Brough In Charge
Mal Brough has been elected President of the Queensland Liberals. While he’s not the parliamentary leader, as some conservatives would have him, he’s going to hold a lot of power in determining the fate of his party. Brough ran on a platform of renegotiating the Pineapple Party merger, stating that he thinks there are some deficiencies which need to be fixed up before a genuinely new party is formed which isn’t just the two current parties squished together.
Federal Nationals leader Warren Truss, who represents the Qld division of Wide Bay, has said that in the talks of the future of the two parties all option must be on the table. This includes the idea that the Coalition may split at the federal level. This isn’t such a strange idea, really, given that the parties aren’t in coalition in every state and territory. In South Australia, there’s a National MP in the Labor government. In Western Australia, the Nationals dissolved the Coalition Agreement in favour of negotiating with the ALP. In the Northern Territory, the Country Liberal Party exists somewhere between its two federal counterparts and sends a single Senator to Canberra.
The problem with a split Coalition at the Queensland state level is that the optional preferential system will bring back three-cornered contests which serve to benefit the ALP. If both parties want to topple the ALP they’ll have to get every single preference from every single party and hope that the swings are in the right places. It seems, though, that the ‘Borg is hell-bent on a unified Liberal National Party rather than a unified Coalition. Merging the parties won’t fix the problems they have regarding policy and a lack of vision. The LNP will be structurally different (with rank and file involvement in preselections being delayed until 2020) but the front bench team will still be the same old faces. As a wise man once said, you can’t polish a turd.
The Queensland Government aren’t particularly popular but I don’t think anyone’s ready to turf them out in favour of a party or two who can’t agree on what they want between them let alone from one level of representation to another. Springborg doesn’t have any of the determination or charisma that Barry O’Farrell does and will find it hard pressed to rally the state to the cause of… well… nothing. Until the Pineapple Party knows what they stand for, they will not be elected. You may not agree with Brough’s politics, but he’s probably the best chance the anti-Labor forces in Queensland have of coming up with some coherent platform.
More at Larvatus Prodeo.
Since the first Liberal Coalition govenment in 1949, the Federal Coalition has split each time they’ve been in Opposition, specifically February 1973 – May 1974 and April 1987 – July 1987.
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rn/2005-06/06rn11.htm)
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Do you think the Liberals and Nationals will ever fully split or is their hatred of Labor strong enough to help them overcome their differences?
The National/Country party were and are a landowners’ party and they hitched their cart to the anti-Labour horse at the start. They’ll either stay Nationals and slowly shrink or merge with th Libs and disappear faster.
“Country Labor” would do well in a Pineapple Queensland, I think.
d
The Liberals and Nationals have never really been allies, the coalition is just a necessary arrangement to form government. In opposition there is no such need. As soon as Joh had the numbers by himself he threw the Liberals overboard. I believe there are very significant differences in the support bases for the two parties which will not come together comfortably. Whether or not the pineapple eventually gets up, Bob Katter is the joker in the pack. He has been talking for some time about a new rural party and he is talking about it again suggesting it is imminent. (But he said it was imminent a few years ago too).
If the pineapple can rise from the shit and rotten matter that has fertilised it thus far, it could well be that the next conservative Qld. government is a coalition of the pineapple and Katter’s Cattle Prod Party.
Ah, Katter’s “The Beast”. It’s the party you form when you’re not forming a party.