The “Coalition deal” accounced yesterday whereby Liberal Parliamentary Leader Bruce Flegg undertakes not to lead the Coalition, even if his party has more seats than the National Party, destroys the Coalition’s chances of winning the next state election.
At a time when Beattie government mismanagement is obvious and everywhere, the Liberal Party is asking Queenslanders to trust them to stand-up for Queensland when they can’t even stand-up for themselves. And the Coalition won’t win without a strong showing by the Liberal Party.
This arrangement means that it doesn’t really matter who Liberal voters vote for, they end up voting for a National Party dominated coalition. It takes away the main reason for voting for a party in the first place, and effectively disenfranchises Liberals. As a result many will probably vote for Beattie – he couldn’t be any worse – or for a minor party – because none of the major parties deserve a vote.
The question of leadership was a problem in the last election, but only because Flegg could not bring himself to spell out the commonsense, democratic position as stated in the Coalition agreement – that the leader of the more successful party would lead the Coalition. Instead he opted for a form of words very much like the one he is using now. He did this under National Party pressure.
The other two significant points of the arrangement look like a cave-in as well, particularly as they appear to be pretty much what National Leader Jeff Seeney demanded late last year in a speech to a Queensland Parliamentary Press Gallery sponsored luncheon.
The Parliamentary Leader is to be elected by the joint party room, and the parties are to contest equal numbers of seats at the next eletion. If Flegg is not leader after the next election, or welches on his undertaking, the first provision gives the Nats a last gasp opportunity to retain power by convincing some rogue Liberals to cross the floor to them. In a secret ballot with ministerial positions on offer, this is a possibility which of course works in both directions.
The principle in contesting seats ought to be that each party runs in the seats where it is most likely to win. As in the last election this might mean that one party runs in more seats than the other. This is increasingly likely to be the case as demographic change means that the National Party’s constituency is constantly decreasing. The 50,000 Australians moving to Queensland each year are mostly used to voting Liberal or Labor.
The National Party knows their base is diminishing and it has been the driving factor behind most of the Coalition turmoil. During the last term of Parliament, then Nat Leader Lawrence Springborg devoted a lot of time to telling Queenslanders that the Coalition arrangement couldn’t work and that they needed a new amalgamated party, under his leadership of course. This was one of the most potent messages available to Peter Beattie when the election came around – “Don’t vote for these guys, even they say they’re stuffed.”
As well as disenfranchising voters, Flegg has also disenfranchised his own party organisation. The Liberal Party deal is that the organisation doesn’t get to tell the parliamentarians how to vote, but they do get to decide on any Coalition, or like, agreements. Before Flegg, no parliamentary leader has thought to pre-empt and effectively blackmail the organisation by negotiating an agreement directly with the other parliamentary leader which is then presented as a fait accompli.
If the party accepts this agreement, then what is the point in joining an organisation which has virtually zero power? If it knocks it back, then Flegg’s position is untenable.
Sean Leahy’s Cartoon in today’s Courier Mail shows Bruce Flegg on television saying “…if the Libs win more seats than the Nats next election I won’t be premier.” “He got that bit right…” responds Norm who is sitting on the couch watching the screen. Indeed.

Kevin Rudd’s charm offensive is designed to fill-out the detail of Kevin before John Howard does it for him. 90 second ads are part of this. Because they are long they say to us that they are deep, not shallow. This isn’t a glib pitch for Rudd, this is information. And from these ads we know that education is important to Rudd, which makes it odd that his attendance at Marist Brother’s Ashgrove has been mostly omitted from the accounts so far.
We know that Rudd went to Eumundi State School, and that he was dux of Nambour High. But hardly a mention of Marist Brother’s. This rankles and puzzles some old boys who’ve been probing my political knowledge. As a result, I’ve done some googling, and Rudd does admit to attending the school, but, as he tells Julia Baird:
“It was tough, harsh, unforgiving, institutional Catholicism of the old school, I didn’t like it.”
According to a well-placed source his older brother Greg puts it another way “He was too much of a mummy’s boy to make it at Ashgrove”.
Is this all there is? He wouldn’t be the only boy of his era with a similar view of Catholic education. It could be a handy starting point to publicly start a conversation exploring the area of the growth of private education, particularly as many of the voters that Rudd needs to woo send their children to private schools because they just don’t trust state school education.
It also resonates discordantly with Rudd’s professed Christianity. He and Tony Abbott are currently engaged in a duel for the Christian vote (such as it might be), but Rudd’s attachment to denominational Christianity appears slight. He attends an Anglican church in Brisbane, but has apparently never converted from his Roman Catholicism, even though he doesn’t appear to hold the Roman Church in particularly high regard. As he explains to Baird:
“Well I think in order to discover, in my case I should say, to discover an adult view of faith it was necessary to step out for a while from the tradition that you’d grown up in, in order to reflect on it and to reflect what actually lay underneath it.”
But Anglicanism and Catholicism are two very different traditions with some quite disparate theologies. It’s one thing for the Prime Minister to move from Methodism to Anglicanism – Methodism was a break-away from Anglicanism, and the Prime Minister is mute on his religious beliefs – another for a crusader like Rudd.
One of the things that voters like about Howard is that he is a known commodity. If Rudd is to match him, we’re going to need to know a lot more about him. Dangling incongruencies are a risk to this. Rudd needs to lay a lot more of his cards out on the table.

Of the numerous friendships Sir James Killen had during his long political career, the most interesting was that with the colleague he admired above all others, Sir Robert Gordon Menzies.
I have written elsewhere that my late friend lamented the almost total absence of any contact with Malcolm Fraser in his retirement. But he rejoiced in the fact that, during Sir Robert Menzies latter years, Jim was in many ways closer to him than any of Menzies former colleagues, with the possible exception of the same Malcolm Fraser.
It was not always thus. Jim served under the leadership of Menzies for the first 11 years of his parliamentary career. He did not receive any promotion to ministerial or other office in that time.
Though he had more contact with Prime Minister Menzies than many of his colleagues, it cannot be said they were close.
Indeed, Jim Killen MP was something of an irritant to Menzies, albeit a “tolerated” one.
It impressed Menzies that Jim read extensively, and, like the great man himself, could speak in Parliament without notes. Jim would often seek him out to talk over a major speech Menzies had given, or to enquire about a response he gave in question time – especially to questions from the more formidable Labor MPs such as Arthur Calwell, Eddie Ward, Leslie Haylen and Gough Whitlam.
But Jim incurred the concern, if not the wrath, of the PM because of his close friendship with rebel MP’s such as Billy Wentworth and Sir Wilfred Kent Hughes.
He also campaigned extensively throughout Great Britain against Britain’s entry into the European Common Market and he was a supporter of the Ian Smith regime in Zimbabwe. These were causes that created some discomfort in the Liberal Party in Canberra. And while Menzies allowed him to speak in a major debate on the Common Market, it did not improve his prospects of promotion.
But after Menzies retired in 1966, to be succeeded by Harold Holt, who Killen was reasonably close to, their friendship blossomed.
Even though it rated only a passing mention in Jim’s memoirs, Inside Canberra, I know from my own extensive conversations with him over the last 20 years that he treasured the latter day friendship he developed with Menzies.
Virtually every time he went to Melbourne he would call on Menzies either at his city office, or after Menzies’ health began to fail, at his Malvern residence.
Even after Menzies died in 1978 he kept in regular contact with Dame Pattie Menzies, and her daughter, Heather.
On one visit, Menzies enquired: “What brings you to Melbourne, Killen? A horse race I presume.” He was spot on as usual.
Jim was a friend of the finest jockey I have ever seen – and have entrusted my bets on – Roy Higgins. The day after he saw Menzies he told Higgins he had visited the former PM. Higgins said he had always wanted to meet Sir Robert.
Jim Killen duly arranged it. Menzies – who had absolutely no interest in horse racing, much to the chagrin of Killen and Holt who were avid racegoers – and Roy Higgins got on famously.
When Killen next visited Menzies, he was staggered to be told that he was gaining immense enjoyment out following the races- or at least the Roy Higgins rides, many of which were successful ones given that Higgins was the dominant jockey in Australia at the time.
The experience gave Jim immense pleasure – given that Harold Holt had told him that he tried for years to get Menzies to attend the Melbourne Cup without success!
My one regret is that ill health in recent years prevented Jim from completing a project that would have attracted immense interest from historians, politicians and students of politics.
Jim was not only an industrious letter and note writer. He assiduously kept virtually every letter and note of significance he sent or received over the last 50 years.
His excellent memory – and it was excellent to the end – together with his most extensive collection of letters and notes were to form the basis of a book on the politicians of note he had known…Menzies, Holt, Gorton, McMahon, Fadden, McEwen, Barwick, Whitlam, Daly, Eddie Ward, among them. And he was a friend of George Herbert Walker Bush, Lord George Brown, the controversial UK Deputy Prime Minister, and the Duke of Edinburgh, among others.
He had planned to write extensively about each of them and more. But his recollections of his friendship with Menzies in the latter’s retirement alone would have been a significant addition to the history of Australian politics.
It was a friendship that was a long time developing – but the one he treasured above all.

With the appointment of Sir Laurence Street to look into the DPP’s decision not to prosecute we’ll get some genuinely knowledgeable insights into this matter. Hopefully his decision will be accepted, even if he does find that a trial should not proceed.
In the meantime, I think a lot of the anger has been misdirected, and that to some extent we’ve witnessed a type of reverse racism where the onus of argumentative proof is up-ended because a member of a persecuted minority is the victim. Would this furore have occurred if Mulrunji had been white? I don’t think so. Could this have happened to a white person? Absolutely. The problem of police bastardisation is much broader than race.
Various participants have combined to make the issue more fragrant than it needed to be. Judge Shanahan, who retired because of a “conflict of interest”, should have been able to foresee his problem. DPP Clare was unwise to state that Mulrunji had died because of an accident. (She should have merely said that a properly instructed jury was not likely to find beyond reasonable doubt that he died because he was assaulted). In the latest misfortune to hit the inquiry online posters are pointing out that Clare’s maiden name appears to have been “Hurley”. It won’t matter if there is no relationship, it will become an urban myth.
From what I’ve seen, Clare was probably correct in her assessment. The evidence of the only eye witness who says Mulrunji was assaulted is unreliable, the medical evidence doesn’t support assault, and the police investigators acted improperly and miscarried the investigation.
I’m not arguing that no-one should be punished. The way the police, the police force and the police minister have handled this matter has been appalling. The government’s probably quite happy for Leanne Claire to take the stick and divert attention from the fact that despite employment matters requiring a much lower hurdle of proof to be met than murder or manslaughter charges, Hurley, and the incompetents who manage and investigated him, continue in their jobs. The coroner’s finding might not stand up “beyond reasonable doubt”, but it would be a good starting point for “on the balance of probabilities”.
They’d also be happy that no-one is asking how it is that so long after the Deaths in Custody Royal Commission the police are still locking up Aborigines for drunk and disorderly behaviour when that was pinpointed as one of the reasons there were so many aboriginal deaths in custody. The problem of deaths in custody is not that Aborigines die at greater rates than other ethnicities when in custody, but that larger numbers of them are arrested in the first place, so they die in absolutely greater numbers.
This issue is much broader than Mulrunji and if it is going to do any good for anyone, it needs to be used as a catalyst to get change in the way that the police do their job, rather than another opportunity for civil libertarians, aboriginal activists and others to merely vent. Senior officers ought to be sacked and the police minister should also be called to account. Strategically it offers an opportunity to force real change in the police force. It’s been almost seventeen years since the Fitzgerald Commission of Inquiry. Things have improved, but not nearly enough. It’s time for some more house-keeping.