kind are no more (and, given the epic failure of financial markets seen over the past two years) arguably less valid than they were before the crisis, at which time Labor rejected them.

That leaves the argument that the asset sales will improve the state’s finances. Such arguments depend on showing that the value derived from selling the assets exceeds the value realised by keeping them in public ownership. In this opinion piece, Bligh attempts to make such a case, but the arguments involve hopelessly invalid apples-and-oranges comparisons. When a policy is defended by such obviously shoddy arguments, the only reasonable inference is that the correct assessment comes out the wrong way.

Read the whole thing!

Anna Bligh’s very bad week

Published
by
Mark
7 months, 2 weeks ago
in Crime, Economics, Federal Elections, Politics, Queensland and State/Territory Elections
. 48 Comments

From today’s Crikey email:

Anna Bligh certainly wasn’t exaggerating when she observed that Queensland Labor had a bad week. Nor has this week started off well for her, with a Galaxy Poll showing her approval rating plunging to 33%, just barely ahead of a disastrous Labor primary of 30%. Nor, seemingly, are many disillusioned ALP voters parking their votes with The Greens. The Liberal National Party scored a 48% primary, and all this washes through to a 59-41 two party preferred lead for the LNP.

As William Bowe notes at The Poll Bludger (where he also has more detail on the poll), the numbers may be inflated precisely because of the beating Bligh took over recent days. But there’s enough evidence around (including a poll commissioned by the ETU on the privatisation of public assets) that the Queensland regime’s support has collapsed very quickly.

Galaxy asked a range of questions stemming from Tony Fitzgerald’s accusations last week about corruption and cronyism, and found a large majority of Queenslanders disillusioned with both their government and the Queensland Police Service. Bligh would have taken cold comfort only from Wayne Goss’ favourable comparison of her with her predecessor Peter Beattie in remarks he made recently, given that Goss also pointedly referred to the dangers of long term incumbency in creating a climate where ethical lapses flourished.

It’s unsurprising that comparisons have been made with the last days of the National government, which Goss himself swept out of power almost two decades ago. But a better analogy for Anna Bligh’s current plight might be the re-election of the Keating government in 1993.

Continue reading ‘Anna Bligh’s very bad week’

The budget is not the economy

Published
by
Mark
9 months ago
in Economics, Media, Politics, Queensland and State/Territory Elections
. 16 Comments

I think there are quite a few self-inflicted political problems for Queensland Labor in the presentation of the budget handed down on Tuesday afternoon. But Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser certainly aren’t helped by the ubiquity of the ‘debt is evil’ theme. Witness George Megalogenis’ front page column in The Australian yesterday:

QUEENSLAND has replaced the usual suspect of NSW as the nation’s sickest state and threatens to drag Australia into a prolonged recession.

Queensland has by far the worst budget position of all the states, and its citizens face the sharpest fall in living standards as unemployment is forecast to almost double in the next two years, from 4.25per cent to 7.25 per cent.

In fact the budget projections show Queensland below the national average in unemployment, and contracting less than the national economy. It is certainly legitimate to question the Bligh government’s economic strategy – and also to question why more wasn’t done in the Beattie years to build up infrastructure and public services. But Megalogenis’ argument conflates the state’s fiscal position with the health of Queensland’s economy in a false and unhelpful way… though it’s probably less unhelpful to Bligh than the “85 billion on the credit card” front page in the Courier-Mail yesterday. Perhaps she can take some comfort from the fact that the C-M’s overt bias towards the LNP had no discernible impact on the March election result.

New LNP leader John-Paul Langbroek delivers his reply in Parliament today. No doubt it will be all about debt and deficits. The ALP is more interested in beating up stories about a leadership challenge, part of a move to wedge and split the LNP on the privatisation bills. It’s a mystery to me why Labor Ministers would be chortling about the prospect of LNP (probably former National) members voting against a firesale of state assets.

Ps: For those interested, the Queensland budget papers can be found here.

What’s with Anna Bligh?

Published
by
Mark
9 months, 1 week ago
in Government, Policy, Queensland and State/Territory Elections
. 54 Comments

In the wake of the unnecessary firesale of state assets, the Bligh government has continued down its merry path of trashing Labor policy. Last week we had the refusal to take any action over the charges laid against a 19 year old Cairns woman for “procuring an abortion” by using RU486. Now, it seems, we’re going to see Bligh “muscle up” and take on the public sector unions by reneging on a promise made for pay increases of 4.5%, 4% and 4% over the next three years of enterprise bargaining agreements. The government has already been slashing casual and short term employment across departments and state agencies. Tomorrow’s budget is rumoured to contain cuts to public sector superannuation entitlements and we know that it will place a cap of 2.5% on pay increases.

The state election campaign was a shambolic affair, and it was almost lost. Despite an inept performance, Labor was re-elected primarily because the “jobs” theme and the promise to continue to invest in public infrastructure despite the economic crisis touched a chord with voters. Anna Bligh made much of standing up to credit rating agencies.

So why the turnaround? A couple of factors are at work. The first is Bligh’s inability to set her own direction, adopting rather the path of least resistance recommended by right wing apparatchiks in her office. Let one grumpy voter in a focus group whine about debt, and, well, forget the election promises. Secondly, there’s the misplaced obsession with “strength”, driven by the same advisers. This apparently means tossing Labor policy out the window and pursuing supposedly popular brawls with unions.

This mob have an inability to understand that Labor governments always need to pursue a direction contrary to that favoured by the big end of town to be a success. Talk of ‘reforms’ in the context of short-sighted privatisations is quite risible in this context.

Nor is Bligh apparently capable of learning from the past. Wayne Goss’ government was defeated not by the ‘Koala road’, but in large part because years of managerialist lunacy alienated the public sector vote. Similarly, the slashing of services in outer suburban and regional areas and decisions such as the one to close down the QR workshops in Ipswich in the midst of a recession and deep structural economic change had a lot more to do with the rise of One Nation than some innate Queensland redneckism.

Peter Beattie knew all this.

The irony – or rather, one of the many ironies – is that the government and top bureaucrats have recently been pontificating about the need for public sector spending to create demand in a sluggish economy. That seems – insofar as it means anything – only to apply to bricks and mortar and roads and bridges and to completely eschew people’s livelihoods. All ‘Bligh the Builder’ is paving the way for at the moment is her own defeat.

Years ago the Queensland government owned 90 butcher shops – Anna Bligh’s defence

Published
by
Brian
9 months, 2 weeks ago
in Politics, Queensland and Transport
. 44 Comments

She did say that in her speech to Parliament:

At times in our history the government of Queensland has sold beer, sawn and milled timber, retailed fish and even had 90 state owned butcher shops.

In Brisbane, our electricity network wasn’t state owned until 1977. And we didn’t own power stations until then either.

We’ve always owned a railway, but never owned a communications company. While we’ve retailed fish and meat, we’ve never been greengrocers.

So Bligh is arguing that what states own over time changes, and changed circumstances require decisions about what assets a state should own and what trading enterprises a state should be involved in.

She was actually quite articulate and even eloquent in the several times I’ve heard her on local ABC radio. And the speech in parliament is not bad at all. It’s just that people don’t listen. As soon as the interview ended callers, probably about 3 to one, rang in expressing visceral displeasure in no uncertain terms.

Continue reading ‘Years ago the Queensland government owned 90 butcher shops – Anna Bligh’s defence’

Anna Bligh’s privatisation train will run off the rails

Published
by
Mark
9 months, 3 weeks ago
in Brisbane, Disasters, Economics, Queensland, Sociology and Transport
. 49 Comments

Intoning the phrase ‘Global Financial Crisis’ at every opportunity, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has been preparing the ground for the privatisation of a wide range of state assets. It was confirmed today that QR’s freight train business would be among the government owned enterprises flogged off.

Bligh seems to be assuming that selling the freight business will be less unpopular than privatising passenger rail. Maybe, maybe not. The unions are certainly unhappy. But hiving off the profitable bits of QR is just nuts. Aside from the economies of scale that will be lost, the lack of a cross-subsidy for public transport will cause immense problems further down the track. That will be compounded by the government’s quick return to an aversion to public spending, which is a complete backflip from its winning electoral message.

Queensland Labor never previously went down the privatisation track favoured in other states. Peter Beattie was happy to retain some fat in QR over a period of years to cushion the impact of restructuring on jobs. There’s also previously been a perception that diseconomies would result from selling off profitable bits of public assets in such a geographically huge state with such a dispersed population. Cross-subsidy is the only model that works for public services in this state.

Continue reading ‘Anna Bligh’s privatisation train will run off the rails’

Sub-editing FAIL

Published
by
tigtog
11 months, 4 weeks ago
in Crime, Media and NSW Government
. 8 Comments

AKA How the addition of a single word results in a headline that doesn’t provoke the Laura Norder crowd to clutch their pearls.

Sub-editing-fail

Assuming, of course, that one doesn’t want to confect a controversy via a plausibly deniable misrepresentation.

Saluzinsky’s article is actually fairly well balanced regarding the proposed privatisation of some NSW gaols, and the objections from both the left and the right to some of the proposals on different grounds. Pity about that headline.

Whichever way the decision comes down on staying public or going private, the idea of allowing prisoners in low and medium security prisons to have duplicate keys to their cells, so that they can have privacy from other inmates as desired, seems to be simply humane; if the experience overseas is that such measures reduce violence as well then all the better.

Unsurprisingly, breakfast TV took the reactionary approach on Sunrise, with Kochy talking about how we are mollycoddling prisoners and why not just give them the keys to the front gate as well? The goal of reducing violence was shrugged aside, as if violence in prisons is only inmate-on-inmate and can therefore be disregarded. Prison personnel deserve to have the safest work environment possible, you know, even if that means that prisoners aren’t sufficiently brutalised to give the Laura Norder mob their vengeful jollies.