Itchy trigger fingers

Seems Morgan are having one of their occasional weeks off. Plenty of federal preselection action to report, as the parties prepare contingencies for a potential early election:

• The Australian’s Michael Owen reports South Australian Labor is finalising its federal preselections, which “senior factional figures” link to a potential early election. Mia Handshin is keen to run again, either in a second tilt at Sturt or where Nicole Cornes failed in Boothby. Cornes herself has found an interesting new line of work as an industrial officer for the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, but is “unlikely to win preselection”. A “senior ALP figure” nonetheless claims she is a genuine future prospect. Owen also reckons Labor Senator Dana Wortley faces electoral oblivion through “moves to relegate her to an unwinnable third spot”, although it was from that unwinnable position that she actually won her seat in 2004.

• Institute of Public Affairs director John Roskam has withdrawn from the contest to succeed Petrio Georgiou as Liberal candidate for Kooyong. He has thrown his support behind industrial relations lawyer John Pesutto, who looms as a threat to merchant banker Josh Frydenberg’s long-held designs on the seat. Rick Wallace of The Australian reports Pesutto also has the support of Ted Baillieu, who angered the Frydenberg camp by attending a function they “claim was to support Mr Pesutto”. Wallace also notes the June preselection will be “one of the first carried out under the Liberal Party’s new constitution, which empowers all eligible members within a seat to vote instead of only specially chosen delegates”. Andrew Landeryou at VexNews is told that “many of them … will be swinging votes with a history of supporting Baillieu/Petro or at least having a significant amount of affection for them or an in-built objection to the recruiting enthusiasms of Joshua”.

• Another interesting preselection for the Victorian Liberals looms in the eastern suburbs seat of Deakin, where two former members are hoping to make a comeback. One is Phil Barresi, who lost the seat to Labor’s Mike Symon in 2007. The other is Ken Aldred, whose eccentric reign extended from 1990 until his preselection defeat by Barresi in 1996. Aldred won a preselection ballot in Holt ahead of the 2007 election, but it was overturned by wiser heads in the party. Rounding out the field of known contenders is Deanna Ryall, a “local businesswoman”. Labor holds the seat with a margin of 1.4 per cent.

• New Queensland Opposition Leader John-Paul Langbroek foreshadows a more “flexible” approach than his predecessor in negotiating fixed four-year terms, improving the prospects for a referendum on the matter during the current term. Langbroek says it is not a priority, but Anna Bligh has apparently put the matter “on the agenda”. A referendum in 1991 for unfixed four-year terms was defeated with a 51.2 per cent no vote.

• Antony Green on the slow death of the election night tally room:

The next South Australian election will be the first conducted without a tallyroom. Both Victoria and NSW have also decided not to hold tallyroms at state elections due in November 2010 and March 2011. These state decisions may yet play a part in deciding whether free to air broadcasters attend the next Federal tallyroom. There were serious noise problems in the tallyroom in 2007, Sky News already bases its coverage from studio, and hosting from a studio would save the ABC and other free-to-air broadcasters considerable amounts of money and allow greater use of studio technology.

• I am maintaining elsewhere progressively updated posts on two looming electoral events: the May 16 Fremantle by-election and May 2 Tasmanian upper house elections.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

759 comments on “Itchy trigger fingers”

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  1. [The Left will probably win because they had the good luck not to be in government when the economy completely collapsed. They won’t be able to do very much since the country is bankrupt. They will join the EU as fast as possible (abandoning a 50-year policy of rugged independence) so they can get on the EU fiscal tit and live as pensioners of the German and British taxpayers. All rather sad really, but it’s obviously kharmic revenge for inflicting Byerk on the world.]
    Aren’t the Left-Green Party the most rabidly anti-European of all Iceland’s parties?

  4. This fro Costello.
    [Costello phoned the ANZ Bank’s chief executive, John McFarlane, and vented his anger. According to Eslake, McFarlane said that the treasurer had threatened to take “regulatory action that ANZ wouldn’t like, because of some mildly critical observations I’d made about the government’s accounting practices”. Eslake phoned Costello to apologise, but the treasurer would not take the call.]

    After some criticism of the Howard Government accounting practices.

    [The Howard government did receive a steady stream of expert criticism for being too lax in its fiscal policy, but it was reluctant to listen. Eslake was one of the Government’s most consistent and forthright critics. He made unflattering remarks about the government’s accounting practices. Costello’s reaction was to try to pressure the ANZ into silencing Eslake. ]

  7. Re 100,

    [
    6. Iraq War. should not have joined it.
    ]

    Agree totally on all of those but wanted to share a light hearted story loosely involving this one ;-).

    My kids (still at home) are 8 & 11. In the most recent foray to our public library amongst the books I checked out were 2 compilations of political cartoons, one each from 2003 and 2005. My kids are following in the well worn tradition of most families in that the children follow mom and dad’s politics so they feel “Rudd good, Howard bad” before this lot of books turned up in the house for a few days.

    The beginning of the Iraq involvement from Australia’s point of view in 2003 was before my kids were old enough to understand what it was and what was going on too. So a few days ago, they open up the 2003 book and see a political cartoon that went something like this. The Grim Reaper is sidling up to a restaurant table as if he was the maitre’d and asks Howard “How would you like to pay for this war?” Howard with the help of the cartoonist puts on his best cheeky grin and holds up his Medicare card. My kids thought this was hilarious (on the basis that “Howard is stupid and the medicare card is for the doctor and not paying at a rest.”) and they have done nothing but giggle and make fun of it for days now. They don’t yet at 8 and 11 probably (although the 11yo might be starting to) understand what a war is but they fully understand Howard’s awkwardness at getting himself into a situation that he should not have.

  8. My grandfather – who was a bona fide saint and therefore impossible to live with, causing his family endless social embarassment – was a pacifist Minister of Religion in World War II (as a result he was shuffled from parish to parish because noone wanted him and ended up spending the war in a remote county town whose population was of 90% German descent).

    People used to ask him what would have happened if the Japanese had invaded and he would point out that they were higher on the standard of living charts than we were.

  9. [Tears ptui. Both my grandfathers served in both world wars, and both my parents served in WW2. (My maternal grandfather is the second image in that YouTube clip, purloined from my website without permission.) All would have regarded such maudlin defeatist sentimentality as Eric Bogle’s dirges with utter contempt.]

    With such complete ignorance and self-aggrandisement, does herr doktor prove yet again that he and the amoeba’s share both the same intelligence and morality.

    Your bumfluffery doth offend and degrade

  10. Gus, yes we got up at the crack of dawn, then we went to the flemington markets and bought a truck full of fruits and veges then we had a big bowl of the Vietnamese Pho noodle soup at Homebush with raw beef.

    While sipping the Pho soup, i remember my great great grand father who fought in the Opium War, not too sure which side though. Nobody knew, they were all stoned.

    😆

    😀

    Give me Eric Bogle anytime.

  12. centre, the home owners grant issue is sloppy journalism at its best. its the INCREASE to the grant that is under review, not the base grant

  13. Boerwar@110,

    As you are undoubtedly aware, the perspective of if a war is worth fighting or not changes with time. Additionally, the outcome of the war should not form a large part of the consideration on the worthiness of the war. While I agree with the pointlessness of the second Iraq war, and knowing nothing about the Boer War, I think Australian involvement of other wars you listed can be justified. For example, North Korea technically “invaded” South Korea in the Korean War. Australia was actually fighting against an invader, which ought to be considered morally justified. Unfortunately, the US, I believe, bit off more than it could chew by doing everything it could to get China involved (Bombing of cities on the chinese-korean border, blockade of the Taiwan Strait). This combined with the Communism-Captialism conflict that was a big, big deal then, to perpetuate the Chinese involvement. Once this occured, the purpose of the war became somewhat muddy. I should add that I personally believe that the Chinese involvement in the Korean War, although coming with a casualty of hundreds of thousand, was actually worth it. It probably wiped out any future attempt to militarily confront China directly, which would otherwise have been plausible given the hostile anti-communism atmosphere in the 1950s and 1960s.

  15. Did the British and French war involvement from September 1939 make Europe a better or worse place?

    Better
    Germany-USSR war shorter
    Mussolini gone
    decolonisation
    Fascism discredited
    Economic stimulus ending depression
    War with France may have happened anyway because of the war in the pacific
    Fish stocks in the North Atlantic given time to build up again due to lack of fishing

    Worse
    Many more civilians dead and injured.
    Harder for refugees to escape Germany
    Food shortages in Western Europe
    May have caused the war to involve Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece
    May have caused partition of India

  16. I’m really enjoying watching the Republican Party tying itself into knots in defending the indefensible about how the US has joined the group of countries that torture. The topic isn’t going away for a loooooong time. They’d be best to give up a few scalps and move on. Bybee should cut his losses and resign but hopefully he’ll have to be impeached.

  17. [Aren’t the Left-Green Party the most rabidly anti-European of all Iceland’s parties?]

    Maybe, but they’re not politically stupid.

    They support a referendum on the issue.

  18. Adam,

    To be fair, Australian’s involvement in the Korean war (in fact, any war) was minor. Even if Australia did not participate, the outcome would not have been any different. US lost badly in Vietnam, but the Vietnamese living there today are not having nearly as bad a life as the North Koreans.
    Apart from WWII, Australia was not directly invaded in any war it engaged in. I guess the spirit of ANZAC is that we celebrate the sacrifice the ANZACs made for their countries, regardless of the outcome or the rightfulness of the campaign.

  20. On Boerwar’s logic, the US shouldn’t have gone into Korea either. Australia as a UN member had an obligation to accept the Security Council’s request for assistance. It would have been immoral to leave the US to do all the work.

    On World War I: You do need to recall what kind of country Australia was then. Apart from a minority of the Irish, nearly all Australians identified as British and saw Britain as the mother country. They did not see this as a “foreign” war at all. It was a war in defence of the motherland. That’s certainly how my grandfathers saw it.

    Further, the immediate cause of British entry into the war was Germany’s unprovoked invasion of Belgium, in violation of a treaty which Germany had signed guaranteeing Belgian neutrality. You may argue that Belgian neutraility wasn’t worth millions of lives, but that’s not how most people at the time saw it.

  21. The polls haven’t even opened yet…

    It’s 3AM in Iceland.

    But it’s not going to be particularly exciting.

    The SDA/L-G coalition will win and Dame Helen Mirren will become PM.

    For a little while it looked like it might be possible that the Left-Greens would outpoll the SDA and be the major coalition partner but this most likely isn’t going to happen.

  26. As far as I know the highest-level openly gay elected figures so far have been the mayors of Paris and Berlin, Bertrand Delanoe and Klaus Wowereit. I can’t think of any others at a higher level.

  27. [Are we counting Roman Emperors?]

    If we must…

    I can’t find a PM or President of any other country who was openly gay. James Buchanan probably was gay but certainly wasn’t openly gay. Funnily enough, the probable next Icelandic PM used to be an air hostess so the Ruddster will be able to put her in her place quick smart. 😉

  29. [The concept of “openly gay” only goes back to about 70. Before that you were admitting to practising an illegal sexual perversion.]

    Was that true for every country?

  30. No, the law wasn’t the same everywhere. There are no homosexual offences in the Code Napoleon, for example. But that didn’t nake public acknowledgement of homosexuality any more acceptable, except to some extent in the artistic milieu.

  33. Just watching the Villers-Bretonneux service, I reckon Veterans’ Affairs Minister Alan Griffin is a bit of allright 😉 and he speaks French, oh-la-la! I think it’s only fair he get’s to sit in the Member for Bass’s seat behind Kev in QT with his top button undone 😀

  34. [What made homosexuality acceptable after so long?]

    To answer that you’d need to know why it became unacceptable in the first place. That’s way beyond my pay grade.

  35. It was a subset of the general push for sexual liberalisation of the 1960s. The modern gay rights movement is usually taken to date from the Stonewall riot in New York in 1969 (40th anniversary this June), although there were gay activist groups in the US such as the Mattachines and the Daughters of Bilitis from the late 1940s.

    I haven’t heard that about Poland. It sounds improbable about the high Stalinist period.

  36. According to Wikipedia, Poland decriminalised male homosexuality in 1932. A very surprising thing for an authoritarian regime in a Catholic country to do. I’d be pretty certain that during the high Stalinist period (1947-55) it was de facto illegal whatever the law said.

  38. I was interested to see what Vera saw in Alan Griffin and went to his Wiki page. No picture so followed the link to the ALP.

    Ended up at the ALP Wiki page which has a history and pictures of Labor PMs. Was very surprised to see the one of P. Keeting. It doesn’t quite fit with the others (even Hawkies) and am interested to know who would have been responsible for adding them to Wiki.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party

  39. It’s a consequence of Wikipedia’s copyright rules. Photos must be absolutely free of copyright, and in Australia most photos less then 50 years are copyright, including newspaper photos and official photos from the Parliamentary Handbook etc. That makes copyright-free photos of recent public figures hard to find.

  40. Scorpio, that was a bit weird. PK must be the man of bronze. (Howie was steel)
    here’s Griffin (he’s got a lovely soft voice too 😉

  42. Is this “unofficially officially” what’s in the Budget?

    [TWO hundred and fifty thousand wealthy Australians will be hit to pay for increased spending on pensions and new job protection measures in Labor’s Robin Hood style Budget next month.

    In a major crackdown on creeping middle-class welfare, the Government intends to make the rich pay its way by imposing means tests on private health insurance premiums and removing generous superannuation tax breaks for those earning more than $150,000.]

    http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25379663-5006301,00.html

  43. Bad luck, Diogenes.

    I think the way that article is defining “middle-class welfare” and if it’s accurate, how the government is defining “middle-class welfare” is a bit weird.

    The first step should be limiting FTB B to at MOST $100,000 and scrapping the baby bonus. Increasing taxes on people earning above $150,000 is not a “crackdown” on middle-class welfare.

    Welfare needs to be refocused and redirected in the areas of most importance which include (in my opinion), youth allowance, disabilities, pensioners and the unemployed. Whilst a lot of middle-class people are doing it tough we aren’t struggling anywhere near as much as those guys and it’s a bit embarrassing that there’s so many perks directed that way when there’s a greater need for them elsewhere.

    Of course there’s nothing wrong with doing both, but when you’re facing a revenue shortfall and have a limited number of options, you won’t be able to do everything.

  45. I’m not sure discouraging people on $150,000 plus from putting money into superannuation is a great idea. Plenty of stock market investment is super funds and shares will have to go down if that happened which will make it harder for companies to raise cash to expand and employ more staff.

  46. On Wars:

    1. Not the first Iraq war either.
    2. In relation to various comments: yes, it is always easier after the event than before the event to make a judgement on wars. It is one of the reasons why I am very toey about going to war – wars hardly ever turn out the way people think they will.
    3. I might be willing to tip Korea into the maybe line on the basis of Adam’s arguments – however in the absence of a south korea, (as in the absence of a South Vietnam for North Vietnam), things might have gone very differently. It is essentially arguing a case by alternative history.
    4. Using the UN said ‘Go’ to the Korean War is neither here nor there as far as I am concerned. I would certainly not be committing Australia to every war that the UN approved. Not with the sort of Human Rights Committees they run.
    5. For those interested in learning more about the Boer War, there is an excellent narrative history called ‘The Boer War’ by Thomas Pakenham. [If you are an Anglophile, be prepared to have some of your childhood heroes, including Baden-Powell) exposed for what they were]. I do hope that the Rudd Government is not silly enough to put up a monument to the Boer War in Canberra. That war was a shoddy exercise in Imperial bullying against two tiny democratic nations to get hold of the Jo’burg gold. The whole thing was based on racism by both sides of the most deplorable kind. The British distinguished themselves by appalling treatment of Boer civilians in concentration camps. Australia’s most noted contributor to the war was Breaker Morant, who was a horse thief in Australia and a cold-blooded murderer in South Africa. Perhaps we could have a statue of the Breaker as our memorial? It would be a fitting memorial to a particularly senseless war.
    6. As for the Britisher-type people who ran Australia prior to World War 1, silly them – they had not realized that their national interests and Britain’s national interests had already diverged. This same mob, lead by Menzies, had still not got the message by the time the Second World War came around. ‘Britain is at war therefore we are at war.’
    7. As far as using the invasion of one country by another as a reason for Australia to go to war, how many wars to we want? In the past hundred years: US has invaded I don’t know how many countries in Latin and Central America, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Pakistan invaded India, China invaded Tibet and Vietnam, Great Britain invaded Afghanistan, the Boer Republics, Abyssinia, China, parts of India, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera; India invaded Goa, Iraq invaded Kuwait and Iran, Israel has invaded Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and vice versa, vice versa…et cetera, et cetera. Clearly invasions are selectively used as triggers by countries when they want to go to war and are avoided as pretexts when they do not go to war.

    To make it clear: I believe that entry into war by Australia may be justified depending on the circumstances. I believe that in Australia we have historically set the entry threshold far too low.

  47. [I’m not sure discouraging people on $150,000 plus from putting money into superannuation is a great idea.]

    Neither, but I think the government’s logic is that they’ll invest anyway.

  48. Oz
    One of the Howard/Costello Government’s economic legacies was a hopelessly distorted superannuation system that gave a whole lot of free money to people who did not really need it to enjoy their retirement years. It was the reverse Robin Hood, as is all middle class welfare. If there is that sort of free money around it should be spread more evenly, but of course, that sort of money isn’t around any more.

    I hope the Rudd Government trashes middle class welfare comprehensively.

    As for the ‘baby bonus’ – what a travesty in a country that is already so overpopulated that it has to build desalination plants powered by C02 emitters to get enough water to drink. Clearly, a very, very stupid policy.
    What we really need is baby demerits and tax breaks for people who do not have children.

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