I wish I had time for a longer post on the John Brogden brouhaha. The degraded state of journalism in the country is on full-show. A politician gets a little drunk and in a situation which is obviously completely off the record indulges in a bit of horseplay and makes a weak, slightly racist, joke about “mail order brides”, and it ends up on the front page of the newspapers. Is this ethical journalism?
And if Brogden’s behaviour was a hanging offence, how did Bob Hawke survive and prosper? (See David Lange’s autobiography for just how blue his private moments could be.)
More to the point, if these moments are now public and these sentiments make one unsuitable to hold down a responsible job, could someone report who the journalists were that were present at the time, and which ones laughed. They ought to be exposed as well.
This is just another example of hypocritical lynch mob behaviour on the part of the press.
When I get time I’ll expand on this post, because one of the stories being missed in the overflow of mock moral prurience is why Brogden and the NSW Libs couldn’t have handled this event better. There are deep undercurrents here which are being completely over-looked.

Barnaby Joyce’s behaviour over Telstra should be a lesson to the Queensland Liberals on how to negotiate a coalition agreement with the Queensland Nats. Just because they threaten to walk away or wreck things if they don’t get their way doesn’t mean they will.
Joyce at one stage wanted $5 billion from the sale of Telstra spent on his constituents, but appears to be now sheepishly settling for much less. It’s standard National Party negotiating tactics, major planks of which appear to be:

I’m reliably informed that despite the Liberals’ good showings in Redcliffe and Chatsworth the National Party is still trying to insist that it has a right to run in urban seats. The Liberals are resisting. They should continue to do so, no matter what the other side says. Given the example of Barnaby Joyce they will most likely fold for a lot less than they are asking.

Full marks to Dr Ameer Ali, president of the national Federation of Islamic Councils, when he says that Islamic extremists should not be banned.
“The best thing is to expose these people and marginalise them. As long as they are out in the open we know what they are thinking,” is one of the classic arguments in defence of free speech.
It is also a good argument against religious villification laws. Can we expect to see Muslim leaders campaigning for the repeal of such laws as a result of the war against terror?

Could Bob Quinn lose his job as a result of winning the Queensland by-elections? That’s the seemingly bizarre analysis running around the Queensland Liberal Party. It goes like this.
Michael Caltabiano, the winner in Chatsworth, has entered Parliament with the express intention of becoming Parliamentary Leader. Not only is he ambitious, but some of his supporters are whispering that he will challenge Quinn at his first party meeting. To win the leadership he has to gather four additional votes. Flegg and Quinn are counted as being the only sure votes for Quinn, leaving four other members as possibles for either side. Of these Langbroek is in the Caltabiano faction, Rogers, the other by-election winner is supposed to be under their influence, and Stuckey and McCardle are apparently critical of Quinn. It’s plausible he could win.
Caltabiano’s track record suggests that would be a bad decision. He has been a divisive figure as president and holds a seat with a tenuous margin, only just established in a by-election. He was the leader of the Liberal Party in the City Council, but resigned from that position in a fit of pique after managing to alienate most of his colleagues.
The next natural leader of the Parliamentary Party is Bruce Flegg. Not only does he hold a safe seat, but he has a term and a half’s experience and can get on with most of his colleagues. If Caltabiano challenges, it is more likely that Flegg will emerge the leader than him. That probably means that Caltabiano will bide his time to keep Flegg out and wait until after the next election when his supporters in the Liberal caucus should increase in number.
One of those supporters is likely to be Peter Turner, the newly preselected candidate for Indooroopilly. This is a must win seat that the Liberal Party threw away last election by preselecting Alan Pidgeon. They appear to be doing the same thing this election. This afternoon, Scott Emerson, a former journalist with The Australian, a local resident and involved in local community politics, and one of the smartest, most presentable and charming people I know, missed the preselection by a narrow margin, to Turner.
Emerson is well connected and would have run a well-financed and focussed campaign which would have been likely to win. On election he could have immediately been moved into a front-bench position. Turner is unlikely to be able to do any of those things. But he has one of the most valuable assets in the contemporary Queensland Liberal Party – a vote that he will exercise as the powers that be direct.
Peter Beattie’s actually having a reasonable weekend. More Liberals means more trouble, but not necessarily for him.

The Queensland Liberal Party has had two significant victories in the Redcliffe and Chatsworth by-elections. With swings in Redcliffe of around 7% and 12% in Chatsworth voters have told Premier Beattie to fix the health system. They have also put in place the first building blocks of a decent opposition.
The Liberal Party has increased its parliamentary membership by 40%. Sounds good, but it’s sobering to think they could do that by winning only two seats! However, these aren’t just any two seats. These are seats that the Liberal Party could not manage to win in 1995, the last time that they were in government in Queensland. So, in a sense, they now have a head-start on the 1995 opening position.
However, before the 1995 state election they had 9 seats, meaning there were four seats that they held then which they do not hold now – Clayfield, Indooroopilly, Kawana and Aspley. While Lawrence Springborg is talking up the chances of a non-Labor win at the next election, that is unlikely. What the next election should be about is building a credible position from which to strike for government. That means that the Liberal Party needs to win those 4 seats, and preferably some others as well.
One way of doing that is to put capable candidates in place. Undoubtedly one of the reasons there was a larger swing in Chatsworth than in Redcliffe was the calibre of Michael Caltabiano. That is a calibre that is recognised by his factional enemies, as well as his friends. The same generosity of spirit needs to be shown in other preselections around the state to ensure that the best candidates are selected, irrespective of who they align with.
Another reason the swing was larger in Chatsworth was that Terry Mackenroth’s personal vote was higher than that of Ray Hollis. There was a generic swing to the Liberal Party of around 5 percent, making the rest the combination of individual candidate efforts and erosion of the extra margin provided by a personal vote. So while Caltabiano was worth something, it was probably only in the vicinity of a percent or two – crucial but not overwhelming.
Which points to another necessity. The Liberal Party has to maintain its wins. History is replete with candidates who have experienced big by-election wins only to be ousted in subsequent elections as the electorate snaps back to type. These seats will need to be nurtured to be retained.
How these by-elections play out on the larger canvass of state elections will be interesting. Evidence from the day suggests that Peter Beattie has some real public relations problems. People have switched off his style and were ignoring him as he walked around campaigning. Beattie needs to reinvent himself. That’s not impossible, but the approach he has run since 2001 will probably not work in the future. Saying you’re sorry and promising to fix problems is a good strategy, as long as you actually do fix problems and change things.
Peter needs to withdraw himself from the media almost entirely. He’s done this well thus far on effervesence, but survival requires not just some humility, but some sobriety. If he can keep his face of the TV screens, voters may have some faith that he is actually off somewhere, doing the job. Ultimately, actions speak louder than words.

In the Redcliffe and Chatsworth by-elections, only the Liberal Party is under real pressure.
For Peter Beattie a loss would be a good management tool. It would say to his back-benchers that his government is not impregnable, so they should be careful how they behave. He would also be able to claim, with more credibility than he can at the moment, to be the under-dog going into the next state election if he could contrive to lose these two seats.
For conspiracy theorists, Beattie actually does seem to be intent on losing. Rather than take the standard public relations medicine and accept responsibility for the state’s health system he has variously blamed the federal government, lack of bulk-billing GPs, and more recently Queenslanders’ failure to live healthier lives, for the problems. At the same time he has tried to make the by-elections a referendum on the Federal Government’s proposed IR laws. All of this uncharacteristic behaviour increases the chance that electors will give him a kick in the pants this Saturday.
The Nationals have nothing to lose as they are not running. However, a Liberal loss will present them an opportunity to negotiate harder with the Liberals about which seats they can stand in at the next election. At the moment the Liberals are trying to freeze them out of the urban area, but if the Liberals are unable to win these two seats then the Nationals will be able to say that while the Liberals always do well in public opinion polls, they don’t do so well in the polls that count. Of course, if they win, the Nats won’t find those arguments so easy, but there’ll be another couple of bodies on the Opposition benches.
From the Liberals’ point of view, if they can’t win these two seats in circumstances where the government so clearly deserves a little punishment, it will be yet another proof that the electorate doesn’t see them as being worthy of opposition, let alone government. Not only that they will have lost an effective councillor, in Caltabiano, who will also be tarnished in his role as party president.
So, a Liberal win or a loss, suits both Beattie and the Nationals to greater or lesser degrees. All the pressure is on the Libs. Will they choke?

I came across this piece in Open Democracy by Scilla Elworthy a couple of weeks ago. In it’s own context it is not that different from the advice that I would give a political combatant in a domestic legislative scrap, so it resonates with me.
Elworthy has five principles to reduce terrorism which she believes the occupying troops ought to observe. Something for our soldiers in Southern Iraq to consider.
They are:

All makes sense to me.
And applying Sophie Panopolous’ metaphor in a slightly different context, perhaps Bill Heffernan should pay attention too!

According to the ABC, Tim Gartrell, National Secretary of the ALP, “wants the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) to investigate whether it is possible to stop political candidates making money from the election process”.
His concern is that Pauline Hanson made $164,000 from public funding in her last attempt to gain a senate seat. I think I have a privileged position in this debate, as I was the first person that I know of to raise the issue of what she might take home from her run for the Senate.
But so what if she bagged a surplus? I pointed it out because she was crying poor, not because there was anything immoral in it. It’s a quirk of the public funding system which anyone is entitled to exploit. Political parties certainly do. They regularly run their senate campaigns at a profit because they never spend any money directly getting a senator elected. The profit is directed towards the lower house, and also indirectly helps to pay the salaries of officials like Gartrell, who are therefore also a private beneficiary.
That is apart from the Democrats and the Greens, and I have always suspected that the public funding laws for the Senate are specifically crafted to help the minors out in the Upper House and the majors in the lower one.
Perhaps Tim should think about paying back the public funding for the Senate, or at least that amount of it that was spent getting lower house members elected?