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Showing posts from December, 2004

Blackmailers In the Ranks - a Government with a Senate majority

The conventional wisdom has it that the Howard Government will have an open slather with legislation when the Liberal and National Parties gain control of the Senate on 1 July 2005. In truth the situation will not be so simple. What will happen next year is that blackmailers outside the Coalition will be replaced with blackmailers within it. The power to decide will pass from Democrats, Greens and Independents to any backbench Senator on the Government side disenchanted with the role being a rubber stamp for his or her colleagues fortunate enough to have been tapped on the shoulder by John Howard or John Anderson to become Ministers. The significance of this shift in power form the third forces to backbench Government Senators has been missed by the political commentators because so few of them were around in the days when Reg Wright, the Liberal Senator from Tasmania, was the bete noir of Prime Minister Robert Menzies. Senator Wright, sometimes with his Queensland colleague Senat

Eight out of Nine Ain’t Bad - the Labor brand

There are nine governments in Australia – those of six states, two territories and the federal one. In Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, Labor rules. For a political brand, eight ninths of the market can’t be bad. Yet since losing the ninth election to John Howard’s Liberal-National coalition, the newspapers and the airwaves have been full of discussions about the need for Labor to undergo radical change. It is like the thinking of that head of Coca Cola who decided that the formula of the most successful soft drink in the world needed to be changed because it had lost a few percentage points of market share. Utter nonsense. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Labor Party brand. In so far as there is a problem federally it is because the federal party leaders, unlike their state counterparts, have forgotten who they should be trying to sell their product to. In