Queensland Election

The photographs and the TV images should have brought home to those running the Labor Party the seriousness of the situation they face.

Seven dejected people sitting around what looked like a kitchen table.

This was Labor’s new caucus in the Queensland Parliament. It is also the future of the party across the nation unless it is very careful.

Continue reading "Wanted: Local champions for Queensland Labor" »

Reading the entrails of the Labor carcass in Queensland will no doubt keep an army of commentators and party strategists occupied for some time. This was not a simple routing, or another “they’ve been there too long” swing. It was something new altogether.

It wasn’t merely a large number of swinging voters deciding they wanted a change of Government. The magnitude of the swing points to a desertion by Labor’s true believers.

While the fact they fled their party is interesting, more interesting perhaps is where those disenchanted dyed-in the-wool Labor folk went.

Continue reading "ALP evacuees have no love for The Greens" »

After the events in Queensland on Saturday it’s probably time to upgrade Wayne Goss’s memorable observation at the 1996 federal election that voters in the Sunshine State were waiting with baseball bats to clobber the life out of the Keating government.

If Saturday’s state result was in any way a dry run for what awaits Labor federally next year, voters in Queensland are waiting with baseball bats, rocket launchers and cans of capsicum spray in readiness to obliterate the ALP.

If the staggering and unprecedented 16 to 17 per cent swing at Saturday’s state election is in any way reflected at the next federal poll, Labor will be utterly destroyed, with a raft of senior government figures from Treasurer Wayne Swan down swept from office. The equal-worst federal result Labor has ever had in Queensland was in 1996, when just two of its MPs were re-elected. On Saturday’s numbers, not one Queensland MP would survive.

Continue reading "Greatest risk to Gillard a dialogue with the deaf" »

Jessica Rudd, daughter of Kevin, gets the award for clever political gallows humour: “I’ve never voted for a minor party before,” she tweeted.

Few other Labor figures were inclined to quips as the Queensland party grimly surveyed the devastation to its ranks, and the emergence of the most powerful conservative leader in the nation.

The Queensland ALP was out-campaigned, chewed up and spat out by a rampant Liberal National Party at the weekend.

Continue reading "Bligh just the first victim of anti-Labor sentiment" »

Queensland’s ground-breaking election at the weekend did one thing above all else. Voters had an overriding message about the nasty, relentless campaign from Labor during the past nine weeks.

They said they hated what they saw and heard. The smash-up election result was always coming but its size was in doubt.

Let’s look at the empirical evidence. Crosby Textor, the best polling organisation working in real politics, did a serious exit poll on Saturday and found a big result - the top issue that affected voters was the nature of this campaign.

Continue reading "The mud Labor flung swung back in their faces" »

The best weapon Labor has at its disposal to prevent the election of a Tony Abbott-led Coalition Government is Tony Abbott. The polls have consistently shown that while Labor is seriously on the nose and Julia Gillard deeply unpopular, the voters have very limited affection for Abbott. Worse for the Opposition Leader, the trend has become even more pronounced, with Gillard pulling in front of Abbott as preferred prime minister in Newspoll earlier this month.

Abbott has a number of problems – he’s seen as far too negative, he’s seen as too aggressive, and he’s seen (even by some of his own MPs) as economically inconsistent, on the one hand arguing for small government and low taxation, yet still pursuing extravagant policies such as the $3 billion maternity leave scheme which has been denounced by the conservative writer Andrew Bolt as an indefensible tax on business. Indeed the mere fact that this policy has won plaudits from the Greens should firmly establish its credentials as a form of budgetary vandalism.

Given these facts, it is more than likely that when the election rolls around next year that Labor, its strategists and its advertising agency will be like attack dogs on a leash as they get ready to mount the mother of all negative advertising campaigns against the Opposition Leader. Abbott will be painted as a bovver boy, an economic lightweight, an enemy of working people.

Continue reading "Elections: If you’ve got nothing nice to say…" »

The smash-up arrived. A hyper-powered LNP vote - not just above 50 per cent but half way to 60 per cent - drove into Brisbane and parked on the footpaths, the lawns and the median strips.

The LNP has secured the greatest majority in Australian electoral history.

The territory from Ashgrove and Mount Coot-tha to Everton and Stafford over to Brisbane Central and Greenslopes was painted blue.

The Premier’s seat of South Brisbane went down to the wire. This morning Anna Bligh has no finger nails and will just hang on. Nearby Bulimba has a blue glow that may grow.

Continue reading "Queensland: Labor one day, Liberal the next" »

In his six types of ill-fated armies, the brilliant Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu identified one called “crumbling”.

“If the higher officers are angry and insubordinate, engaging the enemy themselves out of unrestrained anger while the general does not yet know their capabilities, it is termed crumbling,” Sun Tzu wrote more than two millennia ago.

While the Bligh Government’s first - and last - full term does not fit this description perfectly, there is something in a correlation of the two.

Continue reading "Labor will be left with nothing but crumbs" »

“When the tide goes out in Queensland,” a senior Labor figure said yesterday, “it goes out more quickly and more deeply than anywhere else.”

It’s true. Think the 1974 state election when Labor was reduced to 11 MPs - a cricket team. Think 2001 when Peter Beattie destroyed the conservatives and won 66 seats in the 89 member state parliament.

Or think the 1975 federal election, when an anti-Labor tide affected the whole country but in Queensland left the party with just one seat and less than 40 per cent of the vote after preferences.

Continue reading "The Labor brand is damaged - and so is the product" »

How far do you commute to work? One hour? Twenty minutes? Do you work from home? Where’s head office? Do you think a person who has to drive 15 minutes to their workplace is unqualified to do the job?

In politics, like no other job, being born and raised in the one area is some sort of political necessity. It’s a ridiculous thought because if we all thought like that, we’d be doing piecemeal work from home on looms.

This week, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd called Campbell Newman an ‘alien’ because Newman doesn’t live within the electoral boundary of Ashgrove. Newman lives one suburb away from the seat of Ashgrove. Does this mean he is unqualified to represent the people of Ashgrove?

Continue reading "Politicians don’t have to live in their own electorates" »