Amid the excitement and consternation caused by Campbell Newman’s appointment as extra-Parliamentary leader of the LNP, no-one seems to have noticed a striking fact about the devotion and confidence of his followers. After Bruce Flegg declined some very pressing suggestions that he should spend more time with his family, not a single member of the Parliamentary Party stepped forward to offer the new leader a seat. While commentators have wisely opined that Campbell’s plan might be either crazy or brilliant, the alternative of a quick entry to Parliament, had it been available to him, would have been odds-on to win, given that the LNP was ahead in the polls even under whatshisname, the former leader.
Category: Oz Politics
One Nation resurgent?
Until a month or so ago, I was under the impression that the One Nation party had shuffled off into history. So, I was surprised, attending a lunch at which Joe Hockey spoke, to hear repeated questions from reporters about the role of One Nation in attacks on Hockey’s standard against the appeals to racism allegedly advocated by (Lib Immigration shadow) Scott Morrison. Then, on a recent visit to Sydney I heard David Oldfield spruiking the One Nation line on 2UE. And now Pauline herself appears at an anti-carbon tax rally, along with a bizarre cast of characters including Angry Anderson and the League of Rights. Does anyone have any insight into what’s going on here? Is this just some bandwagon-jumping or is there a real resurgence of One Nation and similar groups?
Campbell’s cockamamie campaign
Brisbane Lord Mayor ‘Concrete’ Campbell Newman has announced that he wants to be State Premier, but is not prepared to give up his current job to run for the office. Rather, he plans to run for a seat at the next election, then challenge for the leadership of the LNP, which, he hopes will have a majority. Like Malcolm McKerras and others, I’m bemused by this strategy. What is the Parliamentary LNP supposed to do between now and the next election, and what kind of campaign can be run on this basis? Will there be two policy speeches?
Supposing that Newman has majority support in the Parliamentary LNP, their best option would seem to be deposing the current leader Langbroek (no great loss there, admittedly) and replacing him with someone willing to act as a stand-in. That would be a pretty miserable position to occupy (imagine the fun the government will have with it) but perhaps someone can be found to do it. The situation in the City Council will be similarly farcical, giving Labor a chance of regaining its majority.
However, I suspect that reality will sink in soon, and that this cockamamie idea will be abandoned. Either Newman will back away from state politics or he’ll have to follow the standard route in such circumstances finding someone willing to stand aside and create a by-election.
Between the successful management of floods and this farce, a Bligh government that seemed doomed (deservedly so in my view) now looks to have a good chance of retaining office.
Update It looks as if they are going with the “stand-in” plan, with Jeff Seeney as the bunny. Both Langbroek and Springborg have quit. Seeney certainly won’t outshine Newman, but he can still do the LNP plenty of damage. I still predict Newman will be forced to run for a seat in Parliament before long. Perhaps one of the departing leadership team will be kind enough to make way for him, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Oz Fail #4
Oz chief political reporter Matthew Franklin tries for a bit of a beat-up with this story about some platitudinous speeches given by Swan and Gillard at the annual conference of the AWU, where, as is customary on such occasions, they said some nice things about their hosts, Bill Ludwig and Paul Howes. Franklin points out, rightly enough, that the AWU supported Gillard in the overthrow of Kevin Rudd. The real problem is with the sub-editor who ran this routine piece of snark with the striking headline “PM, Swan in praise of union ‘saboteurs’ “.
According to the standard, slightly arcane principles that apply here, the use of single quotes around the word “saboteurs” implies that Gillard and Swan actually used the word as a term of praise, with the rest of the headline being a paraphrase. This isn’t quite as crazy as it might sound – the original saboteurs were factory workers who threw their wooden shoes into the machinery as a crude but effective way of protesting against speedup. A historically minded radical might suggest that similar resistance to the work intensification push that began in the 1990s was to be applauded. But of course, Gillard and Swan are never likely to say anything like that, and they didn’t.
The error wouldn’t be so serious if the article quoted someone else calling Ludwig and Howes saboteurs, though it would be more correct to write “PM, Swan ‘in praise of union saboteurs’ “. But in fact there is nothing of the kind, and no hint that anything has been lost in editing. It’s simply that the sub (or maybe the editor) is incorporating his own opinion. If so, it would be more appropriate to run it as a factual description without any quotes. That would entail dropping any pretence of objectivity, but such pretences have worn pretty thin at the Oz.
There are still pockets of good journalism at the Oz. But when even the craft values of subediting are sacrificed to the paper’s political agenda, there isn’t much hope for the future.
Hockey sticks his neck out
I was at a Media Club lunch in Brisbane today where Joe Hockey was the speaker. Amid a bunch of fairly predictable talking points, he offered the view that, if we want to address problems of housing affordability, measures that increase demand, like the First Home Buyers Grant, are exactly the wrong way to go. He’s right of course, and just about every economist who has every looked at the issue has made the same point. Still, given the sacred-cow status of home ownership (both in itself and as a speculative investment) it’s the kind of statement that Sir Humphrey would call “courageous”.
Strikingly, not one of the assembled journalists took him up on it. Instead they bowled him up a series of questions on the kerfuffle du jour regarding the Christmas Island funerals all of which (to mix my cricketing metaphors) he padded away, let through to the keeper or dispatched to the boundary with ease. If I had been looking for a story instead of going through the motions, I would have asked something like “How much could the government save by abolishing FHBG, and where would the money be better spent”.
Given that Hockey has tackled one sacred cow, let me express the hope that some truly courageous politician will make the point that the biggest source of house price inflation is the set of subsidies to owner-occupied housing including exemption from land tax and capital gains tax and exclusion from most means tests. Michael Egan tried to tackle this in NSW, only for houses worth more than $1m IIRC, and got nowhere.
Depressing …
… that with leadership as underwhelming as Gillard’s, the alternative should be so bad as to make it no contest for anyone who cares about policy.
Goodbye 2010
Well, 2010 is over and it’s been a year of contradictions for me. In personal and family terms, things have gone very well, starting with the birth of my first grandson, James in March. Then there’s my literary offspring Zombie Economics, which seems to be going very well, and my election as a Fellow of the Econometric Society (quite a big deal in the academic circles where I move, if not exactly a barbecue-stopper among family and friends in general).
Politically on the other hand, it’s been a year of frustration.
In the name of God, go!
If I could have one big present for Xmas, it would be to wake up and discover that Keneally and Bligh had both proffered their resignations, and devoted their lives to undoing some of the damage they have done to the Labor movement.
Murdoch backs Bligh
Michael Stutchbury’s piece a while back supporting the QR asset sale (my critique, his response) turns out to have been the first of many as the Murdoch press tries desperately to talk this flop up. But the punters aren’t buying, and even some of the subeditors appear not to have got the memo. This (unsigned) piece in the Courier-Mail says that, rather than repaying the debt that was the pretext for the sale, Bligh and Fraser plan to spray much of the proceeds on electoral bribes of one kind or another. The text gives the most positive spin possible, but the headline referring to a “desperate push for votes” gives the game away.
And if Bligh and Fraser weren’t feeling desperate, the comments on the story ought to make them so. In 127 comments, I didn’t find one that actively supported the government, although there were a fair few that were also critical of the hopeless LNP. My personal favorite from “Skeptic”
Hands up those who reckon they can be bribed by this behaviour. If so, I have a bridge to sell you. Oh, wait, they’ve sold that too…
Bligh and Fraser are doubtless on the way to well-paid sinecures in the financial sector. But those members of the Labor Caucus who don’t have anything lined up post-politics must soon realise that their only chance of keeping any seats at all next time round is to sack them both.
Living in the 80s
If you want to see why the Labor party is in so much trouble, it’s useful to read this piece in the Oz by Paul Howes, one of the brighter lights on the right of the party. Howes says
For a generation or more we have witnessed a flowering of tory political culture. We have watched ideas flowing out of places such as the Sydney Institute and the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne. The IPA, the HR Nicholls Society and the Sydney Institute may propose policies that are abhorrent to me, but they’ve created a culture of ideas to nourish conservative politics.
This would have been an unremarkable claim to make in the 1980s (a generation ago). But today ?? The Sydney Institute is Gerard Henderson, who hasn’t had a new idea since the “Federation Trifecta” in 1990. Around the same time, the IPA with John Hyde rose briefly above its history as a conduit for business donations to the Liberal Party and its present role as an advocate of anti-science delusionism on issues ranging from tobacco to global warming to the Murray-Darling Basin (the latter not quite so much since the departure of Jennifer Marohasy). The HR Nicholls society has been moribund for years – its last notable contribution was as the 2006 venue for Nick Minchin’s disastrously leaked suggestion that WorkChoices had not gone far enough (he was bagged for this by John Howard in his autobio)
Howes goes on to mention, and dismiss, a plethora of leftish thinktanks (Per Capita, the Centre for Policy Development, Catalyst, the Australia Institute, the Evatt Foundation, the Fabians (Disclosure: in one way or another, I’m associated with most of them)) any one of which has had more new ideas in the last few years than the moribund shells he describes have had in decades.
Howes’ assessment reveals that, like most Australian politicians and commentators he is still in thrall to the 1980s agenda. The fact that, far from coming up with “brilliant new ideas”, Howes is sticking with an orthodoxy that was already solidifying when he was born in 1981 wouldn’t matter if these old ideas had proved their worth. But they have comprehensively failed, most notably in the current global crisis.
Howes is no fool and has at least made explicit what is merely implicit in the thinking of the average Labor politician (Bligh, Fraser, Keneally, Gillard and Brumby being obvious examples). But it is little wonder that the Greens are making such headway when the major parties offer a bipartisan consensus on such tired and failed ideas.
John Quiggin 