Why does hair feature so much in Queensland elections? First there was Pauline, the incendiary red-head from Ipswich, torching the political landscape. Now we have the blonde Doctor Flegg being stalked for style tips on the campaign trail by journalists. Controversy and couture briefly worked for Pauline. They’re not working for Flegg and Springborg.
According to polling undertaken by John Black and me, earlier this year Beattie could have lost. His “smart state” voters, middle-class Queenslanders in metropolitan areas who often vote for John Howard, were flirting with the Coalition. In fact, they went further, handing them three by-election wins. Those voters have now come home, and while it’s not exactly happy families, they’ve stopped thinking about divorce.
In March, most voters believed the state was heading in the wrong direction. That’s now dropped by 10 percent because Labor supporters have changed their minds. Most voters believe there hasn’t been enough planning. Coalition voters blame the government. Labor voters say that no-one would have planned.
None of the parties talk about it, but voters blame the population explosion in the south-east for our problems. And because no-one can stop people coming across the border, it neutralizes the water and health issues.
Another issue raised by voters, but so far invisible in this campaign is Industrial Relations. It’s a federal issue but it taints the state coalition by association. It also makes voters reach for their checks and balances. Electing Labor governments in Queensland insures against John Howard and his federal Libs.
Federal state relations also play a part in neutralising health. Some voters blame Canberra for the problems in hospitals, believing that there are enough funds at a federal level to fix everything.
For other voters, money isn’t the issue – it’s how efficiently the system is run. Research in other elections has consistently shown that voters are cynical of big-spending election campaigns. The coalition could have been more effective if, instead of promising new hospitals, it promised better administration and more doctors and nurses. Voters in our focus group had some graphic examples of waste in the hospital system. They also like the idea of preventative medicine.
Bruce Flegg was supposed to win the health debate for the opposition because a doctor should have credibility on the issue. This hasn’t worked.
So how do voters view the leaders?
In our polling Beattie’s approval has picked-up – he’s a sure pair of hands. Springborg’s has dived – he’s a “whinger”. Less predictably, according to our polling, Flegg is actually doing much better than Quinn was. That doesn’t change any votes. The contest is seen as Beattie versus Springborg, and while Pete is slippery, tricky and dishonest voters think he’s more fun than Lawrence. They’ve no faith in the ability of either to fix things, but given a choice would rather have the rogue they like hanging around in their TV sets.
With two weeks to go, it looks like Beattie is going to give the opposition yet another haircut. In Queensland, when it comes to political style – he’s the blonde that counts.
A slightly edited version of this was published in today’s Sunday Mail. The same article has been cross-posted at Currumbin2Cook our Queensland elections blog.

When I first moved to Canberra, in the early 1980s, the city was a gem. From the first spring, when the pretty blossoms on the plum tree miraculously turned into an abundance of fruit, I was hooked. What a wonderful place to bring up children (although that didn’t turn out so well), and the low key lay out, with the natural features dominant over the built environment, was relaxed and refreshing. It felt safe, and there was little indication of rich or poor suburbs. All was bland in a relatively egalitarian way. For a while we kept goats in our Ainslie backyard, there were horses not far away, and chickens could be heard crowing in the morning. Above all, Canberra seemed to be decently run, with a view to stability and middle of the road provision of services for all, not just the wealthy.
Since then the population of the ACT (which amounts to Canberra) has more than doubled. The nature of the leafy suburbs has changed, and so has the climate. Like a warning whisper, I hear Jared Diamond’s reasonable voice speaking at the ANU last year: ‘And what will you Canberrans do if you lose your winter rains?’
Well, this winter, we have had very little rain. No government I know has adequately responded to our changing climate, and perhaps it is unreasonable to expect clear thinking from politicians whose brief seems to be playing all sides off against each other. However, that does not excuse the egregious decisions being made in the ACT that go beyond head in the sand stupidity, and border on the dangerously irrational. It is as if the elected officials have all become drunk on a potion that clouds their judgement, and blots out any considerations beyond growth and profit.
As with federal politics, this madness is a combination of woodenheadedness from those in power and ineffectual opposition. A few weeks ago the Budget for the ACT was finally passed, at 5 am. Isn’t it just nuts that the gov had the numbers, but it still took them til 5 am to get it done? While the Canberra Times reported that in 2 years, the ACT has turned a surplus of $12m into a deficit of $291m, this claim was later reversed, and apparently the ACT gov has a surplus. Surprising to me that such serious figures aren’t fully and transparently known well ahead of budget week.
Yet lots of things are being cut back, in a time when real estate prices and therefore land tax and stamp duty have steadily gone up. You have to wonder ‘whose got the money?’ Land tax on a suburban house being rented can be more than $3000 per year, contributing to high rents and squeezing low income earners. It is rumoured that people now sleep rough on Mt Ainslie.
While good money is being spent on luring people to move to Canberra, based on its attractive environment, even more money is being spent reducing it to a bland suburb of Sydney. That’s why I have started thinking of them as the White Coat Brigade, taken by a demented approach to pririty setting. The mentality seems to be Develop- Destroy- Deny, oblivious that they are killing the very goose that laid the golden egg. For many Canberrans, that golden egg was a balanced existence, relatively free from the intensities that accompany big city pleasures. Thank heavens! is often heard when people return from a trip to the Big Smoke up the road, so glad to get back to the trees!
But, like the climate, all that pleasantness is changing. More often now, if I have to go to one of the enhanced and enlarged town centres, I think of how little it attracts me. For a visitor, there would be nothing to draw you back to Woden Plaza, for example. The chance was missed to create a real piazza. Instead, the water feature and trees came out and more cement went in.
Just a few examples of recent crazy decisions:
For the sake of about $180,000 per year (the cost of one bureaucrat committed to maintaining a do-nothing status quo) the ACT gov is shutting down the food service at Ainslie Village. This facility provides housing and services long and short term for people unlikely to find housing elsewhere. Having visited a few times over the years when my junkie son had stints there (he’s not there now) I always thought it a haven, nestled under the mountain, with little ponds and ducks, and good landscaping. The modest rooms are functional, services are nearby for those who need them, and it seems like a place where a person could get back on their feet, or live protected. The food service allowed tennants to have deductions from their dole or disability money in exchange for a cooked meal each evening. From the state of the group kitchens and the tenants, clearly many are completely incapable of the level of organisation necessary to shop, prepare, plan, and clean up for a meal. This lack of mercy for the least fortunate or most troubled in society is not something we can be proud of in the capital of our first world nation.
Instead, the ACT gov is apparently committing $2.5 m over 3 years so that a Melbourne football team can play a game or so here each year. Is that possible? Now, I may be missing the sport gene, but is there really community support for this balance of expenditures?
And it’s not just the pollies that are crazy; the bureaucrats are out of whack too. It seems 2 children known to the ACT authorities (their job is to protect them, you see, they get paid for that) have died in the past 2 years. While I’ve never had contact with child protection bureaucrats, I have had some encounters with those who are supposed to be helping druggies. My best advice, as with many federal bureaucrats, is ‘send them home’. Just let them go, and see if anyone misses them. Sadly, the ACT is not unique. Similar horrific failures of duty of care in relation to children at risk have recently been reported in WA and Victoria. With our great wealth, surely we can do better. This lack of accountability is indicative of a wider implosion of governance.
Only services that provice demonstrable benefits should be retained, as distinct from people who are hired to sit at desks and fill out reports. But the ACT gov doesn’t seem to see value in real services, so they are also shutting down the needle exchange and drug referral service in Civic. Someone said it is being moved to Woden, away from the junkies. So there will undoubtedly be lots more syringes left lying around, and lots more cases of HIV and Hep C. Again, is this the style we expect from our proud capital?
Then there are the grandiose (perhaps even megalomanic) plans to redevelop Civic. There is a sweet little spot called City Hill, beautifully covered in historic trees, but almost inaccessible for use because it is surrounded by a busy traffic circle. A simple minded person (such as myself) might think the solution would be to eliminate some of the traffic, calm it or redirect it, and perhaps provide a pedestrian tunnel or bridge to make it more usable. Certainly that busy traffic circle is both an eyesore and an impediment to a pleasing city centre. Instead, there are large scale and extremely expensive plans afoot to divert the traffic with more roads, and create shops, and more shops, flanked by token pedestrian walkways. An interested developer has proclaimed that Canberra is boring, and believes more commercial development would solve that.
There has been little attempt to create dialogue about what kind of city state we want, or even whether we should be encouraging population growth. In the same week that the success of the recruitment to Canberra campaign was noted, the CT published aerial photos of some traffic jams in Canberra. Together with the scars on the landscape, my golly, you could blink and think you were in Sydney’s hinterlands.
Then there are the school closures, and perhaps some rationalisation has to occur to match changing demographics. But leaving the inner north with no year 11 and 12 facilities doesn’t make sense, as transport to other areas is awkward.
Integrated policy would consider these aspects. In the absence of serious long-term planning for climate change, the new Gungahlin Drive Extension will serve some people, for a while. That much contested but also much desired road (by those in Gungahlin) is now grinding away at great swathes of the ACT’s remaining areas of native bush. Modest 2 or 4 lane roads framed by gum trees were once one of the delights of the capital, but now they are giving way to more imposing highways. Together with the continued drying out of the landscape, with more and more trees marked in pink for cutting down, the allure of our bush capital is giving way to the ordinary obsessions of develpment mentality elsewhere.
Twice Pulitzer Prize winning Barbara Tuchman wrote The March of Folly, and I am reading it now. Unfortunately, her history of folly and woodenheadedness, or actions contrary to self interest, stops with Vietnam. Had she not died in 1989, she would no doubt be writing about Iraq and Israel and Al Quaeda as the height of folly. Maybe the ACT gov aspires to be remembered for its folly, now that would make sense.

A slightly edited version of this article appeared in today’s Sunday Mail.
Before this election campaign started Queensland voters were interested in changing government. But that was before the Liberals changed leaders and State Governor Quentin Bryce rang the opening bell. Now I’m not sure that is still the case.
On Team Beattie’s side of the mat, things started predictably. Peter “Sorry State” Beattie has been doing all the work – creating the crises which he then promises to solve with a headlock here (water grids all-over the state) and an atomic drop there ($1 B to fix his hospital crisis). No small moves in his repertoire.
Voters are awake to the way this works, which is why he has Anna “White Lady” Bligh standing by. She’ll see less on-field action than a cheerleader with the Brisbane Broncos (recently Beattie didn’t even trust her to run a cabinet meeting while he was away). But she resonates well with women 20 to 40 – a key demographic that Beattie has to keep on side.
There’s only one thing that voters trust Beattie to do – say he’s sorry – but they can’t help liking him nevertheless.
In the other corner Liberal Leader Bob Quinn was neither liked nor respected – a “zombie…dead man walking”. That’s why his tag-team dumped him just before this gig and replaced him with Bruce “Mr Deeds” Flegg. Whether opposing Flegg’s fresh naivety to Beattie’s polished spin will lead to Flegg “coming to town” only the voters will decide.
It certainly has caused some problems with the “Country Cousin” – Laurence Springborg – a man who voters are coming to accept. Indeed, more Liberals preferred him as leader than they did Quinn. Springborg wants to be leader whatever the numbers, but that’s not how democracy works. Denying this made the Coalition the issue, stirring doubts about their fitness.
The winner of this election will be the side that can portray themselves as the “least worst” alternative. The Coalition has to prove to voters that Beattie is so bad, that there is no risk in trying someone else. They have to walk around the ring and really get the crowd whipped up. Beattie’s got to keep asking for forgiveness.
It will also be the side that campaigns best in the marginal seats. For many of the voters who have switched-off Beattie, the best result would be a Liberal premier and their local Labor member. That’s a problem for the Coalition, because local members decide premiers not voters.
Health and water are the two stand-out issues, but with differences. Health is a state-wide problem, while water is confined to specific areas like the south-east. Labor is seen as more likely to manage water better than the Coalition.
The other strategic consideration is the large number of independents in the state. There are 6 (or 7, depending how you count Cate Molloy in Noosa). If Beattie loses 16 or more seats then one or more of those Independents will become the king-maker. This gives Beattie another argument against the Coalition – give me a majority and you know what you’ll get. Vote for them and who knows what happens – will those Independents let them build a dam anywhere?
It’s too early to tap the mat yet, but the weight of money would have to be on Team Beattie.

Bruce Flegg’s “gaffe” about who would lead a Coalition government is not accidental – believe it or not it appears to be part of the coalition’s strategy. What wasn’t part of the coalition’s strategy was that “Would-be Caesar”, Michael Caltabiano, would use the opportunity it presented to undermine his newly elected leader to add civil war on top of the official electoral war in which the coalition is engaged.
The commonsense, and actual, position on leadership is that, in the now inconceivable case, that the Opposition parties were to win government, whichever party had the largest number of MPs would be the Premier. Bruce Flegg had no problems saying that to Brisbane’s Sunday Mail last weekend in an article entitled “I’m ready to lead state, says Flegg”. The reason he backed away from that on Monday appears to be that the National Party went ballistic (analogously to the way that, say, Hezbollah might go ballistic).
They did this for two possible reasons. The first is that they genuinely appear to think that that even if the Liberal Party had more members of parliament than them that they should still run the coalition – shades of the now long-interred gerrymander. The second is that they plan to run a presidential campaign based around Springborg, and this wouldn’t work if they admitted he might not be the leader in the event of a win.
So Flegg unwisely tried to find a form of words that would keep them happy. It didn’t keep anyone else happy and now Michael Caltabiano has traded on this dissatisfaction to create a story in this morning’s Courier Mail which has the headline “Revolt over who’s the boss.”
Caltabiano is presumably audaciously aiming at Flegg’s job, but in a sign of the almost unanimous incompetence of the coalition frontline, his intervention could well cost him his seat. Caltabiano won Chatsworth with a 17 percent swing, generated in part by low voter turnout, to give him a meagre 2.5 percent margin, which could easily vanish without the special circumstances surrounding a byelection. One of the reasons that Flegg challenged Quinn was the fear that under Quinn the Liberals were heading for a train wreck that would see them lose Chatsworth as well as Redcliffe and possibly Currumbin.
Caltabiano supported the challenge, but according to one of his financial backers, David Kemp, didn’t want to be seen to be involved, so wasn’t actually in the party-room at the time the vote was taken. There’s no squeamishness about visibility this morning.
All of which makes it even easier for Beattie to continue his line of attack that the coalition is a “rabble” and can’t even work out who will be leader after the election as he now has three possible names to choose from.
Many think that Peter Beattie is probably the worst premier the state has ever had. That’s why, at a subliminal and psychological level Beattie’s pitch can be summed up as “I might be bad, but it could be worse…” Who would have thought that the Coalition would be improvising from that script as well this early in the campaign?

John Howard didn’t believe in the immigration bill that he’s just withdrawn from the Senate. That’s a possible interpretation of his behaviour. Back in June I predicted that he was preparing to step back from the legislation. In the end, he pushed it far enough to convince everyone, including the Indonesians, that he was serious, but not that far that he was embarrassed by its failure to pass into legislation.
Now everyone is happy. The rednecks know he is on their side and will still vote for him. Howard’s conscience is clear. And Indonesia won’t complain too much, or leave the gate open for more refugees. Wilson Tuckey and Don Randall provided the street theatre to make it all seem compelling.

The Queensland election campaign is on, and it’s not much of a contest.
Peter Beattie has a plan for the future which involves providing enough water by 2011 to meet the needs of south-east Queensland in 2006. At the same time he has a plan for population growth which will see another million people in the area by 2020, but no plan to produce any more water. This at a time when his own government says that greenhouse warming means we will have 70 percent less rainfall in 40 year’s time. Do the maths (which Peter says will be easier for current school age Queenslanders than it was for him because their education is so much better under his government) and this spells big trouble. Imagine how much better our government would be if they’d been educated by this current government rather than running it.
So why should you vote Labor?
Well, Peter says that the opposition is even worse than he is – they can’t even agree on a leader.
He might be right.
Bruce Flegg was interviewed on Brisbane radio this evening and here is an extract:

Cary:	Okay, so on the basis of that answer, if the Libs do get more members than the Nats, Lawrence would still be the Premier?
Flegg:	On the basis of that answer, you should be aware I’m not going to speculate on not just that outcome but there are a range of other possible outcomes…
Cary:	But Bruce, we’re going into an election campaign, you just got to be totally honest with the electorate. It’s not a hard question – would you be Premier or would Lawrence?
Flegg:	Greg, we are being honest with the electorate.
Cary:	No, you’re not being.
Flegg:	And we’ve made it very clear that Lawrence Springborg is the alternative Premier.
Cary:	Well, that’s the answer to the question then, isn’t it?
Flegg:	Lawrence Springborg is our alternative premier.
Cary:	Okay, so if the Libs get more seats than the Nats, Lawrence Springborg is the alternative premier, he’d be the premier?
Flegg	Greg, we’re going around in circles here. I’m…
Cary	No, we’re not, you’re taking us there.

The electorate is in a mood to punish Peter Beattie. The opposition needs to fan this mood and they will win a huge “boil-over” election result. They won’t succeed if they don’t keep their message focused on the important issues and the government’s lack of performance. Beattie intends to divert them by putting pressure on the fault lines in the coalition.
It looks from the above exchange as though he has found the fault line and he’s about to build Krakatoa out of a mole hill. Whose face will it blow-up in?

Ultimately it was Queensland’s drought that did for ex-Queensland Liberal Leader, Bob Quinn, using the agency of a mythical “gender-bending” fish. If it wasn’t for the drought, Toowoomba would most likely not have been voting on whether to drink recycled sewage as a solution to its water problem. And if it wasn’t for the vote, Nationals leader Lawrence Springborg wouldn’t have given a press conference in which he claimed:

There’s quite a significant amount of research as well, I mean with regards to hormones and the effect that’s having on the feminisation of fish. There’s a whole range of information that’s available in various journals, that’s where the unanswered questions are, because what it does it actually changes the basic metabolism of species.

And Bob Quinn wouldn’t have been plainly standing behind him at the time.
It was Quinn’s failure to distance himself, intellectually rather than physically, from this outrageous claim that apparently spontaneously led to party rank and file, and parliamentarians, deciding that enough was enough.
Bob Quinn claimed yesterday that he had been ambushed. He wasn’t the only one. Even insiders close to Flegg were shocked to find that yesterday’s party meeting would see a spill. In the event Quinn decided to resign and nominations were called. Flegg was the only nomination (perhaps unsurprisingly as the other possible contender, Caltabiano, wasn’t even at the meeting, making this almost the political equivalent of a double eviction, certainly a double ambush).
Will Quinn’s demotion change the fortunes of the Coalition at this election? I doubt it. Changing state Liberal leaders in New South Wales and Victoria has not resulted in any sustained surge in the polls. Last time this happened in Queensland, when Joan Sheldon rolled Denver Beanland, there was also no improvement at the next election.
Quinn was travelling very badly, but the Coalition campaign is going to rely on Springborg, more than the Liberal leader. Flegg may be a better performer, and we have yet to see whether that is true, but in the short time between now and the next election he will have trouble leveraging that into political advantage. However, the change in leader will make it easier for the Liberals to raise money.
Still, the challenge for the Liberals will not be so much to keep their own leadership team on the rails, but to get Springborg to use the same standard gauge as the rest of the country. Concerns about gender-bending fish are going to make voters wonder whether Peter Beattie might really be “as good as it gets”!
It might win you votes in Toowoomba, where most of the seats are safe, but it isn’t likely to bend too many votes your way in the more sophisticated suburbs of the south-east where the election will be lost and won.