Number 10 Downing Street is the seat of power in the UK, but it is the epicentre of loss of power for Labor in Brisbane.
10 Downing Street, Spring Hill, was the address from which Campbell Newman launched his first successful assault on Brisbane’s City Hall in 2004. His in-laws owned the property and allowed his campaign to operate from there. It was a good omen for his BCC campaign and a bad omen for Labor’s.
Now it is Anna Bligh’s Queensland campaign’s Waterloo.
Sometime after Campbell moved into City Hall the space was leased by an accounting firm. That firm has a number of clients who use their office as their registered office. That’s not their place of business, just their registered office. It’s a common practice to do this and most accountants derive income from such registrations.
Anyone fit to run a company, or a state, should know about this practice. Anyone fit to advise someone who runs a state should also know about it.
That makes Anna Bligh’s allegation that Newman was somehow overly familiar with Philip Usher, a $72,000 donor to his city council fundraising because Usher allegedly ran his business from this address, bizarre and an inexcusable lapse of judgement not just on her part, but on the part of those running her campaign and advising her.
If Usher had operated a business from a Monsour property it would have proved nothing.
To allege that he did when it just served as a registered office at the same time it did the same thing for possibly hundreds of other companies proves the accuser is incompetent.
The Labor strategy was to run as long a campaign as possible, bombard Newman with allegations of personal impropriety, and watch him explode. At times it looked like it was going to succeed. But as of today, it is not Newman, but Bligh and Labor that has cracked.
Obviously the ALP’s internal research shows that the polls aren’t turning, so they have pushed themselves to more and more edgy positions desperately trying to sandbag (an ironic verb given the last time Bligh’s popularity was reasonable was during real floods) enough seats to salvage a respectable win.
They’ve been aided in this by a media coverage which in the main has been woeful.
But there comes a time when edgy goes over the edge. And this is it.
Yesterday Bligh pushed her campaign close to the edge when she admitted she had nothing on him (as detailed by Dennis Atkins here). Today in her desperation to have something on him she took off the handbrake, accidentally hit the accelerator and found oblivion.
This sort of stuff is just so dirty, & it gives us a window into the minds of these labor people. What we see is a pile of maggots, not a picture you want to see in your leaders heads.
Yes the libs have some similar people. We saw it surface in a dirty tricks campaign by Malcolm Turnbull during his short stay as their leader, & it made a large contribution to his demise.
Perhaps it is this part of his personality, & Bligh’s, which appeals to Labor voters, but gets you dumped by the Libs.
What ever it is, I am proud of the majority of my fellow Ozzies, that this garbage turns them off.
Comment by Hasbeen — March 16, 2012 @ 8:54 am
Bligh and Labor know they’re done for. And they know why, which makes their conduct in government Joh-like in its arrogance and their smearing, dirty tricks politicking an absolute disgrace. As you say, they’re trying to sandbag enough seats to save them from oblivion.
If Newman isn’t elected as member for Ashgrove on March 24 (sorry Kate Jones, life’s not really fair) I’ll eat a big pineapple.
Comment by Richard L — March 16, 2012 @ 12:01 pm
Bligh has a bad habit of making outrageous statements and even though she is exposed as a liar she refuses to correct or apologize to her victims, she claimed that the two people that were left behind on the reef had staged the whole thing and should pay for the rescue, she also claimed that Gabe Watson had been tried by a Jury here in Queensland and that they had reached a verdict, Watson’s guilty plea excluded a jury, any of the solicitors in the ALP would have told her that, but she persisted.
Comment by michael william lockhart — March 16, 2012 @ 12:37 pm
What made it worse in the ABC reporting of it, was that they referred to the address as a “residential address”.
This seemed designed to distract from the fact that it was just a company address for compliance with the registered office requirement of the authorities, and not an address attended by anyone from the company, or at which any business was carried out.
Comment by Leo Lane — March 16, 2012 @ 3:26 pm