I’ve been reading about the transformation of the US military under pressure from ‘digitisation’, and what impresses me most about this discussion is the way actual military participants (as opposed to civilian commentators) continue to stress morale as the key factor in military success or failure. In military terms morale is often based on group solidarity, but there is also an element determined by the justice of the cause being fought for. Ultimately, this is about morality. I think this observation about the importance of morality is relevant to political parties and also to modern nation-states. This is a fact largely hidden by the mass media which focuses almost entirely on material well-being as the only important political determinant.
So this blog entry looks at the question of national morale, considers Latham’s potential as a moral leader, and reviews his chances against a PM who, I argue, has minimal claims to moral leadership.
New Labor leader Mark Latham’s recent comments on the refugee problem have been encouraging. He has said Labor would end the Pacific option – one of Australia’s more shameful episodes – and put in place an Australian-based system that processes asylum seekers quickly. How exactly this is to be done is not stated, but it is very much a step in the right direction.
Furthermore, it encourages me in thinking that leadership will mature Latham. He has said some pretty brutal things on this issue in the past, but he knows it is one of those things that define political leadership. Is Labor still the party of principle and fairness over expedience, even when it comes to the treatment of non-Australians? For Latham it is important to get this right – not just for the coming lection, but also in order to begin healing some serious rifts emerging within the Labor Party.
Over the period of his government, John Howard has had a profound effect on the national mood. A truly phenomenal part of Howard’s role in this is his manifest confidence that he personally embodies what ‘average’ Australians really think. In a real sense Howard believes he is a quintessential Australian, and that we are at heart like him. This is why he so easily and consistently plays the role he does, which includes identifying with explicitly nationalistic endeavours, especially successful sporting activities, and dismissing alternative ideas about Australian culture.
And what is the essence of Howard’s worldview? Mostly, it is fear. In particular Howard is afraid of diversity, of things being different to how he wants them. So he has promoted policy that pushes the idea that there is a specific way of being Australian, and that he, and those other ‘true’ Aussies, know what that is.
At the heart of this Howard’s Australia is a simple, brutal materialism. Howard reflects the old pioneer idea that the real environment of this unique country is fundamentally terrifying, but that it can be kept at bay by hard work along with deference to old values and institutions (like the monarchy). As for maintaining the means to live, he reproduces the need to focus on the mechanics of survival under pressure.
This unrelieved ‘survivalist’ attitude explains why, despite being one of the most wealthy and secure places on Earth, Australians feel so threatened. It is also, somewhat paradoxically, a core reason why Australians play so hard.
This narrow view of hard life in a hard land never had any time or place for the original Australians, who lived in this country very differently. Coming here when Howard’s and my ancestors were likely still discovering hunter-gatherer life outside Africa, Aborigines made themselves at home in this strange, old land. After a few mistakes, they settled in to manage this extreme environment so well they thrived for about fifty millennia. That is, until Europeans arrived.
This view also has little to say about the environmental peculiarities of Australia, which the indigenous people directly confronted. This is why Howard has nothing useful to say about environmental issues. Howard still believes in the pioneer idea that the environment must be subjugated, not understood or negotiated with.
Having come to Australia and progressively dispossessed the aboriginal people, Australians then developed a fear of others doing the same. This was especially easy if these putative invaders looked different. Our failure to treat refugees humanely is a direct result of this long-held fear.
Over two centuries what was a harsh but pragmatic way of living in this hard land has curdled and turned into an increasingly xenophobic conservatism. It still works to a point because the problems of environmental degradation and global change have not yet really hit Australia. But they will.
In the meantime, Howard says to Australia, “Just support my tough xenophobia, my unquestioned support for the US, my sustained attack on those who can’t be ‘productive’ Australians, and I will allay your fears”. The price of this paternal protection is of course perpetual infantilism, and a deeply buried but real sense of shame.
If Mark Latham wants to lead this country he must give Australians a better option than that. Sure, Australians want to keep their material affluence and national security, but they also want to stop being afraid, and ashamed. They want to deal with the obvious problems of social change, international upheaval and imminent environmental crisis, but they need strong leadership. They need to believe in a leader who has moral courage as well as practical policies.
Moral leadership, which means being constant in the face of adversity and maintain principle, is necessary because Australians know that new approaches, necessary to deal with the problems, will themselves generate new problems. Therefore, the leader must have the moral strength to keep the overall goal in mind, and communicate that resolution to the nation.
In essence, whatever else their strengths and weaknesses, Australians did not trust Beazley or Crean to act with moral strength, rightly or wrongly. If they do trust Latham then he will win the next election.
There has been little in Latham’s past ideas on reform that indicate his readiness to act as a moral leader, in the sense that many of his ideas are about devolving social decisions back to the individual level. The state and hence political leaders thus play a decreasing role in constructing the national identity and value system. But his sustained attempts at developing a coherent set of new ideas does show his intellectual seriousness (itself an increasingly courageous position in anti-intellectual Australia) and a willingness to build and defend a personal position.
As new ALP leader Latham carries an enormous load, not just in relation to the ALP and its usual supporters; he also carries expectations of all those who want to feel better about themselves. Whatever else it has done, Howard’s government has failed to show moral leadership. Instead, it has confused harshness (towards Aborigines, refugees, the unemployed, students, etc) and an unquestioning alliance with US military power with real strength. If Latham can continue to show moral courage, and if the electors decide that they can have enough of the material goodies with Latham as leader, he will become the next prime minister.

Merri Rose dominates today’s media coverage, as she was always going to do. The question is – who gets the advantage from this? Peter Beattie has been trying to use it for expectations management. The ABC says “he [Beattie] is still concerned that the resignation of Tourism Minister Merri Rose will be very damaging to his re-election chances.” This is echoed by Sean Parnell’s analysis piece in the CM “Beattie sinks in wake of Merri Rose”. In some ways, Merri Rose appears to be just what Beattie needed, a crisis to remind voters that he is not invulnerable, to give him some of that under-dog status. I’ll be interested to see whether voters really care about it when we start our polling .
The Australian accompanies its article with a photo of Beattie and Rose conferring as she apparently tells him the news at a campaign announcement yesterday. This is odd. How did The Australian’s photographer know to take this shot, and how can the reporter be sure what they were discussing, and why was it that the complainant knew at 5:00 the day before, but the Minister had to break it in such a public way to the Premier? There’s more than a little media management going on here.
Photos dominate the coverage. The Courier Mail’s photo is of a blurred, lonely and distressed looking Rose shot through a window with a glass of wine in front of her. The only object in focus in the photo is the wedding ring on her finger. Channel 10 took their camera behind the glass and shot footage of Rose swearing at someone who tried to join her, as well as her boyfriend being restrained. She gives a brief and not very coherent interview.
In an interesting opinion piece in the CM Mike Kaiser predicts that Beattie can’t lose the next election. This contradicts the Premier and helps the Opposition, not that the Opposition appear able to help themselves on this one. Their main pitch is that Rose should resign from Parliament, something which I don’t think reasonable people would support, when they should be honing their lines as to what this says about the Premier and the substance of his government.
Federal National Leader John Anderson appears to know what he is about. The ABC quotes show him tackling the way in which Beattie called the election. “you can’t [fail to] fix problems, such as really serious and endemic mistreatment of children for six years, and then con people by saying somehow or other that’s a pretext for an election,” and “This has been a six year story of the victory of style over substance”.
Merri Rose is a distraction for the Government, but she is also a distraction for the Opposition. By talking about her they fail to talk about the legitimacy of the whole election campaign itself. They are making the mistake of focusing on one episode for quick gratification from instant media coverage to the detriment of the thematic consistency of their argument.
Beattie gave them an opening for expanding on the “style over substance” theme when he promised $3.75 B for transport on the Gold Coast. The CM played it up on an inside page with a picture of Kristie Goulding a Griffith University student who appears to think it is a “vital initiative”. Closer examination showed that only $3M is new money.
The Opposition had a big policy of their own – a “Kids First” policy which will provide “Tough new measures to protect children, mandatory prison sentences for pedophiles and indefinite jail for sex offenders who fail to complete treatment programmes…”. Releasing the policy at this stage of the election is strangely at odds with their position yesterday that Families wasn’t an issue. Presumably their reasoning was that they should get it out of the road at this stage before wheeling out policies they hope will change votes.
A couple of small snippets reveal interesting undercurrents. The Police Union has announced that it will not campaign against the government. This is another indication that Beattie is traveling relatively well. One of the factors in the 1995 Coalition win was the police union campaign run in the Mundingburra by-election which many of us found to our horror after the election had been purchased by the infamous “Memorandum of Understanding” which would have seen a number of police commissioners sacked.
Another shows some friction between the National and Liberal Parties over the Magic Millions. Liberal Leader Bob Quinn quite properly thinks that taxpayer money shouldn’t be going to inflate the profits from a horse auction run by a couple of multi-millionaires – Gerry Harvey and John Singleton – and calls for the withdrawal of its $1 M taxpayer subsidy. Beattie warns him against attacking an “icon” and Springborg sides with the Premier.
A battle about fiscal responsibility is also being waged with Treasurer Terry Mackenroth accusing the Opposition of planning to spend $1.6 B, while revealing that Labor promises to spend the entire surplus of $450 M. Expect this one to fizzle. Not only is the public wary about these sorts of arguments, but they probably regard the Opposition as being that far from Government that it doesn’t really matter what they promise, it’s the effort that counts.
I’m still waiting for anyone to seriously look at the Green and Independent vote. While The Australian and The Courier Mail have stories writing One Nation off, that doesn’t mean that we are back to Tweedledum and Tweedledee two-party preferred politics. Again, I’ll be interested in what our focus groups tell us.

The Courier Mail sprang quickly into action with a four page wrap around, but most of its coverage missed the mark. It appeared to readily accept that the “Foster-Care reforms” were the real reason for calling the election this week in an article that started with this paragraph “QUEENSLANDERS will go to the polls on February 7 in what shapes as the ultimate test of Peter Beattie’s leadership and Labor’s stranglehold on State Parliament.” “Ultimate”? Surely not. If he wins this election and runs again at the next surely it becomes at the least the “penultimate”. This is just one sample of some very breathless prose. It also broke the story on its front cover that “SUPPORTERS of Townsville-based minister Mike Reynolds tried to convince a Greens candidate who has emerged as his main opponent in the state election to “run dead” in exchange for backing to win a local government seat.” Full marks to the Greens for this hit. Beattie needs some opposition. The front page pictures juxtaposed a photo of Peter and Heather Beattie with Lawrence and Bob Springborg, I mean Lawrence Springborg and Bob Quinn.
Beattie has been making full use of his family in the photo ops, somewhat ironically given the trouble Steve Irwin is in for exploiting his, but feeding the chooks is a little safer than feeding the Crocs, and Beattie’s brood are at least driving age. The Springborg Quinn “Odd Couple” do provide a contrast, and not just because they emphasise political rather than family ties, but also because they are sartorially less resplendent than the Premier. He appears to be wearing a double-breasted suit at the height of Brisbane’s summer, while Quinn and Springborg are in shirt sleeves only. Quinn and Springborg’s wardrobe at least comes from the winninf the protest vote handbook.
The Courier’s tactical analysis was awry, partly because their pendulum doesn’t actually tell you much. I’ll get David Fraser to do a detailed post later on, but there appear to be at least three pendulums doing the rounds – David Fraser’s (also known as “ours” but also used by Mackerras in the Oz), Anthony Green’s and the Courier’s. Of course our’s is the only one worth worrying about, but there are logical reasons for the differences and they come back to the problems of calculating uniform swings in elections where Independents and cross-bench parties win a large number of votes.
My colleague John Wanna points out that Beattie won less than 50% of the vote. Well, yes, but his analysis relies on what is effectively a first past the post calculation. Making a two party preferred calculation Beattie is on something like 60% of the vote. A poll cited by the Courier suggests that Beattie’s share has shifted down about 5%. On that figure he would still have a majority of 21 seats.
There is some discussion of the Greens vote in the context of Townsville and ex-ABC announcer Andrew Carroll , their candidate in Mt Coottha. Our records say there is no Opposition candidate yet for Townsville. No wonder the ALP are trying to buy off the Greens candidate because with a lame duck late-selected National Party candidate the Greens could well win. Just as One Nation was a late breaking story that the major media missed in the 1998 election, the Greens could well be the same this time.
Which leads me to the ABC coverage. Anthony Green has his site up at last and has produced detailed analysis of the seats. Most of it is good competent information, but I’m pretty sure Anthony will be eating his prediction about a “Just vote one strategy” not being used this time. If the Greens poll anywhere near as well as rumours suggest they are, then Beattie will have twice the reasons for trying to turn this election into a first-past-the-post one. The radio coverage centred around the theme that this election was about bringing Beattie back to a sensible majority. That’s about right.
For my money The Australian has the best coverage. Its front page stories are properly cynical about Beattie’s reasons for calling the election and it is using our pendulum. Malcolm Mackerras is predicting a swing of 7%. We will see. The school of predicting elections using past results is a bit too Calvinist for me – not all things are predestined, or predictable at this stage of proceedings. The only commentary that was really off the pace was from Ross Fitzgerald who said “the current Government is investing the kind of money that the Bjelke-Petersen regime never did”. I guess after you’ve covered a few elections they all seem to blur, but Bjelke-Petersen has been gone 16 and a bit years!

I thought the fact that Lawrence Springborg had to fly down to Brisbane meant that he was taken by surprise, but today I was told that the Nationals were actually running ads on TV in the morning, so maybe not. At least one Liberal Candidate, Dr Bruce Flegg advised his campaign supporters on Monday that the election could be announced the next day (I have a date stamped copy of the email, so I know this to be true).
However, it doesn’t look as though Liberal Party HQ knew. Not only was Leader Bob Quinn holidaying in Sydney on Tuesday, but the Liberal Party was today advertising for candidates in the seats of Bulimba, Chatsworth, Greenslopes and Lytton, with nominations closing at an unspecified time on Tuesday, 20th January. The advert says that “These preselections will be held in accordance with the Liberal Party State Constitution and the Model Rules and Procedures for Preselection ballots, Queensland Electoral Act 1992.” Fat chance. Nominations close with the electoral commissioner on the same day at 12:00 noon, so anyone nominating in accordance with the ad is likely to face an emergency State Council preselection.
To further confuse the issue Liberal Party President Michael Caltabiano claims that there are only four preselections for the Liberals to complete – Inala, Ipswich, Murrumba and Woodridge, and that these will be done by Friday. For the record, the Liberal Party doesn’t appear to have a candidate for any of the combined list of eight seats, and if you want to run for the advertised ones, good idea to get your nomination in by Friday.

My life is full of essays I was going to write, and last week I was going to write an essay saying that if the Opposition couldn’t handle the Families Department Child Abuse Scandal more effectively then they had no chance of winning the state election. I didn’t realize that this week the Minister for Sodom and Gomorrah (Tourism and Racing to you non-Methodists) Merri Rose, would resign and give me the opportunity to write it any way.
Yesterday I suggested that the Opposition should have been playing up the sneaky aspects of this surprise election announcement. “The question ought to be not whether [Springborg] was taken by surprise but what is Peter Beattie trying to hide?” Today we have the answer.
It wasn’t the Families Department scandal that prompted the announcement, it was Merri Rose’s impending problems. At least that’s the way it looks, considering that just last week the Premier was saying he wouldn’t announce the election until his holidays were over. He always knew the CMC Inquiry into the Families Department was coming down, so something else had to have been the trigger to make him change his mind. Better to announce the election and deal with the Merri Rose issue in a context dominated by an election campaign than to have it hanging around for a week doing the political equivalent of a soliloquy while everyone waited for the Premier to make the election announcement.
This gives Springborg an opportunity to not only revisit the surprise announcement and cast doubt on Beattie’s integrity, but to really put the Families Department issue back on the agenda.
Instead he concentrated his attack on Minister Rose, the one person he couldn’t do any more damage to. What he should have done is draw parallels between her quite proper resignation and the continuation in office of Minister Spence. Rose was found to have bullied an employee. Spence’s office was so derelict in its duties that it allowed children in its care to be abused with some of the children remaining in foster homes even though they had been infected with sexual diseases by their carers! Spence might not have been directly responsible for this malfeasance, but the scale of the damage puts her in a similar position to Merri Rose whose transgression while personally committed was much more minor. If Beattie really wanted to show the depth of concern for the Families issue he would follow the proper Westminster course and hold the minister responsible.
Instead the Opposition is actually trying to sweep the Families Issue under the carpet, claiming that as their policy is as good as the government’s it is “off the agenda as an item”.
Government and Opposition have both made much of similarities between this election and the 1995 surprise defeat of Wayne Goss. The similarities are few while the differences are legion. One of the differences was that when the Borbidge Sheldon team was thrown a bone they worried it to pieces. In particular they would not have won that election if Joan Sheldon had not pursued and pursued the allegation that she was going to privatize the hospital system to the point where the Courier Mail was producing editorials telling the government not to be “grubby” and accusing them of lying on the issue. This Opposition doesn’t even seem to recognize a bone, let alone be able to get any marrow out of one when it is thrown to them.

I see that Greg Barns has written a piece in ‘Online Opinion’ praising WA Liberal leader Colin Barnett. I have to say this visionary leader Barns refers to is not the fellow we generally experience in WA politics. That Barnett is negative, opportunistic and bent on defending the privileged position of his core supporters, like most Liberal leaders.
Nonetheless, I agree with Barns’ assertion that prolonged discussion about a challenge to Barnett, especially as there are no real alternatives, is Labor’s best chance of wining the next state election.
The ALP is pessimistic about this election. ‘Good News Geoff’ Gallop has turned out to be weak on vision, or at least weak on selling his vision. This is a shame because he is a genuinely nice man, well educated (unlike Kim, he was actually a serious lecturer in politics at Murdoch for a while before being snapped up as the coming thing in state politics) and capable of being more than your average polly.
Gallop seems to have taken to heart the success of his famous mate from university days, Tony Blair. He has not pushed any marked reform or innovation beyond his core promises on forests (which some claim won him the election) and has been strong on media spin.
Gallop does have some ideas in terms of promoting ‘sustainability’ as a long-term change in state development. Unfortunately this needs him to stay in government for a while to establish a new culture of environmental responsibility in government, the public service and business. The Libs, who love to hate this sort of ‘tree hugging’, as they see it, will just stifle it when they get back into office.
WA politics suffers from a major electoral gerrymander, which gives the conservative National Party lots of power, a situation the Gallop government has failed to overturn. It seems one person – one vote is an idea yet to appeal to Australian jurists. The Liberals, who are the Nationals’ partners in government, and who have been the state’s power centre over time, are dominated by reactionary local business types. In particular, the powerful, largely transnational mining industry and a gaggle of WA-based developers and primary industry firms practically own the Liberal Party.
In the past tough development-focussed Liberals like Charles Court could combine solidarity with mining developers, rural interests and associated business with a wider vision of a developing pioneer state. The unions were eventually able to deal themselves in during the 1970s boom years, but other groups, especially Aboriginals, were left out.
But Perth – which is most of WA in demographic and political terms – had a nice climate and plenty of space, and most Western Australians were content to go along with this simplistic program of wealth creation through big development projects. The profits for WA were mostly in the earliest building stage, when local business and labour were used, especially since the WA government was weak on getting reasonable royalty payments on the raw materials shipped out. As long as one project followed another in quick succession – with the ‘West Australian’ and the equally unquestioning ‘Sunday Times’ jubilantly announcing each new bonanza – it all seemed OK.
Gallop arguably got in as one of the first ‘clean up the mess left behind’ premiers, and so his interest in ‘sustainability’ as a structural solution to the growing environmental problems makes sense. The trouble is, he just hasn’t been evangelical enough selling his great vision for a kinder, more sustainable WA. Being the tough guy on a few law and order issues – of peripheral importance, but standard sensationalist material for the parochial media – which would be better dealt with by social welfare/education programs hasn’t helped. And he has some very ordinary ministers who mainly seem bent on alienating Labor supporters, like the unions. Perhaps the brightest light in this government has been Justice Minister Jim McGinty, who has showed that a fiscally conservative state government can still reform in areas to do with social justice like discrimination.
Being realistic, state politics is now so hamstrung by the subservient relationship with federal politics, where the money increasingly is, that we have come to expect very little of our premiers and their minions. If they just keep the basic physical, health and educational infrastructure working we are usually satisfied. Perhaps that is enough, but if Canberra is ruled by a PM as negative and reactionary as John Howard, it certainly presents problems for any administration that wants to call itself a Labor government.

After listening to Lawrence Springborg’s press conference responding to Peter Beattie’s election announcement I’m almost ready to call the election to the government by an even larger margin than the one they have now. It was tentative, nervous and with mostly the wrong messages. Peter Beattie doesn’t need to worry about the protest vote going to the Opposition, at this rate they will only be in the running for the sympathy vote.
The Queensland Opposition holds a total of 15 seats out of a possible 89. To form a majority government the Opposition needs to take the best part of 8 seats from Independents and One Nation candidates, and the balance, say 24, from the ALP. That would require a uniform swing of around 10%.
Of the seats held by the Opposition the National Party has 12, while the Liberals only hold 3. Both of the partners have problems, although the Libs’ problems are more severe. They are riven by internal division and have no money. Their new state director only put his feet under the desk on Monday, and only one of their MPs is recontesting. This election is a real challenge for them just to survive. The National Party is in a more robust position but it is being attacked from both sides. Most of the Independents are in what would normally be fairly safe National Party seats, while North Queensland MHR Bob Katter is organizing a ticket of independents in his area, again in traditional National territory. They need to beat off the independent challenge before they can take on Labor. Realistically, this election is one for consolidation.
Springborg started by saying that this election was a chance for Queenslanders to do something about a government that has broken its promises about taxes. That’s only half right. This is an election where Queenslanders have a chance to do something about the government. If they are concerned about breaking tax promises, it is probably not in a general sense, but in the specific example of the ambulance levy. If that is the case, then Springborg should say the specific words “ambulance levy” rather than the more general one “taxes”.
He then broke into a compare and contrast segment where he said Queenslanders had a real choice. If they wanted a government that had created long waiting lists, allowed child abuse in the Families Department, tolerated Ministerial rorting and broken promises about new taxes and charges then they could vote for Beattie and Labor which doesn’t have a plan. But if they wanted to do something else they could vote for a “fresh re-invigorated Coalition in Queensland that does have a plan.” Springborg continued that winning the election was an “uphill [task] but not impossible”, and that the Coalition was in a “sound and strong position to be able to take government in the state of Queensland”.
There are a number of problems with this. No-one believes that the Coalition can win and for anyone to suggest that they will just invites ridicule. Certainly no-one believes that the Coalition is “fresh” or “re-invigorated”, particularly with the continuous public acrimony from within the Liberal Party. If it is a choice between a Beattie Government and a Springborg one, Springborg loses. If the choice is between a bad Beattie Government and a good one, and if voting for Springborg is part of getting a good Beattie Government, then Springborg wins (comparatively speaking). But that isn’t the choice Springborg is offering.
To allege that Beattie doesn’t have a plan is also over the top. Even if it were true I can’t see electors really believing it. “Things are great in the Sunshine State” at the moment, as they are most other places in Australia. Beattie will get the credit for that, and as a result, whatever plan he is using, people will in general be happy with it.
Another related problem is that while Springborg may be nominating the issues that concern voters, that doesn’t mean that voters believe he is the one to fix them. I suspect on the basis of our experience in the NSW election that many voters wanting to protest will actually vote for Independents and Greens candidates because that will send an unequivocal and differentiated message to Beattie. Such is the cynicism about the major parties that a vote for one is often seen as being much the same as a vote for the other.
Springborg didn’t seem to be able to make up his mind whether he wanted the protest vote or not. As a result the message was mixed. At the same time that he was saying that he could win, he was also all but saying that it was impossible to win. Why can’t he just say something along lines like “It’s up to the people of Queensland who wins this election. I can’t honestly say to you that there is any likelihood of us winning, but I can honestly say that if Queenslanders give Peter Beattie another huge majority then he will continue to [insert list of faults here].” The nature of the protest vote means that it is only available to you if the electors think that the government won’t change, not if they think there is a good chance that it will.
He also needs to demonstrate that Beattie is arrogant and takes the electorate for granted, rather than just stating it. When asked whether he was taken by surprise by Beattie’s announcement he should have said “Yes”, even if he wasn’t. Instead he ended up arguing with a journalist about whether he was or wasn’t. Much better to have said, “January is a time when Queenslanders traditionally spend time recharging their energies and getting to know their families better. The last thing people in this state are interested in at this time of year is an election. We’ve all been taken by surprise. The question ought to be not whether I was taken by surprise but what is Peter Beattie trying to hide.”
Springborg also has a potential weakness in his constant references to a “plan”. As yet I have no idea what it is, and if he keeps good his promise to release another 60 policies during the campaign on top of the 45 released to date, then I will be even more confused on election day. A good rule of marketing is to condense your message into two or three simple messages. A large, complicated plan with 105 sub clauses will leave him open to the sort of jibes that sank the convoluted ALP education policy at the last election (Noodle Nation), or the more famous Keating retort: “He’s got a plan, but it’s the wrong one.”
The Coalition strategy to win government ought to be a two election one. At this election they are playing for “most improved” team, not “league champions”. To win that prize they need to be honest with the electorate and themselves what it is they are after. A knock-on at this stage of the game isn’t fatal, but it doesn’t augur well either.

Peter Beattie has kicked-off the Queensland election and we now have a sketch of the first phase of play. At this moment there are four visible prongs to his strategy. Expect a few more tines on the pitchfork to appear later in the campaign.
The first prong is a re-run of the 2001 State election where Beattie turned a probable negative in the Shepherdson Inquiry into a positive by accepting blame and taking drastic and prompt action to punish those responsible. In this case the issue is the CMC inquiry into the Families Department where it was found that children had been abused (including sexually abused) by foster carers under a succession of governments. The inquiry was somewhat unsatisfactory as a large number of documents had been lost, reflecting poorly on the administration of the department.
The second prong is transference of blame from his Government to the Feds. Polling obviously shows that health is a major issue. Rather than accepting blame here, Beattie has signalled that he wants the election to be about sending a protest to Canberra. He particularly singled out bulk billing and aged care patients being in hospitals rather than nursing homes as issues. At the same time he claimed that Queensland had the shortest hospital waiting lists in the country.
Protest votes are also very much on Beattie’s mind in a defensive context. He went out of his way to sketch a scenario where he could lose 15 to 20 seats, citing as objective evidence the opinions of that well known independent commentator, former ALP Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Jim Soorley. Another apparently credible piece of evidence was internal ALP polling showing that apparently 40% of ALP voters thinks he has too many seats. He then pointedly referred to the upset wins by Oppositions against Wayne Goss in 1995, Jeff Kennett in 2000 and Sallyanne Atkinson in 1991. Innoculating voters against the idea that he is impregnable will be a major part of the campaign.
The last prong is a “Don’t risk it strategy” which is coupled with an appeal to let him finish the job that he has started. It is long on rhetoric and short on specifics. It bounces off a claim that “Queensland has enough uncertainty” and that terrorism and SARS are threats to the Queensland economy. (He learnt that one from John Howard). It then recapitulates some of the themes of the government – Smart State and Education Innovation – boasts that Queensland has the lowest unemployment rate in twenty-one and a half years but says “more work needs to be done” and “the job isn’t finished”.
There are weaknesses. The first is that I can’t think of anyone who would really believe that this election has been called because of the mess in the Department of Families. If Beattie was really serious about ensuring that “agony…to Queensland children stops” he would have lopped the head of the Head of Department and the responsible Minister by now as an act of real contrition. Afterall, he has already lopped the head of a Governor General on a very similar issue. It was his tough action on the back of the Shepherdson Inquiry that made him credible on that issue. Beattie used the families issue to justify the timing of the election announcement. People, being cynical, are much more likely to believe the alternative explanation which is that he is calling the election now to catch the Opposition napping. This may further undermine his credibility.
Another weakness is that with the Opposition in ruins and Beattie enjoying a majority of 43 seats, no-one will believe that he can lose this election, whatever he says. A Premier descending into technical analysis of polls is not a particularly edifying sight and can easily appear like an attempt at manipulation, particularly when his reason for calling an election at this time looks opportunistic.
Beattie also has to explain why people should use this opportunity to protest against the Federal Government’s Health Policies but not protest against his own performance. He is sending the subliminal message that he is complacent and that while he is accepting blame, it is really just a ploy. He started his announcement by thanking Queenslanders and saying that he doesn’t take things for granted, but do voters believe him? One of the underlying nuisances of his nickname of “The Media Tart” is that he is about manipulation.
Some of the ironies of his position were caught in the post announcement press conference when he was asked whether Mark Latham would be involved in the campaigning. “No…this election is about Queensland”. So where does the health campaign fit?
I expect that the real campaign won’t start until after the Australia Day long weekend. Voters will not be paying a lot of attention until then. When it does start expect a second phase to open up where the shortcomings of the Opposition are pointed out and Beattie plays the “Just Vote One” card. A result of the second phase may well be that minor parties figure well in some selected seats as they seek for an acceptable vehicle for their protest vote. In this context One Nation may manage to hold their ground. However, I would put my money on a large percentage of the protest vote going to genuine Independents (including the team that Bob Katter is putting together), and the Greens just as it did in the NSW election. Preference allocation or non-allocation will be an important issue for the Opposition and the Government to decide correctly.
Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg will catch the ball at a press conference 2:30 pm EST. I’ll do a quick and dirty analysis of his response as soon after that as I can.

I recently wrote a piece in ‘Online Opinion’ about the way modern popular culture is stagnating, and what that means. I pointed out that in popular writing, music, TV, films and just about anything else that could be called culture, quality is deteriorating fast. These media are becoming ever more formulaic, banal and dull.
On Friday night I watched the one cricket day game between Australia and India on TV. Straight afterwards was a show called ‘Scare Tactics’ where real people (or at least Americans, who seem increasingly unreal to me) were set up in horrific situations (by their supposed friends) so the viewers could watch their increasing terror. In one case a man thought he had discovered a corpse in a freezer. He was apparently about to throw up with fear when the cast of actors ran in and yelled ‘You’re on Scare Tactics!’ and everyone laughed.
This version of ‘reality TV’ is about as depraved as it gets. Here we are, the viewers, feeding off the genuine terror of the victims. This is not like that ‘Fear Factor’ garbage where macho men and women get to test their limits willingly (probably fuelled by shots of testosterone at that).
So, I wondered about the shows where the set up ‘victim’ did not just laugh it off, and instead perhaps wept with humiliation or worse. What about people with heart conditions, for instance? And what about the emotional impact of finding out one’s limits of courage? After all, in two of the set-ups the victims showed themselves to be morally weak. I suppose the TV show just waves money at them, and has lots of smart lawyers just in case.
Sport is of course a form of reality TV. Its great appeal is that it is ‘unscripted’, although sports science is taking a lot of the doubt out of it. Even sport is more and more predictable, more and more following known formulae, more and more dull. The way AFL has been transformed from a game of great variety and skill into a much more one-dimensional running game by coaches and umpires is a good example. Already coaches have done away with drop kicks, have almost done away with spiral punts, and are doing away with high marking, abetted by umpires who will not protect the man going for the ball enough (whatever happened to ‘push in the back’?). Players are less skilled than they used to be, but much fitter and better at the fewer skills they do need.
So, as popular culture – more and more exploitative of unscripted ‘real life’ in reality shows and sport – becomes duller, is it any wonder that the kids are turning to the virtual life of technology. Through their mobile phones (now with SMS) they create an increasingly hermetic kid’s world, no adults and no messy reality allowed. Utilising ever improving music, photo, and video technology they watch and listen to only what they find stimulating. This is all abetted by a culture industry that increasingly focuses on the tastes of the average 15-year-old and mass production of ever cheaper consumer goods.
The best example of this techno-obsession is video games. Kids generally love them because they provide them with instant gratification of the need for power and enable them to experience a kind of immature sexuality.
The only sense not catered to is touch, which is quite important when it comes down to it. It is especially relevant to sexual gratification. Touch, along with all the other senses except smell, can be replicated digitally through technology known as virtual reality (VR), invented several years ago and now just awaiting better software and more bandwidth to become popular. So when virtual reality is perfected and made widely available through storage devices or on the net, the kids will jump into it and likely never come out (unless they are forced to).
Life is duller and duller, or worse, terrifying, and as technology becomes better, those with a choice will increasingly opt for the more exciting and safe ‘reality’ of VR.