World, when are you going to start paying attention to the On Line Opinion election coverage? Name me one commentator(s) who’s correctly called the general result of all elections they’ve covered since 2001? Can’t? Well look no further than the team at www.ozelections.com.
Forgive my angst and allow me to be self-satisfied for just a minute, but why is it that newspapers pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Alan Ramseys and Michelle Grattans of this world when most elections they wouldn’t have a clue what is going on? Why, when by using just a few simple tools and the skills of people who have shown some ability in political campaigning, they could not only have a handle on what is really happening, but leads on stories that would actually interest their readers?
(Readers being, by definition, the people making the voting decision, who must wake every morning, pick the paper up from their front lawn – the small minority who still get it home delivered that is – and wonder why the newspapers aren’t interested in the same things they are).
I wonder how long it took before Gallop’s new-fangled opinion poll took off?
Anyway, be that as it may, despite being one continent and a couple of time zones away, we predicted, on the basis of our qualitative polling that Geoff Gallop would be returned with the same, or possibly a larger, majority. Gallop deserves to be congratulated – polls in January showed that he would be a loser. While I don’t think that was ever really likely, Colin Barnett and the Liberals did give him a big hand by ignoring the issues that counted with voters.
Maybe they spent their time reading the West Australian?

An interview on ABC radio this morning said it all (no audio that I can find, so no link) – we all belong to families, apparently. Minister responsible for Family Impact Statements, Kay Patterson, was asked to define exactly what a family was. After not much rambling she revealed that even a person living alone was a family, because, well, we all have families don’t we? The department appears to have been putting some thinking into defining this concept.
The youngis reporter appeared to have trouble accepting this fairly obvious definition, and kept quizzing Patterson about single parents and childcare – obviously for Generation-whatever-letter-of-the-alphabet-we-are-down-to define families as involving children, perhaps more evidence of an increase in conservatism in the young. The Minister is much more a swinger and seemed to even embrace the possibility that same sex couples are really families.
So, what is a “Family Impact Statement” supposed to cover? Just about everything, it seems, which may disappoint Family First, whose idea it was anyway. Perhaps we should rename them “People Impact Statements”? Not sure that this is what FF had in mind. Afterall, Family First implies elevation of a certain type of human living arrangement. If it could be translated as just People First its claim would appear to be more an elevation of our particular species, or perhaps an anti-corporatist pitch!
You wonder exactly what sort of statements governments have been putting out with their legislation in the past if these statements can be regarded as an innovation. I mean, all legislation is supposed to have a beneficial impact on people, isn’t it?

Budding match-maker Lawrence Springborg has been trying to force a shot-gun wedding on his shy bride, the Queensland Libs. I had always assumed he was the groom, or at least had an enduring power of attorney on the groom’s behalf. An opinion piece in today’s Courier Mail by Scott Driscoll, National Party Life Member, former National Party Campaign Director (and former three-time Liberal Party candidate as well), suggests that if he ever tries to say “I do” he may only be speaking for himself.
Driscoll says:

The parliamentary leader of the National Party must shelve his well-meaning and academically appealing idea of one conservative party and get back to being leader of the Nationals and Queensland Opposition Leader, accepting that such a proposition was never really on.

People like Driscoll generally have an agenda when they put pieces like this into the press. He’s not a professional journalist but a player in National Party politics. He wouldn’t be doing this if there wasn’t significant support for him in the National Party.
All this makes the National’s State Conference the weekend after next very interesting. Word is that Terry Bolger (who all along appeared lukewarm on the Pineapple Party proposal) is retiring. His replacement could make or break Springborg’s proposition, particularly if that person is more publicly opposed than Bolger was.
Springborg has turned down a number of opportunities to back down from his proposal. Twice he’s been rebuffed by John Howard, and Bob Quinn has probably lost count of the number of times he’s told him to take the diamond ring back to the jewellers.
At the moment he is advertising for candidates in Brisbane and Gold Coast seats. This is the “run it or wreck it” gambit. He threatened the Liberals that if they didn’t marry his party, then he would ruin it for both of them by running candidates against the Liberals in every seat. Under Queensland’s optional preferential system that could mean the erstwhile coalition parties would fail to win any seats, and might even lose one or two. It’s actually more a double suicide than a shotgun wedding. What’s more, it’s convinced the Libs that Springborg may be worse than reckless, he may, as they politely put it, have “lost the plot”!
This leaves the Nationals in a difficult position. Springborg is taking them nowhere, but without him, they appear to have nowhere to go. Alternative leader Jeff Seeney is not popular in the city, and there is no-one else, apart from a few clydesdales, like Mike Horan, and they have already hauled the cart a few too many yards.
Their choice of president will be an indicator of what they are likely to do. One of the contenders is rumoured to be Graham Heilbronn. He is also a high profile backer of the Pineapple Party, so that would commit them irrevocably to the marriage, although it wouldn’t disarm Springborg.
When I joined the Liberal Party it seemed like Labor would never ever be in power again in Queensland. Now it’s hard to think of when they might lose it!

Associate Professor of English Wayne Sawyer appears to believe that English teachers have failed because some of their students voted for this Liberal government. If that is the case, then I must be one of the most spectacular illustrations of that failure.
I was fortunate enough to have access to one of the best liberal educations in Australia. During my four years at the University of Queensland in the late ’70s I spent my entire time within the English and French Departments completing an honours degree in English Literature…and last year I voted for the Howard government.
Not once during that time do I recall anyone suggesting that the study of literature (might as well implicate the french teachers as well) led to a tendency to vote one way or the other. Perhaps they did teach historical determinism in Dan O’Neil’s Marxist literary criticism course, but I avoided that, as well as feminist literary theory – I regarded them as being two dimensional intrusions into the mainstream of useful literary theory and criticism, and not worth spending time on.
For me, the beauty of literature was that it could take you outside your time, circumstances and self and present you with dilemmas that though strange were also familiar. It also made you accutely sensitive to the overtones of words and the cultural and semantic resonances that they bring with them.
I’m wondering what courses Wayne Sawyer took, because if there is a serious charge of failure here, it must be that his teachers, not those of a later generation, failed. If he had been properly exposed to the wonders of Western literature from Homer through to The Shipping News, how could he have written what he has written?
There are numerous defenders of Sawyer, and a common theme in their defence of him is that because he was speaking in a private capacity, criticism of him amounts to censorship. In fact, this defence itself amounts to censorship. If criticism equals censorship, and censorship is wrong, then criticism must be wrong, making the expression of contrary opinions impossible.
It is this very attitude – hostility to contrary opinions – which has made Professor Sawyer’s comments contentious. In an ordinary person, this would not amount to very much. It is common for people to be bigotted and biased, and it is their right to be so. However, that does not mean that bigotry and bias have no consequences. There are some professions where they have no place. Judges, for example, should be fair to all and interpret the laws without importing their own personal agendas.
Teachers of English similarly have a duty to be fair and unbiased in their dealings with their students. It is not their role to push a particular political line. Rather it is their role to expose their charges to the complexity and richness of human thought, and help them to explore it. This is a matter of professional competence.
The issue with Professor Sawyer is not whether he has a right to say what he has said, but whether, having said it, he could be regarded as being a competent teacher of English.

It might not be quite what he was intending to say, but Keith Suter appears to have found another use for Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”. The invisible hand is Smith’s description of the phenomenon where, by pursuing self-interest, individuals actually work to the common good – “…by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” The Wealth of Nations
In his latest essay on On Line Opinion, he essentially argues that we can spread democarcy by making commerce not war. That is, if countries develop economically, globalise and create a middle class, then democracy will follow. This sounds just like Adam Smith’s prescription, administered with a slightly different illness in mind. I don’t diagree with either of them.