It’s old news (yesterday’s) but I should note that the New South Wales Liberal Party yesterday suspended a former President for giving an interview to the media. Michael Osborne was president for three years between 1997 and 2000, but he’s been stripped of all rights for two years. His crime was to express “concern over the power of the Right on ABC television last year”.
It’s reported as factional warfare, although Michael Darby who is from the right was also suspended for two years. I met Darby twenty-something years ago and wasn’t surprised to read that he apparently engaged some members of the executive “in a shouting match”. I guess if you had to sacrifice one of your own to make it look like you were impartial, then he’d be a good one to hit with friendly fire.
All of which raises the issue as to whether the Liberal right decided on some co-ordinated action against dissidents at their annual gathering at the Liberal Party convention this year.
The Prime Minister is reported to be livid about the New South Wales shennanigans. This is interesting, because in Queensland the charge against me was apparently led by Ian MacFarlane, who is on the state executive and state council as the PM’s representative. Hard to see Howard having one standard for New South Wales and another for the rest of the country.

Spot the odd man ought – Dean Mighel, Joe McDonald, Graham Young.
Not too difficult. The first two are union leaders who have been sprung threatening and standing-over employers, the second is Chief Editor and founder of innovative online journal On Line Opinion which last year was Australia’s most popular politics site.
So where’s the twist? Well, apparently I do have something in common with Mighel and McDonald. Their party, the Australian Labor Party, thinks their behaviour warrants expelling them. My party, the Queensland Liberal Party, thinks that my behaviour warrants expelling me as well.
I learnt this afternoon that I have been referred to the Disciplinary Committee of the Queensland Liberal Party for remarks that I made in the article State of Disarray written by Bulletin Magazine journalist Chris Hammer.
This action demonstrates just why the Queensland Liberal Party is a bigger threat to John Howard’s chances at this election than even Kevin Rudd.
At a time when two of the Queensland Libs’ federal parliamentarians appear likely to face charges for misappropriation of their electoral expenses; when the government is successfully demonstrating Labor incompetence and disunity by forcing them to serially sack union chiefs; and when Howard’s move on Aboriginal welfare gives him a chance of seizing back control of the values debate; pursuing me is a strategic and tactical diversion from their biggest opportunities and threats.
And to what end? Analysis and commentary is how I make my living. I’m a Liberal Party member, but apart from a branch Christmas Party late last year I haven’t been to an official party meeting in years. I hold no office in the party, and the information that I am privy to is information that any other competent well-connected journalist could get. Expelling me from the party will make no difference to my analysis, just give it a sharper point. But it will send a damaging message about the Liberal Party’s attitude to free speech and democracy and its capacity for self-awareness and analysis.
It will also remind people of the original article and give its analysis greater force, as well as proving that disgraced former minister Santo Santoro is still largely in control.
I have not breached the party’s rules, nor have I brought it into disrepute, which is the major grounds that the party has available to it for an expulsion. Some of the people who have brought it into disrepute are in the article. Their names would sit much more comfortably next to Mighel’s and McDonald’s than mine.

Imagine that the rampant paedophilia shown to exist in Aboriginal Communities had been found in, say, a set of church run private schools, what would the outcome be? Would we be talking about how to deal gently with the church organisation respecting its traditional ways and property rights? Would we sit on the report for 6 weeks and then want to take another 8 weeks to think about it?
I don’t think so. If my memory is correct, the last time there were incidences of paedophilia in a church school we demanded that the Governor-General be sacked because he hadn’t acted promptly enough when he was head of that church. And Toowomba Prep was a Sunday school picnic compared to what has been revealed in Aboriginal communities.
Yet the gently gently approach is just what a number of commentators, including many in the blogosphere are suggesting. That coupled with criticism of the Prime Minister for applying the “wedge” and running the issue for electoral gain. Take a look at this post by Ken Parish on Club Troppo entitled “Australia’s Day of Shame” for an example, or this “Tampa, 2007 Edition” from Larvatus Prodeo.
No doubt, if the Prime Minister had just sat around while the NT government made up its mind to do nothing about a problem that it had pretended didn’t exist in the first place, the same suspects would be demanding that the Prime Minister be sacked. He’d be described as a racist, and condemned for acting politically and playing Swannee River on the dog whistle.
Instead, the Prime Minister acts, and now he is criticised for being political, racist and playing Dixie on the dog whistle. (Complaining about the “wedge” in these situations appears to be as mandatory for the mindlessly partisan as blaming the referee when your footy team has lost).
I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t look critically at the solutions being proposed, but that criticising the motives of the Prime Minister is not infrequently a sign of bad faith. This issue won’t work to Kevin Rudd’s advantage, but he appears to have accepted that this is just how the cards have fallen. It is not as though the issue has just popped up. 12 months ago the government was being criticised when the new Aboriginal Affairs minister Mal Brough raised allegations which have now been substantially sustained. What we are seeing is the culmination of 12 months of work, not just a few weeks.
Nothing gets me angier than abuse of children, and I’ve been disgusted by the way governments have dealt with the issue. In Queensland there were instances of children being returned by departmental staff to foster homes where they were known to have been infected with an STD by a carer, yet there was hardly a ripple. No resignations, and as far as the public could see, no real change in the department.
I’ve no doubt that Howard gets angry about abuse of children, and unlike me he’s in a position to do something. I’ve also more than a suspicion that the agenda is driven by Mal Brough, and whatever people might say about Howard’s opportunism, Brough is no cynical political operator.
If it works to the government’s political advantage – well that’s what democracy is about. It will certainly be to the advantage of the children involved, and that’s where our attention ought to be directed.

Well, I might have been giving Optus incidental plaudits over the PM’s broadband roll-out, but their telephony service still stinks. It took them until Tuesday last week to fix the phone line. The fault was all their’s. (Read the previous posts here and here).
That means it took them 11 days to check-out and fix a problem with a business phone. Pity the small retail consumer. I assume it takes even longer there. Haven’t checked their terms and conditions, but I assume you can’t sue them for any loss to your business. What a pity that last time it was in power Labor set telephony up so that there was no proper competitive market.
It is also humbling to know how little power blogs have – even those that have their posts circulated to 10,000 very influential people every Monday morning. Maybe Alan Jones might like to guest blog now he’s not on Nine daily. That might get things moving.

John Howard’s just delivered bandwidth hogs the best reason to vote Liberal. His broadband proposal is technologically better than Labor’s and is a third the cost. He’s also delivered a practical demonstration of the difference between Liberal and Labor in government.
No wonder Labor is pointing the finger at the Liberals’ political communication strategy – they prepared maps of the roll-out in Coalition marginals before they prepared them for other seats – they need a diversionfrom the fact that their policy has been found very wanting.
As though Labor’s strategy wasn’t political itself. The government has been sweating away trying to resolve the impasse with Telstra over broadband speed. Labor’s policy was meant to make the government look muddling. Lacking the funding from tax revenue, Shadow Treasurer Wayne Swann decided to grab the money from the future fund.
It was gesture politics, and obviously not as well thought out as it should have been. A sibling to the policies Labor has implemented to run health, education and most other services in the states – public relations extravaganzas backed by floods of money employing more staff yet delivering less to taxpayers.
Newspoll reports today that most voters have already made up their minds about how they are going to vote. This ought to be taken with a grain of salt. Our longitudinal polling shows that many voters who say they are likely to change their mind don’t, and many who say they are not likely to change their mind do. The question is interpreted by respondents to be about their reasonableness, not their volatility. Played properly, clear policy superiority like this one, explained clearly enough, can cut through, because you’d have to be unreasonable to ignore it.
For Labor the best thing to do at the moment would be to change the conversation and talk about something else.

There is nothing wrong with the ACTU manual and method for identifying and persuading uncommitted voters. It’s just old-fashioned door knocking. What’s more, in 1996 the Liberal Party did something similar.
In Queensland we telephoned thousands of voters in marginal seats asking how they would vote and what issues interested them. Then, when the election was called we sent those who said they were persuadable electoral information targeted at the issues that concerned them.
We did this using Feedback, the Liberal Party’s computerised electoral database. The ALP have their own computerised electoral database, and also use it for targeted campaigning.
The only difference I can see between what the political parties do and the ACTU campaign is that they are proposing to visit, rather than mail, and that they are 10 years behind the times.
What strikes me however is how American the ACTU employment of the tactic is. In the US, where voting is voluntary, an essential component of every campaign is to GOTV. When I first saw these letters I was confused, thinking they had something to do with broadcast. In fact, they stand for “Get out the vote”. What happens in the US is that they have block captains, who are responsible for a city block, and who generally have a pretty good idea where their voters live. These people coordinate volunteers on the day who go around and doorknock to get the voters out.
I don’t think that the similarity is any coincidence. While Greg Combet is reaping the credit for the Your Rights at Work campaign, it was actually conceived by a US Democrat operative imported for the occasion. Reference to him has dropped off the Internet. This is not surprising as the ACTU and Combet are understandably keen to take all the credit.
His existence also undermines the ALP’s frequent argument that the Howard Government is trying to Americanise Australia and that it imports so-called dirty campaign techniques from the US.

Paul Keating’s Wednesday night appearance on Lateline is more good news for Kevin Rudd.
Rudd, Swan et al were suitably dour, with you-can’t-speak-ill of the deadpan faces, but must have been inwardly smirking.
Here’s John Howard trying to paint them as men of the past and high interest rates, and here’s the living spectre of those things pointing an apocalyptic finger in their direction and saying “You’re not half the men your father’s used to be.” Perfect.
And then, on top of it all, the spectre has a spray at Howard and Costello on the basis that all their achievements are really his because he floated the dollar and he brought in collective bargaining.
So at the same time the past is swept away, it erodes some difficulties in the present for you as well.
This way you can have your argument that you’re a clean break with the past, as well as your argument that Howard has done nothing, and eat it too, without anyone noticing the crumbs all over the place.
Keating’s performance was enhanced by a godawful performance by Tony Jones who allowed him to get away with all sorts of mad whoppers (like that real wages fell because the dollar dropped), without once picking him up.
Seems the gods have deserted Howard.

I eventually received a response from Optus, 91 hours and 27 minutes after I gave up on their telephone system and logged a complaint through their online system.
Only problem is that they want an email address that relates to their client. And as all of our email addresses go via our server and not theirs, well, this isn’t possible. At least, all of our email address relate to their client, but they don’t use the client’s name, so how are they going to know they relate. Perhaps there is a default email address that we were given with the ISP package, but I’ve got no records of it, which means I would probably need the assistance of their telephone help desk to find out what email address they had given us as a default. Catch 22.
And it gets worse. As you can see from the email I have copied below, if I can’t come up with an email address they want me to go to their telephone help desk anyway.

Dear Graham,
Thank you for contacting the Optus Business Centre.
Before actioning emails requests, we need to ensure our privacy guidelines are met. In this case, we require your email to come from an email address that reflects the business name on the Optus account. If you can please re-submit your email confirming this we will action and advise accordingly.
For further clarification, please contact the Optus Business Centre on
133343 or via email to inbusiness@optus.com.au.
Yours sincerely,
[Name suppressed so his kids won’t be teased at school]
SMB Wireline & Internet Support Services

I copied them the blog post, but obviously Optus is so large they don’t feat On Line Opinion.
Anyway, I wrote back:

Dear [Name Suppressed so his wife can still show her face at the school tuckshop]
Hazelhurst, the company on your invoice, does not have an email account.
I have spent over an hour on the telephone waiting for your call centre to respond, and I do not intend to go back to that.
You have the telephone number details for the phone at fault, and I can be contacted on 07 3252 1470. Your call centre can do whatever checks it wants to when someone rings me on that number.
Can I point out that I originally contacted you on Friday and it is now Tuesday? Your response times appear to be leisurely, to say the least.
I’d be interested in whatever deals you have to compensate customers for loss caused by your very slow response times.

If anyone really needs to ring us, they can Skype me! Which might be where we move next.

The problem for liberals is that there are not enough of us to ever constitute a majority. So if you want to influence government you need to make an alliance with the representatives of labour, or capital. 31 years ago I decided that capital was the least unpalatable option. I’ve never doubted that judgement, although capitalists can be pretty dopey from time to time, particularly when it comes to politics.
But not as dopey as some representatives of labour.
Take Sharan Burrow. When she wants it, Labor will probably give her a safe seat, but it’s quite possible that she’s just lost them this election by lobbying to have Australia placed on a list of the 25 “worst” countries by the ILO.
I can’t find the list anywhere, but according to the ACTU website, “Australia’s case will be heard alongside cases from Burma, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Nepal, Colombia and other countries that are known as the world’s worst violators of labour rights.” Other reports say Colombia, where 72 unionists were assissinated last year, has been bumped by Australia. With 178 countries involved in the ILO, it beggars belief that Colombia’s the only example of an egregious double-standard.
What’s even more ironic is that in other areas the ILO says that Australia is the best.

The report, citing 2004 figures, said women earn at least 30 percent less than men for manufacturing jobs in Asian countries, including Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. But the gap also prevails in Europe, where women in manufacturing earn less than 80 percent of what men make in Austria, Britain, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Switzerland.
Bahrain was the worst of 37 countries in the comparison, while Sweden and Australia were the best.

The reason why this referral to the committee is obviously nonsense, and therefore likely to be damaging to the ALP on its merits, not just the fact that they are calling in the UN cavalry, is that the outcomes in Australia are so good.
If our labour laws contravene the ILO conventions, then perhaps the conventions need to be re-examined.