Opinion: Queensland voters saw through and rejected ‘shifty Shorten’
There is now a strong argument Queenslanders are much more politically astute than Victorians, a state dominated by hipster baristas who prefer socialism over aspiration, writes Peter Gleeson.
Opinion
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HOW good is Queensland?
With those words, Prime Minister Scott Morrison gave truth to the words of former Labor lion Peter Beattie, who coined Queensland the Smart State during his term as Premier.
What Australia doesn’t get about Queensland
One word that sums up Labor’s election disaster in Queensland
Tanya Plibersek’s disastrous comment that cost Labor Queensland
There is now a strong argument Queenslanders are much more politically astute than Victorians, a state dominated by hipster baristas who prefer socialism over aspiration.
It took the forward-thinking Queenslander to see through Bill Shorten’s smoke and mirrors. And for the first time in years, the Queensland Labor Party was out-muscled and outperformed during the federal election, gifting the keys to The Lodge to Scott Morrison.
Because of their arrogance and sense of entitlement, Labor dropped the ball, especially in Queensland. A series of gaffes by Shorten, which exposed his trickiness, was all it took for Queenslanders to work him out.
The “sophisticated’’ left wing commentariat in the southern states didn’t count on one thing – Queenslanders have fantastic bulldust radars. They came to the conclusion pretty quickly that Bill Shorten was not only shifty and untrustworthy, but he would not be governing with Queensland in his best interests. After all this was the man who told the people of Batman in Melbourne he was anti-coal and yet when asked the same question in Central Queensland, professed his support for the resources industry.
SHIFTY GOES DOWN A GEAR
This was the same bloke who told a $250,000-a-year Gladstone port worker that he’d look at his tax rate, even though his policies were going to claw an extra $10,000 in taxes from his wallet.
To compound the mistake, some genius at the Port Authority then had his company sack the worker for the embarrassing incident, confirming to voters that there was someone fishy about Shifty Shorten.
And while the anti-Adani message hurt the Labor vote in seats like Herbert, Capricornia, Flynn and Dawson, it doesn’t explain the extraordinary swings against Labor in seats like Longman, Forde, Petrie and Dickson.
But the word “gift’’ brought them undone. When self-funded retirees kept hearing Shorten talking about their franking credits tax refund as a “gift’’, it sparked white hot anger. These are people who have worked hard all their lives to manage their own superannuation fund – taking the burden off the welfare system – only to be told that in retirement the fiscal goalposts were going to change.
That money was often used on a holiday, the local golf club fee or for birthday and Christmas presents for the kids and grandkids.
HARD GRAFT NO GIFT
It’s not a gift. It’s a well deserved tax concession. Cleverly and consistently, Morrison rammed home this point that Shorten was coming after retirees. The same applied to the negative gearing and capital gains tax policies of Labor. Even after Shorten accused Morrison of getting too close to him during a debate – “you’re a classic space invader’’ – Morrison said the only space Shorten would be invading is your wallet.
It was on message and it cut through. Labor on the other hand, through hubris and arrogance, thought they were home and hosed and didn’t have the killer instinct of previous campaigns. By contrast, the LNP ran a Labor-like campaign, disciplined and targeted. They attacked Labor’s weaknesses on high tax and ripping off self-funded retirees. In the biggest irony of the campaign, the LNP learned from Labor’s 2016 Mediscare attack ads that negative messaging works. It was as if Shorten gave the LNP the template.
ROAD TRIP UP
On Adani, the other “gift’’ was the Bob Brown convoy that rattled through Central Queensland two weeks out from the poll.
The presence of mostly socialist teachers and professional agitators in the large convoy triggered a high-vis revolution.
People in the towns of Mackay, Gladstone, Rockhampton and Townsville reacted angrily to southern blow-ins coming to their towns pushing them around.
Again, these southern try-hards don’t understand us. Queenslanders have an indomitable spirit. There are no flies on us. We can stand on our own two feet and when a convoy of unkempt freeloaders rolls into town, effectively urging politicians to close down coal mines, they decided to vent their anger at the ballot box.
Take the seat of Dawson, where Nationals MP George Christensen was the incumbent. Christensen had been dogged with front page stories in the southern press, calling him the Member for Manila, because he’d spent so much time in the Philippines with his fiancee. The locals didn’t give a fig. Christensen said nobody had raised it with him in Mackay and he now holds the seat with a margin of more than 15 per cent.
LABOR’S ADANI SANDWICH
As much as Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk wants to deny that Adani played a role in the election outcome in Queensland, the reality is that she has no hope of winning the next election unless she approves Adani. To suggest otherwise is pure fantasy.
Adani has become the totemic national issue for the Greens and it for the Greens, which paints her and the Left of the Labor Party into a corner.
Does she approve it so that she can give herself a shot at winning in October next year, or does she pander to the Greens and the Left and keep it on hold, thus appeasing the socialists, easing the prospect of a challenge by her deputy, Left leader Jackie Trad?
Either path is a dung sandwich. As former Labor Cabinet supremo Bob Gibbs said, the level of incompetence by the Labor Party on Adani by the Palaszczuk Government is disgraceful. It may be a mute point. Nervous Labor state MPs in the regions are readying to take matters into their own hands.
ADANI MINE HAS LABOR LEADERSHIP IN DEATH SQUEEZE
LABOR has a leadership conundrum, especially in Queensland. Tanya Plibersek, who yesterday pulled out of the leadership race, wasn’t the answer. Her anti-Adani comments wouldn’t have helped Labor’s cause in Queensland. So too Chris Bowen. He will regret forever saying on the retiree tax “if you don’t like it don’t vote for us’’.
Anthony Albanese is the more personable but he’s also from an inner-city Sydney seat with a high Greens vote. Patching up the Adani problem will not play out well in his local electorate. Jim Chalmers (right) is from Queensland and is young and represents a generational change. But he’s a Wayne Swan protege and we all know how his economic recklessness worked out for Australia.
Whichever way they go, it will end in tears at some point. And before Labor wastes time and money on investigations into what went wrong, here’s a tip. If you’d simply read the coverage in The Courier-Mail/Sunday Mail and papers like the Townsville Bulletin and Cairns Post, and if you’d watched the live debates I hosted from marginal seats on Sky, you would have understood why Queenslanders deserted. Labor. While Labor was betraying blue collar workers and pandering to the arrogance of inner-city lefties it was confecting a false class war.
Queenslanders wondered why the party was sneering at aspiration and lumping them – nurses, tradies, coppers, mine workers – in with the top end of town.
When I visited Gladstone, Rockhampton, Mackay and Gladstone for forums, the mood was palpable. Shorten was about as popular as NSW blue in Caxton St on Origin night. The Courier-Mail did face-to-face interviews with 1000 Queenslanders from Cairns to Coolangatta and the reception for Labor’s policies were less than enthusiastic. We called out Bob Brown’s convoy for what it was.
Instead of listening to what its heartland was saying, Labor gave them a middle finger. Instead of reading what The Courier-Mail and Sky News was saying, they decided to shoot the messenger.
Queensland is still full of people who believe if they work hard they should be rewarded, not punished. They want governments to keep out of their lives as much as possible.
Twitter pipes clogged with Lefty sewage
OVER the past 12 months, I’ve conducted a social experiment into people’s behaviour on the social media platform Twitter and the results are bizarre and even a little frightening.
To put it mildly, Twitter is not the real world and that was demonstrated on Saturday night with the electoral thrashing of Labor.
If you’d observed Twitter like I had over the past 12 months, you’d have come to the conclusion that Scott Morrison was the antichrist and that Bill Shorten was the messiah who would single-handedly solve global warming, the refugee crisis, gender equality and right the welfare wrongs – all within 48 hours of taking office.
It is an echo chamber for left-wingers to pat each other on the back, an orgy of self-flagellation where dumbed-down followers “like’’ their posts and comment on how clever they are.
The sewer-like ideology of the cheerleaders-in-chief for the Left is fostered and encouraged by their left-wing media mates.
These people are entitled to their opinion, albeit their jaundiced view of the world has been wholeheartedly rejected by Aussie voters who are much smarter than them.
The problem, of course, is that anybody who has a contrary view to their opinion is bullied, harangued, called out and personally attacked.
It’s the ultimate form of intolerance. Oh the irony. Intolerance from those who preach tolerance. Turning a blind eye to high-profile sexual assault cases when they champion the #MeToo movement. The ultimate hypocrites.
Their obsessive and personal attacks know no bounds. Egged on by their ardent “followers”, many of whom have the IQ of a can of Coke.
If you’re a conservative TV broadcaster or News Corp columnist, and I’m both, you’ll be called everything from scum, to maggot, to f---wit. Even dying in fiery car crashes is a fate that one bloke would bestow upon me.
So along with my good mate and Sky colleague Chris Kenny, I’ve pulled the pin on Twitter. I had a lot of fun Saturday night, letting my many detractors know that it was a conservative government that had won the election. They were strangely silent.
It’s a cowardly sewer of mostly washed-up angry people who frankly need to look at the glass half-full, rather than the glass half-empty.
Of course, when that glass is constantly being drained, no wonder the quality of the tweets deteriorates as the night gets longer.
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