With friends like this, who needs opposition?

TO get a feel for the electoral focus of hostility towards the appointment of Prince Philip as an honorary member of the official Bunyip aristocracy, you only need to take a look at the federal electorates that in 1999 voted for Australia to become a republic.

We had 148 seats at the time and 42 of them voted to sever ties with the monarchy.

Voters in these seats tended to be richer than the rest of us and better educated than most, with university degrees and secure jobs in professions or the public sector. When we look at the top 10 per cent of seats on the SEIFA socio-economic index, only two of the 15 — Mitchell (46.9 per cent) and Mackellar (49.4 per cent) — narrowly voted “no” to a republic.

The “yes” seats included those represented by the now Prime Minister, Sir Tony “Spats” Abbott, and his Treasurer, Joe Hockey.

The generally conservative state most strongly opposed to the 1999 vote on the republic was Queensland, with a 37 per cent yes vote, compared with the national figure of 45 per cent.

Despite this statewide support for the monarchy, two Queensland seats defied the trend. The inner-urban, wealthy and professional seats — Brisbane and Ryan — voted strongly in favour of the republic with pro votes of 57 per cent and 55 per cent respectively.

And these two seats include — you guessed it — Ashgrove, the seat of the Queensland Coalition Premier Campbell Newman, who must be wondering what surprises his Coalition Prime Minister has in store for him between now and polling day this Saturday.

The decision by Abbott to poke the republicans in the eye could not have been better targeted if the intention was to damage Newman personally.

We are now in the process of assembling our demographic and economic database for all Queensland state seats in time for our regular profile on the state elections this weekend.

And when we rank all Queensland seats in terms of education, professionals, public servants or high-income earners, we find Ashgrove invariably listed among the top four seats. Every second worker in Ashgrove has a job dominated by the professions or the public sector. Electronic graffiti litters their computer screens.

These Ashgrove voters would be included among the ranks of those voting yes to a republic in 1999 and would hence be included in the group of Australians most hostile to the idea of anyone being given a knighthood in this country, let alone a non-citizen.

This is the latest in a long line of politically damaging calls by the Prime Minister starting with the increase of petrol excise during the Victorian election and continuing with the review of minimum wages earlier in the Queensland campaign.

You’d have to wonder what Spats has in mind for his state colleagues in NSW for their election in nine weeks. A second nuclear reactor for the North Shore, perhaps?

I’ve knocked around politics for a while now and have not seen such wilful sabotage by a prime minister of his state party colleagues since Gough Whitlam recalled federal parliament during the 1975 election in South Australia in order to debate the “Loans Affair”, which was then killing brand Labor across the country.

Labor premier Don Dunstan survived this election only by publicly disowning Whitlam and federal Labor. Newman has stopped short of doing this, but he has banned Abbott from Queensland during his campaign. Not that it has made a difference.

But it is difficult to see how NSW Premier Mike Baird could ban Abbott from returning to his own home during their state election on March 28.

This means if Abbott survives as leader past the Queensland state election this Saturday, the NSW Coalition can look forward to more of the same sort of treatment.

John Black is a former Queensland Labor senator and now runs ADS, a demographic profiling company.

The ADS Queensland election profile can be seen on www.elaborate.net.au