Too often much of Australia’s daily media coverage is Canberra-centric and political mood changes in states such as Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania are not likely to be detected in Canberra until a Newspoll or election result has highlighted them.

The reality is the new federal Opposition Leader’s direct, knockabout, open style will be well received in these states.

He will be aided in WA by his deputy Julie Bishop and a popular Liberal Premier, Colin Barnett, and in Queensland by an unpopular Labor Premier, Anna Bligh, who is facing a revolt within her own party.

Abbott clearly understands this, which is why one of his earliest regional visits took him to Queensland.

Queenslanders like their leaders to be strong, open characters who directly engage the electorate. The many electoral successes of strong personalities such as premiers Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Peter Beattie should be a key indicator to the Liberal campaign team of Abbott’s potential vote-winning power.

Beattie and Bjelke-Petersen were the most successful campaigners their parties fielded. Both produced landslide victories never seen before by their parties and unlikely to be seen again for some time.

Both are loved or hated depending on political bent.

This is the Abbott style. He will be at home in Queensland.

The battle on the election hustings in Queensland and WA between Kevin Rudd and Abbott will be the highlight of next year’s campaign. Queensland also offers Abbott an unexpected opportunity in Rudd’s home state on the issue of economic management. Economic credentials are always a key electoral issue.

In Queensland, the economic track record of the Bligh government is in tatters and will worsen as the federal poll approaches and the government’s privatisation plans are rolled out.

This will be used by Abbott to undermine the Labor brand and it will strike a strong chord in Queensland.

Under Bligh, Queensland has lost its AAA credit rating and the state budget will not be in surplus until 2015-16.

Both these things were unheard of in the Bjelke-Petersen or Beattie years.

Queenslanders are used to seeing their state as Australia’s economic leader and, with WA, the engine room of the nation. They don’t like Bligh using asset sales to fix the budget bottom line.

Queenslanders also believe the float of Queensland Railways is bad policy and not in the state’s interests. It will soon become apparent that the sale is being handled poorly. Based on history, the float will attract at least a 20 per cent reduction in value for QR compared with a trade sale.

The key question will be: if the state government is so determined to go through with this unpopular decision to sell the assets, why wouldn’t it seek to get the greatest financial returns?

With the state in financial difficulty for the first time anyone can remember, the float is the wrong option. The Bligh government will win no favours by going ahead with it.

Some shares bought by Queenslanders will soon be sold and Queenslanders believe they are being offered an opportunity to buy shares in an entity they already own anyway.

But that is not the only problem that Abbott will be able to exploit .

Eventually the trade unions opposed to the sale will ask why the government is selling both the coal freight business and the rail track now that the Australian economy is improving.

If only the coal freight business were sold and the track kept in public hands, there would be more competition in rail and hence more economic growth in Queensland.

As the global financial crisis recedes it will become harder for the Bligh government to argue it is selling QR only because of the world’s poor economic conditions.

There is also a big problem in packaging the track and the coal freight business in the one float. In effect, this is selling a monopoly. This must impair Queensland’s long-term regional development and in particular the mining and resources industry.

It is to be hoped the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will intervene and not allow this uncompetitive structure.

The big winners from the assets sales will be the bankers, who will do very well from their fees for the transaction.

The Queensland government is handling the sale ineptly and no one should underestimate Abbott’s willingness to take the gloves off to Bligh and her team and do some long-term damage to the Prime Minister and federal Labor’s economic credentials at the same time.

Rudd strongly supported Bligh to become the ALP national president for the 2010 federal election year, a decision he may live to regret. It will be very difficult to hide the unpopular Queensland Premier in this key battle state.

To make matters worse, the unions are agitating for a special ALP conference early in the new year to overturn the assets sale decision and there is speculation that there may be a leadership challenge to Bligh from parliamentary Speaker John Mickel.

The question for Rudd is whether he abandons his close friend Bligh and her unpopular government or tries to defend her performance and in consequence takes the political hit that will surely come with it.

Rudd saw the Goss government, in which he was a key player, lose office in Queensland so he knows how strongly Queensland can swing.

Bligh’s government is closer in style and decision making to the government of Wayne Goss than to that of Beattie.

So the warning signs are not good for Rudd in Queensland.

This is a fight Abbott will enjoy.

The Weekend Australian December 19-20, 2009

Brisbane’s Courier-Mail reported that the day before his retirement announcement, Bligh’s office had denied Kaiser had quit.

Kaiser’s retirement and its timing sent a message that the Queensland Labor government and the Premier are in so much political trouble they have difficulty managing the exit of one of their own trusted people. His exit invites comparison with the departure of John Howard’s chief of staff and close confidant Arthur Sinodinos in 2006. Some observers rightly noted that Howard’s administration never recovered its equilibrium.

If Kaiser’s departure has the same effect on Bligh, it will have national implications. As the ALP federal president for Kevin Rudd’s next election year, Bligh will be nothing but a liability for the election campaign. After her March 21 election victory, she was elected as one of the ALP’s rotational national presidents with strong backing from Rudd.

There is no doubt Kaiser’s exit is a blow to Bligh’s premiership. He was her right-hand man and key strategist. While he had political baggage going back to his involvement in the ALP’s electoral rorting problems and subsequent Criminal Justice Commission inquiry in 2000, he was well respected for his tactical skills, which included masterminding NSW Labor under Morris Iemma and helping win the previous unwinnable election. Kaiser will be paid $450,000 a year in his new job.

There is no one left around the Queensland Premier with the political nous and talent akin to Kaiser’s. Bligh’s inner team of advisers is Deputy Premier Paul Lucas, Treasurer Andrew Fraser and director-general of the Department of the Premier and Cabinet, Ken Smith. None have the tactical skills of Kaiser.

Lucas is struggling to hold together Queensland’s ailing health system as Health Minister, the 33-year-old Fraser is fighting to regain Queensland’s lost AAA credit rating and Smith has his hands full dealing with the mess resulting from the failed downsizing of public

service departments.

There is fury in the Bligh government at Garrett’s decision to scrap the Traveston dam. Media reports in the Smart State last weekend included backgrounding attacks from government officials on Garrett for approving the Gunn’s pulp mill in Tasmania , new uranium mining in South Australia and the Gorgon liquefied natural gas project in Western Australia but knocking back a much-needed dam in Queensland .

Garrett was criticised for playing politics and for primarily wanting to re-establish his green credentials. He reportedly gave Bligh only 10 minutes’ warning of his decision before his media announcement. Hardly the basis for a close working relationship.

This anger is not healthy for Labor going into a federal election year and the real loser could be Rudd in his home state.

The other problem for Labor coming into an election is whether Bligh can survive as Premier. The prevailing wisdom among commentators is that while she is in serious trouble there is no alternative leader and hence she is safe.

This view ignores two factors. First, an increasingly desperate caucus will start to weigh up all the alternatives and second, the political skills of Speaker and former Peter Beattie government minister John Mickel.

Most senior ministers in the Beattie government knew that as premier Beattie was determined to have a woman succeed him as part of his obsession of turning Queensland into the Smart State.

He was so determined to have Bligh take over from him as premier that other ministers had to watch as she was openly groomed for succession and given the pick of the best ministries. This meant talented former Beattie ministers such as Mickel (transport and industrial relations), Rod Welford (education and now out of parliament) and Judy Spence (police) had no chance for the top job and were passed over.

Spence’s political skills were obvious in the past couple of weeks when she was interviewed on the ABC’s Four Corners program about pedophile Dennis Ferguson.

As Beattie’s decision to support Bligh is being criticised for the first time in some senior sections of the ALP, an increasingly desperate caucus may turn to one of Beattie’s best performing ministers in Mickel and ask him to give up the lofty heights of the Speaker’s role and return to the political battle to save the party from electoral defeat in Queensland.

A leadership team of Mickel and Spence would have experience and appeal.

There is nothing to stop a speaker from winning a caucus battle for leadership and then resigning from the post to become premier. Beattie wanted to create history by having a woman succeed him. History could be created again in Queensland if a speaker

becomes premier.

Rudd and Mickel worked for former Labor premier Wayne Goss in the 1990s and know and like one another. Rudd has a close working relationship with Bligh but would not be fearful of a move in Queensland Labor to Mickel.

One thing is clear, with a federal election due next year, unless the Premier’s political fortunes improve quickly, the ALP and state caucus will not be able to ignore the political realities much longer.

Bligh and her state Labor colleagues won’t be able to do what Beattie did last week. When asked about the present sorry state of Queensland Labor, the state’s Los Angeles trade representative and self-proclaimed former media tart simply responded with an email that said: ” I have retired from politics and therefore my views are irrelevant to contemporary politics other than on matters of trade. I don’t believe it is in the best interests of Queensland for me to comment on the decision of the Rudd government.”

It was another first for Queensland.

Ross Fitzgerald, Inquirer p7. The Weekend Australian 21-22 November 2009

The worst world economic crisis since the Depression has led to the loss of Queensland’s AAA credit rating, rising unemployment and the government’s unpopular decision to sell off public assets such as ports, rail and timber.

Yet Bligh did not visit Queensland’s main trading partners: Japan, South Korea and China. It was the loss of coal royalties that reduced government revenue and in part helped Queensland go into serious deficit.

There can be no argument about a visit to the emerging market of India and maybe even the Middle East, but Russia ahead of China, Japan and South Korea confirms that Bligh’s government has the wrong priorities.

Bligh’s predecessors, National Party leader Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Labor leader Peter Beattie, would have visited Queensland’s main trading partners months ago. They would never have left such a crucial visit to a mere minister.

Internally, Queensland is abuzz with frustration, from as far north as Cape York, where the Bligh government’s wild rivers legislation is enraging Noel Pearson and local Aboriginal clans, to as far south as Surfers Paradise, where what was to be this weekend’s SuperGP (formerly the Gold Coast Indy) was dealt a crushing blow by the last-minute withdrawal of the main act.

Instead of the thrilling spectacle of the A1GP cars, Queensland is left with a second-rate Holden v Ford V8 street race.

Recent polls show the Bligh government would easily lose a state election if it were held now. On the other hand, there is a lack of enthusiasm for Opposition Leader John-Paul Langbroek. Hence the frustration with both sides of politics.

The reality is that Queenslanders are disillusioned with both the Labor Premier and the Opposition Leader. Queensland has the NSW factor: that is, a very unpopular government with a long time to go to the next election. The next Queensland election is two years and five months away. That is an eternity in political terms.

Queensland is used to popular leaders who are constantly selling the virtues of the state. Bjelke-Petersen and Beattie were Queensland salesmen who told the nation (and the world) that Queensland was the best place on earth, and Queenslanders responded positively to it.

It is a different story today, when state politics are negative and very personal. The parliamentary exchanges in the house between the government and opposition are quite different from the Beattie and Rob Borbidge years, when there was strong political competition, though with underlying good humour. There is little time under the Bligh government for the popularist politics of taking on Canberra and fighting for Queensland, and Queenslanders don’t like it.

The Labor Party is privately confident it can outlast this period of unpopularity and get re-elected on the strength of the opposition’s incompetence. There is an ingrained belief that after four Beattie election wins — including three landslides — and the Bligh government’s election in March this year Queenslanders will stick to the government they know rather than risk an untested and shaky opposition.

All this makes the political situation volatile and ripe for change. If the Liberal National Party can come up with a decent leader and develop some half-decent politics, it will win. If the LNP had the strength to agree on a presentable leader it could take and keep control of the political agenda.

The opposition has to gently remove Langbroek and replace him with Tim Nicholls, the member for Clayfield, or former opposition leader Lawrence Springborg.

Springborg has lost three times, twice to Beattie and once to Bligh. But Queensland’s second longest serving premier, Francis Nicklin, lost five times before winning.

Springborg is decent and many Queenslanders feel cheated that Bligh didn’t come clean before the March election about many of her plans for after the election. They may well be prepared to give him another go.

One thing is certain: Queenslanders want a change and they don’t want Langbroek or Bligh. Springborg may yet rise again from the political ashes to win the ultimate prize.

We can rest assured Kevin Rudd will not want to see too much of the unpopular Bligh in next year’s federal election campaign. Bligh should remember that when Queenslanders decide to swing against a government they do it in a big way and the result is ugly. Queenslanders will re-elect federal Labor next year and vote out Bligh in 2012, but only if the state opposition can get its act together.

Ross Fitzgerald The Weekend Australian October 24, 2009