Our least significant PMs

John Quiggin28 Comments

My son Daniel pointed me a Facebook post starting from the fact that Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Turnbull served almost identical periods as PM, and comparing their achievements. Of course, there is nothing to compare.  I can’t find the post now (another reason to hate the displacement of blogs by Facebook and Twitter) but I thought I’d give my own prize for Australia’s least significant PM. The main ground rules are that I’m counting only achievements as PM, and I’m not judging whether these achievements were good or bad.

And the award goes to …Read More »

LNP not racist enough for Longman?

John Quiggin18 Comments

The Liberals’ disastrous result in the recent Longman by-election obviously played a major role in bringing an effective end to Malcolm Turnbull’s Prime Ministership. But the lesson drawn from the outcome by nearly all political pundits, and particularly those on the political right seems to me to be totally unfounded.

The central claim is that the Liberals lost votes to One Nation, which more accurately reflected the views of their conservative basis. The corollary is that to win seats in Queensland the LNP needs to become more overtly racist, most obviously by elevating Peter Dutton to the leadership.

I won’t comment on the morality of this, but simply on the electoral mathematics. Let’s look at the electoral results for Longman, conveniently collected by Wikipedia. First, compare the by-election to the 2016 result. Obviously, the LNP vote collapsed. But what’s more striking is that the combined LNP-ONP coalition vote also fell by around 3 percentage points, while the Labor-Green coalition gained 5 per cent. The combined vote for each side was about 44 per cent. So, even if ONP preferences had flowed more strongly to the LNP, the outcome would have been very close.

The other part of the argument seems to be that Longman is representative of Australia, or at least Queensland as a whole. In reality, it’s classic One Nation territory*. In its first outing  in the 1998 Queensland election, One Nation won the state seat of Caboolture (central to Longman), one of only a handful of wins in the South-east. In the  Federal election the same year, One Nation got 18 per cent of the vote, more than this time around. That compares to a Queensland average of 14 per cent and a national average of 8 per cent. Interestingly, the One Nation vote in Dickson (now held by Dutton) was just 8 per cent.

The real problem is not that LNP voters as a group have suddenly become racists (or, at best, anti-anti-racists), but that the party’s members, activists and intellectual base have done so, but have had to conceal or blur the fact until relatively recently**.  That’s why they are eager to adopt an interpretation of the Longman outcome that justifies them in coming out.

 

* To be absolutely clear, I don’t mean that most, or even a large minority of residents of Longman are racists or Hanson fans. Rather, whereas the average proportion of such people in Australia is around 10 per cent, in Longman its closer to 20. Whenever a Hanson-type candidate looks plausible, they can expect to get a fair few of those votes.

** I tried to think of someone who could reasonably be described as a small-l liberal in the way this term was once used. My best candidates were Peter van Onselen and Chris Berg, neither of whom really fit the bill in the way that, say, Ian McPhee did. Any others?

 

Turnbull’s last chance for greatness (updated)

John Quiggin43 Comments

Since he first entered the Australian political scene as a leading proponent of republicanism, Malcolm Turnbull’s career has been one long series of disappointments, which involved failing (more or less steadily) upwards.  Barring a miracle, his career is now effectively over. In the unlikely event that he survives as PM to the next election, he is assured of electoral defeat and subsequent oblivion.

But, he has one last chance for greatness. It’s now clear that  many of his Liberal colleagues and, almost certainly, a majority of coalition MPs, want to hand the country over to an overt racist, bigot and climate denialist*. Yet it would only take 75 votes on the floor of the House of Representatives to stop this from happening.  A handful of genuine liberals in the Liberal party would be enough*.*

If Turnbull led such a group, he would be reviled by his own side, most of whom hate and/or despise him anyway, but he would finally justify the hopes of millions of Australians (including me) who actually believed he could change politics for the better.

Even if the requisite handful could not be found, Turnbull could resign his seat and recontest it as an independent, or support someone else pledged to oppose Dutton.  That would give at least some electors a chance to have their say.

Of course, this is all said in bitter jest.  Turnbull has never stood for anything and never will. He will hang on to the last possible moment, then capitulate meekly.

Update: Well, he hasn’t gone meekly. But rather than take a stand against Dutton’s racism, and support Bishop, or even Morrison, he’s made it all about himself. His whole political career has been a vanity project.

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NEGative thoughts

John Quiggin6 Comments

I was asked by Bloomberg to comment on what the future holds for Turnbull and the NEG. My comments:

It’s an established convention in Australian politics that a narrow victory in a leadership challenge implies the need for a subsequent challenge in which the incumbent invariably loses. So, I think Turnbull’s future is either on the backbench or early retirement from politics.  Even if he hangs on, the NEG is now finished.
 It remains to be seen whether the various ad hoc interventions announced or canvassed over the past few days take place. My guess is that most will require legislation and that getting this legislation through the Parliament will prove impossible.
  I think nothing much will happen until Turnbull is replaced, presumably by Dutton. I can’t forecast what will happen after that.
This followed some comments I gave yesterday about rightwing opposition to the NEG (over the fold)

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Peace for our time ?

John Quiggin15 Comments

Amid the recent upsurge of leadership speculation, this time affecting the government, a crucial observation on the so-called National Energy Guarantee seems to have been missed.

No one thinks the NEG is a good policy: its selling point is the claim that it could resolve, once and for all, the political fight over climate and energy policy.  After the last few days, that claim has fallen in a heap. A few days after claiming the endorsement of his party room for the previous version of the NEG, Turnbull is doing an emergency rewrite of the NEG to stave off a rebellion and perhaps a challenge to his job.

This half-baked compromise, if it works at all, won’t resolve anything. There’s no target for emissions reductions, which might help get legislation through Parliament, but leaves the most important single issue for later. The already messy pricing system is to be complicated further by unspecified policies to reduce prices directly. And the denialists are still pushing for a publicly funded coal-fired power station.

Supposing this chimera somehow struggles into existence, it will last as long as the political stars with which it is aligned. If Turnbull loses to the right of his own party, the whole thing will be dumped in favor of policies driven by culture war concerns rather than economics, let alone climate. If Labor wins, they will need to dump this mess and start again, effectively from scratch.

I have in my mind a picture of Turnbull, descending the steps of a plane and waving a peace of paper while he announces “Peace for our Time”. I guess that can’t literally happen since the relevant meetings will all take place in Canberra and tarmac photo-ops are confined to state visits these days. But I doubt that Turnbull’s deal will last as long as Chamberlain’s did.

Coal and the nuclear lobby (updated)

John Quiggin198 Comments

Against my better judgement, I got sucked into a minor Twitterstorm over the weekend. The main outcome was to remind me that, while Twitter is useful in the role of a microblog, providing quick links to, and sharp observations on, more substantial material, it is utterly useless as a venue for discussion and debate.

Update : A large number of nuclear fans were eager to tweet and share snarky responses on Twitter, but only three people were willing to debate the issue here. Thanks to David Michie, Jonathan Suhanto and Ben Huxham who did at least respond. For those concerned that I might have a home-field advantage, I suggested that they post on a site of their own, with links, but no one took this idea up.  That says it all for the nuclear “debate” on Twitter, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve muted the lot of them.  End update.

In this case, the debate was over nuclear power, and this post from last year. It’s reasonable to ask why I would bother arguing about nuclear power, given my frequently expressed view that it’s dead as a doornail. The problem is that nuclear fans like Ben Heard are, in effect, advocates for coal. Their line of argument runs as follows

(1) A power source with the characteristics of coal-fired electricity (always on) is essential if we are to decarbonise the electricity suppy
(2) Renewables can’t meet this need
(3) Nuclear power can
Hence, we must find a way to support nuclear

The problem is that, on any realistic analysis, there’s no chance of getting a nuclear plant going in Australia before about 2040 (see over the fold). So, the nuclear fans end up supporting the Abbott crew saying that we will have to rely on coal until then. And to make this case, it is necessary to ignore or denounce the many options for an all-renewable electricity supply, including concentrated solar power, large-scale battery storage and vehicle-to-grid options. As a result, would-be green advocates of nuclear power end up reinforcing the arguments of the coal lobby.

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