Beleaguered Bligh braces for battle

THE most recent Newspoll suggests Queensland voters are ready for change.  

111219 anna

IT'S been one of those days for Anna Bligh: more questions about Queensland Health and its latest atrocity with a grants officer who was allegedly sticky fingered; opposition sniping at the pay deal she cut to keep visiting hospital specialists at work; and, to top it off, she is trying to clear her in-tray to go on leave.

You would think the Queensland Premier couldn't wait for this year to end. But, perverse as it may sound, with today's Newspoll affirming that her ageing and indifferently performing Labor government is heading for a hiding at the state election expected early next year, Bligh is travelling better than she was 12 months ago.

Her satisfaction rating with voters is stable, while that of her opponent, Campbell Newman, is down, and the ALP has clawed back some of the monster lead opened up by the Liberal National Party under his nine-month-old leadership.

Predictions the race would tighten seem to have been borne out by this important Newspoll.

Of course, we shouldn't get too carried away. The survey was largely taken before the exposure of the alleged $16 million embezzlement scandal involving Queensland Health grants officer Joel Barlow, who is currently in custody after being charged with stealing $11m from Queensland Health. Given the grief the department has caused Bligh through the years, this in itself may slam the breaks on any political recovery.

Assuming the slight shift back to Labor withstands the negative publicity generated over Barlow, Newspoll still points to a big win for the LNP, which has 56 per cent of the vote after preferences, against 44 per cent for the ALP.

Labor would lose at least half of its existing 51 state seats in Queensland and Newman would be sitting pretty in the big corner office at the top the state Executive Building that has been Bligh's since 2007, when she was handed the reins by Peter Beattie.

"No doubt, things don't look good," she tells The Australian before publication of the year-end Newspoll. "But I . . . never think that your opponent is unbeatable. I do think there is quite a lot left to play in this, and I intend to give it absolutely everything."

The wonder of it is that she has got this far. When we spoke at this time last year, Bligh's leadership was in deep trouble. The government was desperately trying to sell to voters its fiscally responsible, but electorally poisonous, assets sale program involving state-owned ports, road toll and forestry businesses and the freight and coal-hauling arms of Queensland Rail. Few were listening. Opinion polls showed the electorate was inclined to believe opposition that she had lied her way to victory at the 2009 election by denying, ahead of polling day, that Labor had privatisations in mind.

That wasn't Bligh's only problem. A catch-up on long-delayed infrastructure development had helped plunge the state budget deep into debt and, when the global financial crisis hit, Queensland lost its cherished AAA credit rating. Tourism slumped, along with Brisbane's previously supercharged property market.

And, yes, Queensland Health did its bit, too: a new, computerised payroll system went awry and thousands of doctors, nurses and other hospital workers were underpaid week after week. The mess cost hundreds of millions of dollars to sort out.

Such was the instability through 2009-10 that a first-term MP and neophyte minister Cameron Dick was touted as a possible replacement for Bligh. Her cabinet remained solid but there was unease on the Labor backbench.

As she eased into the Christmas break last year, Newspoll showed two-thirds of voters were dissatisfied with the job she was doing, dwarfing the 24 per cent who approved of it. The talk of the Queensland ALP was how long into 2011 Bligh would last.

The events from January 10 onwards put paid to that, however. Ironically, they were also the political making of then Brisbane lord mayor Newman, as both came to the fore during the southeast Queensland flood crisis.

Looking back now, Bligh doesn't dispute this was the turning point for her. She became the big sister of Queenslanders and her talk of being a fighter began to resonate when 22 people died in the walls of water that engulfed Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley, Ipswich and Brisbane flooded, and then, in February, north Queensland was struck by tropical cyclone Yasi.

" I certainly acknowledge and accept that the floods and cyclones . . . were an opportunity for me to demonstrate my capabilities as a leader," Bligh says carefully, conscious to avoid being seen to have capitalised on such misery.

"And those opportunities come along, usually in the most unpredictable of circumstances, and they are the challenges that are thrown your way in a position of leadership and you either rise to the challenge or the challenge overwhelms you.

" I think people did get a chance to see something more of my capabilities than they have seen in the past, and that's . . . a good thing. But I am very mindful that there are many, many issues that people will take into account when ultimately they decide how to vote."

Bligh recorded the biggest turnaround in the history of Newspoll in The Australian, pushing Labor's base vote from a disastrous 26 per cent to 38 per cent, shading the LNP for the first time since 2009.

Then, abruptly, the seesaw tilted back when the conservatives switched leaders from buttery John-Paul Langbroek to Newman, who had set his sights on becoming premier from outside parliament. The September quarter Newspoll, the one preceding today's, had the LNP leading by a landslide-inducing 61 per cent of the two-party preferred vote to Labor's 39 per cent. The Premier acknowledges a sixth successive term for the Beattie-Bligh governments would be a big ask in any circumstances, let alone those she faces.

While coal and coal-seam gas development is going great guns in Queensland, as is agriculture in parts, tourism and retailing remain in a funk. Brisbane residential property values have the dubious distinction of falling further than in any other capital.

"I do sense a mood for change," she admits, settling deeper into the office couch. "I do think that. There are electoral cycles and people do develop a mood for change. But I don't think they will change just to anything. And I think they have still got a lot of Campbell Newman to see before they get to the ballot box."

Wayne Goss, who offered Bligh a seat in cabinet as soon as she was elected to state parliament in 1995, which she wisely declined before his Labor government imploded, famously described how voters were "sitting on their verandas with baseballs bats" waiting for Paul Keating to come along at the next federal election.

Could this apply to Bligh given Julia Gillard's unpopularity in Queensland? Might she take a proxy belting for a Prime Minister who knifed the home-town boy, Kevin Rudd, to get the job?

"I don't think it helps," Bligh says of federal Labor's travails. "(But) I take responsibility for what happens in the state election, and I think it's my job to make sure that people go to the ballot box understanding the state issues, understanding the strengths of my team, the policies that I think we have that are better than the LNP, and the big ideas that I have for Queensland."

Pressed on whether Rudd's overthrow by federal Labor was a mistake -- after all, as ALP national president she did tut-tut over the "NSW disease" of switching leaders -- Bligh professes that hindsight has its limits. "The reality is federal caucus made a decision," she says, adding Gillard has subsequently made some very courageous decisions, especially on pricing carbon.

She rejects the proposition that Labor, state and federally, has an image problem. Those who speak of the ALP "brand" being on the nose with voters should know better, Bligh harrumphs.

"One of the frustrations I have about modern political analysis is . . . the idea that Labor is a brand. Labor is the oldest political party in Australia," she says.

"Labor is the progressive force that has changed this country for the better in every circumstance of government . . . and, like every political party, do we have our ups and downs? Yes we do.

"But I think that anyone who is writing off the Labor Party had better know their history. We are a party that knows how to go through tough times, to re-emerge stronger, and we (are still) the party of big ideas in government."

Which brings us back to Newman. Bligh is adamant he is not up to the job of premier. She makes no apology for playing the man, saying unlike Langbroek and the LNP leader she took on in 2009, Lawrence Springborg, Newman has a record at Brisbane City Hall on which he can be held to account.

Her job, she says, is to "make sure people understand that while he might have a lot of rhetoric, when you actually examine it, it's very hard . . . to say how he changed this city. He was here for a long time and didn't do much."

Newspoll suggests Labor has taken some bark off Newman, though not enough to affect the election outcome. Bligh and her deputy, state Treasurer Andrew Fraser, have hammered away at his financial legacy in Brisbane, claiming he breached undertakings to limit council rate rises to inflation and raised civic debt irresponsibly with his ambitious road tunnelling program. Newman, on both counts, has convincing answers to the Labor attacks.

Yet his flat-footed response to revelations his mayoral pecuniary interests declaration had failed to detail the family investments of his wife, Lisa, was damaging. He took nearly a month to update his declaration -- arguing he didn't need to, as he was not yet in parliament -- and the field day Bligh had may explain the six-point slip in his job satisfaction level in the latest Newspoll, albeit to a still-formidable 45 per cent.

The "dirt file" affair, in which the LNP machine was pinged for paying a disgruntled ex-Labor staffer to peddle low-grade gossip about Bligh's MPs, ostensibly without Newman's knowledge, wouldn't have helped either when he was in full cry about ALP smear tactics. Bligh and her coterie will take heart that, at last, his numbers have dipped.

The fact remains he still trumps Bligh decisively on every measure. In the key head-to-head of who would make the better premier, it's Newman by 43 per cent to Bligh's 39 per cent (a drop on the previous Newspoll of five points for the LNP man, which Bligh picked up).

His net satisfaction rating -- the difference between those who approve and disapprove of his performance -- is plus-12 points, against minus-11 points for Bligh, though many more voters are uncommitted on this question with respect to Newman. Labor's primary vote, while up four points, is still hovering in the death zone at 31 per cent, compared with 44 per cent for the LNP (down six points).

The betting is that Bligh will return from holiday, chair a cabinet meeting on January 23 where she will receive a report on systemic failings exposed by the alleged Barlow fraud at Queensland Health, and call the election for either February 18 or 25.

This Newspoll will give her pause to think whether she should push the poll date into March, or even beyond. Technically, Bligh can string out the term until June.

If she really believes her best chance is to do a Keating and do Newman "slowly", she may well postpone the day of reckoning with voters. Newspoll suggests she has nothing to lose.