The latest Roy Morgan face-to-face poll has Labor’s two-party lead at 57-43, down from 58-42 a fortnight ago. On the primary vote, Labor is down 0.5 per cent to 48.5 per cent, the Coalition is up 2 per cent to 38 per cent and the Greens are down 1 per cent to 7 per cent.
In other news, it’s all happening in Victoria:
• Peter Costello’s surprise announcement that he will not contest the next election has raised the flag on another epic Victorian Liberal preselection stoush in his Melbourne seat of Higgins, which housed successive Liberal prime ministers in Harold Holt and John Gorton. Furthermore, Costello has raised the possibility of an early departure and a by-election, “if it’s in the party’s interest”. Immediately prior to Costello’s announcement, Institute of Public Affairs executive director John Roskam signalled his intention to run if Costello stood aside, after earlier testing the waters in Kooyong (see below). However, Peter van Onselen in The Australian reports that Costello has resolved to oppose Roskam due to equivocal comments he made to David Penberthy of The Punch about Costello’s future value in politics. Van Onselen further reports widespread displeasure at this and other remarks seen to be in breach of Liberal rules that preselection aspirations are not to be discussed with the media. Costello reportedly wishes for the seat to go to a former staffer, Kelly O’Dwyer. It had earlier been reported that O’Dwyer might depose incumbent Ted Baillieu loyalist Andrew McIntosh in the state seat of Kew. The other big name in the Higgins mix is Mal Brough, who has moved to Melbourne and is said to be hopeful of a return to politics that doesn’t involve further dirtying his hands in the morass of the Queensland Liberal National Party. However, Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald reports party sources say he has “no chance”. Also mentioned are former state party director Julian Sheezel, who was said to be backed by Costello but opposed by Michael Kroger when talk of Costello’s departure was in the air after the election, Jason Aldworth, a former banking colleague of Michael Kroger and more recently a consultant for Crosby Textor; and, intriguingly, Tom Elliott, hedge fund manager and son of John, who memorably sought to depose Roger Shipton as member for this very seat in pursuit of his prime ministerial ambitions.
• Merchant banker Josh Frydenberg has won the hotly contested preselection to succeed Petro Georgiou as the Liberal candidate for Kooyong. Andrew Landeryou at VexNews reports that Frydenberg won the second round ballot over industrial relations lawyer John Pesutto by 283 votes to 239 after all other contenders were excluded in the first round. The result is a defeat for Ted Baillieu, whose power base had pursued various stratagems designed to thwart Frydenberg, the preferred candidate of the rival Kroger faction.
• The ALP national executive’s role in Victorian state preselections has been further expanded following John Brumby’s decision to refer to the body all state upper house preselections for next year’s election. Labor insiders quoted by David Rood of The Age relate that the decision will “all but end” the career of Theo Theophanous, who faces a vigorously contested rape charge and was recently among those named adversely in the state Ombudsman’s report into Brimbank City Council. This week the national executive acted as expected in relation to a number of lower house preselections referred to it in the wake of the latter imbroglio, selecting former Trades Hall Council deputy secretary (and wife of New South Wales Senator Steve Hutchins) Natalie Sykes-Hutchins to replace George Seitz in Keilor and confirming incumbents Telmo Languiller, Rob Hulls, Marsha Thomson and Marlene Kairouz in Derrimut, Niddrie, Footscray and Kororoit. It has also been confirmed that Victorian Planning Minister Justin Madden will seek to move to the lower house by nominating for preselection in Essendon, to be vacated by the retiring Judy Maddigan. In his absence, the national executive has chosen incumbents Martin Pakula, Khalil Eideh and Bob Smith to head the ticket in Western Metropolitan (Smith currently represents South-Eastern Metropolitan).
• Helen Shardey, Victorian Shadow Health Minister and member for Caulfield, has indicated she will stand down at the next election. It had been reported she faced a preselection challenge from David Southwick, previously unsuccessful in the federal seat of Melbourne Ports in 2004 and for the state upper house Southern Metropolitan in 2006.
• Andrew Landeryou at VexNews reports that former Liberal MP Phil Barresi, whom he describes as a “factionally unenthusiastic Krogerite”, has been given the green light to attempt to recover the seat of Deakin which he held from 1996 until his defeat in 2007. Barresi reportedly won on the first round over eccentric perennial Ken Aldred, who was dumped in favour of Barresi in 1996 after peddling weird conspiracy theories, and one Deanna Ryall. Perhaps Barresi is encouraged by the precedent of 1984, when the Liberals unexpectedly recovered the seat (with some help from a redistribution) after losing it when the Hawke government was elected in 1983.
Elsewhere:
• Glenn Milne in The Australian reports on the Labor succession in the federal seat of Macquarie, which will be vacated at the next election by Bob Debus. As Milne tells it, Debus or his supporters put it about that his recent decision to withdraw from the ministry and bow out at the next election, which helped the Prime Minister no end as he sought to construct a new cabinet in the wake of Joel Fitzgibbon’s resignation, was conditional upon Debus being given the right to anoint his own successor. This was hotly disputed by Right powerbrokers who are bitterly opposed to Debus’s objective of freezing out industrial barrister Adam Searle, a Left faction colleague but personal rival.
• Two new goodies from Antony Green. An extensive paper for the New South Wales Parliamentary Library provides all manner of detail on the state’s Legislative Council election in 2007, while an accompanying blog post scrutinises the performance of the optional preferential above-the-line voting system introduced after the 1999 election produced a tablecloth-sized ballot paper and elected candidates from groupings that would be flattered by the “micro-party” designation. He further discusses the potential for such a system to resolve the issues which saw Steve Fielding elected to the Senate in 2004. For the more casual election enthusiast, a new 2010federal election calculator allows you set the two-party result to taste to find out the seat outcome in the event of a uniform swing. It turns out a 50-50 result would give the Coalition exactly half the seats and presumably allow it to govern with support of the three independents. Labor loses its majority at 50.8 per cent.
• Queensland independent MP Peter Wellington has introduced a private member’s bill providing for fixed three-year terms, with an escape clause if a new government cannot be formed in the wake of no-confidence motion and a provision allowing for a five-week postponement if there is a clash with a federal election or a “widespread natural disaster”. The major parties both support fixed four-year terms, which unlike Wellington’s proposal would require a referendum. Negotiations for such a referendum broke down last year when then Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg insisted on further unrelated reforms, but his successor John-Paul Langbroek has foreshadowed a more “flexible” approach in future discussions with the government.
• Christian Kerr of The Australian evaluates the Australian political blogosphere.
UPDATE: Thanks to Rebecca in comments for bringing my attention to the fact that Allison Ritchie, Labor member for the Tasmanian Legislative Council district of Pembroke, yesterday announced she would quit parliament after enduring a storm of controversy over her appointment of family members on her staff. This will presumably result in a by-election shortly in Pembroke, where Ritchie defeated an independent incumbent in 2001 and won re-election in 2007. The Electoral Act allows the government enormous latitude on the timing of such a by-election, so I’ll hold off on giving it its own post until its intentions become clearer. Ritchie claims to have been the victim of a plot from within her own party, which presumably explains why she has decided to go now rather than wait for the more convenient juncture of early next year, when a by-election could be held with the state election in March or the annual periodical upper house elections in May.
You missed the resignation of Tasmanian MLC Allison Ritchie over nepotism allegations, William.
Labour offers Costello to head the future fund
http://www.smh.com.au/national/labor-offers-costello-job-20090620-cs0k.html
Labor offers Costello job
Jessica Wright
June 21, 2009
FORMER treasurer Peter Costello will be offered a Federal Government job – the guardianship of the nation’s $60billion future fund he set up during his 11 years as treasurer.
Fitting in some ways, he finally gets to control something he created for once, if he accepts it. 😉
This is the line Rudd needs to keep pushing hard.
Yeah, I heard that bit about the fax number being obscured too. There was a couple of minutes argey-bargey about it.
But without having seen the actual email (are these available?) I can’t interpret Abetz’s comments about it presence on the page in context. One however would think that if it was printed on the page for all to see it would not be a blind “cc”.
As to Thomas send stuff to Swan’s fax (and that’s how it got into the reply field) I don’t see anything sinister in that.
Perhaps what was happening was that Thomas was sending his own emails to Swan as a “cc”. In his emails would be all the previous emails on the subject, including the ones from Grech, and Thomas was advising Grech formally of this fact.
However, this does not fit in with Grech doing the “Reply All”.
In a much earlier incarnation I was exposed to M. P. and Ministerial representations. And it appears to me that something here does not ring true.
An important part of such an exercise is to firstly solve the “problem” and secondly advise the MP/Minister of the result of their representation and prepare correspondence to be sent to the person making the representation via their representative.
In every case it was vital that a detailed record was maintained of all correspondence with ANYONE” involved especially an MP or Minister. This is not only true for the preparation of the “final report” but also to enable the Officer to prepare any “progress reports” if necessary.
In this case the Treasury Official involved has either been very sloppy in his record keeping or there was no document. This is especially true if the representation was coming from the PM or the actioning Officer’s own Minister- in this case both apply.
If there was a document and the Treasury Official did not file it then there is a great deal of doubt about everything he says or does for it indicates a lack of attention to detail and to the correct record keeping procedures that take up most of the time of any Public Servants. If I was this Officers manger I would be very concerned about his inability to carry out the most basic tasks expected by someone in his position.
It would also be expected of this type of Officer that he/she would clearly understand the importance of such a document and if only to cover ones own ars they would keep a copy secure for any future events that may arise.
However, to contemplate that an email from a Minister’s Office would be not be filed is incomprehensible. Such a document would be “folio 1” of the actioning file.
What the!
I thought they were the same person. Doh!
Turnbull already suffers in the electoral trustworthiness stake. I assume that Rudd and co will be pushing the above line very hard from now on.
Milne wears his tawdry personal agenda on his vomit stained sleeve. He should take note of, say, M. Roland Barthes before he writes any of his venemous tripe to help him realise the pitfalls of partisanship:
Okay, colour me totally confused now.
Anyone with a link to anything that confirms that the Queensland LA requires a referendum to alter the State Constitution.
Milne will have talked to Lewis. If Milne is not standing by Lewis’s story (as it were) then LEwis has admitted to Milne he can’t prove the email is genuine. So Milne is going for the consolation prize: Swan’s scalp.
Despite the discrepancies between Swan’s account of how he got cc’d in on the emails (by Grech hitting the “Reply All” button) and the account in the emails themselves (that Thomas was doing the forwarding) I still don’t see how Swan is not in the clear.
The meeting with Ford Credit was ostensibly about OzCar, not about Grant. Grant only came into it after the meeting was aranged (acording to Grech’s evidence). Grant was a second order issue. Swan was trying to get Ford Credit on-board OzCar. Naturally he would be very interested in the outcome, ASAP.
If Grech chose to take up more space in his report on the subject of Grant than of whether Ford would sign up for OzCar, then that was Grech’s assessment of the situation, not Swan’s (at least as far as the evidence goes).
Cruel, but fair.
I reckon it’s about time that all such utterances should be peceeded with the disclaimer: An unelected spokesperson who may, or may not, be influenced by commercial considerations, says:
Talk about what favours can be got from the lend of an old ute? What favours can be got from those who take the silver?
All too complicated, they would lose people in the first sentence. Really you would have to have a clear written instruction from Swan that said something inappropriate. No such thing exists. Something about what other people did doesn’t really work.
Ratsars
And if you do that for long enough you can emulate Hermes, the Jamaican bureaucrat in ‘Futurama” (in one of my favourite episides) and announce:
Hmm, peceeded should either be read as some sort of medical procedure, or if that affronts one’s sensibilities, then preceeded should be substituted.
Your choice. 😉
Flaneur -personally I’ll take ‘preceded’. Anything before a manual prostate test. 🙂
Thomas Paine
True. Too many links and assumptions necessary to hang Swan, same as last night. Too much time spent on Rudd. The email fake will also help Swan. While the Libs are busy climbing off the floor after the Rudd rug was pulled out from under, Swan has returned with a Howitzer.
I certainly did – apologies if I missed earlier discussion of this (which I see happened eight hours ago), which is news to me. This has sent me to the relevant section of the Tasmanian Electoral Act to see if a by-election is imminent in Pembroke, to which it seems the answer is, not necessarily. The rules run as follows:
– If the seat become vacant between January 1 and the date the writs are issued for the annual periodical elections in May, a by-election is held on that day (or not held at all if the seat itself is one of those due for election);
– Otherwise, the Governor must issue writs for a by-election within 40 days (allowing for a maximum 21 day nomination period and subsequent 30 day election period) UNLESS s/he extends the 40-day period by proclamation.
It seems to me that the government could theoretically use the last named clause to leave the seat vacant until the next periodic election in Pembroke is due in 2013, although I could well be missing something. Though no doubt that would not be a good move politically, not least because the seat is currently held by Labor.
Yeah, you’d have to think that’d be rather unlikely.
When was the last time there was a by-election for a Tas Legislative Council seat? I can’t think of an example in the last few years.
More plausibly, they could choose to save some money by holding it in conjunction with next year’s lower house election. However, that still leaves Pembroke without a member for an uncomfortably long time.
The Constitution Act Amendment Act 1934 requires that a referendum must be held to re-establish the Legislative Council (Section 3) or extend the term of the Legislative Assembly (Section 4). The remainder of the constitution can be amended normally.
William @ 20
What’s ‘normally’ in Qld’s case? Just a majority vote of the parliament?
Glen Milne
This is a lie. Grech said that he was left with the impression. He did not tell the enquiry that he was instructed to treat Grant as a special case. Did Milne even watch the senate enquiry, I’m beginning to doubt it.
I try to never read anything from News Ltd now days. And really you don’t need to.
Just think of an issue and you will pretty much know how the newspapers will deal with it and how each journo will deal with it.
You would have gotten ten times more out of reading this blog than reading News Ltd papers today.
Considering the particular organisation he works for, is anyone actually surprised?
William, have you worked out the problem with Saturday being caught in the spaminator ?
More plausibly, they could choose to save some money by holding it in conjunction with next year’s lower house election. However, that still leaves Pembroke without a member for an uncomfortably long time.
I doubt that Labor would think that wise. Leaving a seat without a member for eleven months after a member resigns, only two years into her term, amidst minor scandal – that’d be just asking for a high-profile independent to take an interest.
JV, I assume so. There may be some slightly more onerous requirement for some measures such as in WA, where Labor needed 18 votes in the 34-member Legislative Council to introduce one-vote one-value because an absolute majority was required, and the President had a casting vote he didn’t get to use because 17-16 in favour wasn’t technically a tie. I suspect not though.
This particular issue just demonstrates how much a lot of the print MSM is failing Australia (if it is even interested) and how well blogs can stack up against them on breaking issues, where both have access to the same data.
We went from thinking Rudd was in big trouble to quickly analysing the data that put grave doubts on the email evidence to quickly realising the email was probably faked and to having that confirmed and so forth. The right wing MSM wasn’t interested in that, it preferred to stick with the innuendo of the first position as long as it could. Or so it appears from people’s comments on how they were presenting it.
Thanks William.
Though, I suspect, this legislation could be over-ridden with “normal” legislation. Just like the Queensland Flag legislation, which was written into the Constitution via standard legislation.
Rebecca, the last LC by-election was in 1999, funnily enough in Pembroke. It was held on the same day as that year’s other periodical elections. There was a by-election at another time in Newdegate (now abolished) in 1997 when the member retired due to ill health.
Frank: yes, it was my fault for once, and as you can see it’s fixed.
In fact it is the necessity of many a News Ltd paper to find the Liberal party partisan line on all issues that puts them at a disadvantage to blogs. It is a straight jacket which means they are unable to fully work the data in analysis as it wont produce the conculsions or impressions they want. Blogs can and do deal with all the data, even if partisan the data still gets revealed and given a work over.
And if one pushes an unfavored position the other has to defend it.
Flaneur, the Constitution Act Amendment Act extends the requirement for alteration by referendum to itself. The sorts of questions you might be asking about this were raised in relation to WA Labor’s aforementioned attempt to implement one-vote one-value. They argued to the Supreme Court, and I believe also the High Court, that it wasn’t valid for a parliament to restrict the legislative power of a future parliament in this way. They also tried to pull a swiftie whereby they repealed the act and recreated all its provisions in a different act, arguing that the special amendment requirement didn’t say anything about repeal as distinct from amendment. They had no luck on either count.
If a simple vote of the Qld parliament can amend the constitution generally, then it would be easy for it to vote to repeal section 13 of its constitution (only one member per district), and replace it with a Hare-Clark PR system. Certainly easier than creating an upper house via referendum. 🙂
jaundiced view @ 13
Whatever decisions Public Servants make there are consequences of some form or other including legal and/or monetary consequence.
If a Public Servant (or anyone) cannot support their decisions they cannot do their job. This of cause means that no effective decision is or can be made nor can any decision be effectively reviewed without the supporting records.
This is true if you are the Permanent Head or the lowest grade clerk.
If you don’t keep records it can cost people their life savings, their homes, their rights in any area you care to name. Just think how you would feel if you asked for your Tax Return to be amended and all you got back was a letter saying “NO”, or on an FOI request and you just got a reply of NO. If a request to record the sale/purchase of you house resulted in a sheet of paper with NO on it.
Now these decisions may be correct but how does one know without the paper work behind them.
I am afraid that this requirement to maintain and keep the records not only applies to the Public Service but also to business and to individuals.
If one doesn’t it is at ones own peril. If you think that this is incorrect just remember the recent ruckus over SAS pay. The problem here was ineffective record keeping.
Another example of ineffective record keeping was the “whit board affair” when a Minister in the Keating Government did not keep records of the decision making process in respect of Government expenditure.
I remember a cartoon that was going around some years ago of a child sitting on a toilet/potty and the caption was ”the job is not completed until the paper work is done”.
Very appropriate I think in the current circumstances.
.
Well I’m gob smacked. Surely, us Queenslanders have a bit more nous than those western dwellers.
Okay, perhaps not.
While not wanting to reflect on the findings of the WA Supreme Court, nor the High Court, my understanding was that a principle of the Westminster system was that no parliament could restrict the prerogatives of future parliaments.
Given that precedent (term limits), couldn’t the current parliament alter the constitution to prevent anyone who, lets’s say, owns, or knowns someone who owns, white shoes to stand for election?
Of course, my obvious mistake is relating the Queensland parliament to the Westminster system. But surely, a parliament doesn’t need to resort to pulling a swiftie to undo what a previous parliament decreed?
I get the feeling there could be another Treasury person involved. A person who recently fed Grech a look at the manufactured email, and then took it away and destroyed it but giving the right people a copy of the text. Grech is now aware of the text so he can’t lie about it, but is confused about what is going on. The media know he now ‘knows’ so then contact him and so on.
anyway taking my tin hat to bed.
Thomas Paine
Not beyond possibility at all. Anyway, it will out, and fairly soon I’d say.
I’m off – night all.
Everyone please spare a thought for Iranian protesters who are being bashed and killed as I write this post.
Warning VERY GRAPHIC footage of a girl being murdered in the streets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1aPejT0izs&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fandrewsullivan.theatlantic.com%2F&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrdRwOlmIxI&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fandrewsullivan.theatlantic.com%2F&feature=player_embedded
If there was every any doubt, the actions of the Iranian regime prove once and for all that it is run by a pack of zealots and nutcases that want nothing more than to bring death and misery onto their populace.
Fortunately the Australian embassy is currently operating as a safe haven for injured protesters, because the hospitals are full of militia.
William, seems you missed yesterday’s QLD galaxy?
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25663339-421,00.html
What i’d like to know from Mr Bowe regarding this thread is why MHS in SA and the 17 of 22 Liberal MPs who want to oust him does not rate a mention.
Glen
You keep trotting out the nuclear solution…
While I have some serious concerns about the nuclear option, I am not against it in principle. What I am very concerned about is that people somehow have the strange idea that nuclear can be used as a last resort to save us from CO2. It can’t. It won’t.
I don’t think anything in the article (below) is actually news – except for the bit about the french concrete base cracks and welding cockups. The article does provide some succinct figures on nuclear construction now and until 2030. I suggest you might want to read it before you next throw out a line on nuclear power and CO2.
It is pretty clear that while nuclear power generators might contribute a percentage to the overall CO2 solution, they will not be anything like ‘the’ solution.
In fact, at the rate they are going, it might be some time before the existing ageing fleet of reactors are replaced, let lone significant additional overall capacity generated.
http://business.theage.com.au/business/nuclear-renaissance-hits-trouble-20090620-crxn.html?page=2
Does anyone stil remember this guy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Baldwin_(Australian_politician)
You, I think, are missing the ‘manner and form’ provisions that apply to state laws relating to the constitution, powers and procedure of state parliaments. These allow certain laws to be ‘doubly entrenched’, requiring future state parliaments to follow certain procedures in order to amend/repeal the laws.
So for instance, a state parliament can require certain laws to only be amended by special majorities, or after a referendum on the issue, as long as the amendment effected the ‘constitution, powers and procedure’ of the parliament.
This stems from a section in the Australia Act (previously the Colonial Laws (Validity) Act)) which provides that laws effecting the constitution, powers or procedure of a state parliament will be of no effect if they don’t follow the required ‘manner and form’.
Mirabella facing calls to quit over staffer scandal
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/19/2603178.htm
Sack her! She’s a blight on the Australian Parliament!
Parliaments can restrict future parliaments from enacting laws that effect the constitution, powers of procedure of the parliament by requiring that a certain process is followed in order for the law to have effect.
So, for instance, a state parliament could pass a law saying that for a voting system change to be made it will require a referendum of the people; or require a 60% majority in both houses of parliament. Then, if a future parliament wanted to enact PR (which would undoubtedly relate to the ‘constitution’ of the parliament) it would be required to follow the set out ‘manner and form’, that is they’d need to hold a referendum on the law or pass it with a 60% majority in both houses of parliament; otherwise the law would have no effect.
Yes, unless there is a law somewhere that sets out that a specific procedure must be followed in order to make laws in relation to who can stand for parliament.
States have plenary legislative powers to make laws for the ‘peace, order and good governance’ of the state and aren’t as restricted as the Commonwealth.
So Cosssssie is getting a job. I did tell you so:
Possible reward jobs for Cossssie being a good boy:
💡 Chairman of the new NBN company or the Ruddnet
💡 Chairman of ABC or the Ruddmedia
💡 Chairman of the new Ruddbank
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2009/06/15/newspoll-53-47-2/all-comments/#comment-289016
😎
Finns
Holds lighter (waterproof of course) in the air. I bow to your skill oh finned one.
bob1234 @ 42
Yes, I remember Peter Baldwin. Why do you ask?
WE really need a blog / website to just list limited news’ daily lies in brief concise detail, then publicise the website