The only thing Bligh and Beanland have in common is the first letter of their names, and the fact that they both figure in issues I wanted to mention today.

Beanland

Bundaberg Hospital Inquiry Head Geoff Davies has indicated that he is likely to make an interim finding critical of both sides of politics for the practice of taking documents into the cabinet room so as to exempt them from disclosure under FOI laws. It is claimed that both the Borbidge and Beattie government have done it, and indeed they did. And so did the Goss Government from what I remember.
The Bjelke-Petersen governments didn’t have any such problems, because they didn’t have FOI at all.
However, some people do get an honourable mention. The Courier Mail reports: “Only Liberal leader Bob Quinn was prepared to admit it was wrong of previous conservative governments…” So Quinn gets a medal. So too should Denver Beanland and Rob Borbidge. Beanland, as A-G in the Borbidge Government, took a submission to cabinet to outlaw the practice, but according to my information he and Borbidge were rolled by the cabinet, led by Joan Sheldon and Mike Horan, and supported by Santo Santoro.
The other person who gets credit is Dean Wells who as Labor Attorney-General in 1992 established the act in the first place, although it apparently didn’t take long for things to start reverting.

Bligh

My remarks about Anna Bligh yesterday were based on our public opinion polling. Of course the only poll that counts is that taken of the 61 members of the ALP caucus (which was the other mistake I made, I was still counting them at 63). The hot tip there is that if anything happened to Beattie it would be John Mickel who would win the leadership ballot, not Bligh. So, they are most likely to play the Iemma, rather than the Lawrence/Kirner gambit.

I’ve been ruminating about the likely result of the new Queensland Coalition which, according to its proponents is really a “partnership”, and I think its result might be Queensland’s first female Labor premier.
My thought processes run like this. The Coalition agreement, that is really a partnership, isn’t going to stand up too well to public scrutiny and in fact draws attention to the tension between the National and Liberal Parties. In the long run this will be a problem for them.
In the short run, the new Coalition is a problem for Beattie. This is because one of the reasons that the Coalition has been formed is that the non-Labor parties are trying to capitalise on a public perception that Beattie could lose the next election. That perception creates its own reality and their coalescence brings a much sharper point to it, giving it momentum already there from their by-election wins.
I’ve lifted the lid on our current polling and had a peek. It’s not good for Beattie. It suggests there is a good chance he will have to front the Bundaberg Hospital Inquiry (how did Geoff Davies convince him to reconstitute it?) because of public pressure. Even if he doesn’t show, not appearing will look as bad as appearing probably would have, and it will make the polling even worse.
Labor only chose Beattie in the first place because he was the last credible man standing, and they didn’t have a lot of choice. Now they have some choice. Our polling suggests Anna Bligh might have some attraction as Labor leader. Not that she polls nearly as well as Beattie, but if you were convinced he was going to lose to a rejuvenated Laurence Springborg, you’d probably take a chance on her.
It’s a time-honoured ALP gambit anyway. Replace a tarnished male premier with a left-wing female one, as happened with Carmen Lawrence and Joan Kirner, and hope for the best.
So, on this scenario, Coalition Lite provides sufficient momentum to public perception to force the Labor caucus to reassess its leadership resulting in a change to Deputy Anna Bligh. Robbed of the lubricant that is the Bundaberg Hospital Commission Coalition Lite then runs out of momentum as the flaws in the Coalition become apparent. Bligh then has a solid victory at the next election although ceding maybe 15 or more seats to the Coalition. These are shared between National and Liberal, who continue to squabble because neither has the popular edge but the Nats have more seats, guaranteeing Anna two or more terms.
I won’t stake my forecasting record on it, but it is plausible. There may be little bounty in this coalition for the conservatives if Captain Bligh is the Labor choice.

The Liberal Party should have gone into the coalition negotiations determined to ensure that whatever happened they had the run of the metropolitan areas, the National Party the bush, and they shared the regional areas between them. Queensland politics will be out of joint until the non-Labor side of politics is run by the major non-Labor metropolitan party.
That hasn’t happened, and in the process the Liberal Party have shown the habitual inability to negotiate hard which the National Party would have expected all along, and traded on.
However, the Liberals did have some wins, from what I can find out, so here is the dot-point highlights as they are to hand:

The joint preselection process is bizarre. It entails each party pre-selecting a candidate and then each pre-selected candidate fronting a combined preselection council made up of equal numbers of Liberals and Nationals. If the combined pre-selection council comes to a draw, a preselection council constituted of the party leadership convenes, and if it still comes to a draw, then there will be a three-cornered contest.

The Queensland Liberals and Nationals today announced the formation of a new coalition. The “Coalition of Equals” as they call it in their joint press release wasn’t a good result for the Liberals and robs them of much of the momentum that they gained by winning the Redcliffe and Chatsworth by-elections.
The term “Coalition of Equals” gives the game away. If it was true, they wouldn’t have to say it, and it brings to mind George Orwell’s Animal Farm slogan – “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. Yes, and they live in rural electorates.
While the Liberals are best placed to win urban seats they agreed to contest only those seats they contested the last time, with the exception of Burleigh, which the National Party ceded to them this time. In the seats of Broadwater, Gaven, Mudgeeraba, Redlands, Springwood and Hervey Bay the parties squibbed on the issue by deciding to have “joint pre-selections”.
I’m not sure how you do that under the constitution of each of the parties, but it sounds to me like an invitation to all-out branch stacking in seats where the National Party should have no reasonable expectation of winning a popular vote. But if the National Party can find more bodies than the Liberals, they are likely to be the party contesting it for the Coalition. [See the following post for the details on joint pre-selections, they are not quite what I imagined when doing this post.]
I’ll hunt up the details later and hopefully do a post later tonight.

Mark Latham thought that Labor lost in 2001 because of the small target strategy, and in 2004 because of…well, whatever…it was it wasn’t his fault, or not much of it anyway. Research by ANU and QUT reported in The Australian this morning provides a better idea. It also partly explains why Labor seems so strong in the states and so weak federally.

When asked how to rate the US as a threat to Australian security, 21.9 per cent of ALP candidates said it was a “very likely” or “fairly likely” threat, placing it above China, Vietnam or Malaysia.
Of Coalition candidates only, 1.4 per cent rated the US as a fairly likely threat, placing it second from the bottom of threats, just above New Zealand, with a 100 per cent rating as no threat…
Australia’s fight against terrorism has gone too far or much too far according to 44.2 per cent of Labor candidates, compared with only 2.5 per cent of Coalition candidates…

As long as I can remember, Labor has always done poorly on the foreign affairs front. In fact, its one period of long federal government occurred at a time when foreign affairs was least important to Australians.
When you have anywhere up to 44 percent of your candidates thinking these sorts of things, it is not going to produce the right context for your leader to take a strong position on foreign affairs, which is why it is difficult for Labor to win an election based on them. No matter how tough Labor leaders sound, the public knows that Labor is soft.
Bill Clinton popularised the “triangulation” campaigning technique, which Latham sought to emulate, but he didn’t rely on it entirely. Above his desk was the sign – “It’s the economy, stupid!” On this count, “stupid” is what the ALP candidates were.

While 91.3 per cent of Coalition candidates nominated a stable economy as Australia’s prime concern, only 38.6 per cent of ALP candidates chose this option, with 48.2 per cent nominating Mr Latham’s aim of a less impersonal society.

So, they couldn’t get the most important issue in the campaign right, and they thought the second most important issue wasn’t important at all. What hope did they have?
As it turns out, hope is at a state level, where you don’t make foreign policy and you don’t really shape economies, and being touchy feely alone can get you elected.

Mark Latham is pitching for history, not the present, with his diary. Its style suggests that it was designed to be published right from the very beginning, and if that is the case, while Mark appears a little fevered in his media interviews, the book shouldn’t be written off as the work of a madman. Or at the very least that madman should be given some credit for guile.
It was predictable that both the Labor and Journalistic tribes should close up against Latham – he exposes leaders of both of them – but from what I have seen of the Latham Diaries they have the ring of truth about them. Now, I might be biased, because as a good Liberal I was weaned on tales of Labor corruption. And in latter days, when I have seen a lot of practices such as those outlined by Latham infecting the Liberals, I have tended to think it was a result of some in the party plagiarising the practices of Labor.
I may also be too inclined to be generous to Latham’s motives – we’re both former insiders writing about the inside, (although I’ve obviously never been embedded as deeply as Latham). In my case I do it mostly because I think it is vital that at least some of those who write about political parties are their friends, rather than those who are indifferent, or even hostile. I also think that truth matters and that most of what is written about political parties is bunk because those writing rely on partial and unreliable accounts of what happened – sometimes because they lack sources, and other times because they are hacks more interested in a publishing dollar than making a considered contribution. A low standard of accuracy in political journalism and history is ultimately corrosive of the political process because it robs all of us of a sound basis on which to make decisions.
But it doesn’t matter what Latham’s motives are – the effect of the diaries will be the same. Anyone who writes a history of Australian politics between 1994 and 2004 will need to reference them. What’s more they will carry more weight as a source than most of the newspaper column inches written about the same period because, as Latham repeatedly says, “I put my name to them.” That’s more than the anonymous backgrounders of journalists will do, and the reason why ultimately their version of the truth will not carry as far into the future as Latham’s. It’s hard to footnote rumour, and you can’t write a history based on it.
It’s not true that the victors get to write history. When you win you have less motive and time to write. Losers, on the other hand, have all the time in the world.