Campbell Newman should give Anna Bligh a ministry

A historic election tomorrow with the first ever victory by an organisation called the Liberal National Party in the state where it was founded. Queensland may not be the template for a conservative party merger but its stunning success will make the rest of the country take notice. I said in January the LNP would win comfortably and my then prediction of 13 seats to Labor now looks on track. (photo of Anna Bligh in Mitchell: Derek Barry)

Yet by March there was a bit of a narrowing and I doubted my own prediction. When I did the seat by seat Crikey poll on 13 March, my results were LNP 55, ALP 28 (including Ashgrove) and Independents 6. This still would have amounted to a handsome win for the LNP though tainted by the polls showing Kate Jones was ahead of the presumptive premier Campbell Newman.

Now just ten days later, that forecast appears hopelessly optimistic for the Labor and I won't be winning the Crikey comp. The tainted polls on Newman have been wiped away as is possibly the Queensland Labor Party itself. Labor's rump of 11 to 15 seats leaves hardly any ministerial talent and precious little room to grow in the near future.

Anna Bligh will be one of the few to survive but almost certain to take responsibility for the crushing loss and resign the leadership. Kim Jameson is tipping Annastacia Palaszczuk to be leader of the rump. Jones won’t survive in Ashgrove where the Newman polls have swung almost 10 percent and he is favourite again to get in as Premier. He may have a dislikeable glass jaw but there is no doubting his cojones in taking on a difficult seat and winning. He will owe nothing to his powerbrokers, many of whom would not have mourned his loss.

Because of this, Newman will have a lot of personal power when dealing out the spoils of office. He will lead a huge party with much jostling for position and granting of favours. He is guaranteed at least three terms of office to entrench that power. So here is an out of left field suggestion for him: Offer Anna Bligh a job.

The worst that could happen is that she refuses it, finding it too hard to work for a government she fought hard to resist. Newman would not lose any face and could get on with the largesse. But if somehow she agreed to take a role, the incoming government would be able to make a big statement of intent about inclusiveness and incorporation of ideas of the best people in the state.

Though neither side would admit it, their philosophies are broadly similar with a small tendency for Labor to prefer inclusion over wealth creation with an equally marginal tendency the other way for the LNP. Queensland Labor’s time is now up. In power for all but two of the last 20 years, voters are tired and want a change. That impression has been hammered home by a relentless advertising campaign powered by a huge budget that only winners attract. Newman is not exactly charismatic but has milked his “can do” reputation to the hilt to persuade enough people he will be a better leader.

Yet it will be a hard act to follow. I’ve met Bligh on a number of occasions on her visits to Roma and Mitchell and she is impressive in action. In every situation I’ve seen her in, she has always struck me as the one in charge and the master of every brief. Watching her from afar in last year’s 2010-2011 flooding, she was an effective commander-in-chief, overshadowing the Prime Minister in her visits to Brisbane.

There is also no doubting Bligh’s personal energy and commitment to Queensland, again on first hand observation. In any speech I heard her give, her vision always came around to getting a wealthy future for all Queenslanders. As such she saw the positives in coal seam gas while looking for ways to control the negative impacts. Newman won't change much because he too will rely on the royalties from this massive industry to pay Queensland's debt. There is no way a moratorium will ever be imposed on the industry.

Meanwhile Bligh has led the state through a succession of natural disasters that have emptied the state coffers as quickly as CSG is filling them. Where the gas is mined here in the Maranoa (a council region bigger than Togo or Croatia), the road damage bill alone is well north of $100 million with much of the devastation of the most recent floods last month still unaccounted for. It is reasonable to assume Mother Nature has not finished punishing her errant children and further severe storms in the years ahead are likely if the latest Bureau of Meteorology/CSIRO guide to the weather is correct.

So I could think of no better person to lead the Queensland Reconstruction Authority (or whatever it is renamed to in the LNP era) than Anna Bligh. The role has been filled by army personnel so it is reasonably non-political. There is no doubt that Bligh would throw herself into the ministry with the same gusto she finished the campaign on with 50 seats in a week (ours was one of the missing 39) and a laundry list of Love’s Labor’s Lost at the death.

As the first elected female Premier in Australia, Anna Bligh’s reputation will only grow after she leaves power. People will forget the failures of her watch, most of which were inherited from Peter Beattie. Instead they will remember a likeable and very able leader. The Newman at the current helm should capitalise on this in his moment of greatest power and offer her a ministry.

Time to get rid of Queensland’s faulty fuel subsidy

In a rare outbreak of policy sense, Premier Anna Bligh signalled yesterday that Queensland's eight cents a litre fuel subsidy could be finally be scrapped in June’s state budget. In the 21st century it defies belief that any government would subsidise petrol prices. Yet the Bligh Government had repeatedly assured the scheme would be protected during the election campaign to avoid being wedged on the issue by the Opposition. Now that the election is safely behind her, Bligh is looking for options to get out of that commitment. She said that although she wanted to keep every election promise, her overriding promise was to protect jobs. "To do that we've got to look at some pretty tough decisions and right now everything is on the table,” she said. “That means things like the fuel subsidy have to be considered."

The government may have been encouraged by an editorial in the Courier-Mail in January (incidentally, well before the election) which called the subsidy a luxury Queensland cannot afford. However, the usual vested interests have come out against scrapping the subsidy. Nick Behrens of the Queensland Chamber of Commerce and Industry says Queensland businesses will lose their competitive advantage while Agforce president John Cotter says people living in rural areas would be hit hard if it was removed. Opposition Leader John-Paul Langbroek somewhat bizarrely described the subsidy as a "core service" and claimed losing it would cost Queenslanders $250 to $300 a year on average. And RACQ general manager Gary Fites also weighed in saying "fuel prices will rise by nine cents a litre if the government wants to remove the subsidy.”

Fites is exaggerating but the chorus of opposition shows the difficulty Bligh will have to overcome to abolish the subsidy. Andrew Bartlett says the state government is dealing with the dilemma of dealing with bad policy that is electorally popular. Bartlett says the $600 million a year scheme is an “absurd, expensive program” however, he also says we only have ourselves to blame: “[We often call] for strong action while opposing anything that we feel will make us personally worse off,” says Bartlett “If more people were prepared to speak out in support of good policies that we know are unpopular, it might slightly reduce the need for governments to make quite so many of those promises in the first place.”

This particular promise dates back to the Borbidge coalition government in 1997. They introduced the subsidy after a federal High Court decision prevented the states and territories from collecting business franchise fees on fuel, tobacco and alcohol. In response the Howard Government imposed a surcharge of 8.1 cents per litre on the rate of customs and excise duty and returned surcharge revenue to states and territories. Because Queensland never had a fuel tax, the state government reached an agreement with the Commonwealth and the fuel industry to provide an 8.534c a litre subsidy for retailers to pass the benefit to consumers.

However, inquiries have found that the whole eight cents is not fully passed on to the motorist. In 2007 a Commission of Inquiry led by Bill Pincus (note: the actual report has been moved from the Queensland Government web site and is not available at the time of writing) found that the fuel subsidisation was deeply flawed and conflicted with policies to lower transport greenhouse gases. He also found more than $100 million a year of the $541 million scheme was not being passed on to motorists. Pincus found no evidence of criminal behaviour. "In the main, the subsidy was simply regarded as a component of the cost of fuel and was otherwise disregarded," he said in the report. He recommended the laws be repealed or else incorporate a provision to publish "reference prices".

Neither recommendation went anywhere. In June 2008 the Bligh government considered a plan where drivers would swipe a bar code on their licence at the point of sale to receive the full subsidy. But no one seemed happy about this idea. Civil libertarians warned of privacy concerns. Transport workers thought that interstate truck drivers would suffer while tourist operators said the scheme would deter holidaymakers. Pincus also came out against it saying retailers would simply raise their prices to maintain profit margins.

Given the political difficulties of removing the scheme entirely, perhaps the most palatable proposal is that of economist John Quiggin’s which has been endorsed by the RACQ. Quiggin suggests the government gradually phase-out the subsidy over four to five years and redeploy the savings to service borrowings to fund road and public transport infrastructure. The annual reduction in the subsidy would be 1.6708 cents per litre with consequent fuel price increases of about 1.84 cents per litre per year. Each cut would release about $100 million to service borrowings for additional road and public transport infrastructure. This amount would also repay debt of $1,000 million over a term of 15 years at an interest rate of 6 per cent. Perhaps most importantly, this “death of a thousand cuts” for the subsidy would result in the least amount of electoral (and media) pain.

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 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.