Given that property developers and Queensland politics are so entwined I’ve been fascinated by the way the state government has set the CMC onto certain Gold Coast City Councillors. They may well be corrupt, but if they are, they wouldn’t be on their pat malone, and there could be even bigger skeletons on all sides of politics.
Good on them, for putting the pressure on, but is it too much to hope that they won’t stop with the Gold Coast?
The problem with running a political party in Queensland is that there is only one really big business, apart from mining and agriculture, and that is property development. You can’t fund a campaign without taking money from developers, and that shows in the Annual Funding returns of both the Liberal and Labor Parties.
You can check the donations to all parties at http://fadar.aec.gov.au/. What it shows is that for donations over $50,000 for both the Labor and Liberal Parties (the Nationals didn’t receive any donations over $50,000), property developers predominate. In particular, some crowd called Collingwood Developments has taken a substantial position in both – $75,000 to Labor and $206,231 to the Libs. I have no idea why George Cheihk, who appears to be the principal, is so generous. Nor why he also appears to have donated to the Libs via another entity called the Queensland Group, which put in a further $50,000, but with that sort of largesse he has a large stake in a little party like the Queensland Libs!
The Liberals also took $57,833 from Livesay Road Developments, as well as an entity called Forward Brisbane Leadership, presumably related to Lord Mayor Campbell Newman, and undoubtedly drawing on property developers.
There are other common elements between the Libs and Labor apart from Collingwood Park Developments. Multiplex for one, which gave $70,000 to Labor and only $25,000 to the Liberals. Labor took money from The Brisbane Future’s Committee, which is presumably associated with their council campaign and therefore similar in its sources of funding to Forward Brisbane Leadership. They also took money from Crosby Road Developments, Hatia Property Developments and Yu Feng – all apparently in the property industry.
Labor Resources was their biggest donor at $4,935,000. This is the investment arm of the party which also has property interests.
I guess the GCC Councillors being investigated are a little busy at the moment, but if I were them, I’d be trying to spread the net a little more broadly. Geoff Davies finishes up his inquiry into Bundaberg Hospital later this month. He could probably fit in another inquiry later this year.

One of the most frequent left critiques of John Howard is that he has created a climate of fear in Australia. What makes this observation interesting is that when we survey vast numbers of people we find that those who vote for Howard are most likely to be optimists, with the pessimists congregated around Beazley, and more to the point of this post, Bob Brown.
The fact is that political rhetoric has always operated on the basis of “If you vote for that person something very bad will happen to you, so vote for me.” It’s actually a form of the “precautionary principle” – voting is a risk minimisation rather than outcome optimising process (how’s that for jargon).
So, it’s not surprising that the environmental lobby would use fear as a political marketing ploy itself, and that it would resonate strongly, because their constituency appears to be more sensitive to risk in the first place.
What made me think of this was interviews this morning on Radio National’s Breakfast program with Ian Lowe, who was spruiking his latest book; and David West who was spruiking an organisation called “Power to Change” which is planning a doorknocking campaign to warn people in Melbourne and Sydney of the dangers of global warming.
Over at Troppo Armadillo, Nicholas Gruen implies he believes the anthropogenic warming hypothesis advocates rather than the skeptics because the adocates tend to be “reputable”, “calm”, “lucid” and “convincing”. (He does give Paul Erhlich a clip on the way through, so I might have got this wrong.)
On the evidence from this morning I’m not sure how you could reach that conclusion, and in fact my recent interest in greenhouse has been sparked by hearing a few “facts” and saying, “Hang-on, that doesn’t compute”.
Lowe’s book is mostly a prescription for hair shirts mandated under what I call the “dictatorship of the scientariat” – a collectivist variation of Plato’s Philosopher King. He certainly doesn’t like economists.
His book is slight on evidence, with not a single footnote, but big on claims of impending doom, as was his interview this morning. And lacking price signals, his solutions are doomed to failure, not that any of them look significant enough to make more than a token reduction in greenhouse gases anyway. A hint of the scientific integrity of his approach can be gleaned from his statement that science predicted in the 50s that petrol would get expensive in the 70s, so we shouldn’t discount scientific predictions. So what scientists made these predictions? Psychologists, political scientists, economists? The reason petrol went up in the 70s was because the producers formed an cartel and hiked the price – not something the physical sciences could have predicted!
West has a much more direct approach. His ecological JWs when they knock on your door in Bondi will point somewhere 90 metres up the escarpment and say that if you don’t repent and sell the four-wheel drive, that is where the sea is going to be. In Maroubra, it will apparently be the line of shops that will be the new sea shore.
When I look at the prescriptions for warding off the end of the world, and the methods of selling them, I can’t help but be struck further by the parallel with John Howard. When Howard tells you that if you vote Labor interest rates will eat your babies, he’s not really all that interested in interest rates. What he’s really interested in is getting re-elected so he can introduce a whole range of issues, none of which have much to do with interest rates, one way or the other.
And when Ian Lowe, or David West, tell you global warming is going to eat your future, it frequently seems that it’s a way of trying to produce a society that’s a lot more like Cuba than it is at the moment. (Lowe trotted out a study this morning that allegedly proved that societies with lower income differentials were less polluting, the corollary being that we’d be better off without so many rich people.)
The pity about all of this is that there are pollution problems worth worrying about, and there are solutions to many of them that will work, they just don’t happen to be the ones that the AGW advocates are promoting. And we’ll probably never get to hear about them until a whale pops out of Sydney Harbour or Port Phillip Bay and swallows the Jonahs. There could be a benefit from increasing sea levels afterall.

With Councillor Tim Nicholls winning Liberal Party preselection by two votes for the state seat of Clayfield I now have a 66.66% success rate on my prediction that Santoro, Caltabiano and Nicholls would all attempt to enter state politics at the next election. Actually it’s really 100% because I wasn’t putting any money on the Santoro leg of the trifecta.
This preselection is not a good result for the Queensland Liberals as it further institutionalises factionalism in the tiny parliamentary party and puts another non-descript non-performer into a winnable seat when a more colourful, and ept, alternative was on offer.
Nicholls beat Sally Hannah for the preselection, and Hannah was the Liberals’ candidate for Clayfield at the last election. She did creditably, compared to the previous Liberal candidate, who was Santoro. He won 42.2% of the primary vote, and she won 45.08%. In two-party preferred terms it was 48% for Santoro versus 48.83% for Hannah. So, the decision doesn’t reward performance, and it doesn’t reward loyalty.
It also shows up some of the shifting factional alliances in the Liberal Party. While Hannah was regarded at the last election as being of the Santoro faction, in this preselection she was apparently supported by the Carroll faction, or at least by the Brandis part of it. She also received letters of support from Petrie MP Theresa Gambaro, and newly elected Redcliffe MP Terry Rogers.
The closeness of the vote indicates that Santoro had to rely on the State Executive vote to win a preselection for his preferred candidate in the area of Brisbane that he controls the most strongly. Not only that, but the win was only achieved by excluding the Federal Parliamentary Leader’s representative and Lord Mayor Campbell Newman from the preselection. (I’m not sure how they managed to do this as both on my reckoning should have been eligible to vote.)
In a way it’s not surprising that Newman was excluded – it’s the second snub to him in almost as many weeks. When it came to replacing Caltabiano in Carindale Ward the boys put Adrian Schrinner in, rather than Newman’s candidate. As Schrinner had been the Liberal candidate in the ward of East Brisbane at the last election, which he nearly won, it was a double loss for Newman. If he wants to run Brisbane in his own right, he is going to need to win East Brisbane next election.