When there’s a serious contest for Queensland Liberal Party President it generally ends up being a close-run thing. Not this time. Mal Brough won 309 votes to Greg Spence’s 152. That’s 67% of the vote.
Not only that, but he also had a team elected that he can work with. The Vice-Presidents are Bob Harper (267 votes), Dave Elson (260) and John Caris (243). I’m told that the six from the floor positions are also looking good for Brough.
Common sense seems to be surging up the east coast. Yesterday the New South Wales Liberal Party announced reforms brokered by state leader Barry O’Farrell. Now Queensland appears to be casting off the divisive factionalism that has blighted it for so long.
With such a huge margin it’s important that Brough doesn’t forget to reach out to those who didn’t vote for him. If there is to be an amalgamated party, the Liberals need to be careful that they don’t carry the viruses of political ineffectiveness into the union with them.
And if there isn’t to be an amalgamated party, then the Liberals will need everyone pulling in the same direction.
May 31, 2008 | Graham
Brough wins by largest margin that I can remember
May 31, 2008 | Graham
Early signs good for Brough
It looks like Brough might win the Liberal Party presidency. He and his supporters have won every vote that counts so far this morning.
First was the decision whether to exclude 30 or so delegates from the Centenary branch (there are a total of 460 delegates at the convention, so we’re talking about 6.5% of delegates). This was lost. Then interim president Greg Spenceused his presidential address as a a pitch for the presidency. Delegates demanded that Brough be given equal time, and this was carried, by a substantial margin.
Cameron Thompson, former member for Blair, and a candidate for the presidency until he withdrew last week, tried to move that Brough not be heard. This was lost as well.
While these are matters of procedural fairness rather than votes of confidence, winning them will increase the confidence of those backing Brough, and may help with a band wagon effect. Brough’s numbers men are claiming about 55% of the vote.
May 30, 2008 | Graham
Internal criticism of the Liberal National Party Constitution
According to the proposed Liberal National Party Constitution “No Member shall make any statement or comment, either on or off the record, to any journalist or media organisation about the affairs of the party without the prior approval of the State President or the State Director”. So my informants are getting in first.
I have two documents that just fell off the back of the proverbial bus. The first summarises some key points of the proposed constitution, and the second gives some arguments against it, including answers to some of the questions that commenters on this blog have been asking about branch stacking.
Not my analysis, so I may have some comments on it later.
May 30, 2008 | Graham
A constitution that makes some sense
I’m still ploughing through the proposed Liberal National constitution, and I’m not sure that the National Party know what they’re letting themselves in for. A number of the features that make the Liberals prone to branch stacking are present, albeit as variations of the way they appear in the Liberal Party’s constitution.
So it’s interesting to look at the changes proposed to the NSW Liberal Party constitution, reported in the SMH.
The most important one is probably proportional representation. That’s a proposal that I advanced as a solution to some of the Queensland Liberal Party’s problems years ago.
The NSW Liberals are taking the hard decisions, and as a result may well return to government at the next election. The Queensland Liberals and Nationals are involved in a rushed marriage which suits particular power brokers, but it will bring them no closer to winning the next election, or probably the one after that as well, because the new arrangements are designed to sustain the power of those who have brought the parties to their current state of disarray.
May 29, 2008 | Ronda Jambe
Green entrepreneurs can be the best activists
Several groups in Canberra are now going through strategic reviews. One is the SeeChange group, which grew out of the Nature and Society Forum. The other is ACT Peak Oil. Both have websites, if you care to look them up. Both seek a balance between practical work and policy advocacy. These are hardly exclusive, and in fact, feed each other.
Like many social and environmental groups, they are caught between the rock of dependency on volunteers and the hard place of ever-expanding need for policy advocacy, activism, awareness raising, etc. Volunteers are hard to manage and tend to burn out; money is short for paid staff. SeeChange has been fortunate to have had an excellent paid community development worker, but she is now leaving and more funding must be found to continue and expand that work.
Contrary to some stereotypes, it was not the Howard government that decimated funding for community and environmental groups, but the previous Hawke-Keating mob. Working in the Prime Minister’s Department as a public affairs officer, I watched in dismay in the early 90’s as the communication and collaboration structures were dismantled. These happened nationally, and were accompanied by a similar dismantling of communication processes within the public sector. Middle ranking officers no longer had informal, but supported networks for information and skill sharing.
Now we find that the need for a whole range of active groups is greater than ever, but the old models of government support have crumbled. What is a community organisation to do?
One solution is to become entrepreneurial. This is hardly a new idea, as the outsourcing of everything from social services to aged care has led many large agencies straight to the government teat. Some call this survival, to others it represents ‘capture’. But the fact remains that there is work to be done and these groups are well placed to do it. Properly managed, with high levels of public transparency and accountability, these arrangements can work well.
Environmental services that will take us to a new low carbon, high service economy is yet another opportunity for sustaining civil society groups. Consider this partial list of services that could cater to switched-on urban dwellers who are yearning to be green:
car sharing schemes (working well in Sydney)
service directories and brokerage of green services (with electronic referral systems, similar to Amazon for books)
vegetable growing, sharing, preserving (community gardens)
recycling goods (the free-cycle network)
pooling and trading skills (as with the LETTS scheme)
training and DIY activities (such as the hardware chains already run, but greener)
sustainable house expos and open days
information sharing on all of the above.
Most of these exist already, but haven’t been fully developed to go beyond their small special interest groups. SeeChange has already implicitly taken on a modest brokerage role, by sifting through a number of potential companies for a solar panel bulk buy. Maleny in Queensland has done something similar.
Another example: the exercise of finding the best low emission paint for a particular job creates information that, once gathered, is best shared. This would create learning and spread the good news about these products.
The proliferation of green magazines aimed at middle of the road Australians is evidence that the market now exists, and is growing. Back in the 70s, there were just a few die hard hippie type sharing the Whole Earth Catalog. Now these activities are becoming mainstream, but are still under catered for at the local level.
There is still reluctance in many community oriented organisation to actually making money. It is a messy task, as it brings all the challenges of business and many of the drawbacks. Yet cooperatives are still a common structure, such as the University Bookstore network. You may well be a member of a number of similar cooperatives, but you don’t even think about it, because it works just like any other organisation you have commercial transactions with.
It is a wise group that sees and grasps these opportunities. Heaven knows that being commercial doesn’t stop big companies from taking an advocacy role, so why should it stop a co-op or not for profit? Hopefully some of these green groups will make the transition to becoming self-sustaining. That will make them well placed to evolve into the model organisations that will guide the rest of us to a calmer, greener future.
May 29, 2008 | Graham
Boticelli’s not a pornographer, so why is Henson?
The central improbability of the Henson porngraphy case is the idea that paedophiles will download pictures of his nudes off the net and use them for gratification.
Why are porn sites still one of the surest ways to make money on the Internet? Because picutres of real naked people overtly engaging in sexual acts are orders of magnitude more stimulating than standing in front of The Birth of Venus. Leda and the Swan doesn’t do it for most either.
When it comes to masturbation the net outsells Penthouse which outsells the Louvre catalogue.
So, on the assumption that apart from their predilection for younger people their heirarchies of sexual stimulation are miuch like the rest of the population, why would anyone think that Henson’s photos represent an attraction to paedophiles?
May 28, 2008 | Graham
One party, but…
Mal Brough favours amalgamation of the Liberal and National Parties, but only on the right conditions. Speaking today at the Queensland Media Club lunch Brough stressed that an amalgamation should only happen after proper input from the membership and if it improved the chances of the current National and Liberal Parties winning state and federal elections. He expressed his concern that the proposed constitution did not allow for that.
He singled out the fact that under the proposed constitution members would not get to vote in a Senate preselection until 2020, nor in a preselection for lower house state and federal seats for 5 or so years as areas of concern.
The Liberal party plebiscite was another area of concern. He pointed out that while most in the room were in favour of a republic, the republican referendum failed because voters the principle isn’t enough, you have to have a specific model. He said that while a plebiscite might show the membership was in favour of an amalgamation it wouldn’t show what sort of amalgamation they favoured.
Brough also inadvertently revealed the corruption of the Liberal Party’s administration admitting he had been unable to write to delegates directly because the party secretariat will not make a delegate list available to him. This is unprecedented.
The speech was entitled “The Future of the Liberal Party and its importance to Queensland and Australia” and Brough is tipped by many to be the next Liberal Party president, but there were few Liberals in attendance. Federal Parliamentarians would have been in Canberra, but out of the 8 sitting state members, only 3 were present. Factional heavies were also thin on the ground, although Vice-President John Caris was in attendance.
Some of them may have been off planning for the State Council which is to be held tomorrow evening. I’m told that the reason for this is to set the amalgamation in its current form, in stone.
Brough didn’t rule out running for a seat in the future, but he said it would only happen if the Liberal Party could be fixed. Going on the support that he received today, and the behind the scenes machinations, that’s a task even more forbidding than the NT intervention.
May 27, 2008 | Graham
My footnote in history
I’ve only just started to plough through the proposed Liberal National Party constitution, but there is already one remarkable thing about it. It bans a very small number of us from membership of the new party.
Under the definitions “Member” is defined as:
Member means a financial Member of the Party and includes any person who was a financial member of the Liberal Party of Australia (Queensland Division) or the National Party of Australian (sic) (Queensland) as at 27 July 2008 but does not include any person who prior to 26 July 2008 had been declined membership of or expelled or suspended from membership of the Liberal Party of Asutralia (Queensland Division) or the National party of Australian (sic) (Queensland)
This very small category arguably includes me, as well as Clive Palmer, the billionaire who is a main driver behind the amalgamation push. He was expelled from the Liberal Party back in the 70s, while they think they expelled me just the other day.
It is a curious provision, because later the document provides that people expelled for campaigning against the party can re-apply for membership after 3 years (Clause D.9) and while it disbars people from membership convicted of an electoral offence, they can re-apply for membership after 10 years (Clause D.15).
Only those of us who have been expelled, or purported to have been expelled, prior to the amalgamation are disbarred from ever being members of the new entity.
I must have really upset some people. Who drafted this definition?
May 27, 2008 | Graham
Greene meets low hurdle
I’ve been sent a copy of some of the Liberal Party’s Agenda for its Convention this weekend. Never in the history of the Liberal party has an agenda arrived so late. Too bad if you actually wanted to research your reply to a motion. Although, one might ask what is the point in having motions at all if the party is going to cease to exist in a few months’ time.
My correspondent was a little shocked at State Director Geoff Greenes’ endorsement of the interim president Gary Spence. I was more shocked by Greene’s upbeat approach to the party’s performane under his direction.
Our first attempl at running a Lberal ticket for lhe Gold Coast City Council elecction was encouraging. We altracted a top quality team of local candidates. Whilst we did not win it must be remembered that it was a short sharp campaign. following on from a very long Federal campagn and the Chistmas break. Cleary voters were
election-fatigued and did not engage with candidates until the last weeks of the campaign. However, havng
sad that it must be remembered that it took the Electoral commission a fortnight to declare a result, so close was the final result.
This is an election where the Liberal Party spent over one million dollars and failed to win a single seat and he calls it “encouraging”. The result was so “close” that he can’t even bring himself to use the percentages. Ron Clarke won 53.99% of the two-party preferred vote. To put that in perspective, he did better than Kevin Rudd did in the federal election!
One of the problems for the proposed new party is that this guy will be the State Director of it. That’s got to be a pretty potent reason to vote for Mal Brough for President. If he wins, then Greene goes, and the new party, if there is to be one, gets a clean start. With Greene at the helm it’s only going to get into trouble.
May 27, 2008 | Graham
Phillip Adams on Henson
Phillip Adams does a riff on some of the same themes about the Henson controversy that I attempted in this post.
I have to admit it’s the first Phillip Adams column I have read all the way through in decades, and as a result, it’s the best I’ve read in decades.
And when you put it as he does it is bizarre that you can see videos on shows live Rave on TV that do more to debase teen and pre-teen sexuality, and deprave youngsters, than Henson’s images ever will, yet only the most prudish parents would stop their children watching them.
I can remember feeling confronted when someone bought make-up as a birthday present for one of my girls when she was 9 or 10. But what could you say? All her mates were “dressing-up” too. We never went through the trash dressing phase, but plenty of friends kids have, and you should see what they wear to Sunday school!
So Neo-Calivinism is not a simple thing, it’s selective in its prurience, and pretty easy-going about a lot of sexuality.