Cutting the cord
Queensland’s election result was a vindication of Annastacia Palaszczuk’s decision to walk away from a toxic political relationship that would have otherwise destroyed her. By Nick Cater.
The stench of campus culture hung over Brisbane last week when Green activists dumped a pile of manure outside Parliament House and decorated it with pictures of Jackie Trad.
It wasn’t the only muckraking Labor’s former treasurer was forced to endure as she fought vainly to retain her seat of South Brisbane in the most rancorous contest of an otherwise civil election.
The manure stunt, together with a sexist and personal campaign of social media intimidation, was the behaviour of an injured party in a messy divorce.
Saturday’s result was a vindication of Annastacia Palaszczuk’s decision to walk away from a toxic political relationship that would have otherwise destroyed her.
The Greens’ success in winning at least two seats on Saturday was largely the product of the St Lucia effect, the spread of campus culture into suburbs an easy cycling commute from the University of Queensland.
Like the circles of wokeness around Parkville and Camperdown in Melbourne and Sydney, the effect becomes more pronounced at every election. The Greens expect to retain the seat of Maiwar, home to the St Lucia campus. It is next door to Cooper, once held by former LNP premier Campbell Newman, where the Greens have also polled strongly. South Brisbane sits on the opposite side of the river to St Lucia, a short pedal across Eleanor Schonell Bridge.
On Saturday, four out of 10 voters gave their first preference to the Greens in Maiwa. In booths like Toowong and Toowong South, the Greens received more than 50 per cent of first preferences. By contrast, the Greens received less than 10 per cent of the vote in Aspley South in the northern suburbs.
The 2016 Census paints a familiar picture of two suburbs, 27km apart, that might well be on different planets. Toowong is an inner-city enclave favoured by the young and highly educated (average age 29). Aspley has an older population of practical folk (average age 42) who are more likely to drive dump trucks for business than pleasure.
In Toowong, half of the adult population have a university degree. In Aspley, it’s around a quarter. It may depress you to learn that in Toowong, 15 per cent of adults under 35 possess a post-school qualification in either Society and Community or the Creative Arts.
Palaszczuk owes her success to her efforts to rank the views of people in Aspley above those of Toowong.
She has walked the path the federal Labor Party must follow if it is to recover from its humiliation in Queensland in May last year when it held onto just six seats.
The Queensland government’s approval of Adani’s Carmichael mine shortly before the start of the campaign recognised that Labor’s half-pregnancy was untenable.
In the bragging competition over emissions targets, Labor is always going to come second to the Greens, and the LNP had a better story to tell on jobs.
The great advantage for the Greens is that they will never find themselves running the joint, and so can pull their policies out of thin air, shaped around whatever Utopian thought bubble happens to come into their head.
Queensland, and indeed the rest of the country, should rejoice that these muddle-headed ideologues will not have their hands anywhere close to the levers of power for the next three years.
Labor is capable of doing enough damage on its own. While there is little room for optimism about Queensland’s immediate future, a clean Labor victory is surely preferable to a government in coalition with the Greens.
So Townsville won’t be getting the government-owned solar panel factory the Greens proposed to build, and Rockhampton won’t be getting its windmill factory.
These were to be paid for by jacking up royalties on coal and gas, two extractive industries the Greens would effectively close in their quest for zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
Queensland won’t be getting a state-run pharmaceutical company to develop and produce drugs the Greens claimed had been rejected as unprofitable by the major drug companies. That again is good news, since the surest way to make a marginal private enterprise even less profitable is to take it into public ownership.
The decision to vote Green, however, is seldom driven by a dispassionate assessment of national priorities and the strength of policy proposals. If we are honest, few votes for any party are cast that way.
It is more likely to be a tribal decision, signifying a shared identity and the presumption that they understand the world in clearer terms than those who came before them or the uneducated or misguided people who live in the sprawling suburbs on the other side of the M5.
Like Palaszczuk, wiser heads in federal Labor politics have shut off the siren call of the green left and their insistence on viewing everything through the prism of climate change.
The vanity emission reduction targets Bill Shorten took to the last election have been abandoned under Anthony Albanese who recognises the damage they caused to the party almost everywhere, but especially in Queensland.
On Friday, The Australian’s Greg Brown revealed that shadow cabinet had agreed on a pro-gas peace deal, embracing the position held ironically by both the Coalition Government and two key unions, the AWU and CFMEU. It is undeniably a move back to the centre, the place where Palaszczuk positioned herself as best as she could.
Yet it will be far harder to maintain this position at a federal level, where green ideology has become more deeply entwined.
News of the shadow cabinet pact provoked a strong reaction from the climate activists on the left of the party, who continue to believe that the party can prosper by holding the Coalition to account on climate policy.
The uncomfortable wedge that once divided the Government on climate policy has been passed to Labor, leaving Albanese perched on the horns of a dilemma.
Should he follow Palaszczuk’s centrist path he will suffer a degree of instability he may not survive. For a start, it would put him at odds with the green rank and file in his own electorate. If he doesn’t, on the other hand, he can abandon any hope of leading government.