The Queensland election and the media

The dust has settled and Anna Bligh’s Labor has comfortably retained power in a Queensland election almost everyone thought would be much closer. While the opinion polls were erroneously calling a 51:49 split in favour of the LNP, the bookmakers were closer to the mark with Labor always firm favourite to win (even if it was mostly early money that made up their minds). Labor has now won their fifth victory in 11 years and all the plaudits belong to Anna Bligh. Defeated LNP leader Lawrence Springborg said she had done “an outstanding job” in the campaign and Labor Treasurer Andrew Fraser called it a “tremendous affirmation” of her leadership. "There is one reason we won this election campaign and that's Anna Bligh,” he said.

This morning Prime Minister Kevin Rudd also praised Premier Bligh on Channel Nine’s Today program calling it a great day for Queensland women and Australian women. “This is the first elected woman premier in the country's history and I think that point needs to be marked in history as well,” he said. The weekly Laurie Oakes interview is one of Channel Nine’s increasingly rare forays into politics. Their coverage of the Queensland election was generally abysmal apart from a daily sniping about Bligh’s government in the nightly news. The other commercial channels showed even less interest in the affair leaving substantial coverage to newspaper and online media.

Far and away the best coverage of the election was to be found online. In particular, the ad hoc Crikey collaborative effort Pineapple Party Time offered copious astute, timely, and relevant updates that covered all aspects of the campaign. The blog had a pleasing blend of talents which combined the psephological knowledge of William Bowe with the statistical wizardry of Possum (Scott Steel) rounded off by the penetrating analysis of Mark Bahnisch. Possum also was first to call Labor’s victory at 6:13pm Queensland time based on Auspoll’s exit poll which also successfully predicted the 2007 Federal election.

But while the reputation of online pundits has grown, Brisbane’s only daily newspaper The Courier-Mail has been left with egg on its face after campaigning strongly with a series of anti-Labor stories throughout the election. Last week its editorial endorsed the LNP (unlike its Sunday Mail stablemate which supported the government) saying Labor was “out of touch and out of time”.

The paper was forced to release a more conciliatory online editorial at 11pm last night. This time they gave grudging credit to Labor’s win while still questioning the wisdom of the electorate. The paper called Bligh’s victory a remarkable result and she deserved congratulations. But they also said that now she must deliver and claimed the people of Queensland “have been remarkably forgiving of a catalogue of failure, miscalculation, short-sightedness and, sometimes, sleaziness over the 11-year Labor rule.”

But while the Courier-Mail seems to be on an irrevocable course of irrelevance, the impact of an article in Thursday’s The Australian on Labor's win cannot be discounted. The article by Peter Van Onselen stated that leaked internal Labor polling showed that the LNP were on track to win just two days out from the vote. While nowhere in the article does Van Onselen say how he obtained the poll results, it is difficult not to believe they were deliberately leaked by Labor to shore up its base vote. Van Onselen also noted that Labor strategists targeted electorates under threat, using interstate resources, “in a last-minute attempt to turn around local fortunes.” It would appear that both of these late Labor strategies worked.

Over at Fairfax, the Brisbane Times did a reasonable job of coverage in the first Queensland election since it was founded. They reported several stories daily with occasional useful analysis such as that last weekend by Cosima Marriner. However the publication remains handicapped by a severe shortage of journalists and most of their reportage originated from other Fairfax outlets (particularly the Sydney Sun-Herald) and the wires of AP and AAP.

Lack of journalists is not (yet) a serious problem at the ABC and they can be commended for their coverage of the election. As always Antony Green’s election site is a goldmine of information about the seats, the candidates and the issues. And the weekly Friday night Stateline program has been an excellent resource for dispassionate argument about the policies and ideas that mattered in this election. Program host Jessica van Vonderen is a talented young journalist who did an excellent job in tandem with Green and the vastly experienced Kerry O’Brien in the tally room on Saturday night. The ABC continues to justify its existence with its superior political coverage, unmatched by any of the other broadcasters.

Labor retains power in shock easy win in Queensland

Accepting victory in Brisbane tonight, Labor leader Anna Bligh says: Queenslanders, Thank you.

Her gratitude to the people is because the ALP has won the election in surprising comfort with a margin of what is now looking like 17 seats. The 3.5 percent swing against them was not nearly good enough for the Liberal National Party in its first outing and defied the swing predicted by the polls. Labor has a 2PP (Two Party Preferred) lead of 51-49 - most recent polls predicted the other way round. LNP leader Lawrence Springborg has conceded defeat in a third straight election and says he has walked off the stage for good.

Retirement may or may not prove an exaggeration for a man who is 41 years old. However what is certain is that the history books will remember the state of Queensland elected Australia’s first female premier today, Anna Bligh.

Congratulations, Anna.

(picture is the name of the six-pack building across the road from where I voted today. It sums it up for me)

Queensland election: stumbling to the finish line

The final Galaxy Queensland election poll released Saturday show the Liberal National Party steadying with a 51-49 lead over Labor on two-party preferred. The two-point margin represents a 5.9 per cent swing to the LNP and would leave them just short of government if this swing is applied uniformly across the state on Saturday. The closeness of the race forced Labor to swallow its pride last week and agree to a preference deal with party defector Ronan Lee in Indooroopilly in exchange for Greens preferences in 14 key seats.

The major parties are now pulling out all the stops as the campaign enters its last week. Bligh and Springborg fought out a leaders’ debate on Friday. In the debate Bligh attacked Springborg's decision to impose a 3 per cent efficiency dividend by not filling public sector job vacancies so that the government would "live within its means". Labor used research from academic John Wanna to show the dividend would impact on front-line services. Springborg, meanwhile, attacked Labor on its health record. “[A]fter 11 years of Labor in Queensland there are 35,000 people in this State that continue to languish on our hospital waiting lists,” he said.

The two major parties formally launched their campaigns yesterday (how do parties, state and federal, get away with this sham of having “launches” at the end of the campaign?). The launches became pork auctions with the LNP promising 10,000 new jobs only for Labor to gazump them with a promise of 100,000. The banal similarities persisted as Kevin Rudd introduced Bligh while Malcolm Turnbull did the honours for Springborg. Just as in the polls, there appeared little difference in the launches.

However, the polls are showing some contradictions. While Bligh still has a commanding lead over Springborg as preferred premier (50 to 36), some analysts are saying she is Labor’s weak link. Writing in the Brisbane Times on Saturday, Cosima Marriner says Bligh has become a liability. Marriner says she has struggled to control the agenda and has been constantly on the backfoot. Similarly in The Australian, Sean Parnell criticised her negativity on matters such as the Moreton Bay oil spill and government cutbacks. “Everything Bligh is saying might be correct,” says Parnell, “but she looks like someone trying to defend the indefensible.”

Pollster Graham Young thinks the problem lies with Bligh’s presentation. He says she comes across as “too harsh, too shallow and too reactive” and Labor’s attack ads are not helping. And there are other smaller signs that Bligh is not a great natural campaigner. Yesterday Ben Grubb at TechWired caught out the Premier's office deleting Twitter updates. When Grubb queried whether Kevin Rudd’s Twitter depiction of the Queensland Opposition as “the other bloke” also included the Greens, the person behind @anna4queensland responded with “they’re certainly not an alternative government” before deleting the offending Tweet.

But regardless of whether Anna or “the other bloke” wins on Saturday, there is a definite sense of gloom in the electorate. Jason Wilson tapped into that mood today as he used the environmental disaster from the MV Pacific Adventurer oil slick as a metaphor for Queensland’s current woes. Wilson says that because its economy that relies on mining and tourism, the state is particularly susceptible to recessions. “Under the circumstances, Queenslanders' apparent lack of interest in this strange, irrelevant, funereal state election campaign is understandable,” he writes. On both sides, as Mark Bahnisch says, the vision is barren.

Luckily there is always the curious adventures of Pauline Hanson to cheer us up. She launched another one of her trademark anti-media attacks today after News Ltd Sunday papers published nude photos yesterday. The Brisbane Sunday Mail claimed the photos were of Hanson when she was 19 years old and they paid $10,000 to obtain them from her boyfriend of that era, a man called Jack Johnston. Today, the would-be Beaudesert MP denied she had ever posed nude and said she had never heard of Johnston. Hanson said she was fighting the charge because the media didn’t check the story with her. "They just got these photos, presumed it was me, made it public, and have embarrassed me greatly and I've had enough,” she said. “I'm just not going to take this anymore.”

Other than noting the irony of Pauline Hanson channelling Peter Finch, I agree she has been treated poorly in this episode. Perhaps worryingly, I find myself agreeing with Andrew Bolt for the second time in three days. While the photos were a clear breach of privacy, the whole brouhaha won’t do Hanson a jot of harm. The more the media harass her, the more she becomes a symbol of resistance for the political underclass.

I’m not sure what it is about the redoubtable Hanson but today she also united Tim Blair and Pure Poison in condemnation of the publication of the photos. The Herald Sun dubiously claimed the 30 year old photos had news value because public people are public property. “[E]very bloody time you stand, Ms Hanson,” shrieked the Herald Sun in unconvincing defence, “we will ask the tough questions.” Who exactly, is kidding who, here?

2009 Queensland election: An interview with Joff Lelliott, Labor candidate for Clayfield

The inner north Brisbane electorate of Clayfield is one of the most marginal seats in Queensland. Clayfield is bounded by the Brisbane River, Moreton Bay, the Schulz Canal, parts of Nundah and Wavell Heights, Gympie Road and Albion. Currently held by the LNP’s Tim Nicholls (who defeated then Labor MP Liddy Clark in 2006) with a margin of 1.7 percent, it has been re-defined as a notional Labor seat with a 0.2 percent margin due to a redistribution of 3,000 voters from the Stafford electorate (disclosure: Woolly Days was one of the three thousand). Yet despite the redistribution, ABC election analyst Antony Green says “it is certain” that Nicholls will retain the seat.

The man Labor has charged with removing that certainty is Dr Joff Lelliott. Lelliott is extraordinarily well educated. He began his career in academia, and completed a PhD and research fellowship in History of Science. He also has master’s degrees in ethnic relations (MSc) and politics (MA) as well as graduate certificates in journalism and business. After spending a couple of years in the public service, Lelliott moved into banking and insurance where he still works. He moved to the electorate in 2001 and now lives in Hamilton with his partner Ainslie. “We don't have any children – yet,” he said. “I turned 40 last year, so having a family is becoming a high priority!”

Joff Lelliott is involved in many local community groups such as Melrose Park Bushcare Group, Rotary Club of Albion, Nundah Historical Society and Pinkenba Community Association. He has also been a member of The Fabian Society for several years. Lelliott joined the ALP in early 2000 and quickly found that it took over a larger and larger part of his life. Lelliott told me he has spent a lot of time working in Labor's policy committees - Economic Management, Environment and Heritage, and Housing Local Govt and Planning. “As well as getting candidates elected, one of my key interests is in developing good policy,” he said.

Lelliott then expanded on what he thought good policy might be for Clayfield. “The most important issue for the electorate is to have an MP who is listening and whose focus is entirely on the electorate delivering the services, infrastructure and improvements that people in the area need,” he said. “This means being properly involved in the community.” He also pointed to the transport infrastructure being built in the electorate - Northern Busway, Airport Link, Gateway Duplication and Airport Roundabout Upgrade. “Clayfield needs an MP who can ensure these and other projects are delivered on time, on budget and with the least possible disruption to local communities,” he said.

Looking more broadly at Queensland issues, Lelliott said there needed to be a focus on protecting jobs and preparing the economy for the up turn. “This includes getting the best projects for our local public and independent schools from the stimulus package, building the new specialist Children's Emergency Department at the Prince Charles Hospital and delivering transport projects,” he said. “It is vital that we also make our economy and lifestyles more environmentally sustainable - this is not something to be delayed because of the global financial crisis.”

I asked him how Labor would fight the charge they are going to polls early in order to avoid a worsening economic situation later in the year. Lelliott says Labor has admitted the economy will get worse before it gets better. But he believes the election presents Queenslanders with two parties with very different plans. “You need to choose the plan you believe is going to see us through in better shape,” he said. “We need to do that sooner rather than later so that the new government - whatever its political leaning - can get on with its job.”

When I questioned what were Labor’s weaknesses coming into the election, Lelliott said the biggest challenge was “simply longevity”. But he quickly added that now was not the time to "give the other bloke a go" – what was needed experience, stability and a solid track record. He says that over the last ten years Labor may have aggrieved some people by taking tough rather than popular decisions. He pointed to the example of the Children's Hospital. “Expert opinion in Australia and overseas overwhelmingly supports bigger hospitals as the way to provide top quality healthcare,” he said. “Lawrence Springborg supported the idea three years ago, but in the last two weeks decided to oppose the plans when the only thing that has changed is what opinion polls say.”

I then asked him whether there was anything to admire about the LNP leader. Lelliott said he was impressed by Springborg’s ability to bring together two very different parties “with very different worldviews and constituencies, and fashion them into one party without having a political bloodbath.” But since the merger, he says, people are still waiting to find out what the LNP stands for other than anti-Labor. “I think most people are wondering whether Springborg has the ideas and abilities to lead the State rather than just create a new party,” he said.

Determined to finish on a lighter note, I asked him about his name. While some people are lucky (or perhaps unlucky) enough to have one unusual name, Joff Lelliott has two. Joff, he said, is short for Jonathan. “ When I was younger my friends and siblings could never say Jonathan, it was always "Joffnan" and so it morphed into Joff and then stuck,” he says. “If you put "Joff" into a search engine, there are a surprising number of us out there.” (That is true enough as a Google search found 275,000 Joffs.)

Meanwhile, the surname Lelliott is a variation on Elliott. It was originally a French name L'Elliott. The L’Elliotts that moved to England in the 13th and 14th centuries dropped the "L”. But his branch of the family were Huguenots who went to England to escape the French Revolution. “Unhelpfully, they only dropped the apostrophe,” he says, “leaving generations of Lelliotts with a name that most people think is misspelt!” In eleven days time, Joff Lelliott will be hoping Clayfield voters will trust him enough to put a number one next to his name, whether they think it misspelt or not.

Daylight Losing: An interview with DS4SEQ leader Jason Furze

In one of the more amusing takes on the Queensland election so far, Nomesque Life not only took on the shenanigans in Beaudesert (warning: Warwick Capper photo is unlikely to be SFW, or anywhere else for that matter) but also has a sly dig at the Daylight Savings for South-East Queensland party or DS4SEQ as the one-issue party prefers to be known. Naomi at Nomesque gave us the low-down on her citizen journalism as she interviewed the party on a Twitter stream conversation with @ds4seq. Naomi calls herself a bitch for being slightly cynical, but she does make a very good point: “While I know that single-interest parties are far from rare,” she asks, “surely you’d have to be ridiculously single-minded to vote in someone knowing only one of their policies and beliefs?”

Food for thought and it gave me the inspiration to talk to DS4SEQ party leader Jason Furze today. Furze told me he has long supported this cause. Born and bred in Brisbane, he has fond memories of the time when putting the clock back was Queensland law. “I was around 18 at the time and all my friends and family loved daylight saving”. But in 1992 Queensland voters overturned the three-year experiment with a 55:45 state-wide majority against daylight saving. The matter has never been tested at the ballot box since.

Furze quickly realised there was not an even split across the state. The South East with its geographical position and cultural closeness to NSW was most in favour of changing the time. And over the course of the next 17 years an additional million people of Furze’s generation have gotten on the electoral role (mostly in South East Queensland) that have never had to option to decide on the matter. Furze said the clincher for him was the 2007 Nielsen poll that showed deep divisions within the state. It showed 69 per cent of South-East Queenslanders wanted daylight saving but 64 per cent of regional Queenslanders did not. From that time on, it was clear to Furze that dual time zones were the way forward for the state.

Furze believes that the boundaries of the time zones can be mostly contained to sparsely populated areas. He said the daylight saving time zone would go as far north as Hervey Bay and Fraser Island and as far west as Goondiwindi. Roughly one quarter of the state and about three quarters of the population, would be included in the plan. There would be a few dodgy boundaries. “The Darling Downs would be mostly covered” he said. But when I questioned the fate of people on the wrong side of dual-time zone boundary, he reminded me of the everyday situation now affecting people in the Gold Coast-Tweed region. Yesterday the party launched their election campaign with a stunt on Boundary Street where it is 8 o’clock on one side of the street in NSW and 7 o’clock on the other in Queensland. That might sound funny but as Furze says there are 600,000 people in the region of which 80,000 have their own timezone. The resultant confusion directly affects more than half a million people.

While the arguments in favour of daylight saving might seem blindingly obvious to those living on or near Boundary Street, it is currently of no interest to the two major political parties. Springborg’s constituency is the 25 percent of those that want to live an hour later and Bligh made it one of her first dictums of office not to challenge the status quo. Both sides might look to tradition but Queensland has had daylight saving in the past. The clocks went forward for patriotic reasons in both world wars and it also went forward in 1971/72 and 1989/90 to 1991/92.

There is also a business cost of not changing. in April 2003 the Fortitude Valley Chamber of Commerce estimated that between one quarter and one third of all workday communication time was lost to confusion with not being on the same timezone as NSW and Victoria. There are the health aspects with a likely increase in end-of-day daylight recreation time. Bligh knows all the arguments but doesn’t want to be wedged on what her handlers tell her is an emotive and no-win issue.

But Jason Furze says almost everyone wins from dual-time zones in Queensland. He says that when he talks to those who live in the far north and west and tells them he doesn’t want to change their time, they are ok with the proposal. But he mostly speaks to own constituency and makes no apology for being a single issue candidate. “Queensland has optional preferential voting”, he says “that means people can vote for whoever they like as number two or no-one at all”.

And DS4SEQ refuses to preference any other party. Furze says that means voters get to vote twice, first on daylight saving, then on everything else. Impressively DS4SEQ has found 32 candidates (“more than Family First and One Nation combined” says Furze) to contest the election despite only being in existence as a political party for three months - “we would have someone in all 89 seats if the election had gone to September”. But as a one-issue campaigner, Furze is also realistic. Success for him on 21 March would be “convincing one or the other of the major parties to put the issue of daylight saving back to the people”. About time, too.

Queensland election 2009: turning sublimely ridiculous

“I’ll give her a bit of curry” will probably go down as the most memorable quote of this Queensland election. Was the speaker, former bad-boy Australian rules footballer Warwick Capper, offering his fellow Beaudesert candidate Pauline Hanson an Indian meal? Because I’d never heard the phrase in 20 years of living in Australia I was forced to look it up. I suspected it was unlikely that Capper intended the delicious irony of offering the former One Nation leader a pungent Asian dish flavoured with various spices or curry powder but I was unaware it was Australian idiom meaning rebuking, disciplining, criticising or harassing. So now I know. It could be argued that Lawrence Springborg has been giving Anna Bligh a fair bit of curry this last week.

But maybe Capper did have the food meaning after all. He also offered Hanson a cook-off between Hanson’s former fish and chip shop and his soon-to-be latte sipper’s “Warwick Cappuccino” coffee shop in Surfer’s. While Warwick may have been talking through his Capper, even he realised elections weren’t all beer and skittles. "Politics is a bit of a joke and I'm the king of the jokers,” he said today, “but I think we do have to get a bit serious sometimes.'' Indeed Warwick we do, but with both him and Hanson looking to cash in with PR man Max Markson and an LNP candidate arrested for a Big Brother protest, that leaves Labor's former soldier Brett McCreadie and scientist Andy Grodecki of the Greens looking decidedly dull on the Beaudesert campaign trail.

I doubt it was Beaudesert Lyn Calcutt had in mind when she said the election made Queensland the “Temporarily Interesting and Experimental State”. But the charge does have a serious ring of truth about it. Queensland's election is attracting a lot more national interest than the similar looking election in WA last year. Calcutt also pointed to Crikey’s election site “Pineapple Party Time” (shame about the name) which uses the prodigious talents of Queenslanders Mark Bahnisch and Scott Steel and WA's William Bowe (and a dash of Victorian cartooning from First Dog on the Moon) to easily provide the best and most comprehensive media commentary on the election.

And while the revolution might not be televised, this election is being Twittered. The hash tag #QldElection09 has the latest goods on many useful links as well as quick-fire commentary. The stream was one of the first media to highlight Bligh’s latest attack ad which compared Springborg’s rebuttal of the strength of the GFC with the statements of Obama and Gordon Brown. But apart from the danger that Labor's campaign is too negative, the ad probably won't resonate with potential LNP supporters who don’t admire Obama and Brown in the first place.

ABC Stateline Queensland is proving another useful media resource. Friday’s program had a first week campaign diary, an interview with Springborg, a report on the Greens and One Nation and the centrepiece, a debate between Treasurer Andrew Fraser and my local MP and Opposition Finance spokesman Tim Nicholls. Fraser channelled Courier-Mail sub-editors as he repeatedly asked Nicholls “where is the money coming from” to fund the LNP multi-billion dollar promises “not Santa Claus?” he asked hopefully.

But it does not look like Santa Claus will be bringing any presents to Queensland soon, particularly its troubled mining sector. Today another 650 jobs were lost in Mackay when Anglo Coal scaled down works at Moranbah North and the Capcoal complex in Middlemount. The news followed one thousand job losses at BHP’s metallurgical coal operations across the state, and another 400 lost at their Yabulu nickel plant near Townsville. Rio Tinto, Xstrata and Macarthur Coal have also shed thousands of jobs.

Queensland Resources Council chief Michael Roche warned both major parties that the industry was in big trouble. “[They] need to understand that this goose is done,” he said. But Ronan Lee will be hoping a done goose can still lays green eggs. The former Labor man threw a fair bit of curry out as he called the Greens a coherent alternative to a disappointing Labor government and an opposition with a history of environmental barbarism. "We have the policies to place the Queensland economy on a 21st century footing,” says Lee. “So that we are not so dependent on the mining sector and to promote green jobs everywhere."

Queensland election 2009: In a Galaxy Poll far far away

State elections are not everyone’s cup of tea. Andrew Bartlett hates the “too many photo ops and soundbites masquerading as policies”. The current Queensland election has these blights and is also taking a dangerously presidential turn. The focus is increasingly on the leaders Bligh and Springborg rather than their policies. The attached photo, which appears in the Brisbane Times, makes the two party leaders look like pugilists about to go 15 rounds with each other.

But as the picture shows, if state politicians are putting it on then so are the mass media. Channel Nine delights in presents an almost nightly litany of government blunders while Gary Sauer-Thompson notes that News Ltd is infatuated by “the LNP is gaining on Bligh” meme. The Courier-Mail Galaxy poll published yesterday bought into the horserace analogies so beloved of opinion poll analysis with its talk of “neck-and-neck” and “down to the wire”.

Yet despite Labor’s “10 point freefall”, they should still win the election thanks to its hold in the south-east. The size of the LNP’s task in Brisbane is graphically represented in this excellent map by Ben Raue at The Tally Room. There are 38 seats in the Brisbane metropolitan area and 36 of them are currently held by Labor. As Raue points out, with just 45 seats needed to form government, that already puts Labor “within spitting distance” of a majority.

However, it is likely that a number of these Brisbane seats will fall to the LNP. Assuming the Galaxy poll html is a reasonable point in time reflection of voters’ intentions and there is a 50:50 split in two party preferred, that would represent a 4.9 percent turnaround since 2006. There are 12 Labor seats that would fall if this is a uniform swing – but the stark reality of the numbers means that would still leave the government with a comfortable working majority.

Possum (Scott Steel) publishes the complete Galaxy poll data at Pineapple Party Time (the Crikey group blog devoted to the Queensland election). With a low sample size of 800 people, there is a significant 3.5 percent margin of error. However, apart from whimsically suggesting that the data marked “NFI” (No further information) actually stands for “No Fucking Idea”, Possum leaves the analysis of the poll to his stablemate William Bowe.

Bowe begins by turning to his home state of WA for comparison. He analyses a poll Galaxy published prior to the WA election last year and points out similarities and differences between the two states. While the WA Coalition lead on health issues was replicated by the LNP, Labor polled better on water, education and law and order in Queensland. They also did well in roads and public transport which were not included in the WA survey, However Bowe cautions the Queensland survey didn’t appear to include an important question that was asked in the WA one: “Has the decision to call an early election made you more or less likely to vote for the Labor Party?” In WA over a quarter of the respondents said the early election decision made it less likely.

As I’ve written before, an early election is Labor’s biggest danger. Malcolm McKerras predicted earlier this year Anna Bligh would be re-elected Premier (despite a 50:50 two party preferred vote) but he also cautioned she would call an early election “at her peril.” It is also likely many in the community would agree with the Queensland Greens who say Bligh’s decision to hold an early election is bad for democracy. They want fixed four year terms and want to stop governments from rigging elections “by calling them at a time that takes advantage of wavering public opinion."

And this election is all about how Labor could lose government, not how the LNP can win. As Brian Costar writes, Queensland is beset by serious infrastructure deficiencies in water, health and transport infrastructure. The advantages of incumbency have turned into the staleness of entrenched power. According to LNP supporter Russell Egan, Springborg has one huge advantage in this election: “he hasn’t been in government for 11 years and doesn’t have to explain why not a single inch of new highway or rail has been laid for 11 years, why our hospitals are clogged with elective surgery waiting lists and schools are being outgrown by our ballooning outer suburbia.” Three weeks tomorrow, the voters will get their chance to vent their anger. Bligh will be hoping she gets away with a bollocking, but not the sack.

Max Factor: Pauline Hanson runs in Beaudesert

As noted in places as far away as Singapore, Pauline Hanson is standing as a candidate in the Queensland election. Appropriately for a walking headline, tonight’s Channel Nine News noted that celebrity agent Max Markson will accompany Hanson when she officially unveils her candidacy in the town (and seat) of Beaudesert next week. While Markson denied today he had encouraged Hansen to run, he admitted he was helping her out and handling her media affairs. However with neither an election website nor a publicly available phone number for Markson, it promises to be yet another unorthodox Hanson media campaign. The Brisbane Times speculated today Hanson will either sell her candidacy story to magazines and television or else make a pitch for a reality TV show.

The news came just a week after it was announced Cate Blanchett could play the lead role in a biopic about Hanson. Melbourne filmmakers Leanne Tonkes and Steve Kearney are calling the project "Please Explain" and starts from her time running a fish and chip shop and ends with her on Dancing With the Stars. The filmmakers claim it will be “wry, not vicious”. With a view to the American market, Tonkes compares Hanson with Sarah Palin. “She [Hanson] is naturally sceptical of what we are doing because we are part of the media,” said Tonkes, “but we need to find out the person behind the media front to make a compelling story.”

Hanson has always been a compelling story and she and the media have long been involved in a complicated dance. She began her public life as an independent Ipswich city councillor where she quickly found she possessed skills in communication and listening to people. However she was out of a job after just a year when elections were called after council amalgamations in 1995. She joined the Liberal Party and comfortably won preselection for the ultra-safe Labor seat of Oxley. Prior to the 1996 election she wrote a letter to the Queensland Times where she complaining about Aboriginal welfare. “I would be the first to admit, not that many years ago, the Aborigines were treated wrongly but in trying to correct this they have gone too far”, she wrote.

In some respects what she said was mild, compared to other Queensland Coalition candidates. The National candidate for Leichhardt Bob Burgess described citizenship ceremonies as “dewoggings” while then-fellow Nat Bob Katter complained about aboriginal funding and the influence of “slanty-eyed ideologues who persecute ordinary, average Australians". Both Burgess and Katter got re-elected with above-average swings.

Nor were they disendorsed before the election, unlike Hanson. When Ipswich Labor councillor Paul Tully brought The Queensland Times letter to national attention, she was promptly disendorsed by John Howard when she would not retract her position. But the public exposure backfired on Labor. The newly independent Hanson won the sympathy of the locals who saw her as a victim of political correctness. Though still listed as Liberal on the ballot paper she took the seat with a massive 19 percent swing.

By now, the media spotlight was firmly on her. Hanson became the focus of a race debate. Helen Dodd’s authorised biography questioned whether the media’s aim was to sensationalise the idea that racism was alive and well in Australia. Dodd says the debate never occurred among average Australians but that it was “written, orchestrated and performed by the media”. But Hanson herself bought into the argument. In September 1996 she stood up in front of an almost empty parliament to make her maiden speech. She spoke of money wasted on Aborigines, condemned the Mabo judgement, attacked economic rationalism, called for the abolition of multicultural policy and warned Australia was being “swamped” with Asians. She channelled Menzies Forgotten People speech with her call to represent "common sense and the mainstream".

It was incendiary stuff, and it connected with a lot of people. She proved a hit on television and talkback radio. Hanson had opened a Pandora’s Box of forbidden opinion. As a result, her approval rating soared and for much of Howard’s first term, Hanson controlled the political agenda particularly over the Wik judgement. While the Nationals recognised her as a threat, Howard implicitly condoned her and her anti-Asian attitudes were noted in Jakarta and elsewhere. In 1998 her newly founded Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party (significantly, the first Australian party ever to be branded with its leader’s name) contested the Queensland state election. They attracted 23 percent of the vote and won eleven seats with the help of Coalition preferences.

As Margot Kingston noted, Hanson had ruptured the stability of political discourse. Only then did John Howard realise how serious the phenomenon was becoming. He did a deal with independent Senator Brian Harradine to compromise on Wik and resolved to put One Nation last in preference voting in the impending federal election. But Hanson had to move to fight that election. A redistribution made Oxley unwinnable. She would have been a certainty to be elected to the Senate, but instead chose to fight in National heartland in the new seat of Blair. Placed last on the how-to-vote cards, she would have needed 40 percent of first preferences to win. Abandoning most media conventions and egged on by a massive press gallery, Hanson’s campaign (brilliantly chronicled by her unlikely ally Kingston in “Off the Rails”) went the way of the title of the book. Hanson fell just short with 37 percent and One Nation’s only victory was a Senate seat in Queensland.

The party didn’t take long to unravel without its raison d’etre in parliament. Hanson’s star was on the wane by 2001 and she narrowly failed in a Senate tilt. Nevertheless Howard was still learning from Hanson in that poll. Earlier that year Hanson outlined her policy towards boat people: "You go out and meet them, fill them with food and water and medical supplies and say Go That Way”. Howard was listening and he skilfully manipulated the fear and loathing generated by the Tampa crisis and wedged the Opposition whose lead in the polls quickly evaporated. Hanson rightly complained that the Coalition had stolen her refugee policy clothes. Hanson was gone but the views she left behind went mainstream.

In 2003 she was sentenced to three years prison for fiddling party membership numbers but had the sentence quashed on appeal. A year later she quit politics after another Senate loss. But she simply could not kick the habit. She was back again in 2007 with a new party again featuring her name “Pauline’s United Australia Party”. She recontested the Queensland half-Senate election that year and showed she still held substantial support by taking 4.16 percent of the vote across the state. There was little surprise when she announced her candidacy for this year’s state poll. As Jeff Sparrow puts it, “there's something of Mike Tyson in Pauline Hanson's return: battered and past her prime, she’s drawn inevitably back to what she knows best.”

She is an experienced campaigner now and her results over the years shows she has retained a loyal constituency. It is questionable whether much of it is in Beaudesert but Pollytics says her candidacy there has thrown a spanner in the works of the LNP’s hopes of retaining the seat. The current margin is 5.9 percent but sitting member Kev Lingard is retiring. 30 year old Logan City councillor Aidan McLindon is the new candidate. In 2005 McLindon was fined on a public nuisance charge. He barged on to the set of that year's final episode of Big Brother during the announcement of the winner in a protest against the show’s exploitative nature. Hanson has now made McLindon’s life more complicated. If she can poll 20 percent and her preferences exhaust, the seat “could become marginal if a large swing away from Labor doesn’t manifest.” Meanwhile Hanson can walk away from the mess with a pile of money from Max Markson and plan her next campaign with the proceeds.

written in the writs: Queensland goes to the polls

Australia’s largest electoral event of 2009 (unless Rudd goes a year early) will finally come to pass on 21 March as the state of Queensland goes to the polls. Labor defends a massive lead in this election but most pundits expect their margin to be considerably reduced on election night. It was all Labor territory that Anna Bligh passed through today on the way to the Governor’s office in Bardon to issue the writs, as Mark Bahnisch noted earlier today. But the question is now how many Brisbane seats will still be Labor in a month’s time and whether they will still be in power at all.

While there has been a noticeable absence of recent poll data, an LNP victory is still seen as an outside chance. According to SportsPunter.com a party called “Labour” are $1.50 to win while an entity called the “Coalition” are $2.55. Perhaps given their spelling and failure to keep up with the existence of the LNP, SportsPunter.com ought not to be trusted with your money. Nevertheless the odds are a fair reflection of what the LNP needs to do to win.

Springborg’s party need a uniform swing of 8.3 percent to take outright government. Of course, swings are rarely uniform and there will be variations within the mix that will make prediction difficult. Labor currently holds 58 of 89 seats, the LNP holds 25. Therefore the LNP needs to win 20 seats to form government. The One Nation seat will go to LNP; and of the independents, Dolly Pratt might lose to the LNP in Nanango while Liz Cunningham could lose to the ALP in Gladstone. The Greens hold one seat thanks to defector Ronan Lee in Indooroopilly but even a small swing will see LNP win that seat. Others to watch could be Morayfield (10.7 percent) and Kallangur (11.0 percent) which Labor could lose despite their huge margins due to retiring MPs.

Because of the electoral boundaries and redistributions a 50:50 Two Party Preferred Vote will not be enough for an LNP victory or even a draw. But as Pollytics reminded me today, Queensland has Optional Preferential Voting (OPV) so preferences often exhaust. This makes two party preferred polling estimates potentially misleading. But it can also be a devastating tactic in the real thing, Beattie used OPV in the 2001 election to destroy the then disunited opposition and again in 2006 in an attempt to marginalise the Greens.

However as the Brisbane Times points out today, what goes around comes around and Greens leader Bob Brown would not guarantee Premier Anna Bligh Greens' preferences. The online newspaper says the local Greens are likely to recommend a "just vote one" strategy because of the Bligh Government’s failure to back down on its Mary River Dam project. At least the Fairfax web paper had more of a finger on the pulse than the Courier-Mail. When announcing the election today, the latter came out with this gem: “Calling the election today will result in a 27-day campaign, one day longer than the usual minimum 26-day campaign favoured by her predecessor.” Let’s hope they come out with more incisive analysis than that over the next four weeks.

Another News Ltd apparatchik, Andrew Bolt, was a bit more controversial. He said today that Bligh is going to the polls “before voters cotton on to her economic crisis.” While that seems a harsh judgement, Bligh herself gives credence to the idea that the crisis is “hers” when she claims in her poll announcement video she would protect Queensland from the global financial crisis.

But John Quiggin says the government is going early precisely because the people do not blame them for the crisis. He says the fact that Bligh called the poll within a day or so of the credit rating downgrade “is striking”. Quiggin says the rating agencies are no longer trustworthy and the policies required to keep AAA “would have been economically disastrous”. This is a view shared by Nicholas Gruen and Joshua Gans. Gans, who writes at Core Economics, told Woolly Days today that Queensland cutting infrastructure spending “would be disastrous for the economy”.

Ultimately I agree with Quiggin that as the party in power “[t]his election will be won, or lost, by Labor.” But we have what promises to be an eventful campaign ahead to find out which way they play it.

Queensland loses AAA credit rating

Cross Posted at the new Woolly Days.

On Friday, Queensland became the first Australian state to have its credit downgraded from AAA to AA+. Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) said the drop reflected the projected deterioration of the state's budgetary performance and increasing net financial liabilities. S&P said Queensland's balance sheet remains strong but the new rating reflects significant decline in the state's operating revenue due to global conditions and a large capital program. “Queensland's financial performance remains strong but is no longer consistent with an 'AAA' rating,” said the agency.

The announcement came after Queensland Treasurer Andrew Fraser announced the outlook for a $1.6 billion budget deficit for the current year, just two months after the government predicted a modest surplus. Economic growth in Queensland is also forecast to slow further into 2009-10. Fraser blamed the global downturn, rising unemployment and the flood emergency in North Queensland for the revision. He now admits that has said avoiding a recession will be "a close run thing".

Queensland is the only Australian state to lose its AAA credit rating so far. The most obvious implication is that Queensland will have to pay an extra 0.4 per cent in annual interest, equal to around $200 million. State borrowings will cost Queensland $3.2 billion in interest next financial year and total government borrowings for the next three years will be $74 billion. Anna Bligh's Government is forecasting job losses in the coming financial year and a growth rate close to zero. Writing in The Australian yesterday, George Megalogenis says Queensland's collapse is one of Kevin Rudd's darker nightmares because "a Queensland that does no better than the national average will, of itself, increase the risk of recession for the nation."

State Treasurer Andrew Fraser defended Queensland’s position in a press release on Friday. He said the government would “hold its nerve” and retain its economic strategy outlined in December’s Major Economic Statement. He said the infrastructure program will deliver almost 120,000 jobs and accounts for 1 per cent of Queensland’s overall economic growth. “The economy needs the stimulus of the infrastructure spend, to support activity, support demand and support jobs as private investment evaporates,” he said. “We are choosing to put the interests of Queenslanders facing unemployment ahead of the political sanctity of a budget surplus.”

With early election speculation mounting, opposition leader Lawrence Springborg was quick to pounce on the announcement. He said losing the AAA rating was a financial disaster which will cost “the mums and dads” of Queensland hundreds of millions in increased interest payments and will affect jobs. "Quite frankly Labor should be ashamed of putting Queensland behind an economic basket case like New South Wales, which still has its AAA rating,” he said. “We are now the only State in Australia that doesn't have an AAA rating. It's embarrassing.”

Embarrassing or not, Dr Nicholas Gruen thinks the downgrading could spread to other states. Gruen is the CEO of Lateral Economics and writes for Club Troppo and is a frequent contributor to the Australian Financial Review. He told Woolly Days today that although he was not across the specific budgetary details of each government, it seems likely there will be a trend given worsening budget positions. He also defended Fraser’s position saying that now is not the time to cut back on capital works. As Gruen wrote in the AFR in September (unfortunately no link, the article is behind a paywall) “the electorate likes to see governments investing in the future. And the alternative – arbitrarily restricting investment whilst commuters nurse their resentments in traffic jams or waiting for late trains – is a political road to nowhere.”

Meanwhile UQ academic and economist John Quiggin believes that an AAA rating is overrated and rating agencies are themselves part of the problem. He says the global crisis has exposed fundamental weaknesses in the way in which ratings are determined and adjusted. According to Quiggin, the likes of Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s have suffered credibility issues in the crisis and a need a lot of improvements to restore independence and transparency. “The privileged position held by these agencies can no longer be justified,” he writes.

In any case, downgrading is not a purely Australian problem. Both Spain and Greece were downgraded earlier this year. Now the Telegraph.co.uk reports that Britain too could be stripped of its AAA rating. The Telegraph says Standard & Poor’s have indicated it might downgrade Britain’s rating because of its asset protection scheme. The scheme provides insurance for so-called “toxic debt” but the Telegraph warns the scheme leaves “the taxpayer exposed to losses on billions of pounds of bad loans made by the banks.” Yet as the article itself points out, it is very unlikely the UK Government will ever default on its debt commitments. A credit rating downgrade is clearly not the end of the world.

Nicholas Gruen thinks credit ratings should be taken seriously but governments need to take risks in tough times. That means taking on projects and debts that the private sector is now shying away from. He says that an obsession with an AAA rating now stands as an obstacle to governments playing their rightful role in dealing with the economic crisis. “There’s a dynamic to fiscal responsibility and fiscal management,” he said today. “Had the Queensland Government invested more in the easy times, it would be worth more now.”

Queensland election watch: Here for a long time not a good time

Led by feverish prognostications from the Opposition and News Limited journalists, Queensland has been on early election watch since the start of the year. As the only state in Australia to mirror the federal three year term, ALP Premier Anna Bligh must call an election by September. Though Bligh’s formal position is that she will not call an early election, most parties (Labor included) are already campaigning as if an election was imminent.

Despite the volatility of three year terms, Queensland has had remarkably stable government for almost a century. If Bligh wins, as the quantitative and qualitative opinion polls still predict, it will be Labor’s fifth successive victory in eleven years. And aside from Borbridge's two year hiccup 1996-1998, Labor have ruled Queensland for 18 of the last 20 years. Before that was the 31 year rule of the Nationals whose length in power was dragged out by the larger than life Sir Joh and his clever media adviser Allen Callaghan. Looking back even further, Labor ruled the state for 40 years from 1917 to 1957.

These results show that Queenslanders are conservative because they dislike change not because they dislike Labor. In 2007 the state played a two-hander with NSW in getting Labor (and their own Prime Minister and Treasurer) over the victory line. At a state level, most of their decade in power was under Premier Peter Beattie. Beattie was a consummate media performer who glided his way effortlessly through crisis after crisis to claim victory after victory. But by September 2007 his crash or crash through philosophy was taking its toll. Premier Pete could be tarted up no longer and he stepped aside to let Anna Bligh take over.

Bligh had two years to create a new image for Queensland Labor before she would have to face the voters. As she told the audience at last year’s ALP state conference, “I knew when I took on this job that the next election would be tough”. Surprisingly, this was the only reference to her date with destiny in the speech. But if she wins, she will create history as Australia’s first elected female Premier (both Lawrence in WA and Kirner in Victoria were defeated at the first time of asking). She remains favourite to do exactly that.

At the very beginning of 2009, psephologist Malcolm McKerras was one of the first to openly predict this outcome when he wrote in The Australian that “Labor will hang on in Queensland” He predicted that result even though he thinks the two-party preferred vote is likely to be tied 50:50 which represents a five percent swing to the opposition. The problem is that they need a swing of 7.6 per cent to get an equal number of seats.

McKerras says that thanks to a major exercise in seat abolitions and re-distributions last August, Labor should fall over the line to win the election. The conservative parties have lost out more in the Electoral Commissions rejigging of boundaries (pdf). One interesting re-distribution example that may not work for the government is Clayfield. McKerras noted that a redistribution of notionally Labor voters in Clayfield has made LNP’s sitting MP Tim Nicholls vulnerable. While I was directly affected by this re-distribution – and resent being typecast as a Labor voter – I agree with McKerras and expect Nicholls to hold just about hold on, mostly due to his high public profile after an unsuccessful run at Liberal leader in 2007.

But the LNP could do even better still if Bligh does not adhere to McKerras’s prediction caveat. “She will call an early election at her peril,” he warned, pointing at Labor’s shock loss last year in WA and near defeat in the NT. In both elections, large Labor majorities were lost when over-confident state leaders went to the polls early. But most observers now think that a late wet season election is exactly what Bligh intends to have (though Mark Bahnisch believes the window of opportunity for an early election is just two more weeks). If Bligh is gambling that Queenslanders won’t judge their government harshly by going early, it can only be because she thinks things are going to be a whole lot worse if she waits till September.

Whatever the date, the phoney war has started. Bligh dipped her toes into the digital election with the launch of Anna4Qld.com.au last week. Neither Andrew Bartlett nor Graham Young were impressed by the site. Says Young, “the site pretends to be Web 2.0 when it is so slick and spin-heavy that it shouts 'phony'". In my own view, the crucial point about the site was the re-branding of “Anna”. You had to look deep onto the homepage to find the word “Labor” in small font.

Meanwhile Lawrence Springborg is playing with his own shiny new brand. The Liberal National Party sprung into being last year and this election is its first electoral test. How will the new party perform? Behind the rusted-on marriage of Nationals and Liberals is the old Nationals party machine backed up by the cash of Clive Palmer. BRW says Palmer is worth $1.5 billion but the man himself thinks he has $6.5 billion which would make him the richest man in Australia. Whatever it is, it makes him wealthy enough to support vanity projects such as his son Michael’s tilt at a safe Labor seat and his fondness for defamation suits. However, it is also extremely likely he will also provide a strong war chest for LNP’s upcoming media campaign.

The problem is, as The Poll Bludger quotes Paul Williams: “Brisbane’s progressive Liberals will not vote for a party headed by a National.” Queensland’s own psephologist Scott Steel at Pollytics also succinctly defined Springborg’s problem as “Brisbane”. He says Springborg will face a third defeat as leader because he is unable to jump over the “rather large chasm that separates the Liberal and National party constituencies.” Steel believes Springborg’s anti-green attitudes will scare off urban Liberal voters who also have environmental sympathies.


Antony Green also calls Springborg’s task “Herculean”. Majority government for the LNP requires 22 seats and a swing of 8.3 per cent. The last time Queensland saw uniform swings of that scale was in 1989 when the disgraced Nationals were turfed out of power. But Green also notes that 2006 was an overwhelming election victory at an election that should have been much closer. And also, perhaps more pertinently, he points out that the LNP has so far avoided serious internal dispute.

While Labor has no scandal on its conscience the size of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, it is looking tattered away from the shiny Anna brand. There are several members retiring and possibly more to follow. Tonight, the MP for the marginal seat of Chatsworth, Chris Bombolas gave his former employees at Brisbane Channel Nine news an exclusive to announce he was not seeking re-election due to health reasons. That same Channel Nine news used the story of the long-running flood in North Queensland to point fingers at the “inaction” of the government and show grumbling locals unhappy with the speed of a rescue operation. Last night the same station quoted Opposition frontbencher Ray Hopper who compared it to Bush’s Katrina moment.

While Bligh was quick to denounce Hopper’s statement as bad taste, the jibe may have served its purpose. The LNP might well capitalise on ennui and electoral distaste for an early election. Bligh aside, Labor are beginning to look like a tired government that are simply out of answers. They may also be victims of a reverse zeitgeist that sees Labor entrenched federally, and on the way out in the states. In some respects it doesn’t matter; Queensland is unlikely to be served well by a new government of either persuasion. The ALP and the LNP are both too consumed by a love of the state’s copious coal reserves. Either government will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new 21st century greenhouse realities.