What big idea would you pitch to the Prime Minister and the Premier if you were caught in a lift with them for five minutes? That’s the challenge put to me, and a number of other panellists, by Eidos, “a consortium of Queensland universities, government and non-government agencies or statutory bodies committed to improving education and social change research, policy and practice”.
I’m answering the question Wednesday afternoon, but thought I’d put up my statement in the hopes that some readers might be able to help me refine it a little.

Hey Peter and John. Have you any idea how many electors would vote if it wasn’t compulsory? Do you reckon it would be 70%, 60%? Maybe 50%? Less? None of us knows, do we? But one thing we do know is that it would be closer to 50 than 100 per cent. You, and every other politician and government in the country, have got a problem. You’re elected, but no-one really regards you as legitimate. Voters are grudging, unenthusiastic and disengaged. And things are getting worse, not better.
There are a lot of reasons for this lack of trust and enthusiasm. One of them is that times have changed and politicians haven’t. Electors don’t relate tribally, apart from football; they sleep in electorates, they don’t live in them; they distrust grand policy statements; and they feel soiled by the cheap political promises that buy their votes at election time.
But not everything’s lost, and Peter and John, I reckon you’re in a good position to do something about all of this. Here’s the plan.
Have you noticed that while electors don’t like conventional politics, they’re still vitally engaged in issues? They mightn’t want to join political parties, but they will still turn up to townhall meetings if they think they can make an impact. What you’ve got to do is start treating them as individuals, rather than just electors, and you’ve got to give them the opportunity to engage on every issue if they want.
Some people reckon you’re two of the tinniest politicians around. I reckon they’re right, because just as the problem has got worse than ever, the tool to fix it has appeared, and some of the best people at using that tool are here in Queensland. We’re not just the Smart State, we’re the Lucky State.
The tool that I’m talking about is the Internet. It’s not tribal and it’s not worried about where you live, and it is issues-based, and it gives you the chance to treat everyone like individuals and consult them on almost every issue without having to lick and pay for a million stamps. In the Queensland Government’s Community Engagement Division you have an eDemocracy section that is regularly cited around the world as being at the forefront of citizen engagement. And you’ve got us. On Line Opinion has 70,000 readers each month from around the country (and the world) and we operate a bit like a 24 hour town hall meeting. What you need to do is to combine our different approaches and produce a totally new institution, and while you’re at it, make it a national institution, not just a state one.
Big national ideas have come from Queensland before. Samuel Griffiths wrote a lot of the Commonwealth Constitution. We’re talking about a similarly significant and unique moment in time. The Internet is a network, and it doesn’t work well with the hierarchical systems that politicians have got used to, but it is not going to go away. When a similarly disruptive technology – wireless – came along we took a national view of it and created the Australian Broadcasting Commission, an organisation at arm’s length from government, but funded by it, because we wanted the technology to serve all of the people and we knew it needed government support to do this.
That’s what we need now – an ABC of the Internet. Something which will be an amalgam of news organisation, conversation, townhall meeting, think-tank, street march, convention, conference, parliament. An organisation that will broker conversations between politicians and electors; between electors and electors; and politicians and politicians. Where I can be alone with my own thoughts, or in company with thousands of others, all at the click of a mouse.
This might sound a little grandiose, but the alternative is to get run over. There’s an organisation in the US called Moveon.org. It’s based on the Internet, it supports candidates in US elections, and it has more members in Australia than all of our political parties (including both of yours’). It played a big part in the last US elections, and while it didn’t win, it’s learning. And it won’t be the only organisation like this, and these organisations will start up in Australia, and they’ll play politics in ways that might actually make voters more grudging, unenthusiastic and disengaged (and more inclined to make life impossible for you and every other politician).
So it’s your big chance. You can grab the opportunity the Internet gives you, and you’ll stand-out like a Samuel Griffiths or a Henry Parkes. Or you can keep on doing what you’re doing, in which case, you’ll be remembered as good politicians, for a while. It won’t be comfortable, and it won’t be easy, but you didn’t get where you are without taking a risk, Peter and John. Howabout it?

Beazley’s budget reply is better economics than the government’s budget, but more to the point it is better politics. Howard holds government in Australia by assembling a coalition of the well-off and the working poor. The last group tend to vote Labor, and continue to do so at a state level, but Howard has hived them off federally.
These people live in seats like Ford and Longman in Queensland where safe federal Liberal seats contain mostly safe state Labor seats.
What Beazley has to do over the next two-and-a-half years is convince them that Howard has taken them for a ride, taking their votes and cashing them in to fund favours for the the top-end of town. By rejecting the government’s tax cuts for ones which favour less well-off voters and in the process make the welfare to work transition easier, Beazley has taken the first step down the path of winning Howard’s battlers back to Labor.
He has combined this with a pitch to those people who think apprenticeships are important, by pledging more money for traineeships, and a promise to do more about infrastructure spending. Quite rightly he views a more productive economy as being one best able to meet the challenges of an aging population, and infrastructure is one key to achieving that.
Now what he needs to do is play this wedge in the context of the Treasurer’s self-indulgence in demanding the Prime Minister’s job. In the past the Liberal Party has too easily worn the mantle of being the “Born to Rule” Party. John Howard may say that he does not take the next election for granted, but the Treasurer’s attitude says just the opposite. It’s an unedifying spectacle that Howard’s battlers will not be liking.
Beazley will of course face opposition from those earning over $100,000 a year, but they have a fairly weak case. Sure, under Beazley they may not be receiving the same proportionate tax cuts as less well-off voters, but then the less well-off don’t have access to the same tax advantages that the wealthy do, such as sheltering significant amounts of income in superannuation. It’s ironic that in this country, the one group we bribe to save are actually the group who would save whether or not they were bribed at all!
Labor’s starting to look competitive again. What will the government’s answer be?

The best budget analysis I’ve found this morning is not in the pages of the daily broadsheets, but rather in two documents prepared by Saul Eslake, the ANZ’s Chief Economist. His Budget Report (pdf 88kb) starts like this:

Budget 2005-06: The Magic Pudding
In a post election year there was no pressure on the Government to spend its way to popularity. It was time for a healthy dose of economic realism, fiscal rectitude, and vision. And this year there was no fear of an obstructionist Senate with the Government gaining control from 1 July. With the sale of Telstra back on the agenda it again became critical to distinguish between the headline surplus
(including the proceeds of asset sales) and the underlying surplus (ex asset sales).
On the surface this Budget looked like a magic pudding – tax cuts for all, virtually full delivery of election promises, a concerted effort to increase labour force participation by moving people from welfare to work, and still delivering healthy underlying cash surpluses. But it was a Budget built on the windfall gains of cyclically high commodity prices and the projected highest terms of trade in 50 years. In our opinion these gains should have been saved so as to moderate domestic demand and take pressure off interest rates. There is a real risk now that the RBA will feel the need to lift interest rates again.

His Post-Budget slides (pdf 150kb) give graphic examples to back up his conclusions.

Lynton Crosby is a great self-publicist. This morning on ABC Radio he was given credit for the 1995 Queensland State Coalition Campaign. There are a lot of things he has done, but that wasn’t one of them.
He’s not alone in getting undue credit for that campaign. After the election Kelly Gee, the National Party’s advertising agency, claimed the credit in the Courier Mail. But all they did was shoot the ads under direction from John King and Toby Ralph of DDB Needham, the Liberal Party’s advertising agency. Their original pitch had been to run a campaign branded “The new coalition” because they reckoned that if you put “new” in the name of something, like “New Coke” it would sell.
Then Ken Crook won an award for the campaign. Ken was an integral part of it, but his biggest contribution was to convince the National Party that the Liberal strategists who dreamed it up could deliver.
Just for the record, the original strategy was conceived by me (I was then Liberal Party Campaign Chairman) and David Fraser (former Liberal State Director), and borrowed significantly from Wayne Swan’s campaign for Jim Soorley in the 1991 BCC election. It was adopted by Bob Tucker and further developed in consultation with Mark Textor, Toby Ralph and John King. Jim Barron was a very new State Director at the time, and he, along with me, Andrew McBryde and Bob Tucker, executed the strategy, and refined it in parts as well. McBryde ran the polling in consultation with Mark Textor who was a Liberal Party employee at the time. I don’t remember ever discussing anything with Lynton Crosby during the course of the campaign, although others might have.
We didn’t win in 1995, we had to wait until the Mundingburra re-election in 1996 to be able to form a minority government with the support of Independent Liz Cunningham. That campaign was mostly run by Jim Barron and Toby Ralph, and the strength of the result shows what we could have done in the state election if we hadn’t been forced to soften our message because the National Party wouldn’t buy the whole package.
When he was interviewed on TV on the night of the re-election our candidate, Frank Tanti, gave all the credit to God. That led to him receiving a gruff phone call very early the next morning. “It’s God here,” said the voice and hung up. No, it wasn’t Lynton Crosby, it was State President Bob Tucker.
Lynton did get some credit for Mundingburra in Pamela Williams’ book The Victory. On page 217 she say “On by-election day the Liberals festooned the polling booths with metres of bunting featuring Keating ordered well in advance by Lynton Crosby”. Well, no they didn’t. No such bunting appeared on the polling booths in Mundingburra. Nothing like being there, and Lynton wasn’t.
None of this should be implied as criticism of Lynton as a campaigner, just a correction of the record, and the first attempt anywhere that I know of, to actually put the record straight on the 1995 election. One day I’ll have to write the book – it was a classic campaign.
Late note: A well-connected correspondent with a long range memory wrote to remind me that Lynton had actually “fled the State in Dec 1993 – 18 months prior to the said triumph”.

I’m sure it’s just coincidence, but Pru Goward, Federal Age Discrimination Commissioner and wife of John Howard’s biographer, is running a seminar on age discrimination in the workforce. Has she issued an invitation to Peter Costello to attend?
Pru will be speaking, as will Philip Ruddock. Ruddock could also be sending a subtle message to the Christian right which is rumoured to be stacking out his seat.
The release announcing the seminar says:

The federal Age Discrimination Act 2004 aims to achieve attitudinal change by raising awareness that people of all ages have the same fundamental rights and by removing age stereotypes and barriers to participation. The Act seeks to eliminate discrimination on the basis of age in areas of public life, by investigating and attempting to conciliate cases of age discrimination. (For further information on the Age Discrimination Act visit: http://www.humanrights.gov.au/age)

Note the use of the words “public life” and “conciliation”. It could actually be a veiled invitation from Pru and David to both the PM and the Treasurer to come over for dinner and settle the matter there.
The release also says that “The discussion will be relevant for academics, business, unions, government, non-government organisations and the media.” You can phone the commission on 02 9284 9608 to book the Treasurer a spot, or yourself for that matter. It’s on in Sydney on Monday week.

Wednesday 11th May will be a significant day for Margaret Krause. It is the day she will appear in front of what she and others refer to as the “Star Chamber” – the Queensland Liberal Party’s Discplinary Committee.
The committee has had a revamp since it interviewed Marion Feros, a former challenger for the presidency of the party. Her crime was to answer journalists’ questions honestly after her defeat, and for this the committee recommended that she be censored. It now includes some new members, including Kathi Parer, wife of former Senator Warwick. None of them appears to have any legal experience.
That makes you wonder what they might do about Krause’s crime which is to occasionally circulate emails from Crikey!, one of which was picked up by her local paper and printed as though it were a letter to the editor from her.
All of this is just another pain-in-the-neck for Liberal Leader Bob Quinn. According to the Courier Mail today, and confirmed by party sources, his press sec and another long-serving staffer have departed or been sacked. On top of that, rumour has it that the Sicilian faction is targetting his preselection using Young Liberals in the Gold Coast Young Liberals branch.
While the GC Y/Ls are based in the neighbouring federal electorate of Moncrieff, held by Stephen Ciobo, a significant number of them actually live in Quinn’s electorate where they attend Bond Uni. I’m told that maybe 100 of them could be eligible to vote in Quinn’s preselection, which would dwarf his own senior party branch membership. Normally you’d discount this sort of speculation as being just trouble-making, except for the fact that the administration is refusing to give Quinn access to the branch membership records of the GC Y/Ls. The speculation also says that Michael Caltabiano is the one interested in running. One for an enterprising journo to get him on the record about.
Imagine that, a state leader being denied access to a membership list. No date has yet been set for Quinn’s trial. Seems Margaret has all the luck.