Bundambarama

A second by-election now looms in Queensland, in which One Nation may cause trouble in a traditionally Labor-voting working class seat. Elsewhere, Josh Frydenberg faces a contentious Section 44 challenge, and a Victorian Liberal aspirant regrets not paying his train fare.

At the top of the sidebar are links to guides I have up for three by-election campaigns currently in progress, including yesterday’s new addition:

• Queensland’s festival of democracy on March 28 looks set to receive a new attraction after Jo-Ann Miller’s announcement to parliament yesterday that she is resigning as member of the eastern Ipswich seat of Bundamba, effective immediately. After two decades as Labor member, Miller has grown increasingly estranged from her party over time, a particularly interesting manifestation of which was an appearance alongside Pauline Hanson on the campaign trail two days before the December 2017 state election. One Nation did not field a candidate against Miller in 2017, but has been quick to announce it has a candidate ready to go for the by-election, who will be announced on the weekend. Since Ipswich was the birthplace of the Hanson phenomenon, this could yet make the by-election more interesting than the 21.6% two-party margin suggests. Tony Moore of the Brisbane Times reports Steve Axe, Miller’s electorate officer, will contest the preselection, but Sarah Elks of The Australian reports the front runners are two candidates of the Left: Nick Thompson and Lance McCallum, who are respectively aligned with the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union and the Electrical Trades Union. I have a provisional by-election guide up and running which takes it for granted it will be held on March 28, though this is yet to be officially confirmed. Also on that day will be the Currumbin by-election and council elections, including for the big prizes of the Brisbane city council and lord mayoralty.

• Further on the by-election front, I had a paywalled piece in Crikey yesterday on the Greens preferences imbroglio in Johnston.

Legal matters:

• The Federal Court is hearing a Section 44 challenge against Josh Frydenberg relating to his Hungarian-born mother, which complainant Michael Staindl argues makes him a dual citizen. Frydenberg’s mother and her family fled the country in 1949 as its post-war communist regime tightened its grip on power, describing themselves as stateless on arrival in Australia. Staindl maintains that the whole family’s Hungarian citizenship rights were restored with the collapse of communism in 1949. Staindl is also pursuing defamation action against Scott Morrison over the latter’s claim that his action was motivated by anti-Semitism. The Australian ($) reports a decision is expected “within weeks”.

• In further legal obscurantism news, Emanuele Cicchiello has withdrawn from the race to fill Mary Wooldridge’s vacancy in the Victorian Legislative Council on the grounds that he once pleaded guilty to an offence carrying a prison term of more than five years – for improperly claiming a concessional train fare when he was 19. The Australian ($) reports that those remaining in the field are Asher Judah, former Property Council deputy director and Master Builders policy manager, and Matthew Bach, deputy director of Ivanhoe Girls Grammar.

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.

1,417 comments on “Bundambarama”

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  1. Whitehaven Coal profit slumps 91pc

    Whitehaven Coal has continued to pay a small dividend despite rising net debt and its weakest half year profit in four years.

    The $27.4 million half year net profit was 91 per cent lower than the $305.8 million generated in the same period of last year, as Whitehaven struggled with both controllable and uncontrollable factors.

    The profit was weaker than analysts had expected, and Whitehaven shares were more than 6 per cent lower in morning trade, continuing a slump that has seen the stock more than halve over the past 18 months.

    At Thursday’s levels, Whitehaven shares are testing their lowest levels since October 2016.

    The biggest contributor to the lower profit was sliding thermal coal prices; benchmark NSW thermal coal prices fell 44 per cent between the September quarter of 2018 and the final three months of 2019.

    Whitehaven sells both thermal coal and semi-soft coking coal, and its average received price in the half was about 31 per cent lower than at the same time last year.

  2. “Paul Bongiorno@PaulBongiorno
    ·
    4m
    Surely the penny is dropping for Australians. The myopic argument over costs left the nation with a second rate national broadband. The victory for a 3 year term impacts Australia for decades.”

    And there is a damn good point lizzie.

    The way things are going i think that the electorate, you know, the ones that the ALP has to win over to actually get into Govt and IMPLEMENT better policy that actually means something……..may not accept the Coalitions arguments on cost of action, and be far more receptive the the ALP position on the cost of inaction. After all, a very high proportion of the population got whacked squarley in the face with that this summer.

    And, while the Greens / ALP wars will continue on what to do and how fast to do it, on the costs of action / costs of inaction argument is one where the ALP and Greens can and should be firmly singing from the same song-sheet, that just makes sense.

    Yup, that brings up the Coalitions normal attack mode of ALP/Greens coalition govt ….oogga booga they are coming to make you wear recycled hair shirts and live in yurts and take all your $ in death taxes so BE AFRAID!!!

    They are going to do that anyway, as well as do every other bullshit scare campaign they have done before. The non-Coalition actors are just going to have to deal with that in the next election campaign as best they can. I think part of that will be to pull back from the really, very policy based campaign of 2019, and shift a bit more, at least, to a more negative campaign emphasizing Coalition , lies, corruption and inaction ….but backed by the policies we need.

    To achieve that, Greens and ALP cant be seen to being in bed with each other, but CAN go a bit easier on each other in public to achieve the objective of getting a change in Govt and having arguments later. Cause really, the ONLY way the Greens are going to get any of their positions into lasting policy is if the ALP forms a Govt where they have a reasonable majority in the HoR and rather than an outright majority (which is fantasy), a workable Senate composition.

  3. Peg
    Coal mining for steel production is likely to continue and on a smaller scale for energy use much like kerosene which was once the major energy source.

  4. ‘They are willing to tackle any issue head on, even if they are lying or wrong.’

    Er, that’s contradictory. If you’re willing to tackle an issue head on, then you don’t have to lie about it.

    And the Liberals don’t do what they say you do. Normally, what they do is promise exactly what Labor is promising, which most of us (the politically informed) know that they have absolutely no commitment to delivering, and then don’t deliver.

    They say what people want to hear. That’s not tackling issues, that’s avoiding them.

  5. So in order to win Labor needs to be more dishonest and more corrupt and offer Clive Palmer a better deal than the coalition?

  6. jenauthor @ #1144 Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 – 1:45 pm

    One thing that must be remembered — after an election, media tends to get policy amnesia and wipe the slate clean for oppositions especially.

    The electorate might forget. The media don’t. They just bide their time until they need a “gotcha”.

    And this is another thing Labor needs to learn – never apologize for anything you said or did in the past, even if you got something horrendously wrong. How often do you see the LNP doing that? Go on the attack instead!

    One reason the LNP get a much better response from the media than Labor does (ignoring for a moment any bias) is that the LNP makes better news. Even if it is only because the audience is so gobsmacked at their bare-faced cheek!

  7. peg

    ‘Anthony Albanese says coal mining could continue in Australia in a net zero emissions world..’

    …but you’ve been saying that coal mining would continue under a Green government, so why is this a Bad Thing?

    And if (big if, I admit) coal mining could continue and the world was at net zero emissions, why would that be a problem?

    The issue is moderating/winding back climate change, not getting rid of a particular industry.

  8. Roger
    Considering the mounting evidence there is nothing to lie about, just point to the Whitehaven Coal numbers or the published notes from Blackrock and others. The ALP problem is simple to explain as seen before the last election when AGL Energy released its results and stated the government was forcing up the cost of electricity, the ALP did not use it.

  9. Pegasus @ #1149 Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 – 1:49 pm

    Anthony Albanese says coal mining could continue in Australia in a net zero emissions world

    Yes, it could. But that means someone else has to have negative emissions to compensate – all just so we can pander to a few greedy mining billionaires.

    And who will be the ones who have to make the sacrifice? You already know the answer: it will be us!.

  10. I’m waiting for the first coal company to go under to prove that coal is history.If the banks wont back them then surely they are yesterdays news.

  11. zoomster @ #1156 Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 – 1:53 pm

    ‘They are willing to tackle any issue head on, even if they are lying or wrong.’

    Er, that’s contradictory. If you’re willing to tackle an issue head on, then you don’t have to lie about it.

    You are missing the point. How many times have you seen a Labor person interviewed where they get all defensive and try to avoid the issue because they don’t want to criticize their own colleagues, or some interest group or other (such as the unions). Gillard was a classic case.

    The LNP don’t do that (well, not much). If they can’t think of a response, they attack. If they don’t have the facts to hand, they just make them up. It takes time and effort to refute such lies, by which time the carnival has moved on. Abbott was a master at this. It was, in fact, his major (only!) talent – which became apparent after he won.

  12. steve davis
    Its already started with big name American coal miner Peabody Energy needing to go into chapter 11, it has since restructured. The banks wont just pull the plug but what the banks are doing is increasing investment in renewable energy and more sustainable businesses with global regulators releasing tighter and tighter rules which are tipping energy use towards the bludging renewables.

  13. I would say Labor is a 40 % chance of winning in 2022 and about 75% in 2025.

    What’s less clear can Labor develop a program for government which can see It through 2-3 terms of government.

    Turtle Bowen tried it for May 2019 but now they are running Away from any agenda – which is strange for a supposedly progressive party ?

  14. Player One:

    [‘And this is another thing Labor needs to learn – never apologize for anything you said or did in the past…’]

    Are you speaking from personal experience? I think the electorate appreciates a pollie admitting they’ve got this or that wrong – makes them almost appear normal.

  15. P1

    Yeah, pass on that. We don’t improve the polity by following the Liberals down that rabbit hole.

    Remember the last election? The media said quite blatantly “Yes, we knew the Liberals were lying about that, but we let them get away with it because of Mediscare.”

    If the media doesn’t call it out, the electorate doesn’t either.

    (The only exception I can think of is Victoria, where Ballieu pretended he was Labor lite to get elected and then proved he wasn’t. Even though the local media backed Napthine, he lost – because Victorians have got “Liberals lie” fairly embedded in their psyche after Kennett. If Ballieu had delivered, he’d still be there….)

  16. Mavis @ #1167 Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 – 2:05 pm

    Player One:

    [‘And this is another thing Labor needs to learn – never apologize for anything you said or did in the past…’]

    Are you speaking from personal experience?

    Yes. But irrelevant.

    I think the electorate appreciates a pollie admitting they’ve got this or that wrong – makes them almost appear normal.

    Yes, they do, and yes it does. But it also makes them losers.

    Typo: “yes”, not “yet”.

  17. When people look back at Speers career they will mark the start of the decline as being when he lost Bushfire Bill on Pollbludger. Mark my words !

    Just the kind of useless, spiteful comment you’d expect from someone who’s contributed nothing to this blog in the entire time he’s been snarking here from the sidelines.

    Speers never “had” me. You could only watch him on Sky News mostly, and I gave up my subscription to that cancer on the Mediascape 15 years ago, even while some of the Lefty tragics here were bleating about holding onto theirs… because they couldn’t give up their sport.

    Millions more have left Fox over the years, so I’m nothing special in that regard. But at least I did it. I doubt whether the sneering Lars could comprehend why.

    I was hoping for something different from the new broom at Insiders. I have been disappointed, as it’s plain others have been, both here and elsewhere.

    What are the lessons of the drought, the fires, the mass deaths, the coral bleaching, the rape of our rivers – all from the past 6 months – if those who claim “insider” knowledge, understanding and savvy, can rattle on about costings, party room factions and cosmetic appearances as if nothing has happened, or changed?

    The way Morrison spoke yesterday, reviving his old “Kill Bill” mantra, was as if he’d won the election in a landslide. The reality is that no-one was as surprised as his own party, given the way they looted the Treasury before their expected loss.

    In reality he was talking to a few thousand coal mining employees, not the nation. He was speaking as if Labor got no votes at all, and he knew why. Well, I give him 5 points for chutzpah. But none for comprehension.

    Yet the Insiders went along with it. Sure Kenny and Karvelas put up a bit of a fight, a mild caveat here or there, but they were given the interruption-disruption treatment by Speers too, if they strayed too far from the Groundhog Day of “Where are the costings?”

    Speers didn’t listen to a thing Albanese said, didn’t even consider he might have had a point in saying we can’t afford NOT to start action. He brushed all of it aside in an attempt to make himself the subject of the interview, and ended up producing 10 minutes of television that imparted no information, and of which only about 25% could even be heard properly above the constant rude interruptions.

    He played a foreign TV interview at the end where the interviewer and his guest were shouting at each other. He played it for a laugh.

    But it was so close to what we’d just seen him do, it was embarrassing to watch.

    This Speers bloke just doesn’t get it.

  18. zoomster @ #1169 Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 – 2:07 pm

    P1

    Yeah, pass on that. We don’t improve the polity by following the Liberals down that rabbit hole.

    Remember the last election? The media said quite blatantly “Yes, we knew the Liberals were lying about that, but we let them get away with it because of Mediscare.”

    If the media doesn’t call it out, the electorate doesn’t either.

    (The only exception I can think of is Victoria, where Ballieu pretended he was Labor lite to get elected and then proved he wasn’t. Even though the local media backed Napthine, he lost – because Victorians have got “Liberals lie” fairly embedded in their psyche after Kennett. If Ballieu had delivered, he’d still be there….)

    You are actually confirming what I am saying, although you apparently don’t realize it.

    You just don’t yet want to win badly enough to learn from it.

  19. Peg,

    I’m convinced Labor are stuck in a time loop fighting the Labor factional wars of 1989-90, over, and over and over.

    The targets of Labor hate have shifted from the evil ACF, TWS, Greenpeace and “extremist” environmentalists in 1989-90 to “extremist” Greens in 2020.

    Otherwise the list of grievances hasn’t changed in the slightest: Labor has been ignoring the traditional Blue Collar Voter – they need policies to win them back, Greenies want to send us back to the caves, Greenies want to wreck the economy, Greenies hate farmers and miners, We need to attack the Greenies to win back working class voters…

    Here is one example from November 1989 in the lead up to the 1990 Election…
    https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/120857334

    Mr Kerin said yesterday the development debate had been reduced to “bush walkers’ rights versus industry rights”, and that environmental movements in other countries had created trade problems for Australia.

    :::

    Mr Kerin is regarded as one of a group
    of economic rationalists within Cabinet, and he said yesterday that while all Cabinet decisions were unanimous, there were some “differences of emphasis” in different areas.

    However, he admitted he was not a close colleague of Senator Richardson, who he did not see terribly often. He said, “We are both very busy, quite honestly. He wanders around the country bagging the miners and the farmers and all the rest of it.”

    :::

    Prominent leaders of the environment movement criticised Mr Kerin yesterday, with the president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Peter Garrett, saying Mr Kerin’s statements sounded like a case of sour grapes, with the Minister apparently prompted by increasing pressure from the mining lobby.

    “[For Mr Kerin] to accuse environmentalists of wanting to go back to the caves, accusing us of being some sort of hyper-surreal religious sect who is more interested in hugging trees than the progress of the country, is a complete fallacy and absolutely misrepresents our position,” Mr Garrett said.

    Jack Mundy, the convener of a new left political party with an emphasis on environmentalism, said it was wrong of Mr Kerin “to pose environmentalism versus the economy as though one has to be more in front”.

    “Just posing the environment movement as being negative and having an attitude of stop, stop, stop is absolutely wrong,” Mr Mundy said.

  20. Player One:

    [‘And this is another thing Labor needs to learn – never apologize for anything you said or did in the past…’]

    Are you speaking from personal experience?

    [‘Yes. But irrelevant.’]

    One admires your candidness. It’s hardly irrelevant though, as it goes to your bona fides. Anyway, off to the club to watch Tyson Fury v Deontay Wilder.

  21. P1

    I know what you’re saying, and I don’t think going down the Trump/Morrison/Johnson road is worth it. For starters, it just ends up with Trump/Morrison/Johnson in charge. They might be disguised as Labor, but they won’t be the real thing, and I doubt any commitment they made to anything would get us anywhere we want to be.

    We do want politicians with some respect for truth, because we do want them to listen to the experts. If lying is normalised because lying makes you a winner, then politicians will view anyone who has become an expert as exactly the same.

    Apparently the quite reasonable suggestion that people get behind Labor, flawed as it is, and put all the pressure on the government, which can actually act, is too ridiculous to contemplate.

    You seem obsessed with winning at any cost. There’s more to life than that, and there are potential paths to true victory (serious action on climate change) which don’t need it to happen. It just seems the best bet we’ve got atm.

    But I repeat: If Labor remakes itself in the image of the Liberals, by deliberately and consistently lying, whatever policy they put up would be pointless, but no one would trust them to deliver. We’ve seen the different ways a lying Liberal and a lying Labor MP are treated, which is why Labor types parse their words and the Liberals don’t.

  22. PeeBee @ #1176 Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 – 2:18 pm

    P1’So you think Labor is a minor party?

    Didn’t say that.

    I said you spend a lot of your time slagging Labor.

    It seems that way to you because you are sensitive to criticism. It seems to escape some people here that I also criticize the LNP and the Greens.

    But perhaps I do spend more time criticizing Labor than the others. And perhaps that’s because I still have hope for them.

  23. Everyone agrees thermal coal is on the way out.

    So, logically, the Labor party should thus purge all OTIS group members and preselect genuine progressives instead.

  24. Also, given Labor says they’re the party for the worker, they should disassociate from the SDA who’ve neglected their members for many years.

  25. P1: ‘It seems that way to you because you are sensitive to criticism. It seems to escape some people here that I also criticize the LNP and the Greens.’

    I don’t read all posts so could easily have missed them.

    Funny thing is, although I skip many posts, the ones of yours I read seem to slag Labor.

    What are the chances of that?

  26. zoomster @ #1181 Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 – 2:23 pm

    Apparently the quite reasonable suggestion that people get behind Labor, flawed as it is, and put all the pressure on the government, which can actually act, is too ridiculous to contemplate.

    So, when you and the other Labor partisans here bleated that “you can’t do anything until you are in government” and I said “of course you can” …. I was actually correct?

    Thanks.

    You seem obsessed with winning at any cost.

    And you don’t seem to want to win enough to ever do so.

    There’s more to life than that, and there are potential paths to true victory (serious action on climate change) which don’t need it to happen. It just seems the best bet we’ve got atm.

    So, when I said this … and was criticized for it … I was actually correct again?

    Thanks.

    But I repeat: If Labor remakes itself in the image of the Liberals, by deliberately and consistently lying, whatever policy they put up would be pointless, but no one would trust them to deliver. We’ve seen the different ways a lying Liberal and a lying Labor MP are treated, which is why Labor types parse their words and the Liberals don’t.

    When did I say Labor should become an image of the Liberals? I said Labor could learn how to win an election from them. I was asked for examples, so I gave some. Some of them just amount to “be more media savvy”. If you don’t like my suggestions, by all means don’t adopt them. Just be prepared to lose again.

  27. It’s also funny how the parasites are seeing the complaints over Speers’s interview this morning being about how Albanese was treated. What they don’t realise or understand, because climate change is just politics to them, is the the problem with the interview was the treatment of climate change as a political issue rather than a global existential issue.

  28. PeeBee @ #1188 Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 – 2:34 pm

    Funny thing is, although I skip many posts, the ones of yours I read seem to slag Labor.

    What are the chances of that?

    And what are the chances of you only noticing and commenting on the ones you don’t like?

    But by all means skip more. Skip them all, in fact. You don’t contribute much to the actual substance of the debate anyway.

  29. Player One @ #1134 Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 – 2:39 pm

    Rex Douglas @ #1185 Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 – 2:28 pm

    Everyone agrees thermal coal is on the way out.

    Coal would already be pretty well finished if it had no subsidies. As it is, coal is still quite a profitable industry, even with low coal prices.

    In a policy sense, it will be interesting to see how much taxpayer monies the OTIS group can lock in to prop up their thermal coal interests for as long as possible…

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