So, I just went and voted (Green) in Indooropilly, a seat held by Labor until the last Parliament[1]. In the entire campaign, I’ve seen no sign of activity on the part of the Labor candidate (a commenter tells me he’s a law student). This continued at the polling booth, where there was no-one handing out Labor how-to-votes, the first time I’ve ever experienced this. I’ve heard from other sources that the party machine has been desperately trying, and failing, to round up volunteers.

This is a disaster worse in many ways than the wipe-outs of the 1970s when at least the party faithful were, well, faithful. The Bligh government’s sellout on asset sales wiped about 10 percent of its support overnight and, except in the immediate aftermath of the floods, that hasn’t changed.

And yet, the ALP is still in denial about the whole thing. Wayne Swan is expressing his hope that Andrew Fraser, the main driver of the asset sales can be saved. And Bligh’s defenders are pushing the line that electors are finally responding to their desire to punish the government for the sins of the Beattie era. The idea that you lose votes by doing something that’s directly opposed to your platform, that you’ve promised not to do, and that voters hate, seems not to compute

I said in my last post that I wasn’t looking forward to two terms of Newman. But unless Labor wakes up to itself, they could be out for a lot longer than that.

fn1. The Labor member, Ronan Lee, defected to the Greens before the 2009 election, which was won by the Liberals.

Barring a miracle, the Queensland Labor government will suffer a defeat tomorrow, comparable in its severity to the Joh-era election of the 1970s, when the caucus was reduced to the size of a cricket team. The great majority of Labor MPs are likely to lose their seats. While I regret the fact that matters have come to this, and like and respect quite a few of those MPs (including, for that matter, Anna Bligh[1]), I will be shedding no tears over this outcome.

Minor update I found a report listing Paul Hoolihan, Jo-Ann Millar, Amanda Johnstone Dean Wells and Lindy Nelson-Carr as members of caucus who opposed the sales. I have met and been impressed by the last two, and I’m sorry that most of this group seem likely to be swept away along with the rest.
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A couple of days after Labor united behind Julia Gillard, allowing her to implement her commitments, we get
this (somewhat belatedly denied) and
this.

Meanwhile, in Queensland, Labor is marching towards a defeat that has been inevitable ever since Bligh’s post-election announcement, in 2009, of a massive, and economically unjustified program, of asset sales. Despite the fact that most of them are going to lose their seats, and that the policies violates both election commitments and Labor policy, hardly a single member of the Labor Caucus has opposed this, or even dissented from the retribution dealt out to the ETU and others who did stand up.

In the wake of the Labor leadership ballot, I tried to think a bit about new directions for public policy in Australia. My conclusion, in short, is that there aren’t any. I’ve hammered the point that Gillard is a policy-free zone, and even her supporters haven’t pushed back on this. I have to concede though, that while Rudd’s challenge speech was impressive in many ways, he also failed to produce much in the way of new ideas.

The problem isn’t just one for social democrats and Labor supporters. Abbott is the worst kind of poll-driven populist, and Turnbull, the only person on the conservative side of politics who has anything resembling a clue has been permanently marginalized.

Finally, there’s the policy elite represented by the Fin, the Oz and the various establishment thinktanks and policy talkfests. After thirty years, they haven’t come up with anything better than the tired old 80s agenda of market-oriented reform, competition and productivity, encapsulated in Workchoices, rejected by the Australian public in 2007 and totally discredited by the GFC.

The Greens are the best shot, but under current conditions they can’t hope to do much better than their current role of supporting a minority government and/or holding the balance of power in the Senate. That gives them the chance to make a small number of non-negotiable deamnds (eg carbon price), and to exercise some influence. But in broader areas like economic policy, they remain marginal. Even though they have some good ideas, they aren’t treated as serious players in this field.

The best that can be said is that, as long as the terms of trade continue to boom, the cost of missed opportunities will not be all that great. Australia remains a lucky country, run by second-rate men (and now also women) who share its luck.

By contrast, US politics seems to be opening up to the ideas of the left, at the same time as the Repubs are spiralling off into the Delta Quadrant. All in all, a lot more color, interets and hope than the drab prospects before us.

A couple of points that have emerged in the debate over the Labor leadership need a response

First, there’s the claim that there are no policy differences between Rudd and Gillard. This is often presented as if the two had independently arrived at the same position. In fact, as the equation in the post title implies, it’s because Gillard is a policy-free zone. Her independent ventures into policy making amount to a disastrous set of pre-election moves on carbon policy (no tax promise, consultative assembly, cash for clunkers) and a series of failed attempts to resolve the asylum seeker problem. Now that the Rudd agenda has mostly been passed or abandoned, Gillard has no policies whatsoever, a point I made some time ago. Her abandonment of the Gonski report, which she used as an excuse for doing nothing when she was Education Minister, is typical.

Second, and with somewhat more justification, there’s the fact that Gillard has been successful in getting policy passed where Rudd failed. The unusual circumstance of a House of Reps minority has led most people to overstate the relative difficulty of Gillard’s task. She has needed the Greens and three of five independents, normally being Wilkie, Oakeshott and Windsor. Rudd needed the Greens, Xenophon and Fielding, which was obviously harder. It’s true that Rudd made the mistaken choice of freezing out the Greens and trying to negotiate with the Liberals, which made no sense given that the Greens were bound to hold the balance of power sooner or later. A more comparable test is that of asylum seekers, where Gillard has done no better than Rudd, arguably worse.

*This equation was allegedly written by a notable, but somewhat obscure economist with his own name in the place of Rudd, and that of a better-known researcher in the same filed in the place of Gillard

A showdown over the ALP leadership, and therefore the Prime Ministership, has been inevitable for some time, and Kevin Rudd has finally brought it on, resigning as Foreign Minister in the face of direct personal attacks from Simon Crean (himself, apparently, a covert contender for the top job) and others.

Readers won’t be surprised to learn that I support Rudd. I have two reasons for this.

First, whatever his problems with interpersonal relationships and administration, Rudd is a serious leader with ideas for Australia’s future. Gillard has shown herself to have no ideas worth the name. Her policy agenda has consisted, almost entirely, of implementing policies introduced by Rudd.

Second, Gillard has totally lost the trust of the Australian people and if she leads the government to the next election, there is no chance whatsoever of a Labor victory. The result will be the election of Tony Abbott, someone who matches Gillard in terms of a lack of any consistent principles or concrete achievements, but adds to it a reactionary ideology and determination to undo the policies brought forward by (Rudd) Labor. Labor’s only chance of retaining office is to go back to Rudd.

Anyway, feel free to have your say

In a piece that pretty much writes off Julia Gillard as PM, Laurie Oakes reports

ALP polling has produced a finding that has startled those around the prime minister.

It shows that, while only 30 per cent of voters plan to vote for the Gillard Government, 38 per cent describe themselves as Labor people.

The conclusion drawn from this is that the Government has to be seen as ‘more Labor’. It has to show more concern about, and become more identified with, things that are regarded as `Labor issues

Wow, how could anyone have predicted that?

The date for the Queensland election is now set. Last year, when it was clear the Bligh and Fraser were going to push on to their end with their appalling plans for privatisation, I said that I planned to put Labor last, behind the LNP. Nothing much has changed with Labor, but the choice of Campbell Newman as the LNP leader has led me to revise my views. Newman was a terrible Lord Mayor of Brisbane, pushing through a bunch of uneconomic PPP projects like the Go-Between Bridge. He’s even more addicted to hard hats than Bligh (admittedly, he’s an engineer, so I would be happy for him to wear a hard hat if he had stuck to that line of work).

So, I’m going to take advantage of the marvellous institution of optional preferential voting. I’ll give the Greens my first preference, followed by any acceptable independent or minor party candidate. Labor and the LNP won’t get anything from me this time.

Looking at the latest TV news I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’m sick of the confected outrage surrounding the Australia Day incident. On the other hand, if this is what it takes to make the Labor Party realise they have to go back to Kevin Rudd, and sooner rather than later, then I suppose I can live with it.