My mobile phone buzzed a few minutes ago with an SMS message from reader Mike Smith, advising that a state election has been called for Saturday 9 September. This is, I think, the first time I’ve received actual news by text message.

I’m not great on the instant analysis thing, but my off-the-cuff prediction is a narrow win for Labor. I heard on the news that Centrebet were offering 8/1 for bets on the Coalition, which seemed long enough odds for a flutter, but by the time I checked in they’d shortened to 6/1. Meanwhile Labor has ‘blown out’ from 20/1 on to 10/1 on. This still seems to me to underestimate the odds of Labor losing, given that the opinion polls are level pegging, but the margin isn’t enough to induce me to back my judgement with cash.

One question that arises is whether a Coalition government would be led by the Liberals or the Nationals. I caught the tail end of an interview with Springborg in which he assured voters that he would be Premier in the event of a Coalition win, but I don’t know if that was based on an agreement with the Libs (possibly unenforcable) or his confidence of winning more seats (dubious based on a quick scan of the marginals).

I’ve expressed the view that we’ll never see another National government and I still think that’s highly probable. The best chance for the Coalition is that the Liberals get more votes and seats than the Nats this time around, and then become a plausible contender next time around.

The withdrawal of the Howard government’s legislation aimed at recreating offshore prison camps for asylum seekers is good news all round. The Liberal MPs who crossed the floor to vote against the bill (along with Family First’s Steve Fielding who indicated a vote against and Barnaby Joyce who threatened to abstain) have helped to revive the idea of Parliament as a place where laws are decided and debated rather than a rubber-stamp for the executive. Substantively, the failure of the bill reduces the likelihood of children being kept in detention centres again, though this is still, I think, possible under existing laws.

Despite the usual posturing, the outcome is not a bad one for Howard, as was shown by the rapidity with which he dropped the bill. There are no more votes to be had from anti-refugee demagogery, and the government was happy to back away from its past policies last year, and return to a process in which we implemented, at least in part, our legal obligations to deal fairly with asylum seekers. The problem was the inconsistency between the government’s rhetoric and actions in 2001, dealing with refugess from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the admission last year of refugees from West Papua (note to those who seek to use non-words like “illegals” in this context – those I refer to have had their refugee status confirmed by the standard legal process).

Not surprisingly, the Indonesians were upset by this inconsistency, which implied that the position of West Papuans was worse than that of people escaping from the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, so the government was pushed into yet another reversal. But now, Howard can go the Indonesians and say he has done his best and that the problem is with the Parliament. Not surprisingly, Downer has already done this.

I was watching the TV news tonight and, about halfway down the bulletin, there were some stories about the new leader of the (Queensland State) Liberal Party, Bruce Flegg. Apparently he rolled Bob Quinn yesterday, but, even though I read the papers pretty carefully (OK, I read the websites of the national dailes pretty carefully and scan the Courier-Mail pretty fast) I hadn’t heard anything about this.Technorati suggests no-one else noticed either.* Somehow, I don’t think this is a good sign as regards the electability of the local Libs.

* I realise that my search omitted some blogs with few incoming links. A broader search picks up a couple of new bloggers more alert than me.

If you sign a loan contract, you’re well advised to read all that boring fine print and get good advice on what the terms and conditions actually mean. This is also good advice if you plan to rely on promises from the Howard government. During the 2004 election, the Liberal’s ran on the slogan “Keeping interest rates low”. The content of this promise has now been explicated by the Prime Minister.

“You have to look at everything I said during the election campaign and you will find that I repeatedly said that interest rates would always be lower under a coalition government than Labor.

“In 13 years of Labor, housing interest rates averaged 12.75 per cent and peaked at 17. Under 10 years of coalition government, housing interest rates have averaged 7.25 per cent – a 5.5 percentage point difference.

Supposing, as looks increasingly likely, that Howard plans to stay on for another 10 years, he can manage an average rate of 17 per cent over that period and still keep his government average rate below Labor’s.

But at least Howard gets his facts straight. Treasurer Costello*, is quoted as saying

And the critical thing is to make sure that we don’t have interest rate rises of 300 per cent which would take us back to where the Labor Party low point was, or 1000 basis points, which would take us back to the height where they were under the Labor Party.”

It’s easy to check that the Labor party low point for the cash rate was 4.75 per cent in July 1993. But the message from Costello is the same as Howard’s. Anything below 17 per cent counts as delivering on the government’s promises, and anything below 9 per cent (the current cash rate of 6 per cent + 300 basis points) deserves extra applause.

* I think he’s segued from a selective quotation of home mortgage rates into discussion of the cash rate (only the latter is discussed in terms of basis points), but the implication is the same.

Unless Costello has another move planned, it looks like we can all turn back to the sports pages. Costello’s called Howard a liar, Howard has returned the compliment in spades (without actually repeating his earlier denials) and now it’s back to business as usual.

The only real interest in all this will be for the history books. Unlike the tangles of Children Overboard and AWB, where plausible deniability has reigned supreme, this is as straightforward a demonstration of the mendacity of Australian politics in the Howard Years as could be imagined.

The Howard-Costello version of the Kirribilli pact is providing lots of innocent amusement, and insight into the postmodern nature of Australian politics.

Costello says there was a deal, Howard says there wasn’t, but, as the government’s supporters will no doubt hasten to point out, the whole idea of a ‘one size fits all’ truth, the same for everyone, smacks of socialism. In a modern market system of politics, everyone can pick their own truth, as desired, and have more than one available for different occasions.

The AWB fiasco illustrated this perfectly. On the one hand, Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant and it was our obvious duty to support the US in overthrowing him, even if Australian lives were bound to be lost in the process (not to mention, of course, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, wounded or displaced). On the other hand, it was the government’s duty to promote the interests of Australian wheatgrowers, and if that meant slipping Saddam a few hundred million, creamed off the top of funds set aside to help the Iraqi people, then so be it. And, with Saddam gone, it was obviously necessary to cover the deal up so as to keep the incoming government sweet. With the surprising exception of Murdoch’s Australian no-one on the political right saw anything wrong with this.

As with AWB, I doubt that anything will come of this, unless Howard or Costello has decided to push the whole thing past the point of no return. Costello’s deliberate setup of a direct conflict with Howard suggests this. Still there’s plenty of time to patch things up.

More on this from Andrew Bartlett and Mark Bahnisch similarly cynical). Tim Dunlop retains some capacity for outrage and also thinks that Howard has to sack Costello now.

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The new IR laws take us back in many ways to the conditions of the 19th century. In some ways this is good for trade unions, since they need to campaign actively, rather than relying on industrial courts and awards. The LHMU which covers cleaners is taking the lead with its Clean Start: Fair Deal for Cleaners. Many employers have agreed with the broad principles of the campaign, described here. Others have not and the first Golden Toilet Brush has been awarded to property company Allco which has declined repeated invitations to meet cleaners’ representatives.

I’ve been meaning to post on the merger between the National and Liberal parties in Queensland, pointing out that it makes no sense to have two separate parties in permanent coalition, and expressing a bit of surprise that the local parties got their act together so quickly. Now, however, it’s all off.

This is amazing good luck for the Beattie government, which has made more than its share of mis-steps lately, although I think the main thrust of policies, raising services to a level comparable with other states, and pushing the “Smart State” slogan as a counterweight to the notorious anti-intellectualism of the Joh era (and for that matter, the Nicklin and Gair eras before that – it was a Labor government that cut the number of school years in Queensland, a decision that has only just been reversed), has been sensible.

Whatever the government’s problems, it’s hard to see Queensland voters going for a National-led coalition again> I’ll repeat what I said in 2004

In the case of Queensland, Labor has an advantage that does not seem to have been remarked on. The only plausible alternative government is a Liberal-led coalition, but for historical reasons, this isn’t on offer. In fact there are only three Liberals in Parliament and of these only one is running for re-election. Instead the Opposition is in effect the National Party (there are also the remnants of One Nation and assorted independents). Even though the Nationals have held office for most of the past fifty years, I don’t think we’ll ever see another National Party premier.

Assuming no merger, I thought in 2004 that it would

take three more elections for Labor to lose. The Liberals need one to become a credible party rather than a trivial joke, a second to become the leading opposition party, and a third to beat Labor.

Having won a few more seats, and with Labor looking ragged, you could just about have said that the first of these stages had been passed, until the fiasco of the last few days.