Anthony Albanese’s verdict on the Queensland election was unequivocal: “Steven Miles ran an effective and vigilant and courageous campaign … the outcome was much better for Queensland Labor than what was anticipated.”
Perhaps Albanese was relieved that it was not worse. Perhaps he was distracted by premonitions of the Qantas freebie scandal that was about to break over his head. But declaring that a 7 per cent primary vote swing against Labor was somehow a “magnificent loss” (echoing Billy Snedden in 1974) is just the latest sign that it’s the Prime Minister who’s losing it.
In a further self-congratulatory vein, the Prime Minister even tried to take credit for the Greens’ loss of one of their two seats to Labor because, he claimed, he’d successfully portrayed the Greens as “blockers” in Canberra.
In fact, Labor won back the seat of South Brisbane for just one reason: the Liberal National Party preferenced Labor ahead of the Greens. Had this not happened, the Greens would have won comfortably, given their clear first preference lead.
Further, the Greens held on to the seat of Maiwar only because Labor preferenced the Greens ahead of the LNP. Had Labor, which came third on first preferences, taken the same principled position as the LNP and put the Greens last, Maiwar would have fallen to the LNP and the Greens would have been wiped out in Queensland.
The Prime Minister may like to beat his chest about the Greens but it’s Labor’s parasitic relationship with them that keeps them alive, as well as the Greens delivering Labor the preferences it needs to hold power.
Until recently, the Coalition too, by preferencing Labor last as a general rule, helped the Greens.
Yet now that Peter Dutton has declared that the Coalition will always preference Labor ahead of the extremist Greens (a lead the new Queensland Premier decided to follow), it’s clear the Greens will survive only because Labor is in a de facto coalition with them.
This is the biggest lesson out of the Queensland election: that whatever cosmetic criticisms it may sometimes make of the Greens, Labor will never put the national interest in driving the Greens to the margins of our public life ahead of its own short-term political self-interest.
The Greens may have long abandoned conservation in favour of cultural Marxism, preferring Hamas to Israel, and forcing everyone to live like Amish only without God, but that won’t stop Labor preferencing extremists of the left over the mainstream party of the right. Far from Albanese being an opponent of the Greens in any effective way, it suits him to keep the Greens alive as political force.
The further lessons from Queensland are that almost nothing is too irresponsible for a desperate Labor government to promise if it thinks voters may be susceptible to electoral bribes, and that Labor will never let the facts get in the way of a confected scare campaign, especially over abortion.
Ex-premier Miles’s $1000 per household energy subsidy was a classic case of government putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound of its own making. Power bills are skyrocketing for one main reason: the green left’s emissions obsession makes opening new coal-fired power stations or extracting more gas almost impossible.
Yet replacing reliable 24/7 electricity from fossil fuels means a massive overbuild of intermittent renewable energy plus extra transmission lines that even federal Labor costed pre-election at $80bn. And that’s before the batteries, pumped hydro, diesel generators and extra gas “peakers” needed to try to ensure that the lights stay on in our homes (even as heavy industry goes offshore).
Forget the green left blaming higher power prices on overseas wars rather than domestic ideology because if that were the case power prices would be skyrocketing everywhere, rather than now being nearly twice as high here as in the US.
On top of this transparent electoral bribe there were 50c public transport fares, free lunches for all kids in government primary schools, whether they needed them or not, and 20 government-run service stations supposedly to stop fuel rip-offs. It was basically the government throwing money at every focus-group gripe.
Despite Jim Chalmers’ reassurances that there’ll be no vote buying from him, it’s a near certainty that federal Labor will “invest” past surpluses in what it will coyly call cost-of-living relief, given that it has no record to run on and no real plans for a second term and will want the election to be about the Coalition “taking away benefits”.
On post-election Sunday, Labor’s senior Queensland senator, Murray Watt, all but guaranteed a federal re-run of Labor’s abortion scare, which was itself a direct import from the Democrats’ weaponisation of this issue in the US.
The federal Opposition Leader needs to be ready for Labor claims that an incoming federal Coalition government would seek to roll back women’s rights based on recent moves to require treatment for babies born alive after late-term abortions, even though there is no clash between supporting a woman’s right to choose and supporting the rights of a newborn baby born alive to emergency care.
Almost inevitably, if Queensland is a guide, Labor will try to turn what should be a civil debate about how to deal with tragic situations into a test of whether political parties are pro or anti women.
In 2022, against a disappointing three-term Coalition government that had run out of puff, Albanese was able to coast into office claiming to represent “safe change”.
Having failed to deliver on the promises he made, such as the $275 per household a year cut to power bills, largely lost his mojo after the failure of his signature voice referendum and largely shed his “likeable westie” persona through indulgences such as the Qantas freebies and his clifftop mansion purchase, he will face a much more critical electorate.
Just as they’d given Scott Morrison the benefit of the doubt in 2019 but had changed their minds just three years later, come next March the Prime Minister could find that voters have well and truly turned.
With no first-term landslide margin to fall back on, even a modest shift could send this PM for Perks packing.
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