Newman, Abbott face a flogging in by-election

Premier Campbell Newman and LNP Candidate Bob Andersen.

NINE months and counting … The countdown for Tony ­Abbott as Prime Minister starts today in the Queensland state seat of Stafford. It continues through Victoria’s election in Nov­ember and rolls on to the NSW and Queensland elections next March.

This countdown will start ugly for the Coalition, with a two-party-preferred swing of up to 20 per cent against the Queensland Liberal National Party government in today’s Stafford by-election, following the 17.2 per cent swing against the LNP in the Redcliffe by-election in February.

Stafford is a marginal seat lost by Labor in the pro-Coalition landslide of 2012 with a swing of 14.4 per cent to the LNP’s Chris Davis, leaving Davis with a 2PP vote of 57.1 per cent.

In political terms, you couldn’t ask for a more representative seat than Stafford. It nestles snugly in Brisbane’s northern commuter belt, and federally it is divided between the marginal Liberal seat of Brisbane and the marginal Labor seat of Lilley. Stafford is only a three-minute drive away from the Aspley Hypermarket in the swinging federal seat of Petrie, which was lost to the Coalition last year.

It is next door to the marginal seat of Ashgrove, won for the LNP by Premier Campbell Newman in 2012, with 55.7 per cent of the vote.

In demographic and economic terms, Stafford is middle income. It has an average mix of home-buyers, homeowners and renters. It is better educated than the average Queensland seat. Stafford overlaps Brisbane’s high socioeconomic status goat cheese circle and contains disproportionate numbers of professional men and women and fewer skilled and unskilled blue-collar workers.

Nearly one in three women and one in four men working in Stafford are professionals. Many of them hold jobs funded by or regulated by the public sector — in public administration, education or health — the jobs cut back by Newman after he won the March 2012 election and that are shrinking further under Abbott.

The census tells us that 8 per cent of employed men in Stafford and 20 per cent of employed women work in health. Stafford contains the 630-bed Prince Charles public hospital and some big private hospitals. Many of its voters work in the nearby 930-bed Royal Brisbane Hospital.

You don’t want to offend doctors and nurses in this seat. But the state government has done just that. The Queensland Nurses Union this week claimed 700 nursing and midwifery positions had been cut from Brisbane’s metro north region since the LNP took office in March 2012. Davis was opposed to these well-publicised state government cutbacks and decided to quit his job as junior health minister and Stafford MP, leaving the Newman government with a by-election on the issue of hospital cutbacks in a seat in which the health sector employs 11 per cent of eligible voters. You could not make this stuff up.

During the 2012 election campaign, Newman spoke proudly of how he was going to build a four-pillar economy in Queensland based on mining, tourism, agriculture and construction.

Australian Bureau of Statistics labour market figures for Queensland in May give us some indication of the economic progress Newman has made. Since the election of the LNP government, the civilian population available to the workforce has risen in Queensland by 169,500, but only 55 per cent of them — 93,500 — have found jobs. This is 13,000 below the level needed to maintain the employment levels handed to the Newman government by the Bligh Labor government.

The four pillars Newman selected for attention have gone backwards by about 11,000 jobs compared to the rest of the labour market. In February 2012, the four pillars were 22.4 per cent of the workforce, and in May 2012 they were 21.9 per cent. More than 80 per cent of the 93,500 jobs generated in Queensland since the 2012 election were part-time jobs and 52,900 of these were gained by women. Men gained only 13,800 full-time jobs since the election of the Newman government.

The problems affecting the Queensland labour market in recent years run directly parallel to the same problems besetting the national labour market. The global financial crisis hit full-time private-sector jobs for men and the stimulus generated part-time public-sector jobs for women.

Now both are facing the axe under the budget put forward by Abbott and Joe Hockey, who are starting to look a lot more like John Gorton and Les Bury than John Howard and Peter Costello.

The Newspoll quarterly summary of national trends confirms a national primary swing of about 9 per cent against the Coalition since 2013 from men and women. The swings are concentrated in commuter belts dominated by families in their late 40s, with teenage children. These are the groups identified in our May labour market survey as losing jobs but not yet officially unemployed.

The Newspoll figures show the women threatened with the loss of stimulus-funded public-sector jobs are swinging from Liberal to the Greens and other third parties, while the men losing full-time jobs are swinging directly to Labor or to Labor via the Greens.

Other professional groups in Stafford include lawyers, and Newman and his Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie have done whatever they can to remind all Queenslanders about the record of the Bjelke-Petersen government with their appointment of the new chief justice Tim Carmody nine months after he was made chief magistrate.

The head of the Queensland Bar Association, Peter Davis QC, quit over the ­appointment and a sitting ­Supreme Court judge, Philip McMurdo, said the appointment process had “seriously failed”.

Tony Fitzgerald, the man ­appointed to shovel all the merde out of the cow bales after the endemic corruption of the Bjelke era, said the Newman government had flaunted its disdain for democracy and good government by attacking the independence of the judiciary and state Crime and Misconduct Commission.

“However, it’s deeply troubling that the megalomaniacs currently holding power in Queensland are prepared to damage even fundamental institutions like the ­Sup­reme Court and cast doubt on fundamental principles like the ­independence of the judiciary,’’ Fitzgerald said.

He also openly criticised changes to the CMC that allowed the government to appoint a chairman without bipartisan ­approval.

“This debacle will adversely ­affect Queenslanders and ultim­ately end in tears for the government, which has staked our future and its future on the whims of a few inexperienced, arrogant fools who seem unaware of the extent of their own ignorance,” he wrote in an email to the ABC in May.

Fitzgerald ended his latest statement by saying Queenslanders had to decide at the next election which party would do the least long-term damage to the state. I think he felt a bit better after that.

The bloke in damage control for the government was Deputy Premier and former premiership contender Jeff Seeney, an old-style Country Party type, who said he’d like to speak to Fitzgerald face to face to explain “the extent to which I hear his concerns”. Perhaps they could share tea and pumpkin scones. I’m an old country boy and I’d pay to see it.

When Seeney was offering half-hearted support for his leader and Newman, the look on Seeney’s face reminded me of our old Jersey milking cow Creamy, when she saw the butcher’s ute coming up the road to collect her 12-month-old bull calf Brutus. For Creamy, it meant she got another trip to see the bull, but she was going to miss Brutus.

On present indications, the LNP in Stafford is cruising for a swing ­approaching 20 per cent 2PP against LNP candidate Bob Andersen and towards the ALP candidate Anthony Lynham, which puts the Queensland LNP on track for a minimum 10 per cent swing against them in March next year.

It also puts Abbott on track for the loss of 10 Queensland federal seats in 2016 — presuming Abbott is still the Prime Minister in 2016 after the Coalition loses Victoria and cops a hammering in Queensland and NSW. I doubt it.

The Queensland LNP can still win government next year with a desperately unpopular leader destined to lose even his own seat. We have to bear in mind the LNP won 63 per cent of the 2PP vote in 2012, so it’s sitting on a 13 per cent buffer.

In fact, the knowledge after Stafford that Newman is going to lose his own adjoining marginal seat will probably save votes for the LNP. Life without this political irritant would make the next LNP government more bearable.

However, the margin for the federal Coalition is much tighter at about 4 per cent and the sorts of state swings the Liberals could withstand in Queensland and NSW would produce a wipe-out for the federal Liberals under ­Abbott.

While the Queensland Premier has a net satisfaction rating of minus 24 per cent in the latest Newspoll, the current figures for Abbott are minus 29.

If you divide these dissatisfaction scores by four, you get a rough idea of how many votes the political tin ears of these two unpopular leaders are costing their respective parties.

I think Queensland state MPs who elected Newman as their leader will probably keep him there after Stafford and thereby take many of their own number off the public payroll at the next election, proving Charles Darwin was on the right track.

I’m not so sure, however, about our federal Coalition MPs and senators, especially those who have had the chance to see a bit of political wet work performed up close on state colleagues in their own federal seats.

Time will tell and the countdown starts Saturday.

John Black is a former Queensland Labor senator. Online maps and reports of the past Queensland election are on his website at www.elaborate.net.au.