This important committee has been working overtime to ensure the Tony Abbott-led opposition will go to the next federal election with a policy platform that adds up politically, philosophically and fiscally. Systematically but unobtrusively and in the main under the political radar, Robb and Smith have been dotting their policy i’s and crossing their costing t’s.

After the 2010 federal election, the Opposition Leader was determined to ensure the Coalition embarked on a comprehensive policy development process. Given the tenuous nature of Julia Gillard’s hold on minority government, Abbott wanted to ensure the Coalition would be ready to go in an early election. As well, there was quiet recognition that the Coalition’s development of policy before the 2010 election needed improvement.

It wasn’t so much the policies themselves that needed work but the development process had been handicapped by the instability that had plagued the Coalition during its first term in opposition. A quick succession of leaders – Nelson, Turnbull and Abbott – within 18 months caused political upheaval and procedural destabilisation.

The policy development committee went through a succession of chairs – first Julie Bishop under Nelson, then Kevin Andrews under Turnbull, and finally Robb. In such a tumultuous atmosphere, a policy development process could be neither efficient nor seamless.

Hence Abbott was determined to ensure that the Coalition’s second – and hopefully final – term in opposition would not only be better, but the best it could be. He reappointed Robb to chair the policy development committee and appointed the talented Smith as deputy.

Early last year, Robb and Smith initiated a series of meetings, reviews and stress-test sessions for draft policies that continued throughout the year.

Along with key staff from the leader’s office, they worked hard to assist shadow ministers to develop a strong policy base in the event of an early election. And these policies have been adjusted and updated where necessary to accommodate changing circumstances and events. The result is an opposition policy development process that is one of the most comprehensive and advanced in recent political history.

Robb and Smith are not taking input only from the Coalition frontbench: every Liberal and Nationals backbencher has been afforded the opportunity to throw their ideas into the mix. Hence every Tuesday evening of each sitting week last year, at his own initiative, Smith allocated a few hours to meet with any colleague who wished to run an idea through the policy development process.

Along with key members of Abbott’s staff – Mark Roberts and Andrew Stone – they met individually with almost every member of the Coalition party room. And many of these backbenchers came with well-researched and well-conceived proposals that derived from their unique local experience and personal expertise. A highly credible source informs me that the controversial, former Liberal Party MP now Speaker, Peter Slipper, was one of the very few backbenchers not to take up this opportunity.

Some of the ideas emanating from Coalition backbenchers have produced policy gold, with Robb and Smith marking them for further development.

Abbott himself has been keeping a keen eye on who has shown enough interest to make a contribution and noted that some of the least-known backbenchers have produced the most thorough and dynamic work. Indeed some of these backbenchers have been given research tasks to support possible policy initiatives.

Throughout this process, the policy development team has been well aware of the fiscal constraints a Coalition government will face if it were to win the next federal election. Not only have the Rudd and Gillard governments squandered the $45 billion nest egg left by John Howard and Peter Costello, but Labor has driven the commonwealth more than $100bn into debt.

So any policy initiatives will have to be tempered by the over-riding imperative that the federal budget be restored to surplus ASAP. Moreover, Robb and Smith have worked hard to ensure that Coalition policy will reflect the small-government principles that are at the core of their Liberal world view.

As a result of all this hard work and as yet unknown to many, the Coalition is going into this year with a quiver full of policy arrows. Thus, even in the unlikely event of the federal election coming early, the Abbott-led opposition will be positioned on solid policy ground to take the fight to a dysfunctional Gillard government.

Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University Ross Fitzgerald’s latest book is the co-authored political satire Fools’ Paradise, published in Melbourne by Arcadia and Australian Scholarly Publishing. The Weekend Australian January 14 -15, 2012.

This was until the January floods and Cyclone Yasi allowed Anna Bligh to show some political leadership for the first time. Her performance was impressive but it took more than three years for Bligh to act like a premier. And it remains to be seen whether her improved personal ratings, coupled with a revamped cabinet, will carry over into electoral support and save her government in the long term.

On March 21, the Bligh government will celebrate the second anniversary of its election in its own right following the hand-over of the premiership by Peter Beattie. While Bligh’s personal approval rating has dramatically improved, her government still trails the opposition in both the primary vote and on a two-party-preferred basis. On the latest figures her government would still be defeated.

It is likely that Prime Minister Julia Gillard will face hostile state governments in all but two states from early 2012. This would be a shot in the arm for Tony Abbott’s ambitions to become Australian prime minister and provide vital firepower for the federal Liberals and the Nationals.

The fate of the Queensland Labor government is unlikely to be as devastating as NSW Labor’s, but it’s too early to tell and will depend entirely on Bligh’s ability to continue the momentum after her positive flood performance, and recent cabinet reshuffle, which is perhaps why Bligh has said an early election would be “wrong”. This is code for the government needing more time to rebuild electoral support.

Prior to the floods Bligh’s poor performance had managed to drag the ALP primary vote below 30 per cent and she was facing a thrashing at the poll. The core problem for the ALP in Queensland is that, while there has certainly been a huge spike in support for the party as a result of the floods, Bligh’s ability to run a competent government is still in question.

That will be her real challenge and will become more obvious when, as is certain to occur, the media return to more objective reporting of Queensland politics: this will especially apply if the large-scale plans for reconstruction don’t proceed as promised.

Examples of recent state government incompetence are already many and varied. As Queensland was recovering from the crisis, the health department was demanding proof such as photos from flood-affected health workers before they could claim absent days; aspects of help to flood victims were means-tested; and there are suggestions that poor management of the Wivenhoe dam considerably worsened the flood damage to Brisbane.

Plus the fact that, for more than three years, the Labor government failed to build the promised cyclone shelters along the Queensland coast. If the government’s poor track record continues, then unfortunately for Queenslanders the rebuilding could become a serious problem.

Adding to the long-term difficulties for the Bligh government is the growing perception that, by a succession of enterprise-bargaining deals with its workforce, it has squandered the strong financial legacy it inherited from Labor and conservative governments alike. These deals have undermined the state’s budgetary position and made a significant contribution to putting the Queensland budget in the red.

This is one of the reasons Queensland lost its AAA credit rating and has fallen behind other states economically. While Bligh cleverly hid this incompetence behind a wall of asset sales by highlighting the virtues of privatisation, the state’s financial weakness will take years to repair.

Former premier Peter Beattie, who was so dominant a leader, may not admit it publicly but he must be privately shaking his head in disbelief at the current state of the Labor government. His strong fiscal and economic legacy has been squandered.

Before the floods, Queenslanders were waiting with sledgehammers to dismantle the state Labor government at the first opportunity. In nine months many voters may well revert to their previous position.

The Bligh revival may turn out to be the worst of all worlds for the ALP. It may have saved Bligh herself but prevented Labor from getting a new leader and a real fresh start, not just a reshuffle.

The Labor Party believes the Queensland government will get re-elected if Bligh can bleed the floods and cyclone for as much political gain as possible.

This is why Bligh has spent time governing from North Queensland and is being profiled in TV variety shows and by colour magazines, including Women’s Weekly. However, the absence from cabinet of the wily, Rockhampton-based Robert Schwarten can only make Bligh’s task more difficult.

Unfortunately for Bligh, her poor polling at the end of 2010 strongly reflected resentment by Queenslanders that she went to an early 2009 election without telling voters of her privatisation plans. The catastrophic floods may not wash away this loss of trust and if Bligh should call another early, opportunistic, Queensland election before it is due in June 2012 this would backfire on her badly.

Deputy Premier and former failed health minister Paul Lucas is widely regarded as one of the reasons for the government’s poor electoral standing after the health department’s (Queensland Health’s) new computer system was publicly shown to be incapable of paying Queensland’s health employees properly.

Public sympathy will always be with nurses and other health workers when they are up against government. This is certainly true when these crucial workers can’t even be paid correctly.

This expensive, drawn-out, administrative debacle should have seen Bligh sack Lucas but she has been too weak to overcome her long friendship with Lucas that started at the University of Queensland.

Bligh should have made Lucas accept responsibility for the mismanagement and removed him from the ministry. Instead, in her recent reshuffle he was moved to Attorney-General, Minister for Local Government and Special Minister of State.

The Liberal-National Party opposition believes it can win the next Queensland election on the health issue alone. Notwithstanding that there is now a new Health Minister — former education minister Geoff Wilson — the anger and disillusionment among health workers towards the Bligh government will not easily be forgotten.

Opposition Leader John Paul Langbroek has understandably slipped behind Bligh as preferred premier because he did not play politics on the floods. But together with experienced and extremely capable former opposition leader Lawrence Springborg and talented opposition treasury spokesman Tim Nicholls, the state LNP contains the nucleus of a credible alternative government.

February 17 was the tenth anniversary of Beattie’s landslide election in 2001 when the ALP won 66 of the one-house state parliament’s 89 seats.

There has been no acknowledgement of this by Bligh or Queensland Labor. The last thing Labor wants to do is remind the electorate of past victories. The Bligh government’s chance of re-election is almost totally dependent on playing flood politics and, to achieve this, there can be no distractions.

The Weekend Australian, March 12 -13, 2011.

In the main, William Bligh, who joined the British navy at the age of seven, has had a bad press in Australia. In particular, Bligh has often been portrayed as a martinet when he was governor of NSW. Earlier in his career he was thought of as a cruel disciplinarian.

Despite Bligh’s foul language and fiery temper, Rob Mundle makes clear that Bligh delivered far fewer floggings than many of his contemporaries, including Captain James Cook, with whom he had sailed previously. In fact, throughout his life Bligh was a “restrained disciplinarian”.

Although Mundle is not a professional historian, he is a fine storyteller and the scope of his research in Bligh: Master Mariner is vast. This especially applies to the infamous Bounty mutiny, which was led on April 28, 1789, by his erstwhile friend Fletcher Christian, who later acknowledged that his captain had treated him “like a brother”. Bligh and 18 other men were banished to a small open boat with scant provisions. Mundle paints a powerful picture of the way Bligh, enduring appalling conditions, led his increasingly fractious crew on a 47-day, 6700-kilometre journey from Tofua (a volcanic island in the Tonga group) to Coupang in Timor.

In Timor, Bligh bought a ship, which he renamed Resource, and headed for Batavia (now Jakarta, in Java) via Surabaya. Soon after arriving, the ill Bligh set about organising his passage, and that of his remaining crew, to England, where he was reunited with his beloved wife Elizabeth (affectionately known as Betsy) and his daughters, whom he had not seen for two years and three months.

On his return, Bligh published his Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board His Majesty’s Ship Bounty; and the Subsequent Voyage of Part of the Crew, in the Ship’s Boat. This further fuelled the British public’s fascination with what Mundle terms Bligh’s “odyssey into an unknown and exotic world”. He was regarded with such distinction that he and Betsy were presented to King George III at Buckingham House under the escort of his mentor, the botanist Sir Joseph Banks.

Mundle is also particularly strong when writing about the seductive allure of Tahiti, which at first sight Bligh described as an unalloyed “paradise”. In fact, the beauty of Tahiti and the appeal of its women were a key factor in the overthrow of Bligh by the duplicitous Christian.

Despite Bligh “losing” his ship and the court-martial of the mutineers in some ways discrediting Bligh, the influential Banks had no hesitation in recommending that his tenacious and incorruptible protege should take over as the fourth governor of NSW. On August 13, 1806, the 52-year-old Bligh, having arrived in Sydney a few days earlier, formally replaced the widely “disliked and much opposed” Captain Philip Gidley King. Sadly, while his second eldest daughter Mary (and her sick husband) accompanied him, the ever-supportive Betsy – who had a phobia about being on board a ship – could not travel with Bligh to Britain’s fledgling, yet foundering, colony.

One of the National Library of Australia’s greatest treasures is the small notebook kept by Bligh detailing how he and his loyal but near-starving crew survived the mutiny by negotiating the extremely arduous journey from Tofua to Timor in an extremely cramped seven-metre open boat with few rations and little fresh water and rum to keep their spirits alive.

Thankfully, Jennifer Gall has now published beautifully illustrated extracts from Bligh’s notebook, which not only gives us a unique insight into his leadership but also reveals the fascinating details of his navigational calculations and his descriptions of the suffering he and his men had to endure.

What is not so well known is that Bligh, a man prone to uncontrolled rage and fury at the best of times, had to survive another near-mutiny by the ragged and sometimes disobedient crew who had been cast adrift. Yet perhaps more remarkable is the fact that, because of his brilliant navigational skills, 16 of Bligh’s “loyal” seamen survived the exhausting trip.

Each chapter begins with a reproduced page from Bligh’s notebook, which begins with these brief but memorable words: “Just before Sun Rise the People Mutinied seized me while asleep in my Cabbin tied my Hands behind my back.”

In comparison to Bligh’s water-splashed notebook and Mundle’s magisterial and superbly illustrated book, Russell Earls Davis’s Bligh in Australia is a much slighter work. This supposedly “new appraisal” of Bligh and the so-called rum rebellion of January 26, 1808 (20 years to the day after the founding of the colony) is, in fact, largely based on research that is often out of date.

This means that Rundle’s 14-page epilogue on Bligh’s regime in Sydney and his many battles with that great agent of perturbation in NSW, John Macarthur, is significantly more revealing than Davis’s entire book. Moreover, in Bligh in Australia there are some inexcusable errors, including misspelling the name of Bligh’s predecessor, Philip Gidley King. There are also a number of typographical mistakes.

However, there are some good points in Davis’s narrative, which, unlike Bligh: Master Mariner and In Bligh’s Hand, seems to be directed at school students. This especially applies to his treatment of the rapacious New South Wales Corp, the military force that monopolised the sale of many necessary items of food and clothing and widely controlled the trade in “rum”, a term that covered all forms of alcohol. Indeed, in NSW, as Davis pithily puts it: “Rum became the unofficial currency in the colony and alcohol addiction its greatest curse.”

The truth is that Bligh provoked the ire of the Rum Corps and their friends, in particular Macarthur, a teetotaller who had previously been a member of the corps. In contrast to his opposition to the depredations of the Rum Corps, Bligh supported free immigrants and small farmers, who soon became his most loyal supporters.

All in all, by portraying Governor Bligh as more wronged against than not, especially at the hands of Macarthur, Davis’s heart is in the right place in trying to re-establish Bligh’s tarnished reputation. Certainly, he highlights the fact that, before the military coup that resulted in his wrongful arrest, Bligh not only attempted to deal with alcohol abuse but tried to stop the bartering of spirits and the use of rum as currency.

It seems somehow fitting that while Bligh died in London on December 7, 1817, much loved by his family, Macarthur died, alone, friendless and insane, at his property, Camden Park, on April 11, 1834.

Bligh: Master Mariner, by Rob Mundle, Hachette, 368pp, $49.99

In Bligh’s hand, by Jennifer Gall, National Library of Australia, 234pp, $34.95

Bligh in Australia, byRussell Earls Davis, Woodslane Press, 242pp, $24.95

Review by Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University. Ross Fitzgerald is co-author of Bligh, Macarthur and the Rum Rebellion and the forthcoming Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace (Hale & Iremonger).

In rhetoric reminiscent of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Peter Beattie and other long-serving premiers, Labor and conservative alike, Bligh’s answer to the conundrum of how to be optimistic and survive this natural disaster was crystal clear. We are, she said, lips aquiver, “Queenslanders. We’re the people that they breed tough, north of the border. We’re the ones that they knock down, and we get up again.”

Similar patriotic, even jingoist, sentiments are expressed each year during the State of Origin rugby league series between Queensland and NSW, when the cry “Queenslander!” resounds from Suncorp Stadium, or Lang Park, as locals still prefer to call it. That stadium, too, suffered inundation recently but it also stands as a symbol of the Queensland spirit embodied by the Maroons, its rugby league team. Many television commentators and reporters have done their stand-ups beside the statue of league great Wally Lewis, dubbed the Emperor of Lang Park. The statue survived the flood: a good omen, according to the pundits, that all will soon be well.

Bligh’s main metaphor, expressed at her sombre but stirring press conferences, evokes partisan State of Origin passions: a powerful yet simple division of them and us. Or, more subliminally, them — the aliens from, in particular, the southern states — as against us, dyed-in-the-wool Queenslanders.

Then, following her largely controlled yet emotionally appealing response to such a large-scale catastrophe, the Warwick-born and Queensland-educated Bligh said something of which Bjelke-Petersen and populist Pete would be proud. Evoking the deeply held notion of Queensland as the frontier state, and of Queenslanders as brave and bold frontiersmen and women fighting against the odds, Bligh in a very human touch announced: “This weather may break our hearts, but not our will.”

Bligh’s imagery tapped into deeply held folk memories of other Queensland floods. Thus all the Premier needed to do, once or twice, was to articulate the fact that the January floods were rivalled only by the Australia Day weekend deluge in Brisbane in 1974, which itself evoked vestigial memories of the two great, and even more deeply destructive, floods of February 1893 that, among other damage, washed away Brisbane’s Victoria Bridge.

In the Bible, the Talmud and the Koran, central to the story of the flood is the notion that it was only the God-fearing Noah who could negotiate the great deluge and thus save, for the world, humanity and all the animals. Similarly, the telegenic Queensland premier’s key statements about last month’s deluge implied some sort of unconscious notion of Bligh (whose forebears include William Bligh of mutiny on the Bounty and Rum Rebellion fame) and Queenslanders as the chosen people who can struggle against the odds and come out alive and somehow land on top. On a metaphorical Mt Ararat, as it were.

There seems no doubt that, in some important respects, Queensland is different from other states, with the possible exception of Western Australia. Queensland is by far the most decentralised mainland state. Its economy is built on agriculture and, like WA, on mining. To this is connected the fact that manufacturing in Queensland is much less important than in all southern states and that the professional class is much less important than in Melbourne, Sydney or Adelaide. Many Queenslanders are so remote from Brisbane, situated in the far southeast of the state, that they can’t relate to it as their capital at all. Also, until relatively recently, Queenslanders were less well educated than their southern counterparts.

What is it about the inhabitants of the sunshine state that, for a week in December 1899, they led the way in reforming politics by electing the world’s first Labor government, headed by Anderson Dawson from the dual electorate of Charters Towers? And that they elected, and re-elected, Australia’s only communist member of parliament, Fred Paterson, who was the state member for Bowen from 1944 until his seat was redistributed out of existence in 1950, and who, on St Patrick’s Day 1948, was bashed senseless by a plainclothes Queensland policeman, most likely on the direct orders of the autocratic, long-serving Labor premier E.G. (“Ned”) Hanlon. Plus the fact that in 1922, Labor premier and later federal treasurer, E.G. (“Red Ted”) Theodore managed to persuade a “suicide club” of 12 male members he appointed to the upper house to vote for the abolition of their Legislative Council and thus make Queensland the only mainland state with a unicameral parliament.

But those who want to argue that in 2011 Queenslanders are substantially different have to grapple with some unpalatable facts. Perhaps most important is the huge internal migration to Queensland. This means that up to one-third of citizens on the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane have moved from Victoria and NSW. And they bring with them their own sets of ideas and attitudes, only some of which may blend into those of born-and-bred Queenslanders.

Until the overthrow of Kevin Rudd by the then darling of the Victorian Left, Julia Gillard, some commentators argued that Queensland was the new centre of political gravity in Australia. Indeed, in spring 2008 a whole issue of the ‘Griffith Review’ was dedicated to this rather grandiose claim. It was largely predicated on the fact that the prime minister (Rudd), the federal Treasurer (Wayne Swan) and the Governor-General (Quentin Bryce) all hailed from Queensland. But since Gillard’s coup the political axis has markedly changed, with much of the fulcrum perhaps now situated in Victoria.

Just like the once prevalent myth that Australia was a land of virile and egalitarian bushmen who supported the underdog (when, in fact, women comprise more than 50 per cent of our population, most of us live on the urban eastern seaboard, and the gap between rich and poor has never been more marked), so too the notion that Queenslanders are fundamentally different contains much more myth than reality.

Yet it wasn’t so long ago that Bjelke-Petersen headed overseas on a trip to “sell Queensland” in which he and his very capable Liberal deputy premier, Llew Edwards, made it clear that first and foremost they were Queenslanders rather than Australians. The same applied to the gargantuan “minister for everything”, Russ Hinze, who had once boasted, “Let me draw the boundaries, Joh, and we’ll be in power forever!”

As the deeply flawed but passionately Queensland-centric Bjelke-Petersen so often said, not just to Queenslanders, but to Labor premiers and to Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam in particular: “Don’t you worry about that!”

And even though the Bjelke-Petersen regime has long gone, largely as a result of Tony Fitzgerald’s powerful inquiry into police and governmental corruption, politically at least, in our federated form of government, until the not so distant past senior Queensland politicians thought that there still remained some mileage in running a “Queensland for Queenslanders” and a Queensland v Canberra line. But since Labor has been in government federally, this hasn’t had anywhere near as much cachet for Labor premiers in Queensland as it used to for the New Zealand-born Bjelke-Petersen and his conservative forebears, including Country Party premier “Honest” Frank Nicklin.

As for Bligh, she’d probably be horrified by comparisons with infamous Country-National Party figures of the corrupt and authoritarian past. However, if not in public, she may nevertheless have been a closet admirer of their passion for the Sunshine State and for all things Queensland. Right now, she is rallying Queenslanders the way Bjelke-Petersen did when he regularly fed the chooks, and the way the hugely successful and media savvy Beattie did immediately before he handed Bligh the Queensland premiership on a platter.

And it’s doing Bligh no harm. Almost all commentators and the general public agree that she has been an outstanding leader at a time of monumental crisis. With Julia Gillard’s performances during the floods coming a long second to Bligh, many tweets have called for her to become the next prime minister and almost everyone in the nation has been inspired and moved by her defiance and compassion in the face of adversity. She has fought back tears to declare that Queenslanders may be down but not out and, in the process, radically turned around her personal popularity rating which, immediately before the floods, stood at 28 per cent and was significantly lower than that of Opposition Leader John Paul Langbroek, who has been all but invisible during the flood crisis.

Thus, although Bligh may not have definitely saved the good ship Labor for next year’s state election, her resolutely Queensland-centric approach has certainly ensured that there will be no challenge to her leadership, which was the talk around Brisbane’s George Street immediately before the floods.

Perversely, at least as far as the Premier’s parliamentary career is concerned, this colossal and continuing human and fiscal-economic crisis has proved to be a godsend.

Bligh’s consistently first-rate performance during the great deluge may have been politically astute, although it seems clear that there was, and is, little or no contrivance involved. It has been a positively Churchillian stand, coming straight from her heart and head, unmediated by spin doctors or party political media monitors. Cometh the hour, cometh the woman.

As a 21st-century, Queensland-based Boadicea, Bligh has tapped into the fundamental myth, however wrongly based in fact, that Queenslanders are a breed apart, a far-flung tribe that can reclaim the promised land despite all and any adversity. This is a mythology various peoples have developed over the ages to reassure and inspire themselves. Its stirring stuff and can also be claimed to exhibit the spirit of the Aussie battler, the Anzac ethos, the spirit that supposedly embodies the best of us all.

It’s our modern myth. And right now, in the vast state of Queensland, in what was previously a politically divided state, the citizens far and wide are united in their belief that, with enough grit and determination, they can overcome catastrophic natural disasters and any other adversities.

For now, we can sympathise with Queensland and Queenslanders and lend moral support to their visionary self-belief. In the future, psychologists and philosophers will see the events of January 2011 as a case study of humans in extremis and how they can survive catastrophes. Who knows to what use we may have to put this knowledge in the brave new world of the 21st century?

The Australian Literary Review, Wednesday February 2, 2011

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