On the last Saturday in January, the people of Queensland kicked out a conservative government, led by former army officer and lord mayor of Brisbane, Campbell Newman.
The result astonished everyone, including the Queensland state Labor party.
On the eve of the vote, as I called my friends in the party around the Sunshine State, known for its Big Pineapple and Great Barrier Reef, and even with primary vote polling predicting a dead heat, they were only expecting we would win 25 of the 45 seats we would need to form government.
The Queensland legislative assembly has 89 seats, and, after 23 years of Labor government (1989-2012), Newman’s Liberal National party had been governing with the alarming arrogance of a party with a preposterous 78 seats to Labor’s seven.
On 13 February, the result was declared and Annastacia Palaszczuk formed government with 44 seats, and the support of long-serving (since 1998) independent Peter Wellington.
The Newman government was notable for its ideological arrogance, even by the standards of contemporary small-government conservatives. It had sacked 24,000 public servants, many living in Newman’s own seat in the state capital, Brisbane (which he later lost with a 10.5 swing against him). It had lifted spending caps on confidential donations, resulting in an enormous war-chest funded by property developers and mining magnates.
Newman’s very young attorney-general and justice minister (now 33) Jarrod Bleijie courted criticism for leaking details of private conversations with the state’s jurists to the media. He introduced draconian anti-assembly laws giving police powers to prevent motorcycle gangs from congregating which, while popular, were condemned by civil libertarians. The appointment of an inexperienced chief justice to the state’s supreme court was described as ‘the most controversial judicial appointment in the nation’s history’.
The LNP government ran on a platform of privatising the state’s electricity transmission networks, with Tony Abbott’s federal government offering a sweetener incentive of 15 per cent of the sale price. But voters were concerned with the experience of other states that had seen maintenance decline, customer complaints increase, and prices rise since their grid had been sold. All in all, although the LNP government was about as bad as you get, these two swings – to the LNP in 2012, and back to Labor in 2015 – may be further evidence of a interesting pattern emerging in Australian politics. Australia is experiencing political volatility on a scale previously unseen. The sheer size of the changes in such a short period of time presents a great opportunity and threat for Labor.
It was once believed that governments in Australia are never thrown out after just one term. Yet the people of Victoria (southern east coast – think Melbourne and neighbours) and Queensland have done that in the past year. On current polling the federal government of Abbott is also heading off a cliff after one term.
Labor is on the ascendancy here. But this new, increasingly politically volatile, environment will mean we will need to be on our game to make sure we are not quickly tossed out like our political rivals.
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Sam Dastyari is a member of the Australian senate
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