We just had an election in my home state of Queensland, and the outcomes will be of some broader interest, I hope. The governing Liberal National (= conservative) Party has (almost certainly) gone down to a surprise defeat, going from 78 of 89 seats at the last election to a probable 40 or 41 this time. The key issues were broken promises (particularly regarding job cuts) and government proposals for privatisation.
This can be seen either as a reversal or a repeat of the last election when the governing Labor Party went from 51 seats to 7. That election was also fought on broken promises and privatisation, but with the roles of the parties reversed (Labor had won an election opposing privatisation, then immediately announced it would go ahead).
Among the actual or potential ramifications
* The first instance of a woman Opposition Leader defeating an incumbent government at state or national level in Australia (there have been examples in the much smaller territory governments, but I think this is the first case at State level. The more common pattern has been for a woman to get a “hospital pass” when it is clear that the government is on the way out.
* At the national level, the replacement of the current conservative prime minister Tony Abbott
* The abandonment of the biggest coal mine project in Australia
Looking internationally, the outcome can be seen as a defeat for the politics of austerity and maybe as an example to suggest that Pasokification can be reversed, under the right circumstances.
Finally, I’ll link to my analysis of the asset sales, which got a reasonably prominent run during the campaign. It probably didn’t change many minds, but it helped to counter the barrage of pro-privatisation propaganda.
John Quiggin 
A reversal of Pasokification would be bad news for the Greens here, as they arguably stand to benefit the most from such a trend by siphoning away Labor voters. Shorten is from the Right, nonetheless, and I suspect his policies once unfurled in theoretical government would not be Syriza-esque. But why would he bother articulating them?
Lost in all the euphoria is (a) how small the seat lead is going to be and (b) how difficult it is going to be to govern and maintain party unity as a consequence. Could turn into a Ted Baillieu situation.
Can anyone direct me to a site that features the average results of the parties in the seats they ran in, which seems (for the minors) a more relevant figure than their first-past-the-post figure? One Nation, for example, got under one percent overall but 25% in her own electorate, which looks to me like a Senate quota.
Are there cases where austerity has been postponed and it worked out OK in the end? I ask that because examples like Greece seem unresolved.
If Wayne Swan is pulling strings behind the scenes he’ll want Carmichael mine to go ahead. He’s previously said it will help the poor of India. If ALP get up nationally in 2016 perhaps it will get federal help.
Pasokification needs to continue. We need to destroy the two neoliberal parties of LNP and ALP.
In the meantime, a minority ALP govt. (43 seats) with Katter Aust Party support (2 seats) could govern. The best we can hope for from such a government is no asset sales and nothing much else. I wonder how long Qld ALP will keep its word? All politicians lie all the time so I am not hopeful. Anna P. will try some sort of trick on the electorate I guess. At that point she will sign her own political oblivion warrant just like Newman did. It’s funny how they just don’t get it.
Chances that this ALP government will be good, sensible, honest and enlightened? About 1 in a 100 I think.
ChrisB
http://www.abc.net.au/news/qld-election-2015/guide/electorates/
This might be what you want; click on the electorate you want and you get the votes and the percentages for each candidate.
@ChrisB
I don’t know if this will have what you’re after, but there are fairly comprehensive figures at the ecq site (put the “http:” in front of):
//results.ecq.qld.gov.au/elections/state/State2015/results/summary.html
An unmissable opportunity to pull out that splendid Australianism, “It couldn’t happen to a nicer pack of bastards.”
@Hermit
1. It’s very clear that austerity in a recessed or depressed economy makes things worse. Have a look for How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled – Paul Krugman.
2. Anyone who directly promotes the opening of a new coal mine and offers govt. subsidies for same in 2015 (and beyond) is a climate criminal.
John, I think that preferential voting partly protects Labor from Pasokification here in Aus.
I did have one question about the idea of asset sales in relation to electricity generators in particular. Is there any logic to the argument that the rise of renewable/decentralised generation that seems fairly inexorable at this stage is a justification to sell out of those baseload generators sooner rather than later?
The result from the Queensland election was a real surprise to almost everyone. There were a couple of things that really struck me while I was watching the results come in last night.
First was the lack of any real policy from the ALP. This is not unusual in a world of politics where oppositions campaign on the fact that they aren’t the current mob in charge. But I think this was even more evident in this election campaign because the ALP had no realistic expectation that they would win (so why bother thinking about policy). A a consequence, I hope the ALP really take their time in developing policies and actually get them right.
Secondly, I suspect (haven’t had a good look at the numbers) that many of the seats won were even more reliant on Greens preferences than normal (e.g. Mt Coo-tha, Brisbane Central) or on preferences from the Katter Party (e.g. Cook). It is reasonable that the Green will seek some payback in the form of vastly improved management of agricultural runoff into the Great Barrier Reef (the Green’s number 1 priority) and that the Katter Party will be expecting new investment in infrastructure in regional areas (probably in the form of new dams for irrigation). It is going to be interesting how the ALP manage the potentially conflicting set of favours they implicitly owe to the minor parties.
I wish them good luck, and I hope they seek some quality advice…
Tyler have a look at Table 8 here
Click to access 2014-australian-energy-statistics.pdf
The uppermost line entry says we get 86.9% of our electricity from burning fossil fuels. Another line entry hydro may be half in 2015 what it was in 2014.
@Hermit
Thanks! I’m definitely not disputing the current dominance of fossil fuels, something that clearly needs to change. I suppose there’s also an argument to retain public ownership of those assets on the basis that it allows us to shut them down once we start taking climate change seriously.
That’s an interesting idea…if coal plants are leased to the private sector then governments need to protect a cash cow.
Iceland rejected austerity (at least, the full package), and generally did better than others, even though the financial crisis was worse there than anywhere.
On the count so far, I get from the electoral commission site at least 23 seats where the number of “exhausted” votes exceeds the difference between the 2 parties vying over the final outcome (i.e. after preferences and doesn’t include informal votes).
I take that as a very strong sign that ‘we’, as a whole, are rejecting the ALP/LNP duopoly.
I don’t think there’s an inevitable trend towards Pasokification, especially within a system of representative democracy. It’ll be hard for a left-leaning party to challenge an established centre left party (look at the resources the Greens invested in regaining the seat of Melbourne at the 2013 election). I think the Labor Party in Australia and the Democratic Party in the US are a much broader church than you give them credit for. I can’t think of anybody in the ALP who has the influence of Senator Elizabeth Warren, but she demonstrates that centre left parties can regenerate without “Pasokification.” Bill Shorten is a right wing bovver boy who peddles a version of neo-liberalism lite, but I live in hope that there is room in the ALP for regeneration.
Quite a few people on this site, including me, expected minor parties and independents to increase their representation in the Qld Parliament. I would speculate that the major parties did so as well with LNP’s just vote 1 strategy and ALP’s resistance to this, presumably on the basis that although a win was unlikely, preferences and parties they could work with was an OK price for increasing their overall TPP vote. Given that essentially the opposite happened and the sweep to Labor upset sitting independents (including passing one seat back to the LNP) does anyone have any theories as to why this should be? It certainly seems that the Qld electorate is not simply sick and tired of the same two parties.
I’m expecting a similar shock in NSW; the polls suggest that the youthful innocence of Baird Jnr will ensure a return. In the case of QLD both the polls and the bookies got it wrong – another indicator of badly normal business is done.
and then there’s ICAC.
Sorry, that should be “another indicator of how badly normal business is done”
@2 tanners
Yes, we are simply sick and tired of the – faux choice between the – same two parties.
The picture on minors/independents is a bit more complex than you allow. Peter Wellington is a very popular independent and he increased his margin. Liz Cunningham was very popular but retired at this election – so she didn’t ‘lose’. Alex Douglas and Carl Judge were both elected in 2012 as LNP in LNP electorates but defected to PUP then became independents. If the LNP gets their seats, looking likely, it isn’t so much a case of independents losing as LNP taking back what was theirs in 2012.
The two KAP members look to have easily held their seats.
The problem is not that we love one or other of the duopoly, it is that the duopoly has inordinate power. For example, CSG was a mutual ‘no go zone’ between the duopoly and AKAIK it was never raised with them by our Murdoch controlled ‘media’. But it is a big issue with a lot of voters.
Pr Q said:
Syrizia is an insurgent minor party which has now occupied the ideological space vacated by Pasok. Roughly like the GRNs replacing the ALP as the major party of the Left.
True Pasofication, in the QLD context, would be the GRNs winning a landslide electoral victory. The victory of the QLD ALP a bit different than Pasokification, given that its an example of a traditional major party completely rejecting its own previous “austerity” course. In fact it is just the QLD ALP reverting to its traditional ideological type.
The AUS party duopoly is pretty much indestructible. Both the ALP and L/NP have both suffered electoral wipe outs which, in proportional representation electorates, would result in the collapse of the party.
More generally the Occidental political landscape is rapidly shifting under the impact of the twin earthquakes of GFC on economic status and H-BD on ethnic status. The post-modern liberal elite consensus is falling apart.
We are in for interesting times.
A personal neoliberal victory. I won $50 on the outcome of this election from Ray Hollis, Queensland’s parliamentary speaker under Goss and Beattie. He felt they hadn’t a show. Not quite sure whether this because he was no longer there, or because of what he saw as an abysmal policy vacuum. Or it could be because like so many labor figures, he reads The Australian.
John, can you please stop calling the LNP “conservative”. The constant dismantling of what took decades to construct is better described as “radical”. Even their retreat from science is a radical process.
Bligh and asset sales—tripped up the Qld ALP government. Did people find it amusing to be told “No asset sales”, only to have asset sales? Nope. The Newman character thought he could shove asset sales down the throats of an electorate that still didn’t want it. They copped faux-austerity, and idiosyncratic un-signalled budget cuts, and didn’t want that either. Newman tripped up.
So, the question is, can the Qld ALP avoid tripping up this time ’round?
Don’t underestimate ridicule of the LNP’s patronising tone as a factor in the outcome. The TV ads consisted basically of repetition of the word “strong”, to an extent impossible to parody. I suspect many people would have resented having their intelligence insulted so blatantly.
Another interesting result was the abysmal failure of Palmer’s mob, despite spending huge amounts of money. At least in my regional electorate they seemed to spend twice as much on TV commercials as the other parties combined, but it did them no good.
And finally, Labor was almost invisible in the TV commercials where I live. Perhaps the days when TV advertising could influence election outcomes are over.
Pr Q said:
Take a bow, well played sir. The twin victories of Syrizia in Greece and the ALP in QLD go a long way to politically vindicate Pr Q’s intellectual critique of privatisation.
Pr Q has, over the past 20 years, waged a lonely one-man campaign against wholesale public utility privatization. Both piecemeal empirical analysis of individual privatisations on the AUS political scene, and a more general theoretical critique of privatization as it has been carried out in the post-Cold War era.
This has been an amazing effort on two levels. One, very few public intellectuals have been willing and able to do the hard yards, look under the hood at the fine print and bottom line of most privatization schemes. Two, his critique of privatization has been based on the orthodox economic theory of public goods provision under conditions of monopoly. A theory utterly neglected by most neo-liberal economists who like to style themselves as the hard-headed exponents of economic rationality.
He certainly convinced me of the validity of the traditional case for state ownership of natural monopoly utilities. Not that I needed much convincing after paying close attention to the catastrophic Harvard Mafia-Suitcase Economist “Rape of Russia” privatisation.
I predict that the Old Left economic programme – nationalisation of utilities, regulation of finance and fiscal expansionism – will make a comeback in the general public political life. Whether that get past the Deep State elements in the financial industry, who are committed to the interests of the 1%, is a question that remains to be settled.
Perhaps more co-operation in the international Left. Or perhaps some link ups with local nationalist parties., such as UKIP and Front National. My crystal ball is murky on this.
@Jack Strocchi
Jock, talk of the Pasofikation of politics is inane. The background to the electoral success of Syriza is at least the whole of the twnetieth century in Greece and most particularly the history of WWII in Greece, the Greek Civil War and the Junta. So, for example, that background includes historical memory of the way that colonial powers have treated Greece including the massacre of Greek resistance fighters by (right wing) Greek Police backed by British troops:
It gets worse, especially during the Junta. Remember the persecution of Mikis Theodorakis by the Junta:
I suggest that you have no grasp whatever of what is happening in Greece right now. Comparing Greece to Qld is laughable.
Non Neo-Con-Duopoly parties and independents got just over 20% of the vote in this Queensland election, so far.
The duopoly are perfectly happy to pretend they are the two extremes on our available voting spectrum and “there is no alternative”. The establishment media plays a crucial role in perpetuating this charade.
The perfect example of this truth was after 2012 when, with less than 10 seats, the ALP did not technically qualify as “the Opposition” but Newman made an exception to the rule and made the ALP, alone, the “Opposition”. In one of his parliament’s first moves the ALP and LNP voted together in the middle of the night to change the rules so that the KAP/independents group couldn’t seek “Opposition” status. It’s much more than a title, the position brings additional funding, staff and resources like office space.
Strange behavior for purported mortal enemies.
Keeps it all so nice and neat and frenemy.
If there is to be “Pasokification” in this country it is going to be a rise of a force or forces to counter the duopoly stranglehold. The Greens looked promising in that regard until they decided to become unofficial junior coalition partners with the ALP and began adopting neo-con economic attributes.
jungney @ #28 said:
FFS, I’m not “comparing Greece to Qld” in any substantive historical sense. Merely pointing out that Syrizia was, until recently, the minor party of the Greek Left, analogous to the GRNs who are the minor party of the AUS Left. Pasok have lost their major party of the Left status because they drank too deeply from the neo-liberal Kool Aid, which was toxic policy and turned into toxic politics.
Syrizia are now the major party of the Greek Left. The “Pasokification” analogy with AUS breaks down because the GRNs have not replaced the ALP as the major party of the AUS Left. In part this is because the ALP have retained some fidelity to its traditional economic Left values.
This is an argument by analogy, not identity. But unless one actually spells that out one gets the straw man hunting hounds out in force, baying for blood.
I don’t have any particular interest in contemporary Greek politics or history, apart from the rise of Syrizia and Golden Dawn as portents of the crack up of the post-modern liberal elite consensus. Ancient Greeks are a little bit more my cup of tea.
My experience of contemporary Greek political culture is probably typical of Melbournians. Patiently listening to passionate harangues about the iniquities of fascists, communists, Jews, bankers etc from wild-eyed Greek angry young men at parties and union meetings. Although I enjoyed the occasional session in a Lonsdale Street cafe, swapping yarns in low tones with their cloth-capped peres. They sipped Greek coffee, so strong, sweet and coarse-grained you could stand your spoon up in it. You gotta love them, but their politics drive me up the wall. They never get over it. A bit like jungney, by the sound of it.
@Jack Strocchi
It’s just a matter of respect where it is due. In this case to the Greek left, including the Greek resistance, and all the other forms of resistance in Europe to fascism, France and Italy included. While you have supped with Melbourne Greeks, so colorful of you, I’ve shared bread with Italians whose entire village was murdered by the Fascists because it was a centre of Italian anti-fascism.
I’m loyal to history. And I don’t forget.
If you want to draw analogies between Qld and elsewhere then maybe you could show some respect into the bargain by drawing on real examples rather than figments of the imagination.
Or is history just too old hat for you?
Can someone talk me through how a “don’t allocate your preferences” campaign helps you get elected? As I see it, your preference flow only matters if your first-preference candidate gets eliminated, at which point they can’t win anyway: there’s mathematically no way that not allocating second preferences can get you over the line, or improve your chances of getting over the line.
jungney @ #31 said:
I respect the partisans. My father was a Christian Democrat partisan (Po Valley). Probably the only one. And experienced similar horrors. So please, don’t be teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.
My father managed to get over the War, employing both ex-fascists and ex-communists in the garage. Political arguments were a great hoot, but no one lost sight of the main game which was to make sure that Gough’s Medicare policy finally stuck.
I am not particularly horrified by Italian fascists. Some members of my family, who did not live near Red Bologna. were fascists and they didn’t have horns growing out of their head. Most European fascists were just nationalists who got steroids from exposure to war or to communist revolution.
Nazism was another kettle of fish entirely. Hitler had big plans for the whole world. Its just that some peoples did not feature in those plans, they had to disappear. Mussolini, Metaxas, Horthy, Franco and Petain were, on the whole, a lot nicer.
Through the first half of the 20thC everyone, both communist Left & fascist Right, had plenty of blood on their hands. If you want to start playing the vendetta game it won’t take too long before the place turns into the Balkans. Thats why the European Union was so crucial, it took people’s minds off the past. They got over it.
Except maybe Greece where the past is not dead, its not even past.
The post-modern liberal elite consensus (ala Pasok) plays into the hands of those nursing eternal grudges. No nation state can withstand the strain of the global cult of individualism. And the EU is built up of nation states. So it is currently not dealing with the strain, any more and it will break up.
A more conservative, economically equitable and culturally cohesive, path is indicated.
@Collin Street
Antony Green can (to avoid eternal moderation, put “http:” in front of):
http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2015/01/why-campbell-newman-advocatesjust-vote-1.html
Extract:
But you’d need to read the whole post. The converse is “Number Every Box and Put LNP Last”.
@Collin Street
Oops, missed my own advice and ended up in moderation.
Antony Green can (to avoid eternal moderation, put “http:” in front of):
//blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2015/01/why-campbell-newman-advocatesjust-vote-1.html
Extract:
But you’d need to read the whole post. The converse is “Number Every Box and Put LNP Last”.
Read the Pasokification article and ground my teeth in anger.
Well spoken Jack Strocchi, If I’ve not misread you.
Globalisation is a global pestilence in its corrupted neolib form.
No doubt people have read that Merkel won’t give an inch on debt write offs for Greece. But I don’t beleive this is for rational economic reasons; at least reasons I’d consider “rational”.
I think it is because the powerful cling to power regardless of harm done others, even to the point of crippling millions of people’s lives just to have the world suit the few and their hangups.
Back to a key point of the post.
The ALP.
The main problem with tribalists, LNP ones seem to me more honest about what they actually stand for than the ALP ones. That may be unfair, but so be it.
In my view the ALP will never change for the better while it has blind tribalist support “right or wrong”. How can it, and why should it?
The following example comes from a twitter exchange about refugees (protesters tried to put up a banner at the tennis tonight and an ALP tribalist approvingly retweeted the story – which makes me see red. It was the ALP that locked up all the refugees in offshore detention).
I find the hypocrisy impossible to understand. Some insight into the tribalist mind, and why the ALP is simply half of a corrupt duopoly.
I started it off, as I usually do when I see an ALP person talking about refugees, by asking:
I reproduce this exchange here to show how futile it is to expect the ALP to “change from within”. ALP tribalists are first and foremost concerned with ALP electoral victory. Absolutely nothing takes priority over that.
According to the ABC “Queensland Election 2015 – Live Results” website, Antony Green is now predicting:
ALP 44
LNP 43
Fingers crossed for a hung/minority parliament.
So, with independent Peter Wellington and the two KAPs, it would appear that Palazscuk is going to be forced to start her term with the breaking of a “core promise” – NO DEALS.
On the other hand, with Newman gone it’s not impossible for some less fascist LNP leader to convince the three cross-benchers that they should trust them to form a government.
Wellington has said that he would back the ALP. But he did that once before under Beattie in 1998 and the ALP turfed him six months later when there was a convenient by-election they won. Once bitten…?
Thanks, Megan. That’s about what I’d guessed, but I had some vague hope that there was some non-bad-faith argument you could advance.
But no.
Prof Q, it seems to me you are too modest regarding the impact of your asset sales analysis. To the best of my knowledge, “no asset sales” is the only specific policy promise made by the leader of the ALP.
Taking your self-assessment of the impact of your work as a given, there is an interesting implication. Your productivity is at least equal to that of the entire Ernst & Young team that worked on the topic and teams of spin doctors. But this is not how it would be recorded in the national accounts, assuming you did this work in your usual manner. Their ‘work’ would have a much higher value than yours in these accounts – no? Assuming the answer to my question is yes, there is something wrong with the objective of ‘economic growth’ if the source of the ‘growth’ is unexamined.
I found it refreshing that Ms Anastacia P. abstained from making all sorts of specific promises, said to “ensure” desirable outcomes (which are typically not deliverables because of lack of direct control). She spoke in a more sensible language such as policy objectives. No asset sales is a deliverable. It is credible.
The result is interesting, but the history of big swings in QLD is also strange. Is this a result of not having an upper house? No way to express your disapproval of the government other than to vote them out.
Or is it more simple, with the Queensland floods, droughts and cyclones costing so much that any government would look bad?
@John Brookes
It is partly as a result of our unicameral parliament. But in reality our lower house should look roughly like any other state’s.
The main factors are, firstly, that we are effectively a mono-media state. NSW and Vic have vastly more media diversity. We have the ultra-right-wing Fairfax radio, the ultra-right-wing-phone-hacking-scum Murdoch papers and the in-bed-with-Murdoch ABC (often literally since many of them intermarry). We also have some ALP-right dominated “community” radio. But mostly the problem is that Murdoch controls the placement of the window and all the “players” happily take their places within that frame.
Secondly, neo-liberalism. When this state was bursting out of its old “Joh” reactionary past and getting all excited about ‘going forward’ and not being ‘country’ any more in the late 1980s, the ALP was hitting top gear in its embrace of “economic rationalism” and it sounded so funky and modern and Let’s All Get Rich.
Since then we’ve had only two choices of rulers: Neo-Con ALP, or Neo-Con LNP.
So, the short answer to your question:
Is: “No, that’s all we’ve got.”
And, PS: We’ll keep doing it until we get our democracy back.
Pasokification can only hapen within an environment that is comparable to Greek environment.
Greece has 27% unemployment and demolished safety nets, risen VAT taxation to to 27% .
Since normal greek unemployment was around 10% and VAT was 19% with prety good safety nets.
Only change of such magnitude can cause change of similar magnitude as in Greece.
That would be unemployment in Aus of around 15%, VAT taxes introduction and cuts in social spending. So, no chance for Pasokification in Aus or anywhere near.
But not to say that there would be no influence of Pasok experience, there will be a slow move toward more leftist policies, a slight move toward postwar environment after going further down the present road of going rightish.
There is even the possibility of conservatives taking spot in a vacum left by left parties.
This is very interesting if true.
Chamber of Comerce is warning Republican Party about elements in public prepared to totally discredit candidates that are warning about public debts and calling for austerity. MMTers no doubt.
(Iconoklast, i think my prediction is comming true, Kelton became US senator’s finance adviser and Yanis Varoufakis became Finance minister)
Repaired link
@John Brookes
PPS:
I love this idea that our leaders are desperate to hear what we think, but somehow we are not speaking loudly enough.
Many have forgotten that ALP Bligh as Premier and LNP Newman as Brisbane Mayor joined together to violently shut down “occupy Brisbane” in 2011. But many have not.
Just one of many examples. Another that springs to mind is “Community Consultation” beloved of both sides of the duopoly to pretend they are willing to listen.
“The more common pattern has been for a woman to get a “hospital pass” ” – JQ
Being given the leadership of a 9 member opposition qualifies as a ‘hospital pass’ I would think……she just managed to score a length of the field try with it.
Probably even more true in the US with the democrats.
@Ernestine Gross
You make good points there. Plenty of “work” and growth in our society is of dubious value. This is especially the case if we measure value by more than just GDP. For example, what is the real value of junk food production and junk food advertising? We would all be better off (except for a few junk food kings) without any junk food at all in our society. This is just one of many examples we could produce. In fact, every piece of advertising for increasing wasteful and dangerous over-consumption of all kinds (like large SUVs for example) is of dubious value given the real challenges we face. I mean limits to growth and climate change of course.
@Megan
Megan, you say the ALP is neo-conservative. But you also say it is neo-liberal. It can be one or the other, or neither, but it can’t be both.
@Uncle Milton
The eminent John Legge defined democracy as we all know as government by the people for the people, neoliberalism as government by the few for the few and neoconservatism as government by the few for the few by force. I would contend that the ALP is neoliberal and that the LNP (at Federal level at least) is tending towards neoconservative aka the Bush the younger administration.