Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has used her keynote address at the Queensland ALP state conference at the Gold Coast today to distance herself and her government from her predecessor Peter Beattie. Bligh criticised Beattie for short term thinking and for being reactive.
Ever since she became Premier, it’s been clear that Bligh understood the importance of putting some clean air between herself and Beattie. Frustrations about service delivery and perceived inaction on health, water and infrastructure almost saw the veteran Premier lost the last state election, saved only by a clever campaign and the complete uselessness of the Nationals and Liberals in opposition. Beattie was also able to argue that service delivery had been impeded by the Feds’ inaction under John Howard, a line that resonated powerfully, and that was put to good use in delivering Kevin Rudd and Queensland Labor such a big swing and a swag of seats in the Federal election last year. Bligh will be hoping it’s a theme good for three elections - her argument will now be that Kevin Rudd is helping where Howard didn’t, but that results will take some time to eventuate.
Bligh’s emphasis on forward planning was established before her ascension to the top job - when she was Treasurer, she began to move away from the state’s traditional low debt and low taxes mantra, and this is a direction she’s accentuated as Premier - keeping business sweet by going with the PPPs Beattie had always nixed. It also gives her the chance to do something that many in the Labor Party had always regarded as neglected under Beattie and Wayne Goss - ramp up Queensland’s historically low levels of social spending. Bligh has eschewed Beattie’s “media tart” strategy, keeping a lower profile and not popping up on the tv news every night in the manner supposedly characteristic of state premiers. In fact, her appointment of Beattie to a Trade Commissioner position in the US is looking a bit smarter than it did at the time - enabling her to insist that as a public servant, he no longer hold forth on the news of the day. His running commentary certainly continued after his ostensible retirement.
One thing that’s always been a puzzle to me about Lawrence Springborg’s assimilation agenda is why exactly anyone would want to take over the squabbling rabble that is the Queensland Liberal Party. This is the mob who last year - let it be remembered - took almost a fortnight to work through a leadership challenge in their caucus of eight members, and for a couple of days were seriously contemplating deciding the winner by tossing a coin. And whatever the current byzantine alignments of their factions are, you can always bet a Santo Santoro acolyte somewhere in the shadows plotting a leadership coup.
Now Graham Young has provided us with the good oil on rumours of a plot by Clayfield Liberal MP Tim Nicholls (the new new face of Queensland?) to roll The Borg in the amalgamated Liberal National Party room. Aside from the good old fashioned notion of revenge percolating in the background with former Nats leader Jeff Seeney not exactly having buried the hatchet, there’s also the small matter of Lawrence’s opinions on recycled water:
The Liberal Party votes are said to be solid because none of the Liberals has ever been supportive of Springborg. In fact, the reason that Bob Quinn was dumped when he was had to do with the fact that he stood beside Springborg as Springborg expounded on the alleged tendency of fish to change gender from drinking recycled water. Quinn was expected to repudiate the remarks and didn’t.
You can read more about The Borg’s worries about fish and feminisation in the LP archive.
So, it’s not just NSW Labor that has political scandals now. It’s Black Friday for the ALP in Queensland today.
In a curious piece of timing the tenth anniversary of the Queensland Labor government has been, to use the media cliche, overshadowed by the release of a letter from Nationals MP Rob Messenger to the Crime and Misconduct Commission. The letter, obtained by Crikey and viewable here [pdf], refers allegations made by a deceased staff member of Merri Rose, a former Minister who lost her Gold Coast seat of Currumbin in 2004 and was subsequently convicted of and imprisoned for blackmailing former Premier Peter Beattie. Bernard Keane writes:
The Queensland Opposition has referred to the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission serious allegations relating to attempts to conceal a relationship between then-Premier Peter Beattie and his Tourism and Racing Minister Merri Rose.
In May 2007, Rose was sentenced to eighteen months gaol for attempting to blackmail Beattie. She was released after three months. There was considerable speculation at the time about the nature of Rose’s blackmail threat.
Yesterday, Nationals frontbencher Rob Messenger wrote to the Crime and Misconduct Commission with allegations from a former Rose staff member that Rose forced staff “to shred official documents, sign off on invalid overseas and intrastate trips, schedule unofficial business and official business and process false parliamentary leave requests to conceal a relationship between former Premier Peter Beattie and Merri Rose.”
As Keane notes, the transcript of the conversation between the former staff member, Barbara Daddow, and Messenger, does not contain any allegations against Peter Beattie. Continue reading ‘A Rose by any other name’
The Borg’s “Pineapple Party” is set to take off on the back of his own rebranding (visible on huge billboards in Brisbane and no doubt throughout the state) as the “new face of Queensland”. Although Mal Brough, newly elected as Queensland Liberals president, may be renegotiating aspects of the deal with the Libs to create the Liberal National Party, there’s no doubt that many Liberals are still worried that the Pineapple Party is - in effect - a takeover by the Queensland Nats. Lawrence Springborg himself has been saying very little on policy, let alone resurrecting some of his charming thoughts on immigration, for instance. But Barnaby Joyce - as he’s wont to do - may have let a cat or three out of the bag (should that be his swag?)…
The National Party is a party based on agrarian, socialist principles, as can be seen in the single desk for the orderly sale of wheat, drought aid and regional development.
The Liberals believe in the free market and it is probably in their economics where they are truly liberal. They believe in pure market principles and that the consequences of what happens next are, in the long term, the best outcome.
The Nationals believe greed is a higher order driver than market principles and market power ultimately destroys market theory. The Liberals believe the market will look after you; the Nationals believe, unguided, it will walk over you.
Dr David Solomon, a former journalist and barrister who’s long had a big interest in this area, has released a sweeping report to the Queensland Government on reforms to freedom of information and fostering a culture of open government. Significant recommendations include reducing the cabinet secrecy provisions from 30 to 10 years, and 3 years for cabinet briefs, the release of a version of the cabinet agenda, and bringing state owned enterprises under FOI provisions. Solomon was chair of EARC in the early 90s (the Electoral and Administrative Reform Commission established subsequent to the Fitzgerald reforms), and understands well the need not just to widen access to government documents and data but to bring about a cultural shift in how politicians and the public service go about their business. The full report can be read here.
I hope that federal Special Minister of State Senator John Faulkner reads it, as the Rudd government also needs to act in this area.
Those of us who remember Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland will also recall the intimate links between civil liberties, democracy and censorship. Stephen Keim, the prominent Brisbane QC who distinguished himself with his courage in conducting Dr Haneef’s case in the Federal Court last year, certainly does remember. One of the ironies of Kevin Rudd’s intervention in the Bill Henson controversy is that recent Queensland Labor governments have been doing their utmost to dispel our state’s older image in large part through promoting creativity and culture - and perhaps because of the legacy of the Joh era, concerns about liberty and the link between freedom of speech and democracy are still very present in the Brisbane of 2008. So I was very interested to read Keim’s contribution to today’s Crikey, which I’m reproducing (with permission) over the fold.
Queensland Treasurer Andrew Fraser has handed down his first budget, with Premier Anna Bligh branding it as her “government’s first budget” - an obvious counter to perceptions that Peter Beattie had dropped the ball on services and infrastructure. Three interesting themes to emerge from the new spending commitments are housing affordability, public transport and assistance for pensioners and people with disability. The spending is underpinned by a rise in coal royalties from 7% to 10%. The focus on social housing is particularly welcome, and reflects Anna Bligh’s desire to raise the state’s traditionally low levels of expenditure in social policy domains. So too is the goal of putting downward pressure on rental prices.
Glenn Milne must be delighted that Martin Ferguson isn’t a happy camper, as he’s finally able to write a column based on rumblings within Labor rather than play his traditional role as a conduit for Liberal leadership dissent (or smear people as “artists” and therefore “pervs”)… Today’s instalment contains lengthy discussion based on information from “those involved in the FuelWatch saga” including what Ferguson purportedly told “colleagues” - all in order to communicate “the message… from Ferguson”. Curious yet?
Those involved in the FuelWatch saga say that apart from the obvious economic nonsense of the scheme, Ferguson’s overarching concern was that to cede [sic] to such nonsense so early in the term of the Rudd Government would be to see federal Labor inevitably set on the same course as the Carr, Beattie and Bracks administrations.
Whoever’s been bending Milne’s ear also praises Paul Keating to the skies, and this bit is highly reminiscent of former Keating chief of staff Don Russell’s op/ed on Friday:
The message, I’m told, from Ferguson was that there are governments dedicated to “actions” and there are governments dedicated to “outcomes”. And in Ferguson’s judgment federal Labor’s state antecedents were in the former category; lots of largely meaningless activity that captured the 24-hour media cycle, but which ultimately amounted to not much in policy terms.
One might readily conjecture that Paul Keating has been having a word in Ferguson’s shell-like, but however true that is, it does appear plain that there’s something of a campaign being run here - for which Milne (as usual) is only the mouthpiece. So, is there any substance in the calls for substance?
Whether Brough will prove a leadership saviour for the Queensland Libs down the track is still very much a moot question. But it’s impossible to read his election other than as an expression of deep unease about the creation of the Pineapple Party. The interim president, defeated today, Gary Spence, was the leading Liberal figure in fast-tracking the formation of the Liberal National Party. Spence was promised the presidency of Lawrence Springborg’s baby, only one of the many undemocratic aspects of both the process of amalgamation and the draft constitution of the new entity. Graham Young has been providing detailed analysis of these issues at Ambit Gambit.
A lot of the discussions about web 2.0 and the media tend to conflate citizen journalism with all sorts of other things that happen in the online media spaces. Bloggers, for instance, can be citizen journalists, but by no means all bloggers are, and perhaps a lot of bloggers occasionally are but are more often than not not… One of the traditional functions of public journalism, now rarely fulfilled in Australia, is to bring together a lot of relevant information that non-experts wouldn’t be able to find readily, contextualise that information, and relate it to issues and developments which materially affect citizens. Sometimes, still, you’ll find this done well on national issues, but at the local and even state level it seems to be almost a dying (if not dead) art. That’s why the sort of work blogger Derek Barry is doing here in Brisbane is so valuable.
LPers might remember my post a while back about the redevelopment of the old flour mill next to Albion station. At Woolly Days, Derek has done a top notch job of doing exactly what I’m characterising here as public journalism with respect to that very development, which is on his patch. I think we need to see a lot more of this. It’s a space that the MSM have left almost entirely empty, and because these sort of things are not just hugely important to citizens’ amenity but also to fostering real participation and civic capacities. Derek’s post also situates what’s happening in one inner city suburb of Brisbane within its global context - which again is something in my view that big media almost never does.
A vigorous discussion of various aspects of the controversy about Bill Henson’s photography (and particularly about the images of naked adolescents now at the centre of a media and legal storm) continues on this thread. I think it might be useful if we tried to separate out some of the issues - I think that discussion shows that a lot of us are agreed that an incredible number of different topics are collapsed together in the framing of the Henson “debate” in the media. So on this thread, I’d like to discuss the politics of the Henson controversy. Please restrict responses to that specific aspect - others can be discussed here on the continuation of the previous thread.
It’s pretty clear to me that the only political winners from the brouhaha over Henson’s photographs are the culture warriors themselves. Whether or not Miranda Devine knew what she was setting off is perhaps a moot question, but it seems obvious that the culture warriors are rejoicing in being able to find an issue that positions what they normally bang on about as much more central to public debate than their usual fare. I doubt their own triumphalism is warranted - they still face the problem that ranting and raving about Islamism and the enemy within and global warming denialism fails to cut through in a changed landscape of public opinion - not every issue will allow them to position all their enemies - “luvvies”, “the left” - in such a neat row with the highly emotive issues of child sexual abuse and internet pr0n as a hook to draw attention to their opinionating. This thing has moved at the speed of light in the media cycle, but conversely its centrality to the media cycle has already ended - we’re back to all things petrol.
[Via steve in comments] Just as it appears that The Borg has finally got his way and Liberals at all levels are happy to enable the formation of the Pineapple Party (that’s if rank and file Liberal members accept the Nationals’ takeover offer), it appears that the hurdles the new Liberal National Party will have to cross have been set higher than anyone had been anticipating. Anna Bligh’s been busy talking up how the state redistribution map proposed for comment by the Queensland Electoral Commission will make Labor’s task of winning a fifth term more difficult. But Antony Green has finalised his calculations and reported at The Poll Bludger that Labor would have 63 nominal seats on the redrawn boundaries as opposed to their current 59 of 89.
The LNP may or may not put paid to the problem of three cornered contests (and if it forces Liberal and National candidates to fight it out within one party structure, or if it spawns breakaway parties on either side, it won’t). But that was never the real problem electorally it’s been built up to be - it was more about the squabbling exacerbating perceptions of coalition disunity. Continue reading ‘Pineapple party pulped?’
I must confess that I haven’t been following the national innovation debate closely. It does seem to me that there are some in principle incompatibilities between:
(1) Industry policy by another name;
(2) Fostering innovation as a behavioural disposition;
(3) Specific attempts to create either new knowledge or research or create the infrastructure and skills which support these efforts.
The default policy reflex seems to be (1) and (2) is very difficult for governments to do directly. Since a lot of this stuff was pioneered here in the SunshineSmart State, it’s interesting to see Anna Bligh redirect some of the “big picture” stuff and the industry policy money - signalled by the abolition of the Department of State Development and now by a switch in focus from infrastructure to direct funding for research, scholarships and fellowships. Continue reading ‘Innovation smarts?’
One of the big credibility problems The Borg has with his “new face of Queensland” nonsense is that at least on the National Party side of the Pineapple Party benches, he’s surrounded by a bunch of time serving geriatrics. The younger members - including Deputy Leader Fiona Simpson - have hardly made much of an electoral impact either. There’s a risk to running on “age” and “renewal” - Anna Bligh is no John Howard, and she’s not that much older than The Borg himself. Nor has she been in Parliament seemingly forever - “fresh” Lawrence is approaching the 20th anniversary of his election. Sam Clifford from Public Polity takes a look at another big fissure in Lawrence Springborg’s narrative - the fact that the ALP has been renewing itself with some genuine talent.
It looks like some of the Class of ‘89, those ALP MPs who entered politics when the ALP finally defeated the Nationals, are going to step aside for the next election. MPs like Rod Welford, the Education Minister, will be sorely missed but there needs to be renewal in government to maintain strength and contact with the world outside. There are a number of promising young Labor politicians like Ronan Lee, Andrew McNamara, Grace Grace, Stirling Hinchliffe and Andrew Fraser who will form the next generation of Labor’s front bench and will shape the future of the state (much to the ‘Borg’s chagrin).
Lawrence Springborg is one step closer to achieving his grand dream of five years’ standing – a united conservative party in Queensland. This courtesy of new Liberal President Gary Spence, who, to the fury of some Liberals, has responded to the Nationals’ plebiscite by agreeing to a vote by rank and file members – and appearing to prejudge the result by embuing the “Liberal National Party” with an aura of inevitability.
That may be a tad premature, as the announcement of the “breakthrough” was quickly followed by anonymous Libs leaking about the possibility of a break away party should the Pineapple Party become a reality. There’s also the position – articulated by Brendan Nelson – that nothing should happen until discussions on amalgamation at federal level are finalised – at some indeterminate time in the future.
So exactly who’s doing the assimilation? Resistance is futile, as the Star Trek version of the Borg intoned monolithically, because Lawrence Springborg has already been anointed leader in advance of any decision by the new party, and no democratic process is apparently envisaged for the division of the spoils of opposition. In fact, as Graham Young reports, so undemocratic is the process that former assimilation critic George Brandis has gone quiet after a deal for Senate preselection, which also protects Barnaby Joyce’s interests by giving him a Senate seat (Ron Boswell’s) even if he loses at the next election.
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Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has used her keynote address at the Queensland ALP state conference at the Gold Coast today to distance herself and her government from her predecessor Peter Beattie. Bligh criticised Beattie for short term thinking and for being reactive. 
One thing that’s always been a puzzle to me about Lawrence Springborg’s assimilation agenda is why exactly anyone would want to take over the squabbling rabble that is the Queensland Liberal Party. This is the mob who last year - let it be remembered - took almost a fortnight to work through a leadership challenge in their caucus of eight members, and for a couple of days were seriously contemplating deciding the winner by tossing a coin. And whatever the current byzantine alignments of their factions are, you can always bet a Santo Santoro acolyte somewhere in the shadows plotting a leadership coup.
The Borg’s “Pineapple Party” is set to take off on the back of his own rebranding (visible on huge billboards in Brisbane and no doubt throughout the state) as the “new face of Queensland”. Although Mal Brough, newly elected as Queensland Liberals president, may be renegotiating aspects of the deal with the Libs to create the Liberal National Party, there’s no doubt that 
Lawrence Springborg is one step closer to 
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