The Soviet-style one-party “election” for the UQ Union is rolling on, and so far the University has not acted to stop it, though there are some hopeful signs. Here’s an open letter supported by a wide variety of student groups, including many that would normally be regarded as conservative in their orientation. There’s a petition here, which I urge readers to sign.

At what appears to be a tender age, UQ Union President Colin Finke has perfected the art of the non-denial denial. Responding by email to a question from the Brisbane Times about the exclusion of all opposition parties from the Union elections (their names having been registered by Finke’s cronies), Finke stated

“These accusations are completely incorrect,”

“My understanding is that the returning officer [gym manager Alexa Faros-Dowling], an independent officer overseeing the UQ Union elections, has informed students that there are a number of registered parties running in the union elections.

“This attack appears to be no more than petty student politicking.”

It will be fascinating to watch Finke’s LNP career.

Student politics has long been the playground of budding party apparatchiks keen to try out dirty tricks, but the current Union election at hte University of Queensland goes beyond anything I’ve been seen before. I expect that, when these hacks graduate to adult politics, they’ll make the headlines in due course, and not in a good way.

Over the fold a guest post from Daniel Carr, who has the details

Read More »

The Labor Party has released a report on the Queensland election debacle. As far as it goes, it’s quite sensible, dismissing silly chatter about the election strategy and other trivia. The main causes of the disaster are identified as
* Too long in office
* Problems in the health system, particularly the payroll fiasco
* The asset sales

The first two of these can be dealt with pretty quickly. Obviously governments can’t last for ever, but reaching your fifth term is the kind of problem you want. As regards the health bungles, I’m reminded of the PM’s observation in The Dish. It’s accurate, but unhelpful to say that bungles like this are to be avoided if possible.

Finally, there’s the asset sales. The committee, probably wisely, avoids judgement on the merits of the issue, but concludes correctly that the decision to announce the asset sales, shortly after the successful conclusion of an election campaign based on a commitment to public investment was a disaster from which the Bligh government never recovered. The Committee also observes that the government’s defeat was made even worse by the hostile reaction from the party base, including unions. I’m not part of the Labor party base, but I certainly made strong public criticisms of the government’s case for asset sales. Given the scale of the resulting defeat, and the appalling policy decisions being made by the Newman government, it’s worth reassessing that course of action.

As an economist, I try to call the issues as I see them, rather than calculating the political consequences. So, I would certainly have expressed the same views on the bogus case advanced by Andrew Fraseer and the Treasury, even if I thought the result would be to reduce the government’s chances of re-election. But, in other capacities, as a blogger for example, I took a political stance against the government. Was this justified?

At this point, we need to push the analysis a bit further. The announcement of the asset sales was a political disaster for the government (as well as being bad policy in most respects), but it could have been recouped if, at any time in 2009 or 2010, Bligh had changed course and admitted that the policy had not attracted the necessary public support. Under these circumstances, her post-flood surge in popularity might well have been sustained. So, those who attacked the government in this period were in fact throwing a lifeline that, if grasped, could have saved it, or at least, allowed for a respectable showing and a strong basis for attacking the LNP. But that didn’t happen, and there was no way to unsay the valid criticisms that had been made of the government. So, the end result was to turn what would have been a thrashing in any case into a wipeout. Still, I can’t see that there was any reasonable alternative. At least now, there is some basis for a critique of the LNP, which there would not have been if I and others had given the Bligh government a free pass.

Back around 1970, the Labor Party was unelectable because its biggest branches, in NSW and Victoria, were controlled by factional machines of the right and left respectively, who were still refighting the battles of the 1950s Split. The eventual response was Federal intervention to restructure both branches. The intervention was more successful in Victoria than in NSW, but overall the results were good enough to produce a revitalised Labor party. The election of the Whitlam government was one result, as was the strength of the early Hawke ministries, almost any member of which would outperform the great majority of both frontbenches today.

I doubt that an intervention would produce a similar result in NSW today, but the situation is now so dire that it could scarcely make matters worse. It’s hard to imagine a political party with less justification for its continued existence than NSW Labor. It sold out its stated principles with repeated attempts to privatise the electricity industry, then made a botch of the job anyway> It has made itself look stupid with repeated changes of leaders (the only one who tried any resistance to the machine was Nathan Rees, and he was promptly squashed). Its members are enmeshed in every kind of corruption, financial, ethical and sexual, above and beyond the routine corruption of political processes that turned the word “rort” from Sussex Street slang into an Australian byword for sharp practice. Electorally, it’s a disaster area, having gone down to the worst defeat in its modern history, under the sock-puppet leadership of Kristina Keneally. Even though the NSW Libs are, as they always have been, appallingly bad, the O’Farrell government is riding high.

And now, these geniuses have decided that it’s smart politics to make war on the party that’s keeping Federal Labor in office, and with which they will need to deal for the indefinite future if they ever want to pass legislation through the Parliament. Looking at this appalling crew, I can only quote Oliver Cromwell “You have been sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

Update My friends at the Oz take a keen interest in all my thoughts, so I wasn’t too surprised to see this post linked in their “Cut and Paste” section. However, the headline All the Climate Change Authority member would like now is to get rid of the NSW Right seemed both unwieldy and obtuse, in a fish-meets-bicycle kind of way. Why should my (widely shared and longstanding) views on the NSW Labor Right machine be of any more interest by virtue of my membership of the Climate Change Authority? And why should my enthusiasm about the election of the Rudd government (also linked by Cut and Paste) be relevant to either?

The answer, I would imagine, is this post by Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy who (in a quite strange misreading) took the imprecation “In the name of God, go” to be directed, not at the Sussex Street machine repeatedly criticised in the post, but at the Federal Labor government. Terje Peterson tried to set him straight in comments (thanks, Terje), but I had to spell the point out before he added a correction on Sunday evening, which made the entire post rather pointless. By that time, I imagine, the cutter and paster had already set the story up and gone home, leaving the unfortunate sub-editor to do a salvage job with the headline (not the first time!).

By resigning gracefully. If I were advising Gillard on how best to secure her place in history, I’d suggest waiting until the 1st of July and then making a speech along the following lines

The carbon price, legislated by my government is now in place. It will soon become obvious that the scare campaign run by Mr Abbott and the Opposition has no basis in reality and that our plan will achieve cost-effective reductions in carbon emissions, while making most Australian households better off. I am proud of my government’s achievements in this and other areas. Nevertheless, I recognise with sadness that I am not the best person to take this message to the Australian public. I have therefore decided to resign the office of Prime Minister and advise my Labor colleagues to support the return of Mr Kevin Rudd to this position. Mr Rudd and I have had substantial disagreements over matters of managerial style, but we are agreed on the need for a Labor government with Labor values, and on the need for action in key areas including the carbon price, the mineral resource rent tax and the successful management of the Australian economy. I will give the new PM my enthusiastic support, and work for the re-election of a Labor government.

Would this work? I’m not really sure. But given Abbott’s failure to achieve any popular support at a time when Labor has plumbed unheard of depths of popular support, it would have to be worth a shot. At a minimum, it would help avoid the Queensland-style wipeout that is currently on the cards. And if it worked, history would certainly look kindly upon a PM willing to give up the job for the sake of her party and, more importantly, in the best interests of the country.

Bob Brown has just announced his retirement from politics. It comes as a shock, but such announcements usually do. I can’t do justice to Bob’s thirty or more years of activism in a blog post, but there have been few people in political life who’ve achieved as much while not compromising their integrity to secure political support. The Green Party which Bob effectively founded and has largely embodied for many years, has made a big positive contribution to Australian political life

Given the rubbish in the comments threads recently, I’m going to be ruthless in moderating this one. There will be plenty of time for critical thoughts on Bob Brown’s political career and on the Green Party. If you can’t wait for a more appropriate occasion, take such comments to the sandpit. Anything in this post that crosses my subjective line will be deleted with prejudice.

My wife alerted me to this piece by Kristina Keneally at the Drum, and so I ran out a quick response.

Shorter JQ: Keneally is right that voter backlash against privatisation caused NSW and Queensland losses, wrong that the policy was sound and even wronger that Labor (at least in Qld) didn’t try hard enough to sell the idea.