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Accidents do happen, if you let them

By Graham Young - posted Tuesday, 3 February 2015


The Vote 1 campaign was a mistake – they needed non-Greens minor party support to counter the Labor/Greens alliance. Worse, in the last week Jeff Seeney alienated minor party voters by telling them their vote was wasted.

The centre piece of the campaign was a privatisation designed to raise $38 B, but instead of using all of the proceeds to reduce debt, $8 B was allocated to spending in electorates.

Electors interpreted this as a bribe, confirmed when Newman threatened that if they didn't vote for his candidates their electorate wouldn't get its share of the booty.

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His last week campaign performance was bad-tempered and he failed to take steps to inoculate against the protest vote by demonstrating how close his party was to losing (although everyone knew he would lose his own seat).

The result is not ideal for Labor either. As a result of their small target strategy they have no concrete plan for the future, and can't just steal Newman's because asset sales are off the table.

Their plan to pay down debt out of income from government owned corporations is not tenable, predicated on money that has already been committed. So the future under Labor for Queensland appears to be slow growth, high unemployment, and higher taxes.

The buzz is going to go out of the place.

For the federal Liberal party this is ominous with some of the same themes repeated.

The PM is unpopular, bordering on despised, and there seems to be a cultural inability to understand retail politics and a belief that good policy is enough.

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Then there is the management mayhem, solutions in search of a problem, broken promises and the unpopular leader acting like a lightning rod for discontent, together with an unscrupulous opposition allowed to reinvent reality on the run.

In the end Labor just fell over the line. Voters didn't think Newman could lose and they were uninterested in the few critiques of Labor that were offered.

They do understand that Abbott could lose, so eventually will ask more questions of Bill Shorten than Annastacia Palaszczuk.

But with the examples of Victoria, and now Queensland, one way of barnacle scraping that the federal party may consider is to keel haul the captain.

These are testing times for all in 'Team Australia', including, but not limited to, Captain Tony.

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A version of this article was published in the Australian FInancial Review.



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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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