Looks like the environment movement has finally managed to define “being alive” as an act of vandalism. This morning on ABC Radio National Breakfast I have repeatedly heard the meeting US sponsored meeting on climate change described as a meeting of “the 16 largest polluters”, referring to their level of CO2 emissions.
Since when was CO2 pollution? Everytime we exhale, we exhale CO2. And the “carbs” that some of us eschew and that the rest of us live on – they’re produced by plants which synthesise them from atmospheric carbon dioxide, water and sunlight. Rather than pollution, it’s the stuff of life, which would be just as unimaginable without it as it is without water.
These subtle shifts in word usage are important. “Emission” is a neutral word, but “pollution” rules out any benefits from an activity. Surely Auntie could be more careful. There’s upside to CO2 as well as downside, and failure to acknowledge this will lead to some bizarre and counter-productive policies.

I’ve just fired-off a letter to the Liberal Party’s General Secretary. The party extended their deadline for me to respond to the Disciplinary Committee’s report until 5:00 pm today. They may hold a special meeting of State Council to consider the report and my response no earlier than 5:00 pm tomorrow.
My reply was that given the flaws in the whole process, there was no point in responding to the committee’s report. They have two choices. One is to forget about the whole matter. The other is to start again.
The basis for this response is outlined in my solicitors letter. There are five grounds:

1. Failure to properly particularise the charges
2. Failure to present evidence
3. Failure of the Committee to observe the rules of natural justice
4. Failure of the Committee to proceed according to the Constitution
5. Inclusion of Mrs Bowers as a memberof the Committee

Anyone of these would be fatal to the process. I’ll quickly deal with two of the issues to demonstrate just how incompetently the administration of the party has proceeded. And by “administration” I’m really talking about the State Director, the President and their close buddies, including the Chairman of the Constitution and Rules Committee, who provides legal advice. The State Council relies heavily on what it is told, and what it is allowed to know, so while individual members are liable for the decisions of the council, they often vote against it, or have reservations.
The inclusion of Bowers is a good example of how this works. She was appointed, at the last minute, by a flying minute. The Constitution doesn’t allow the State Council to make decisions by flying minute. There has to be a contemporaneous meeting of some sort. To appoint someone to such a significant position, there needs to be an opportunity to inquire into their suitability, look at alternatives and so on. A flying minute does not allow any of these things, and so the constitution quite sensibly requires a meeting.
But how does a single member of State Council do anything about this illegal method of appointment when they are presented with it as a fait accompli, particularly when the Chairman of the Constitution and Rules Committee, Peter Baston, a barrister, is likely to tell you that it is legal? So Mrs Bowers was illegally shoe-horned into the position. Mrs Bowers once even lobbied my own mother against me, so I have no doubt as to why she was nominated – it wasn’t for her robust sense of fair play!
State Council members have no control over the second issue that I am going to highlight, and that is the failure of the people they appoint to behave competently. Under the heading or “Failure of the Committee to proceed according to the Constitution” comes the complaint that:

At the hearing, the Chairm, Mr Miles, told Mr Young on several occasions that it was not the Committee’s role to make findings, but rather to investigate. It seems that this was the basis upon which Mr Miles concluded that it was up to Mr Young to disprove the allegations made against him rather than to require State Council to prove its complaint.
It seems to us that Mr Miles and his fellow committee members simply misunderstood the task assigned to them under the Constitution. In those circumstances, it is difficult to see how any report prepared by the Committee could be a constitutionally valid basis for action by the State Council.

So, there would seem to be little point in debating the committee’s report, particularly as all it does is confirm the complaints in the solicitor’s letter. Which means it was fairly predictable, given that the letter was written without the advantage of seeing the report!

We might be somewhere around 5 to 6 weeks away from a federal election, but the Queensland Liberal Party State Council appeared to be more interested in making a meal of its own than stopping the Rudd threshing machine. There were two major decisions that they needed to make – whether to proceed with the expulsion proceedings against me, and whether to run in the Brisbane Central by-election.
Let’s leave me to dessert and another post and talk about Brisbane Central.
If you had asked my opinion a week-and-a-half ago whether the Liberals should run in Brisbane Central I would have said no. It would be a waste of resources, they have no hope of winning, and the best chance of unsettling Labor would be to give the Greens a clear run at it. With a federal election that is more critical than any since 1996 it is a distraction they don’t need.
This should have been reasonably easy to sell to the media. For once the Liberal Party could say, we are being tough and strategic. Then it could turn the argument onto the Bligh government. 12 months ago Peter Beattie told the electors of Brisbane Central he wanted to represent them for three years, now they’ve been dudded, just like Beattie’s been dudding Queensland for the last 10 years. His resignation was strategically timed so that the byelection would occur around the same time as the federal election, but “We’re not going to get sucked-in by Beattie’s clever political tactics,” they could say. “And look, just as we told you, the Labor Party’s full of union hacks and heavies, and they’re slipping another one of them into parliament. A Rudd government will be just as tricky and just as full of time-servers and time-wasters.”
So I was a bit surprised to hear Bruce Flegg on radio shortly after the byelection announcement saying that the Liberals were going to definitely be running in Brisbane Central. As parliamentary leaders don’t determine where and when the party runs, I assumed he must have been saying this with the agreement of the organisation. I subsequently found out that party president Warwick Parer had told him they would be running.
So I was shocked to find just a few days later that some elements in the party, on the urgings of state director Geoff Greene, had decided to reverse this decision. Now it may have been an ad hoc decision, but it was taken by the leaders of the state parliamentary and organisational wings, and publicly announced. A back-down was going to be damaging for one, if not both, of them.
It might not have originally been a set-up of Flegg, but it turned into one. Greene spent, on most accounts, around 30 minutes at last Sunday’s State Council running through a slide show of polling which purported to show how hopeless Flegg is. According to Greene he has the worst approval figures ever. I find this hard to believe, and even harder to believe that there so bad a competent professional couldn’t work with them.
But why was Greene spending all this time on state polling with a federal election imminent? The reason was that his major argument against running in Brisbane Central wasn’t anything to do with strategy or tactics, but that he didn’t think the state parliamentary leader was up to it. This was an opinion that was leaked fairly soon after the meeting to the media who duly reported in the Courier Mail:

The decision came after heavy lobbying from senior federal figures who believed the by-election would be a distraction from the main political game – winning the federal election.
There was concern about Dr Flegg’s campaigning prowess and the possibility his bumblings could shift the spotlight from Prime Mininster John Howard.

Way to go Geoff – shoot yourselves in as many feet as possible. If Flegg’s that bad what are you going to do in a general election?
The CM’s headline was spot-on “Libs unveil by-election strategy – surrender”.
It might be news to Mr Greene, but it’s his job to do the best with what he’s got. When I say it’s hard to believe that Flegg has the worst approval figures ever I’m thinking of Rob Borbidge and Joan Sheldon. When Borbidge and Sheldon went into the 1995 state election, according to Newspoll Borbidge had a net -9 percent approval rating. (They didn’t track Sheldon). And in one memorable poll in the CM Borbidge had an approval rating of 19%. But guess what, we overcame that to come within one seat of winning. And then we managed to handsomely win the Mundingburra by-election with Frank Tanti, who gave a whole new meaning to the words “stumble” and “bum”, and that clinched government.
Once Flegg and Parer had made the decision Greene had no other sensible choice but to run. Instead, he took the opportunity to pursue factional advantage. His criticism of Flegg is no more than a cover for his factional manouvering. Since he’s been in Queensland Greene has undermined the state parliamentary leader in favour of the Santoro aligned challenger, whether the leader was Quinn or Flegg, or the challenger Caltabiano or Nicholls. Caltabiano now sits on the party’s State Council, and was one of the ring-leaders in shafting Flegg.
What Flegg needs is more experience. A by-election that no-one expects him to win could have been managed to increase his experience. A good result would have given him a bounce. A bad result would have been swallowed-up in the federal election. That opportunity has now been lost to the factional infighting of the Liberal Party.
And these people think that I bring the party into disrepute! I’ll post dessert tomorrow.

The latest Newspoll has the government recovering by 4%. This could be a result of sampling error. Since July this year Newspoll has given a series of results that have clustered around a two-party preferred vote of 56 Labor, 44 Government. This most recent result of 55 to 44 is therefore well within the sampling error of plus or minus 3%.
Which doesn’t mean that it is a product of sampling error. My hunch is that the government’s position has improved for two reasons – APEC and leadership speculation.
APEC changed the conversation to a subject which favours the government – foreign affairs. Foreign affairs is one of the few areas where the government maintains a lead over the opposition in the public mind. So, while they have generally this year been arguing about issues like health, education, training, climate change and infrastructure which favour Labor, for a change they got the agenda right.
Who knows, Kevin Rudd’s polished Mandarin tutorial may have even lost the ALP ground. I suspect most voters understand that there is more to foreign affairs than currying favour with just one, albeit large, country. Howard’s battlers were never comfortable with Keating’s pitch of Australia as an Asian country, and his toadying to objectionable Asian regimes like Suharto’s and Mahathir’s.
While leadership speculation showed the government in a poor light, it also confirmed in most people’s minds, mine included, that we’d better start getting used to the idea of a Rudd government. Which means that the Rudd government now becomes an issue. As every state campaign in the last two years has confirmed, it’s easiest for a government to win if the opposition is the issue, this would also have had an effect too.
The challenge now for the government is to take the swing beyond the margin of error. Peter Costello made a good start at that this morning when he quipped that Kevin Rudd had already had his campaign launch (although the election has yet to be called) and that the way he was going he’d be having his victory party next weekend. Perhaps the Treasurer has been playing Achilles, and now that the PM has definitely said he’ll hand over the mantle of power, he’s decided to stop sulking. A few one-liners like that, repeated ad nauseum, could really make a difference in the polls. Even then, I suspect they’ll still need a “mean nasty and tricky” Trojan horse strategy if they want to make the citadel of government again.
One thing they need to do is to change the media interpretation of these polls. This poll does not show a significant recovery in the government’s vote any way you look at it, and if people think that it does, then attention will start shifting back to the government, which is the last thing Howard wants or needs. Some journalists may think they’re doing Howard a favour by boosting his election chances. Labor and Rudd will hope that they continue to think so.

Until the Goss government came to power in Queensland poker machines were limited to casinos and one of the small excitements available amidst suburban domestic boredom was making a bus trip over the border to the Terranora Lakes Country Club where poker machine gambling could be done legally.
When Goss left power, poker machines were more plentiful than cane toads after a thunderstorm.
And who ran the Goss government? Well, Goss, obviously, but backed-up by his senior mandarin, Kevin Rudd. Rudd’s control over the public service was so centralised and locked-down that it was said that you couldn’t sharpen a pencil in the public service but Kevin Rudd would know the weight of the shavings by close of business that day.
This makes Rudd’s campaign “du jour” on poker machines a little risky for him. As the graphs below demonstrate, growth was explosive, and it occurred mostly on his watch. Where are the memos demonstrating that this happened over Rudd’s dead body, and if they don’t exist, when did he realise the error of his ways?
Rudd appears to me to be currently running the risk of over-promising. If something is too good to be true, it generally is.

Source: Queensland Gaming Commission Annual Report 2001

The hagiographers are out in force painting a saintly picture of Peter Beattie. But if they’re right, and Beattie is an honest man, then he’ll have no problems with this piece.
Beattie will be remembered as a wiley politician, but not as someone who built Queensland. He’s a fox, not a beaver, and it’s a pity that there aren’t indigenous equivalents so I can make the image suitably Australian, but then, Beattie is unique.
I shouldn’t write his building skills off entirely. The modern Queensland ALP is a formidable organisation, and Beattie played his part in creating it. Indeed, as a young State Secretary he took high stakes political chances to bring about change, and was at one stage expelled from the party. In 1974 the Queensland ALP was reduced to a cricket team without anyone to carry the drinks – 11 members. Within 15 years it had wrested government from the National Party, and has held it since with a brief interegnum between 1996 and 1998.
Without Beattie that modernisation and renovation might never have occurred.
He took that high stakes approach into parliament when he eventually succeeded in winning a preselection. (He ran for Redlands at one stage, but was beaten). It took him years to become a minister, despite his obvious talent. This was in part due to his chairmanship of the Parliamentary Criminal Justice Committee where he frequently took sides against his own party. He was demoted from the chairmanship after one term.
When he did become a minister it was only after Labor had effectively lost the 1995 state election. They remained in power for six or so months while matters wended their way through the courts, leading to the Mundingburra re-election and their absolute defeat. This led to Beattie becoming Leader of the Opposition, but only because he was the last man standing with any credibility. His factional enemies supported him, but only out of necessity.
I’ve always admired Beattie for his pre-1998 achievements.
I’ve also had a lot of admiration for his political skills post 1998. In 2001, he effectively campaigned against his own party, which had been condemned by the Shepherdson Inquiry, apologised for its transgressions and demanded a mandate so that he could fix the problems. He was rewarded with a huge majority.
This modus operandi became standard, to the point where he is now a caricature of himself. Beattie will take responsibility for any mess he has created, assert that he is the only one who can fix the problem and demand a mandate to do so.
At the last election, held in 2006, voters re-endorsed Beattie on this argument, even though they saw through it. While they held their noses as they went into the polling booths, they deemed the opposition even less competent.
In policy terms the Beattie era has been full of wasted opportunities. Like the Goss government before him he has been concerned with maintaining the status quo at the same time as paying off selected constituencies and flooding the electorate with public relations bumpf. Essential services are decaying from lack of expenditure and feather-bedding of administrative staff at the expense of those who deliver. So more hospital administrators, but no more doctors and nurses, or at least not proportionately so.
Queensland inherited an extraordinarily strong balance sheet from the National Party – it is the only state to have fully-funded public service superannuation – yet that balance sheet was never used to put the infrastructure into place at the optimal time. Instead, infrastructure has been built only after a crisis has occurred, leading to dislocation in essential industries, like water supply and mining, delays and high costs. Properly managed Queensland could have been kilometres in front of the other states and an even stronger magnet for investment and immigration.
In other areas, unnecessary increases in regulation have led to huge cost increases. Beattie bears a disproportionate blame for high housing costs because of the regulations introduced via planning legislation.
Beattie boasts about his success with the Smart State, but the SS is no more than a slogan. Queensland continues to prosper from the innovations of the Coalition governments of the 60s and 70s, but they were in traditional industries. Gordon Chalk and Joh Bjelke-Petersen introduced the Japanese into the mining industry, expanded agriculture and tourism, and by abolishing death duties directly caused the immigration of older Australians to the sun-belt state. Agriculture, mining, tourism and property development are still the backbone of the economy.
If Queensland is more cosmopolitan now than it was, that is a legacy also left by Joh Bjelke-Petersen. In bringing Expo 88 to Brisbane he set in train events that would be capitalised on by two Brisbane Lord Mayors – Atkinson and Soorley – which would lead to the state’s capital becoming more optimistic, outgoing and confident. It is this change in Brisbane which makes Queensland seem less the “hick state”.
Beattie is leaving the state a worse place than he found it. That is a pity. I, and many other Queenslanders, had higher hopes for him when he took over the premiership. There are some competent members of the team that are left, and if Anna Bligh is a good manager, she will give them more freedom than Beattie did. Bligh will be the first female premier of Queensland. This is strongly symbolic, but unlike Beattie, I hope she will strive for more than mere symbolism.

I don’t think this one will be a huge hit on YouTube. Peter Garrett appears to be doing a Don Burke (Chair of the Australian Environment Foundation and former celebrity gardener) impersonation. (Except I think Burke has a more optimistic view of just how threatening global warming is than Garrett does).
While Howard is breaking ground getting China to agree it needs to limit greenhouse emissions, Peter Garrett is doing a “Backyard Blitz” of sorts, exhorting us all to save the planet by growing more natives, mulching, growing our own vegies and installing bird baths. It’s a very 80s retro-performance, not far removed from Howard’s white picket fences.
This one’s ripe for mash-ups I think. Must be able to do something with garden beds and “beds are burning”.

Should John Howard abdicate? Various Newscorp columnists and analysts, such as Andrew Bolt, Paul Kelly and Janet Albrechtsen, think so. Is this their view, their organisation’s, or are they being fed by would be successors to Howard? In other words, does it have legs? Hard to tell, and it doesn’t really matter – from the Liberal Party’s point of view, as well as the country’s, it is a bad idea.
Public opinion polls are unequivocal. Howard is going to lose this election. In which case the Coalition’s most immediate job is to ensure it retains enough seats to make the incoming Labor government accountable. Howard needs to be leader to achieve this.
It’s true that Howard is part of the problem. Voters have switched-off him. But that doesn’t mean they will switch-on to someone else. The last three elections have been a contest between certainty and risk. Electors don’t like Howard, don’t particularly like his agenda and they’ve liked his opponents and liked their agendas. The difference is that they believe that Howard will deliver and his opponents will not. So faced with a choice between the certain and the uncertain they’ve chosen certainty.
The Liberal Party has generally been behind with electors on most issues, but their perceived greater reliability has trumped that every time, allied to strengths in economics and foreign affairs. This election they are not so dominant in economics and foreign affairs, leaving only reliability. Howard is the key to that reliability: “Love me or loathe me, you know what I stand for”.
Peter Costello is the alternative to John Howard, but despite being in the public eye as Treasurer for eleven years, voters still don’t know what he stands for. A change to Costello wouldn’t rob the ALP of policy primacy, but it would turn the Coalition into at least as risky a proposition as Labor because the new leader would bring uncertainty. Probably more risky, because Rudd has been busily painting in his own unknowns to the point where voters think they know him.
So with Costello you definitely lose your only edge, while with Howard, you have a better chance of retaining at least some part of it.
Worse, the ALP would paint in Costello’s details. “You want to know what Costello stands for?” they would say. “He stands only for the Liberals’ frantic desire to hold onto government. He’s Howard’s last trick. Don’t be taken in by him.”
Precedent supports this anlaysis. True, Bob Hawke was successfully jammed in at the last moment, but that was an election that the opposition was going to win, and Hawke was a very well-known Australian by this stage in his career. In 1989 in Queensland, facing defeat at the hands of the ALP as a result of the Fitzgerald Committee of Inquiry, the National Party replaced Mike Ahern with Russell Cooper. It made no difference, and a young Kevin Rudd got to run the Premier’s office as a result.
In 2003, although he’d been in the public eye as leader for some time, New South Wales voters judged John Brogden too unknown to replace Bob Carr. He could have made it in 2007 after proving himself in the previous election, but by then he’d been replaced by Peter Debnam, who again was judged too unknown. Colin Barnett had similar problems in Western Australia, as did Ted Bailieu in Victoria.
Some of the commentators draw an analogy with the way that Gordon Brown has been welcomed as Prime Minister of Britain. The circumstances are completely different. It was an orderly hand-over mid-term, and Brown is taking votes from a Conservative Party that has been trying to almost move to the left of Labor. Brown’s taken the votes from the Conservatives by moving Labour to the left as well, at least in terms of perceptions. Brown has differentiated himself from Blair in policy terms, but apart from a whinge about spending, Costello has no significant differences with the PM.
In the UK voters had moved to the Conservatives almost as a way of sending Labour a message of where they wanted it to stand – a mid-term shot over the bows. Now the message appears to have been heard by Brown Labour they’ve moved back. In Australia voters have just moved, and it is the end of term. They’re looking for a change of government, not a change of leader or direction in the ruling party.
There are other problems with deposing Howard. Any change means you definitely have to defer the election until December, something which is starting to look untenable. Any advertising that was “in the can” will need to be redone, but before that, you’ll need to redo all the research. Strike off at least a couple of months.
Then there are personnel issues. Howard’s staff are the only ones who understand how the jigsaw of the government fits together. Even if they stay, and even if they are co-operative, they still need to realign all their understandings for a new boss. And that’s assuming he doesn’t want to bring his own staff along with him. If he does there will be weeks worth of internal administrative chaos. (That was probably the biggest problem that Bruce Flegg encountered in Queensland last year when he replaced Liberal Leader Bob Quinn in a last minute panic move weeks before the election).
And then once you replace the Prime Minister you’ll also have to replace the Treasurer. The knock-on effects mean that just as you are moving into an election a number of ministers are moving into unfamiliar portfolios and new offices. You could cure that by having Costello retain dual roles, but that would shout “panic” even louder. Maybe you could combine Finance and Treasury for the course of the election and limit the moves to one. This would only be likely to be an option if Howard went willingly. If he doesn’t go willingly, promises and undertakings will have to be made to swing support behind the new regime, which generally means some promotions.
The last reason why it would be madness to depose Howard is that, even though he is likely to lose, he is the only member of the government who is capable of delivering an effective, cut-through, political line. Costello might be good in Parliament, but only John Winston Howard has shown he can cut it on the stump. The government needs to change direction in its attack on Rudd, and there are viable alternative strategies (although probably not winning ones). If it does change direction, then it will need its best advocate putting the case. All talk of deposing him does is make it more difficult for him to focus on the necessary change in tack, and plays into the ALP’s hands.