From Friday’s Crikey:
One thing I found when I was covering the state election last year for Crikey was that it was hard to sit in Brisbane and get a good read on what was going on in North Queensland. Queensland is Australia’s most decentralised state in population terms, and unsurprisingly, local and regional factors feature strongly outside the capital (and even in Brisbane, we’re seeing distinctly different patterns emerging on the suburban edges to the southwest and north respectively).
That was very evident in the state election - from a distance, you might think that the Sunshine and Gold Coasts were superficially similar in terms of the sorts of demographics and issues, but Labor held its own on the Gold Coast while the Sunshine Coast was the state party’s only real disaster area. The Nats made ground in some regions, but went backwards in the Lockyer Valley and around and in Toowoomba. And in far north Queensland, Labor got some excellent swings in its favour - up to 8 or 9% in some seats.
So it would be quite wrong to read off polls taken in Brisbane and assume any sort of uniform swing.
Continue reading ‘The view from FNQ’
Today’s instalment:
There are criticisms within the Liberal camp about the extent Mr Howard seeks the advice of his former chief of staff, Grahame Morris, and that Mr Howard appears to be running his own marginal seat campaign against Labor’s Maxine McKew in his Sydney electorate of Bennelong.
I guess it would be better tactics if Howard just conceded defeat in Bennelong? Wtf?
There’s probably an element of suppressed wishful thinking “within the Liberal camp”. They just wish the old bugger had nicked off ages ago, and they’re unconsciously wishing personal retribution on him.
Check this long list of sprays out from *unnamed* Ministers, reported in The Bulletin:
Continue reading ‘More wisdom from Shanahan’
From today’s Crikey email:
On the Crikey Politics Free-For-All blog Christian Kerr asked cheekily if any readers remembered Russell Cooper (the short term Premier of Queensland who was going to be the Nationals’ salvation a few months out from the 1989 election after they dumped Mike Ahern). Kerr wondered who would be Canberra’s Cooper.
It looks as if there won’t be one now. Howard’s ministers have less courage than the state Nats did in the dying days of their 32 year reign, and the great pretender’s non challenge has been defused by a meaningless promise, which significantly fell short of an endorsement of Costello’s claims.
But you could be forgiven for thinking that the epicenter of politics has shifted north. As Kerr observed, “Queenslanders are in the news – Kevin Rudd, Peter Beattie – so let’s use a Queensland simile for current events in Canberra.�
At the beginning of Rudd’s leadership, political commentator and former state Liberal Vice-President, Graham Young observed that Rudd and Swan had a lot of experience in tearing down a long term conservative government.
Indeed they have, but Labor strategists in Queensland are also calling to mind more recent similes.
Continue reading ‘After Howard, the deluge’
From today’s Crikey email:
Peter Beattie’s final legacy to Queensland (and federal) politics is characteristic of his modus operandi. The new Premier, Anna Bligh, will be able to execute the quick step Beattie was no longer capable of doing convincingly – admitting mistakes have been made, garnering sympathy, and promising to fix them. Beattie’s already done the hard part – telling the ABC twice last night that he’d been “over-enthusiastic� about local government reform and “should have listened more�.
Whether Bligh shifts the policy or not is moot, but she’ll change the rhetoric.
And it won’t be difficult to build a bit of honeymoon momentum on the back of the most recent Newspoll on state voting intentions, published in June, which found state Labor had a 51% primary vote and an astonishing 61% two party preferred. Both figures represent swings to the government from last year’s election.
Bligh will be elected unopposed tomorrow as Labor leader, and sworn in as Queensland’s first female Premier on Thursday.
Continue reading ‘Smooth operator, smooth transition’
Peter Beattie has resigned as Premier of Queensland. Crikey is publishing a special email, and I’m in the middle of writing something for it now, so I’ll update this post with a bit of analysis in a few hours. In the meantime, comment and speculate away! I think this move by Beattie has big positive implications for Rudd and some significant negatives for Howard. But more on that later.
Elsewhere: The Poll Bludger, Andrew Leigh, Blogocracy, Woolly Days, Down And Out Of Sà i Gòn and Stoush.
Update: I’ve posted my piece from the special edition of Crikey over the fold. You can read Richard Farmer and Christian Kerr on the Crikey blog.
Continue reading ‘Breaking news: Premier Pete resigns’
From today’s Crikey email:
Something is rotten in the state of the Queensland Liberal party.
Yesterday, I wrote about the spillover of toxic leadership wrangling into the federal sphere. It’s now clear that the state Liberals commissioned research into the party’s federal standing which included questions about the Liberal leader, Dr Bruce Flegg. As Graham Young writes, the inclusion of these questions is counter-intuitive and their being asked at all is likely to colour the polling results.
Continue reading ‘Can Howard be quarantined from the toxic Queensland Libs?’
From today’s Crikey email:
The long running federal police investigation into the affairs of several Liberal MPs isn’t the only incipient disaster for John Howard in Queensland. As if he needs more headaches from a state where he has to hang on to seats in the face of the Rudd/Swan home town onslaught, the charming combination of the toxic factional politics of the state Libs and the ever fractious Coalition relationship with the Nats has lobbed up another time bomb.
The Courier-Mail has been reporting Opposition Leader Jeff Seeney’s half-hearted denials that he’s trying to oust his hapless Liberal counterpart, Bruce Flegg. The Nats have always blamed Flegg for losing the state election last year. There’s a lot of truth in that, as his error prone performance destroyed the Liberal vote within a few days of the election being announced. But it’s also a mightily convenient excuse for the Nats to absolve themselves from blame for their own very mediocre performance, which saw large swings to Labor recorded in quite a few of their regional and rural seats, swings Rudd Labor will be hoping to capitalise on.
Continue reading ‘Queensland Liberals Howard’s achilles heel?’
From today’s Crikey email:
Peter Beattie’s announcement at the weekend State Labor conference that he will contemplate retiring in twelve months should come as no great surprise. There’s no doubt that Beattie has been shaken by the recent Merri Rose bribery affair, but also no doubt that he realises his time in the sun is coming to an end.
Continue reading ‘Beattie going?’
The biggest danger for the government is that no one will take any particular notice of the budget. Not only have previous “budget bounces” been derisory, all the signs are that Howard has increasingly been written off by the punters as a tired and too clever by half politician. That $60 billion spending spree in the last campaign launch was a very bad omen for Howard. All he probably needed to do to win was hang up a sign outside each polling booth which said “Mark Latham is the Labor leader” but the purported political genius is a good judge of his own campaign skills.
But it’s not voter cynicism I’m talking about, or not just. It’s the cynicism of largely symbolic spending announcements which are supposed to win over a particular segment of the electorate. More often than not, except for the actual cheques in the mail, or the milkshake and a sandwich we all enjoyed after a tax cut, nothing happens. Where’s all the money diverted from the Telstra sale in 1996 gone? It was meant to fix the Murray Darling, remember… Or what about all the money allocated in several terms for “better telecommunications”? How many of the technical schools are operating and what difference have they made? Has the skills shortage been solved by giving apprentices a toolbox? Have baby bonuses improved early childhood outcomes? Have Australian flags improved public education? Have tv ads won the “war on drugs”? What concrete benefits to public services and infrastructure have the Howard government actually delivered?
To be fair to them, that’s not traditionally been the role of the Commonwealth. But we’ve seen Howard and all the gang spend the last few years denouncing the states day in and day out. Yet announcements made to deal with water - for instance Turnbull’s pipeline from the Clarence to somewhere or other in South East Queensland - are demonstrably just political thought bubbles. If the government have succeeded in convincing electors that they are responsible for doing something meaningful in areas like infrastructure and education, then it’s long past time for some results to be evident.
Continue reading ‘It’s the cynicism, stupid!’
The Newspoll in this morning’s Australian shows the Greens polling 6 per cent of the primary vote, down from 7.2 per cent in the 2004 election.
Newspolls this year have consistently had the Greens vote fluctuating around the 5 per cent mark, and this has resulted in commentary in the Oz and some other Murdoch papers about a supposed decline in Greens support.
Allow me to present some evidence in support of an alternative hypothesis: that Newspoll, for whatever reason, is underestimating the Greens vote.
Continue reading ‘Newspoll and the Greens’
From today’s Crikey email:
If there’s one thing the Queensland Liberals don’t get marks for (well, actually, there a lot), it’s originality. NSW colleagues having a divisive leadership battle? Hey, let’s do the same in Queensland, after a few weeks’ damaging front page stories in the Courier-Mail largely inspired by leaks from contending factions.
The Santoro affair has been (accurately) seen as a damaging contamination of the federal sphere by the pathological state Liberal division. Bizarrely, the dethroning of King Santo and the endless squabbling about his replacement as Senator has now come back to haunt the state Libs.
As I wrote in Crikey a few weeks back, hitherto hapless state Leader Dr Bruce Flegg was on solid ground in opposing Howard’s Goodna bypass. It’s poison to his own constituents, and will probably lose Ryan MP Michael Johnson more than a vote or two. Flegg is in the good company not only of Liberal Lord Mayor Campbell Newman, but also Peter Beattie and the state government.
But now, apparently, the Santoro faction has damned him for acting against the interests of the PM. As if Santo hasn’t, well, been doing just that in recent weeks.
Continue reading ‘Queensland Libs - self-destructive one day, farcical the next’
Over in the States, Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condi Rice are fiercely leaking stories about internal dissent in the administration ranks - on a fairly regular basis. The most recent being their attempts to have Gitmo closed down, blocked by Gonzales and Cheney. Gonzales, of course, will be the next man overboard. Rice, as I’ve argued before, is young and ambitious enough to see herself as still having a career post-Bush. And Gates is probably partly jousting with Cheney and partly trying to avoid being seen as Rumsfeld lite. All this as talk of indictments, and even possibly impeachment, swirls around Washington. What a difference a Democratic Congress with subpoena power makes. The stunning dimensions of casual illegality in the Bush administration are becoming apparent very quickly.
And back here, another troubled right wing government will probably soon start falling apart at the seams.
Tim Dunlop, at Blogocracy, links to an article from Paul Sheehan suggesting that Howard should go. As Tim notes, it’s too late for that. But don’t be at all surprised if, as happened with the Liberals in the Queensland state election, the recriminations start before the election, and the leaks from the Cossie camp suggesting the smirker would be doing better turn into a flood.
From today’s Crikey email:
Incumbency, it seems, is the talk of the political town at the moment. Morris Iemma’s government in NSW seems set to repeat the Beattie and Bracks wins of last year, and when talk turns to the Howard government’s chances of survival, the strength of the economy and the Coalition’s ability to turn the spending tap on with abandon are perceived as Howard’s trump cards.
But, is this the full story? After all, a plethora of political scientists and pundits produced mathematical modelling in 2000 to prove that Al Gore couldn’t lose the election when the Democrats were presiding over such prosperity.
In fact, research conducted by Graham Young and me for The National Forum might tell a different tale.
Continue reading ‘Incumbency rules?’
Queensland was supposed to be an electoral bastion for Howard. Allegedly, conservative Quincelanders just love a cold coconut cocktail. But Howard’s karma is coming back at him in a big way - not just through the big blowback from judgementgate, but also for good measure a replay of the ill wind called the Joh for PM campaign that blew his electoral chances away in 87. Queensland is again his nemesis.
Continue reading ‘Desiccated coconut probably not Maroons fan’
Trevor Cook recently interviewed me for the MEAA’s Walkley Magazine. Unfortunately, the bloggercon being organised by Peter Black from QUT which Trevor wrote about has had to be postponed til August. Congrats to the Walkley subeditors for coming up with a great tagline for the article!
If you want to find some of the most intelligent blogs around, look north, says Trevor Cook. No, not Asia. Queensland.
Update: Gary Sauer-Thompson has a couple of interesting posts on political blogging over at public opinion.
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