I don’t understand this speech by John Howard

“If re-elected, I will put to the Australian people within 18 months a referendum to formally recognise indigenous Australians in our Constitution – their history as the first inhabitants of our country, their unique heritage of culture and languages, and their special (though not separate) place within a reconciled, indivisible nation.
“My goal is to see a new statement of reconciliation incorporated into the preamble of the Australian Constitution.”

It has been an article of faith in my analysis that Howard’s ascendancy is founded on a coalition of blue collar conservatives and middle to upper class Australians. Amongst the issues that tend to motivate blue collar conservatives is antipathy to a special place for indigenous Australians. This speech cuts right across those assumptions.
What is happening? Have good economic times made blue-collar conservatives more generous towards indigenous, so that this announcement is now in fact in line with their preferences? Does Howard sense he’s going down, and is this the equivalent of a death bed confession? Mal Brough’s photo features in the Australian’s coverage of the issue – has he turned the Prime Minister?
I can’t imagine that this advice was given by the party’s pollster, Mark Textor, so is this evidence that Textor has been marginalised, as I’ve been told? And if he’s been marginalised, does that explain why Howard is doing so poorly in the polls? Too many questions, and I could keep going.
An election will most probably be announced this Sunday. While I’ve now publicly written the Howard government off several times in the last months (the latest being a prediction of a 15 seat Labor majority made in Melbourne a month ago), it is always with the reservation that on announcing the election Howard could change the entire paradigm of the debate and make analysis based on how it is currently framed irrelevant.
This announcement is certainly left-field, and certainly changes the paradigm of debate, but I don’t think it alters my prediction at all.
Note: Further rumination raises the possibility that this could in fact be a defensive strategy aimed at limiting the losses this election. While the blue-collar conservatives conferred a majority on Howard, the Liberal Party’s bedrock has remained the middle class which provides the bulk of seats. This bedrock has been gradually leaching from under Howard, and if some of the scuttlebutt about polls is correct, may have been seriously eroded. The issues washing it away have included the Prime Minister’s attitude to indigenous Australians. So facing losses at both ends of his support base, Howard may well be choosing to go with the group that has been with him and his party the longest, and those who he knows the best, many of whom live in his own seat.

One of the arguments for replacing John Howard with Peter Costello, even at this late stage, was the high standing in the polls of Tony Blair’s heir, Gordon Brown, immediately after he inherited the job. The lights have dimmed on that argument. Recent polling in the UK shows Gordon Brown losing his dominance over the Tories in just one week with an 8 point swing to the Tories.
According to Peter Kellner, president of online pollster YouGov, this stems from one speech of Tory leader David Cameron “presenting the middle classes with attractive, if highly focused, tax cuts”. Cameron’s standing jumped by 19 points.
Just as the honeymoon was not directly comparable to anything likely to happen in Australia, neither is the swing. But it makes you wonder whether some dramatic tax announcements from Howard as he announces the poll couldn’t similarly change the dynamic here. Voters are volatile. It’s still possible (although unlikely) for Howard to do well.

Kev07 must be driving a bandwagon with very strong halogens on it. He’s certainly got the Howard bunny so caught in the headlights that it fluffs even the easiest of questions.
Today is the third anniversary of the last election, so Labor has predictably called on Howard to call the next election. The answer should be pretty straightforward:
“The leader of the Opposition recently called for four year terms of parliament, one-third longer than the terms that Australian parliaments currently serve. Now he is calling on me to call an election less than three years since the beginning of this term of parliament. Mr Rudd needs to understand that parliaments run from parliament to parliament, not election to election. He also needs to understand that the government of this country should be run for the convenience of the electorate, not his convenience. An earlier election no doubt suits Mr Rudd. He has no interest in being subjected to any closer scrutiny than he can avoid. No wonder when he appears to be able to simultaneously hold two conflicting beliefs at the one time.”
Or something along those lines.

Leaked Liberal Party research says that the once-blue-ribbon seat of Ryan in Brisbane is “ultra-marginal” as a result of John Howard’s decision to fund the $2.3 B Goodna by-pass, rather than widening the existing Ipswich Motorway, according to this morning’s Australian.
The research was most probably leaked by LP Headquarters in an effort to swing the seat back, however factional politics have played their part in the saga.
The by-pass has never been popular with any of the electors in the area. People in Ipswich refer to the current motorway, which serves as their major link to Brisbane, as a carpark, and people in the western suburbs of Brisbane are happy to live in a quiet cul-de-sac and don’t want another link road with connections to them put through their area. All the local politicians that I am aware of are opposed to it, with the exception of Blair MHR Cameron Thompson.
But Thompson apparently has the best access to the Prime Minister, because in March Howard announced that he would fund the more expensive and less popular option, riding over the wishes of local state politician Bruce Flegg, who just happens to be the Liberal Party’s state parliamentary leader.
Flegg is a member of the moderate faction in the party, and Santo Santoro was out raising funds for Thompson shortly after his resignation in disgrace from the senate. Factional alignment seems the only viable explanation for this bizarre decision.
There is another leg to this factional story. Johnson was originally aligned with Santoro, and while he has since fallen out, wouldn’t have been preselected the member for Ryan on his merits. He appears to have been a very poor member for Ryan. I know this from our polling. In May 29% of traditional Liberal voters who responded to our survey and who came from Ryan said they were unlikely to vote for the party with Michael Johnson as the member. The verbatims were fairly negative, and this one from an erstwhile Liberal voter more or less summed them up “Michael Johnson is the invisible man in our electorate and does not turn up to local meetings of importance to his constituents. Like a bad champagne, all froth and no substance! ;-> ”
Not all the blame should go to Johnson. Ryan is the “jewel in the Liberal crown” not just because of its margin, but because it is home to the smartest and richest people (on average of course) in Brisbane. A loss of Ryan would confirm the trend under John Howard for the Liberals to lose these seats to Labor as they have loosened their grip on the professional class. In effect Howard has traded seats like Ryan for working class seats like Blair by pitching so strongly for blue-collar conservatives (Blair now encompasses much of the territory once represented by Pauline Hanson). Except this election most of the seats like Blair appear to be heading back to Labor whence they originally came.
Ramifications of a loss in Ryan could be far-reaching for the Liberals. In the event of a change in government the party will need to remake itself. That means ousting ineffective factions and broadening the party’s support base so that it doesn’t make dumb decisions in opposition like the Goodna bypass. Johnson is actually a force for good in the Queensland Liberals at the moment as a member of the “rainbow coalition” that is hoping to oust the sicilian faction from the party’s administration at their next convention. He controls massive numbers of branch delegates and provides the edge between them and Santoro.
Losing Ryan may paradoxically strengthen the Santoro faction’s hand if it takes Johnson out of play, even though they would be responsible for its loss, whichever way you look at it!

That’s what the headlines should have been when it was revealed that Kevin Rudd and his wife have been looking for beachfront property to buy.
Although I don’t agree with ALP front-bencher Tony Burke that the politics of envy are dead in Australia. When Rudd drops in popularity, being a mogul will be one reason for that.

Maybe Kev07’s going to decriminalise marijuana (not a bad idea to my mind)? Was it a strip club or a strip joint he was caught in? Perhaps there was something other than tobacco in the stogies that Col Allen coerced him into puffing? Is someone going to ask him whether he inhaled, or not? Well, he must smoke something. How else could he have come up with the idea of indicting Iranian President Ahmadinejad for anti-Semitism before the ICC?
I’ve got no reason to doubt Alexander Downer’s legalistic point that he picked the wrong international organ, but seriously, who is going to arrest Ahmadinejad to bring him to justice? I know Rudd isn’t “Captain Perfect”, but he’d have to be Captain America to bring this guy to justice, or the Caped Crusader (but as the current Captain America knows, you shouldn’t use the word “crusade” in a Middle East context).
And if you can’t arrest him, what’s the point of trying him? Rudd apparently thinks that finding him guilty in absentia is going to somehow improve the situation. Removing him from power might do the trick, but unless you have super powers there are only two ways to do that. You either engage a genuine super power to invade, or you rely on the democratic process. I thought Labor would have learnt by now that hauling sovereign governments in front of international tribunals tends to strengthen their domestic mandate, not weaken it. I mean, it’s done Howard so much damage to be on the wrong end of UN reports.
Which is the problem with Kev07 – more front than Mark and Foy, but much less structural steel, or even greenhouse-friendly, wooden bearers. All show, no go.

One of the earliest things that the Goss government did when it gained power in Queensland in 1989 was to abolish the hospital boards that up until then had helped to administer the state’s hospitals. It was part of their allegedly “economically rational” agenda, in which Rudd was an integral player. It happened in most states, and now, two decades later, we have a conservative prime minister promising to reverse it.
There was in fact nothing “economically rational” about abolishing Queensland’s hospital boards. Economic rationalism is about a number of things, including devolving decision-making down as close as possible to the people affected by a system. Abolishing boards wasn’t rational in any economic sense, because it moved control away, not towards, the community.
It did, however, make good political sense. Most hospital boards had become stacked to some extent, particularly in country areas, with National Party hacks. Eliminating the boards eliminated political opponents and whistleblowers.
Modern economies are as efficient and wealthy as they are partly because they have moved away from centralised, bureaucratic, industrial age structures into networked communities of linked producers. Today, when you buy a car, for example, there is a good chance that only some parts of the car were made by the manufacturer. Many will have been made by smaller components manufacturers, like PBR in Australia who produce brakes for GMH, Daimler Chrysler and Fiat, to name just three.
Another example is the franchise system, which has dramatically improved the survival prospects of small businesses. Yet another is the Internet, which using a network structure has facilitated efficiency in industries as diverse as dating and terrorism.
Networks succeed by allowing for nodes of specialisation and linking them together.
The federal government has been very good at embracing this modern management approach to running large scale social infrastructure. One of their innovations is the Job Network, from which, ironically, the Rudd family made its millions.
When you look at where Labor states have gone wrong with hospitals, it isn’t so much for lack of funds, but the way those funds have been spent. The numbers of administrative staff have increased in size, while the numbers of doctors and nurses stagnated. Command and control solutions just don’t work, and similar tricks have been played in the hospital system to those that the Soviet era managers used to play. Need to decrease a waiting list? No problems. Create a waiting list for the waiting list and you can cut the official waiting list at the same time that the total number of people wanting a particular operation actually increases!
The Liberal proposal appears to be to directly fund hospitals themselves, while leaving some sort of light touch bureaucracy over the top of them. It’s where Rudd should have gone in his Queensland days. Hopefully it’s an issue where he will again play Howard lite having learnt from his previous experience.