Tuesday, February 03, 2015 8:19:15 PM
Queensland rejected hubris and unrestrained power when it rejected Campbell Newman
"Campbell Newman takes gamble calling a surprise early Queensland election"
Mark Bahnisch
After Saturday’s historic election, the LNP must realise there is no going back to the dark days of crony capitalism and arrogance
‘Campbell will now have to formulate his own personal Strong Plan for his own future,
post-politics.’ Photograph: AAP
Contact author @MarkBahnisch
Sunday 1 February 2015 19.32 EST
In 1993, the election that was supposedly unlosable for John Hewson, I staffed a polling booth at the Coomera State School. Coomera is one of those very pleasant districts that’s either on the north of the Gold Coast or the south of Logan, perhaps depending on which way you’re heading. This country belonged to Russ Hinze, the former “minister for everything” who died in disgrace in 1991, and the Nats volunteers, old blokes with bowed legs and Akubras shading their gnarled faces, were from this era.
The Liberal volunteer on the booth was a blow-in from Melbourne. Why he’d leave Jeff Kennett’s neo-liberal utopia in the making and come up to Queensland was anyone’s guess. The humour of a very good-humoured day, breezy and unrushed, was that this guy got almost absolutely nothing about Queensland .. http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/queensland .
I could tell a lot of stories, but the one that resonates with me 22 years later, after the Queensland election, is when a police senior sergeant came in to vote in uniform, taking only the Nationals’ how to vote. The Lib claimed that he had seen the exact same walloper cast his vote earlier, at a neighbouring polling booth. Perhaps all cops look the same in the bright light of the sun, or perhaps he was right. Vote early and vote often was one hallmark of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s regime, and the dead voted too, in numbers, particularly in close by-elections. One of the old Nat blokes in a battered Akubra said, “don’t worry mate, he’s ok, he’s one of Russ’s boys. Russ’ll look after him.” Our Victorian mate pointed out, reasonably, that the former minister for everything was dead. “Naah, mate”, drawled the Nat, “he’s just sleeping. Don’t you worry about that, mate. Over there, in a cave in that hill.”
---
"Let all the misgovernment and malfeasance come to an end, and let it be unmourned."
---
Nats of old could surprise with their erudition and their humour. Just another tall tale from the land of the Cold Ghost? The story of the election that ended Campbell Newman .. http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/campbell-newman .. is also about an interment and a resurrection.
It’s an extraordinary result, the outcome of this January election held on a sweltering day across the length and breadth of Queensland, from Currumbin to Cook. As the day dawned, federal Libs were scrambling to spin Labor’s return as a “natural correction” to the LNP’s huge 2012 majority, the cost of Can Do’s hard decisions. Strong choices weren’t mentioned. Nor was the human cost of so-called reform, all the lives upturned through unemployment and the shrinking of opportunity that comes not just from public service cuts but also from the ultimate logic of austerity politics – the withdrawal of the state from actively supporting communities and individuals in their basic struggles. No, that was not it, just swings and roundabouts.
This election result is about much more than swings and roundabouts, and about much more than the fate of Campbell Newman himself, now making history as a premier who lost his own seat. The pork barrel was empty, it would seem, and the good burghers of Ashgrove made their own strong choice, a choice that had no place for Campbell, who will now have to formulate his own personal Strong Plan for his own future, post-politics. The reasons for Campbell’s political demise have been analysed often enough, including by me, and no doubt the analysis is not at an end. With Newman’s political career in the coffin, the ghosts of National party premiers past ought also to be interred.
If the voice of Queenslanders said anything on Saturday, it thundered a rejection of the culture of power unrestrained and politicians’ hubris and arrogance. No more bills passed in the night, stripping citizens and workers of fundamental rights. No more dodgy donations. No more jobs for the boys and girls. No more “don’t you worry about that”. Queenslanders voted in massive numbers for a return to accountability and the basics of good government and democratic practice, conventions trampled underfoot by the RM Williams boots of the LNP’s ministers over the past term.
‘It is absolutely to Palaszczuk’s credit that she’s grown in stature over the last term.’
Photograph: AAP
Any Queensland government must now understand there can be no going back to the dark days of the past, that there is no electoral reward to be had from “strong plans” that don’t factor in the human cost of unrestrained crony capitalism. There will from now on be no electoral reward from “strength”, if that means treating citizens with disdain and contempt.
Let all the misgovernment and malfeasance come to an end, and let it be unmourned. There was a sly charm in the old Queensland, a seductive whisper that the state’s distinctiveness was expressed through its baroque tropical politics, a humour beneath the cattleman’s hats. But Russ Hinze is dead, he’s not sleeping. He was never a king or an emperor, even if Sir Joh was a Knight, and after this result, he should never be coming back. Lawrence Springborg and the LNP – take note.
Tony Fitzgerald QC should be resting more comfortably in his bed tonight. Hopefully he takes heart from the ordinary Queenslanders who will no doubt have been influenced by the sheer audacity of the joke Newman’s crew tried to play on what should be a modern and democratic state.
While it’s absolutely legitimate to criticise the ALP campaign, distorting the scale of its comeback by talking about “natural corrections” is rubbish. Let’s go back in time to a comparable wipeout: Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s reduction of the opposition to an 11 person “cricket team” in the 1974 election (in which Labor leader Percy Tucker, compared unfavourably at the time by Mungo MacCallum to a lettuce leaf, lost his own seat). The “natural correction” in 1977 was a small one; it took Labor until 1983 to regain most of the seats it had lost to the Coalition. Labor now has power in its grasp after just one truncated term.
"Labor’s 'modest' policies have not been plucked out of a political strategist’s hat"
Politics does move much quicker these days, of course, but the decimation of the parliamentary Labor party in Queensland in 2012 was a unique event in electoral history. The party was in chaotic disarray. After having promised to govern with grace and dignity, the new premier, evidently having forgotten magnanimity, kicked Labor out of parliament house and relegated them to a public service building in Margaret Street, a few blocks away. The seven remaining MPs from a pre-election caucus of 51 regrouped and elected Annastacia Palaszczuk as leader. Swings against Labor in seats they held had been as high as 21.3%. Now they have swung back in the opposite direction, often by the same order of magnitude. Having made history in 2012, the Queensland voting public has pulled off the same trick in 2015.
Palaszczuk, a lawyer by training and an MA graduate of the London School of Economics, took the safe seat of Inala in 2006, following her father Henry, a veteran MP and popular minister for primary industries, into parliament. A good listener, and very responsive to community voices, the novice parliamentarian rose quickly from parliamentary secretary through a junior ministry to transport minister. It’s unlikely, though, that Palaszczuk had been carrying a leader’s baton in her backpack. She certainly wasn’t mentioned in dispatches as a future leader. Anna Bligh, it was assumed, would anoint the youthful treasurer Andrew Fraser, and the education minister, Cameron Dick, was talked about as a potential rival. Both lost their seats to the LNP.
It is absolutely to Palaszczuk’s credit that she’s grown in stature over the last term, and to the credit of the seven MPs (whose number grew to nine after a succession of stunning by-election wins last year) that they have not just been able to provide a viable opposition but also to come tantalisingly close to victory so soon after Labor’s Armageddon. This was achieved not just through parliamentary efforts, but also through returning the party to its bases in the labour movement and the community. As with the Victorian election, journalists have been inclined to miss the enormous grass roots effort – volunteers, thousands of phone calls and door knocks, and more importantly, a politics of community consultation.
‘With Newman’s political career in the coffin, the ghosts of National party premiers
past ought also to be interred.’ Photograph: AAP
Labor’s “modest” policies have not been plucked out of a political strategist’s hat, but rather are the product of listening to those affected by Newman austerity politics – whether nurses and ambos or bus drivers and Indigenous people. Labor has also recruited an astonishingly diverse array of candidates, notwithstanding the six defeated MPs who have recontested and taken back their seats this election. Among these candidates, many who will shortly be sitting in the Legislative Assembly, are Leanne Enoch, the state’s first Indigenous woman MP, as well as electricians, defence lawyers, medical specialists and tradies. So much for the claim that the major parties always draw only on the political class.
It’s these connections with professions and trades, and the deep links made by Labor MPs in the manifold and multifarious communities that make up a diverse state, that have ensured not just its survival, but also a resilience that positions the party not just for an astonishing victory but also very well for the future.
In a sense, then, one sleeping giant has been awakened through this election – the sense that so many have of Queensland as a project. A work in progress, sure, but progress to a more humane, more inclusive, more transparent, fairer and more accountable polity and society. That project, the legacy not just of figures such as Tony Fitzgerald and the late Wayne Goss but also of a multitude of activists and citizens over the decades, has shown its strength when tested against the flim flam of “strong plans” offered by a rattled party in a state of advanced decay.
Political nostrums that have endured for ages should now be tossed out, along with the many, many LNP MPs who have lost their seats. The LNP must understand that Russ Hinze’s ghost no longer slumbers under the hills of Coomera. And Labor, though it will tread softly, has learned the key lessons of its defeat in 2012 – that privatisation is poison, that Queenslanders want a government that respects not hectors them, and that there’s life still in social democratic politics, provided it connects with citizens. This result is truly an astonishing one, and its implications are manifold. The political rulebook has been smashed to smithereens along with the LNP’s majority, and every political party must now take stock.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/02/queensland-rejected-hubris-and-unrestrained-power-when-it-rejected-campbell-newman
===
Queensland: hung parliament looms as vital seat faces possible legal dispute
Joshua Robertson
Tuesday 3 February 2015 02.07 EST
Labor is forecast to win 44 seats – enough for minority government with independent support – but bankrupt candidate in Ferny Grove disrupts plans
Jackie Trad, right, the opposition environment spokeswoman, with the Labor leader, Annastacia Palaszczuk,
during the campaign. Trad is tipped to be deputy premier if Labor takes office. Photograph: Nathan Paull/AAP
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/feb/03/queensland-hung-parliament-looms-as-vital-seat-faces-possible-legal-dispute
===
.. this one by the ultra conservative Andrew Bolt (he gets a mention in the 2nd last paragraph here ..
High Court rules against Scott Morrison's refugee protection visa cap
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103551286 ) ..
Queensland election a disaster for Abbott
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/queensland_a_disaster_for_abbott/
Congratulations to Queensland voters. A switch for decency.
"Campbell Newman takes gamble calling a surprise early Queensland election"
Mark Bahnisch
After Saturday’s historic election, the LNP must realise there is no going back to the dark days of crony capitalism and arrogance
‘Campbell will now have to formulate his own personal Strong Plan for his own future,
post-politics.’ Photograph: AAP
Contact author @MarkBahnisch
Sunday 1 February 2015 19.32 EST
In 1993, the election that was supposedly unlosable for John Hewson, I staffed a polling booth at the Coomera State School. Coomera is one of those very pleasant districts that’s either on the north of the Gold Coast or the south of Logan, perhaps depending on which way you’re heading. This country belonged to Russ Hinze, the former “minister for everything” who died in disgrace in 1991, and the Nats volunteers, old blokes with bowed legs and Akubras shading their gnarled faces, were from this era.
The Liberal volunteer on the booth was a blow-in from Melbourne. Why he’d leave Jeff Kennett’s neo-liberal utopia in the making and come up to Queensland was anyone’s guess. The humour of a very good-humoured day, breezy and unrushed, was that this guy got almost absolutely nothing about Queensland .. http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/queensland .
I could tell a lot of stories, but the one that resonates with me 22 years later, after the Queensland election, is when a police senior sergeant came in to vote in uniform, taking only the Nationals’ how to vote. The Lib claimed that he had seen the exact same walloper cast his vote earlier, at a neighbouring polling booth. Perhaps all cops look the same in the bright light of the sun, or perhaps he was right. Vote early and vote often was one hallmark of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s regime, and the dead voted too, in numbers, particularly in close by-elections. One of the old Nat blokes in a battered Akubra said, “don’t worry mate, he’s ok, he’s one of Russ’s boys. Russ’ll look after him.” Our Victorian mate pointed out, reasonably, that the former minister for everything was dead. “Naah, mate”, drawled the Nat, “he’s just sleeping. Don’t you worry about that, mate. Over there, in a cave in that hill.”
---
"Let all the misgovernment and malfeasance come to an end, and let it be unmourned."
---
Nats of old could surprise with their erudition and their humour. Just another tall tale from the land of the Cold Ghost? The story of the election that ended Campbell Newman .. http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/campbell-newman .. is also about an interment and a resurrection.
It’s an extraordinary result, the outcome of this January election held on a sweltering day across the length and breadth of Queensland, from Currumbin to Cook. As the day dawned, federal Libs were scrambling to spin Labor’s return as a “natural correction” to the LNP’s huge 2012 majority, the cost of Can Do’s hard decisions. Strong choices weren’t mentioned. Nor was the human cost of so-called reform, all the lives upturned through unemployment and the shrinking of opportunity that comes not just from public service cuts but also from the ultimate logic of austerity politics – the withdrawal of the state from actively supporting communities and individuals in their basic struggles. No, that was not it, just swings and roundabouts.
This election result is about much more than swings and roundabouts, and about much more than the fate of Campbell Newman himself, now making history as a premier who lost his own seat. The pork barrel was empty, it would seem, and the good burghers of Ashgrove made their own strong choice, a choice that had no place for Campbell, who will now have to formulate his own personal Strong Plan for his own future, post-politics. The reasons for Campbell’s political demise have been analysed often enough, including by me, and no doubt the analysis is not at an end. With Newman’s political career in the coffin, the ghosts of National party premiers past ought also to be interred.
If the voice of Queenslanders said anything on Saturday, it thundered a rejection of the culture of power unrestrained and politicians’ hubris and arrogance. No more bills passed in the night, stripping citizens and workers of fundamental rights. No more dodgy donations. No more jobs for the boys and girls. No more “don’t you worry about that”. Queenslanders voted in massive numbers for a return to accountability and the basics of good government and democratic practice, conventions trampled underfoot by the RM Williams boots of the LNP’s ministers over the past term.
‘It is absolutely to Palaszczuk’s credit that she’s grown in stature over the last term.’
Photograph: AAP
Any Queensland government must now understand there can be no going back to the dark days of the past, that there is no electoral reward to be had from “strong plans” that don’t factor in the human cost of unrestrained crony capitalism. There will from now on be no electoral reward from “strength”, if that means treating citizens with disdain and contempt.
Let all the misgovernment and malfeasance come to an end, and let it be unmourned. There was a sly charm in the old Queensland, a seductive whisper that the state’s distinctiveness was expressed through its baroque tropical politics, a humour beneath the cattleman’s hats. But Russ Hinze is dead, he’s not sleeping. He was never a king or an emperor, even if Sir Joh was a Knight, and after this result, he should never be coming back. Lawrence Springborg and the LNP – take note.
Tony Fitzgerald QC should be resting more comfortably in his bed tonight. Hopefully he takes heart from the ordinary Queenslanders who will no doubt have been influenced by the sheer audacity of the joke Newman’s crew tried to play on what should be a modern and democratic state.
While it’s absolutely legitimate to criticise the ALP campaign, distorting the scale of its comeback by talking about “natural corrections” is rubbish. Let’s go back in time to a comparable wipeout: Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s reduction of the opposition to an 11 person “cricket team” in the 1974 election (in which Labor leader Percy Tucker, compared unfavourably at the time by Mungo MacCallum to a lettuce leaf, lost his own seat). The “natural correction” in 1977 was a small one; it took Labor until 1983 to regain most of the seats it had lost to the Coalition. Labor now has power in its grasp after just one truncated term.
"Labor’s 'modest' policies have not been plucked out of a political strategist’s hat"
Politics does move much quicker these days, of course, but the decimation of the parliamentary Labor party in Queensland in 2012 was a unique event in electoral history. The party was in chaotic disarray. After having promised to govern with grace and dignity, the new premier, evidently having forgotten magnanimity, kicked Labor out of parliament house and relegated them to a public service building in Margaret Street, a few blocks away. The seven remaining MPs from a pre-election caucus of 51 regrouped and elected Annastacia Palaszczuk as leader. Swings against Labor in seats they held had been as high as 21.3%. Now they have swung back in the opposite direction, often by the same order of magnitude. Having made history in 2012, the Queensland voting public has pulled off the same trick in 2015.
Palaszczuk, a lawyer by training and an MA graduate of the London School of Economics, took the safe seat of Inala in 2006, following her father Henry, a veteran MP and popular minister for primary industries, into parliament. A good listener, and very responsive to community voices, the novice parliamentarian rose quickly from parliamentary secretary through a junior ministry to transport minister. It’s unlikely, though, that Palaszczuk had been carrying a leader’s baton in her backpack. She certainly wasn’t mentioned in dispatches as a future leader. Anna Bligh, it was assumed, would anoint the youthful treasurer Andrew Fraser, and the education minister, Cameron Dick, was talked about as a potential rival. Both lost their seats to the LNP.
It is absolutely to Palaszczuk’s credit that she’s grown in stature over the last term, and to the credit of the seven MPs (whose number grew to nine after a succession of stunning by-election wins last year) that they have not just been able to provide a viable opposition but also to come tantalisingly close to victory so soon after Labor’s Armageddon. This was achieved not just through parliamentary efforts, but also through returning the party to its bases in the labour movement and the community. As with the Victorian election, journalists have been inclined to miss the enormous grass roots effort – volunteers, thousands of phone calls and door knocks, and more importantly, a politics of community consultation.
‘With Newman’s political career in the coffin, the ghosts of National party premiers
past ought also to be interred.’ Photograph: AAP
Labor’s “modest” policies have not been plucked out of a political strategist’s hat, but rather are the product of listening to those affected by Newman austerity politics – whether nurses and ambos or bus drivers and Indigenous people. Labor has also recruited an astonishingly diverse array of candidates, notwithstanding the six defeated MPs who have recontested and taken back their seats this election. Among these candidates, many who will shortly be sitting in the Legislative Assembly, are Leanne Enoch, the state’s first Indigenous woman MP, as well as electricians, defence lawyers, medical specialists and tradies. So much for the claim that the major parties always draw only on the political class.
It’s these connections with professions and trades, and the deep links made by Labor MPs in the manifold and multifarious communities that make up a diverse state, that have ensured not just its survival, but also a resilience that positions the party not just for an astonishing victory but also very well for the future.
In a sense, then, one sleeping giant has been awakened through this election – the sense that so many have of Queensland as a project. A work in progress, sure, but progress to a more humane, more inclusive, more transparent, fairer and more accountable polity and society. That project, the legacy not just of figures such as Tony Fitzgerald and the late Wayne Goss but also of a multitude of activists and citizens over the decades, has shown its strength when tested against the flim flam of “strong plans” offered by a rattled party in a state of advanced decay.
Political nostrums that have endured for ages should now be tossed out, along with the many, many LNP MPs who have lost their seats. The LNP must understand that Russ Hinze’s ghost no longer slumbers under the hills of Coomera. And Labor, though it will tread softly, has learned the key lessons of its defeat in 2012 – that privatisation is poison, that Queenslanders want a government that respects not hectors them, and that there’s life still in social democratic politics, provided it connects with citizens. This result is truly an astonishing one, and its implications are manifold. The political rulebook has been smashed to smithereens along with the LNP’s majority, and every political party must now take stock.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/02/queensland-rejected-hubris-and-unrestrained-power-when-it-rejected-campbell-newman
===
Queensland: hung parliament looms as vital seat faces possible legal dispute
Joshua Robertson
Tuesday 3 February 2015 02.07 EST
Labor is forecast to win 44 seats – enough for minority government with independent support – but bankrupt candidate in Ferny Grove disrupts plans
Jackie Trad, right, the opposition environment spokeswoman, with the Labor leader, Annastacia Palaszczuk,
during the campaign. Trad is tipped to be deputy premier if Labor takes office. Photograph: Nathan Paull/AAP
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/feb/03/queensland-hung-parliament-looms-as-vital-seat-faces-possible-legal-dispute
===
.. this one by the ultra conservative Andrew Bolt (he gets a mention in the 2nd last paragraph here ..
High Court rules against Scott Morrison's refugee protection visa cap
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103551286 ) ..
Queensland election a disaster for Abbott
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/queensland_a_disaster_for_abbott/
Congratulations to Queensland voters. A switch for decency.
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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