Following its defeat in the recent Queensland election, the
Liberal-National Party has conducted a post mortem and decided that the main
reason for its loss was the policies, approach and personalities of Campbell
Newman and his cabinet.
So what did Campbell Newman do wrong?
The answer is that Newman was a motivated, articulate,
focussed, progressivist Premier who wanted to bring Queensland into the 21st
century. For Queensland, you can’t get much more wrong than that.
For those unfamiliar with it, Queensland is the odd one out of the Australian states, always
some fifty years behind the rest of the country. In the post-Whitlam period when
other Australian states were governed by premiers such as Neville Wran, Carmen
Lawrence, Don Dunstan and Dick Hamer Queensland was governed
by the redoubtable and reactionary Jo Bjelke Petersen, a man who made George
Wallace look like Jane Fonda.
Petersen’s political philosophy was not just dominated by Ol’
Time religion, obsessive anti-socialism and a magnanimous tolerance for bribery
but a Mugabe-like paranoia regarding the southern states and the Federal
government - indeed Federation itself. What most made him popular was his insistence
that there was a “Queensland way” of doing things which was not to be disrupted
or corrupted by the communists and homosexuals from the south.
Jeff Seeney (the guy who probably would have been the
premier if Newman had not been parachuted in from the outside) unconsciously
echoed this recently when he said that bringing former Brisbane Lord Mayor Newman
in to lead the party was “an experiment that failed”, that Newman and his team of
novices didn’t understand “the way things were done.”
First of all, given that Newman won 42 seats to Labor’s 37,
it was scarcely an experiment that failed but second, and more important in my view, changing
the way “things are done” in Queensland is something that ought to be admired.
The criticisms of Newman seem to reduce to the following:
Inexperience He did not abide by the political processes
that are entrenched in Queensland.
Arrogance He
wanted set goals and took action to achieve them.
Hubris He
was prepared to defy powerful organisation such as
(a)
outlaw motorcycle gangs.
(b)
The bench of the Supreme Court.
In the tradition of the American gang-busters, Newman and
his Attorney General launched an all-out attack on outlaw motorcycle gangs that
were engaged in multiple illegal activities and were directly connected to American
drug syndicates. The government’s measures were aimed at putting the gangs out of
business and driving them out of the state which they largely succeeded in doing. Oddly, rather than supporting these measures some civil
liberties activists condemned them. In an amazing logical about-face, violent,
drug dealing, psychopaths were painted as “victims” of a brutal government.
Newman however was leading the way and now other states have either passed
similar legislation or are planning to.
Newman and his Attorney General Jarod Bleijie however were
to come up against a force more dangerous than the Banditos and the Mongols;
the Queensland judiciary.
That Bleijie was a young Attorney General of 30 was bound to raise
doubts in the minds of the older members of the legal fraternity – which is to
say most of them. He was accused of being “under-educated” for an AG even
though his qualifications were the same as almost every AG in the last 20
years. The real problem was that he was rather abrupt and some of his behaviour
was seen as indiscreet. He did not seem, as might be expected of a young AG, to
have sufficient respect for the
judicial establishment and he probably didn’t. Soon a furore erupted over the decision to promote the plain-speaking Chief
Magistrate Tim Carmody to Chief Justice. I imagine that Newman and Bleijie
thought Carmody might bring a measure of common sense and real world experience
(he was a former policeman) to the rarefied culture of the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, trying to introduce common sense to the legal world is a bit like
trying to introduce empiricism to the Vatican. The judges almost unanimously
condemned Carmody’s appointment (they obviously felt it should have been one of
them) and refused to even attend his swearing in – a unbecoming act of petulance. The campaign to remove Carmody was relentless, culminating recently in
his offering to resign.
Lawyers may spend their days opposing each other in
court but if someone outside the law dares to challenge them they will snap into combat like ants pouring out of the nest to attack an intruder.
The last expression of “arrogance” in the Newman government
was the plan to sell so-called government assets. Newman and his cabinet were aware that
Queensland badly needed to develop infrastructure. Schools were old and crumbling.
The vast state had no adequate transport system: roads were unmade, narrow and dangerous and
got washed away every time there was a flood. Even railway lines were closed or
destroyed every time it rained heavily. The coastal cities needed new and
deeper ports and so on. The plan was to sell government assets such as
electricity providers and use that money to reduce the deficit, maintain the
credit rating and start work on much needed developments. Unfortunately, this
initiative provided the Labor party with a large stick to beat the Newman
government with.
In the 2015 election, the Labor party ran perhaps the most
dishonest series of television commercials ever broadcast during an Australian election
campaign. A “whingeing Wendy” housewife sulkily accused “Mr Newman” of selling
off the assets which would cause electricity prices to rise. Of course, in
states like Victoria and N.S.W. where electricity companies have been
privatised, prices are lower than Queensland but that didn’t matter. The Newman
government was “arrogant”; they weren’t “listening to the people”; they were
“out of touch.” etc - the usual barrage of political slurs and slogans that are
now flung about during elections instead of actual policy debate.
And so, a significant section of the electorate that had
voted the LNP into power three years earlier with a healthy majority and a clear
mandate, voted in a Labor government with arguably less experience than the one they were ousting. Remarkably some of
the biggest swings against the LNP were in the coastal cities – Bundaberg,
Gladstone and Cairns - that had most to
gain economically from the LNP policies.
Now, as mentioned above, we must remember that the defeat of
the Newman government was not a rout. The LNP still polled more votes
than the Labor Party which only governs with the support of the Greens and
Independents (déjà vu Julia Gillard in 2010). The question
is why the LNP lost the massive majority it enjoyed in the 2012 election. Some
would say it was just a correction: a normalising reduction often follows a
landslide. Others blame the feud with the legal establishment and the proposed
asset sell-off but I believe it stems from something deeper.
Campbell Newman was visibly a Liberal in a party which, though
it calls itself the LNP, is still dominated by the old National Party
personalities and more importantly a National Party outlook. Queensland is
unique in that it is the only state in Australia where the bulk of the
population does not live in the capital. Brisbane and the Gold Coast
account for less than half the population of Queensland which means politicians
must juggle a host of competing demands and ancient hostilities between Brisbane and the rest of the state. This is not to say that Queensland politics
are still dominated by the farming sector for there is also strong support for
Labor in many of the provincial cities – as the swings of 2015 demonstrated.
What it means is that, as in Britain, the Liberal party in Queensland has
historically been a minor party squeezed between two larger bodies. And there is also
not as much difference between the old Nationals and the Labor party as might
be supposed: farmers and lower income voters both look to and rely on government
for continual financial assistance and both are suspicious of commercially-focussed
city folk. That traditional suspicion has not been allayed by combining Liberals and
Nationals into one party.
Liberal politicians today face opposition on multiple
fronts, from Greens, Labor voters, Independents and even the old dyed-in-the-wool
conservatives of the National Party who see them as being too small L liberal. Though they may hate each other, what all these different parties have in
common is suspicion of or even outright
opposition to economic development.
A fear of change, a mistrust of development, and a sense of “things
are okay the way they are” has stalled the economic and social development of Queensland for many decades.
If you consider the changes over the last quarter century in Melbourne or Perth
– which is also the capital of a large resource-based state – the developments
in Brisbane seem astonishingly meagre. The last major project in the state
capital - unless you count the spaghetti
like mess of freeway overpasses and tunnels - was the Southbank development for
Expo 88. Despite its abundance of
natural resources, national and international companies have not flocked to
build their headquarters in Brisbane or anywhere else in Queensland. The state
boasts a multitude of universities, and
indeed tertiary education is one of the most successful industries in the
state, but graduates have to move interstate to get jobs.
If Queensland were a country it would be the 15th
largest in the world. Its per capita product is equivalent to New South Wales, larger than Victoria's
but it has much greater opportunities for expansion northwards and westward, and more unutilised resources, than either of those states. Yet, it remains a vast, sparsely settled, under-capitalised,
collection of sleepy country towns and Miami-style coastal retirement
communities.
But apparently, that’s how a lot of Queenslanders like it.
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