Terry McCrann: Why Pauline and Clive are our saviours
There’s plenty that those still inside the “Canberra bubble” have failed to grasp. Without the minor parties, Australia would have been on the road to a Venezuelan future under Bill Shorten, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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Thank you, Clive. Thank you, Pauline. Thank you, Queensland. For saving yourselves and the rest of us from the utter lunacy of a Shorten-led Labor-Green “road to Venezuela” government.
But for Clive Palmer’s money and Pauline Hanson’s integrity, and their preferences in Queensland, Prime Minister Scott Morrison would have been joining Tony Abbott on the political scrapheap of history, rather than — as is the case, and good riddance — Bill Shorten.
To adapt that famous 1992 front-page headline from our British stablemate The Sun, after Conservative PM John Major’s similar shock election win, “It’s the Sunshine state wot won it”.
The simple undeniable maths is that but for Queensland, we would have been welcoming — for want of a better word — a Shorten-led government, and would have been on the road to a Venezuelan future.
Working off the state of play as of Sunday, the Coalition appears be heading towards winning 76 seats, Labor 69, and independents — all but one of them Left-leaning — six.
But take out the heavily lopsided Queensland numbers and it would have been: Coalition 53; Labor 63; and 5 (all Left-leaning) independents. That would have been a much clearer Labor-Left win than Morrison’s narrow victory.
Indeed, even if you further took out Victoria, which leaned, but not quite so lopsidedly, in the other direction from Queensland, Labor still won in the remaining states: Labor 41; Coalition 39; and 3 Left-leaning independents.
Obviously, this would change, but not meaningfully, if the Coalition did pick up an extra seat or two.
Equally, of course, it could still fall short of even the all-important 76.
It must await more detailed forensic analysis of the flow of Hanson and Palmer preferences to know exactly how many seats they delivered in Queensland. But with Hanson polling just shy of 9 per cent statewide and Palmer 3.5 per cent — plus Fraser Anning and assorted others on the Right adding 2 per cent plus — they clearly delivered a significant number.
To take one very significant example: Peter Dutton is winning his seat on a 53.7 per cent two-party preferred vote. In his seat, Palmer and Hanson got 7 per cent and Anning a further 1 per cent. He would not have won without their preferences.
The “still inside-the-bubble” Canberra media babble was nearly unanimous in ridiculing both Palmer’s “failure” and applauding it, on the basis that it would have been terrible if Palmer had succeeded in “buying a seat”.
In the process they managed to utterly miss not one but two big — and what should have been rather simple — points.
What do they think the mainstream parties are doing with the money they spend? Holding charity fetes?
Secondly, the media’s ideological and inside-bubble mindset makes it utterly incapable of understanding that Clive was effectively spending the $50-60 million on behalf of the Coalition.
He had as much an anti-Labor message as a pro-Palmer one.
What is impossible to measure is how many votes that pervasive messaging drove away from Labor and directly to the Coalition.
MORE: EVERY ELECTORATE WINNER IN VICTORIA
Palmer might have “only” polled 3.4 per cent nationally (although, think about it: that’s 10 per cent of the total Labor vote) — but he could well have saved Coalition seats outside Queensland, and particularly in Victoria, beyond his direct preferences.
Pauline is a phenomenon — in Queensland, obviously, where she’s polled 9 per cent of the state vote, and in Western Australia, where she’s polled 5 per cent.
She is clearly the strongest individual political brand in the land, and she has sustained that for a quarter of a century despite unrelenting abuse from across the “mainstream” political and media elites, so-called. And she has saved us from Shorten and, at least temporarily, Venezuela.
How the NBN has delivered just in time
The NBN has delivered, and it has done so in what can only be described as the ultimate — the hit-the-ground running immediate — stress test, rites Terry McCrann.
Sydney airport the wrong place at the wrong time
Sydney Airport has some of the sweetest acreage in Australia but when passengers numbers have dwindled from 9 million in the March quarter to 400,000 in the June quarter, that doesn’t count for much, writes Terry McCrann.