Friday 29th of March 2024

malcolm in the middle ....

malcolm in the middle ....

from Crikey ….

As far as the public was concerned, the most notable event of the NSW Liberal Party's state council meeting last weekend was the heckling delivered to the Prime Minister after he boasted that the party was "not run by factions".

However, those who were observing proceedings more closely didn't need to rely on the word of disgruntled Tony Abbott loyalists to conclude that factional power in the party was alive and well.

The meeting also brought about the demise of a reform push that would have thrown party pre-selections wide open to the rank and file, thanks to backroom machinations that would have done the party's rivals at Sussex Street proud.

The subject is particularly sensitive for the NSW Liberal Party at the moment, as its pre-selections for the next federal election have so far been on ice pending a redistribution of the state's electoral boundaries -- a process that reaches a milestone today with the Australian Electoral Commission's publication of draft boundaries, with a final resolution scheduled for the end of February.

When the ball finally gets rolling, some of the party's most glittering prizes are likely to be in play, including Tony Abbott's Manly-based seat of Warringah, Joe Hockey's seat of North Sydney immediately to the west, Bronwyn Bishop's seat of Mackellar immediately to the north, and Philip Ruddock's seat of Berowra in Sydney's outer north.

At present, the party determines its pre-selections through votes involving branch delegates together with a "central component" consisting of representatives from the state council and state executive.

Under the thwarted reform plan, this system would have been replaced by plebiscites open to all financial members of the party from the electorate in question.

This sounded particularly appealing to the party's religious right faction, which, among other things, is noted for its talents in mobilising branch support.

But it was considerably less pleasing to the ears of the ascendant moderate faction -- which, in alliance with the forces of the centre-right, was the dominant force at state council.

What emerged from the wreckage was a compromise brokered by NSW Premier Mike Baird, in which plebiscites will be trialled in a small number of state and federal seats over the next five years.

The outcome was part of a recurring pattern on both sides of the political fence in which grand visions of reform have been proposed to address a perceived crisis of democratic legitimacy in modern party politics, only to meet decisive resistance from the very forces they are designed to overcome.

Another thread common to such schemes is that they are often the work of party elders who discover an appetite for reform that wasn't always evident during their own time in office.

While the immediate impetus for the weekend's reform push was provided by Walter Villatora, the local party president in Tony Abbott's electorate, the reforms sought to give effect to recommendations from a post-election review panel headed by John Howard.

Among other things, the panel's report argued that party plebiscites would "contribute to the weakening of factional influences".

A similar tale has often been heard from the Labor Party as it has grappled with its image problems and attendant electoral failures going back to its poor show at the 2010 federal election.

On that occasion, Senator John Faulkner and two of the party's most successful premiers, Steve Bracks and Bob Carr, produced a report that recommended a radical new preselection model with 60% of the vote determined by the rank and file, 20% by members of affiliated unions, and another 20% by a public vote open to anyone willing to sign on as registered Labor supporters.

In common with most of the other reform ideas proposed in the report, that plan has since been all but forgotten.

When the ALP held its national conference in July, a more modest proposal to have the party's state conferences surrender half of the vote in Senate preselections to a rank-and-file ballot likewise met decisive resistance from powerbrokers, despite having the endorsement of a brace of former senior federal ministers and state premiers.

As often as not, those resisting such plans have been motivated by a crude desire to protect their fiefdoms.

However, arguments that internal democracy is not always in a party's electoral interests can't always be dismissed out of hand.

Given that the Liberal Party has just dispensed with the services of a Prime Minister who had led it dangerously far to the right on a number of fronts, there is some force to factional moderates' arguments that democratised pre-selections would empower well-mobilised radical elements, just as the Tea Party has done for the Republicans in the United States.

Tellingly, reform talk has also been heard recently from the Liberal Party's Victorian branch, which instituted reforms in 2010 that were not unlike those that have just foundered in New South Wales.

This process caused immense headaches last year for then-premier Denis Napthine, when party members in the safe seat of Kew preselected Tim Smith, an arch conservative Young Turk, ahead of senior government minister Mary Wooldridge, whose existing seat had been abolished in a redistribution.

Earlier this year, leaked recordings revealed that the party's recently installed state president, Michael Kroger, considered that the system benefited "careerists" whose chief qualification was that they had courted favour with members through party committee work.

In Kroger's view, this had left the party starved of parliamentarians with skills in raising funds and communicating the party's message through the media, and played a key role in the defeat of the Napthine government in last year's state election.


 

there's an election warming up in the rubbish bins...

As the preselection for Liberal (CONservative) candidates for seat of parliament heats up, it's seems the process is like the recycling of rubbish and is running hot. And I mean rubbish. Tired old crap that won't decompose to make a lovely compost. I see candidates like old sprung-out mattresses, rusty engine parts and lots of those broken shelves made of compressed shavings that got bloated like toads in the last shower.

 

And our Malcolm Himself owes big favours. Favours are cheap. You scratch my back, I myself scratch yours with a nicely penned recommendation and a smile plus a very positive boost of political hot air. One can sense that Malcolm is in a hurry. His approval rating is plummeting like a barometer on the approach of katrina-style hurricane. But there is no hope of a redress unless he starts to talk sense rather than blah blah blah blab...

 

And now, Kristina Keneally compares our Mal to Rudd and Abbott mixed together... This would hurt:

 

"We believe in Australia’s north ... This is the most exciting time to be an Australian. This is the most exciting time for Australia. We have greater opportunities than we have ever had before. And they are no greater than here in northern Australia,” the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said yesterday.

Relax, northern Australia. This enthusiasm will pass.

Within months, possibly days, the caravan (and possibly the new Northern Australia minister, Matt Canavan) will have moved on. Remember the prime minister’s “deep interest” in cities five months ago?


“Historically the federal government has had a limited engagement with cities, and yet that is where most Australians live,” he said last September. “It is where the bulk of our economic growth can be found. We often overlook the fact that liveable cities, efficient productive cities, the environment of cities, are economic assets.”

And so our innovative prime minister created a new portfolio: minister for cities and the built environment. Yet in this week’s reshuffle he overlooked the importance of liveable cities by demoting that new ministry to half a parliamentary secretary’s responsibility.

Oh, but our PM is also agile, explaining that the new assistant minister for cities and digital transformation wasn’t a demotion of the cities portfolio so much as a promotion. Hmmm. What’s next, elevating the role of the health portfolio by handing it to the newest, most junior assistant minister in government?

I could not care less if we have a cities minister. It was always nothing more than a stunt of a portfolio, designed to produce exactly what it did: fawning praise from the media and lobby groups. As I’ve pointed out previously, there is very little the commonwealth can contribute to making our cities more liveable beyond funding major transport infrastructure.

What I do care about, what we should all care about, is whether we have a prime minister and a government that is delivering considered, developed policy positions based in equal parts on evidence and their core values.

Australia has already recently endured a prime minister – Kevin Rudd – who governed like a toddler: obsessed with a new, bright, shiny toy one day, only to be off in another direction the next, distracted by the next policy toy and leaving the previous one in the back of the cupboard untouched. For goodness sake, we don’t need another such PM.

Not only was Rudd easily distractible, he was also extraordinarily flexible in his personal policy commitments: the “greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time”, climate change, became a low-order priority rather than something worth the fight. The emotion exhibited in his apology to the stolen generations never amounted to any progress towards constitutional recognition or agreement-making with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. His plan to “end the blame game” in health was nothing more than an incredibly generous funding agreement in which the states walked away the big winners.

By now you have probably worked out that I am no fan of Rudd (that may have been obvious earlier). I confess I neither like Rudd’s political practices nor him as a person. I do like Turnbull as a person. He’s charming, urbane and quite intelligent. But his political style? In many ways, it’s looking reminiscent of Rudd.

Remember the “thrill” that surrounded Rudd’s 2020 summit? Here finally was a PM who was going to have an adult conversation with the nation. Sound familiar?

Remember the Henry tax review? It was going to deliver the most significant overhaul of our tax system, setting Australia up for the 21st century. Hmm, where have we heard that lately? Tax white paper anyone?

Remember “programmatic specificity”? Yes, “innovation and agility” is less ridiculous, but it is all the same waffle without saying anything.


Some in the current Labor opposition may not like this comparison with Rudd. They are keen to point out Turnbull’s similarity with another previous prime minister, Tony Abbott. Labor made great merriment of Abbott’s statement just after he lost the prime ministership that in a range of important areas – climate change, border protection, and marriage equality – nothing had changed. Turnbull was running the same Abbott government, with the same Abbott policies. At the time, I rolled my eyes at Labor’s glee, confident that within a few months significant policy changes would likely occur. But five months on, the opposition has been vindicated in bringing this charge.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/16/malcolm-turnbulls-political-style-in-so-many-ways-its-reminiscent-of-kevin-rudd

 

Yes malcolm did throw out Abbott — NOT TO MAKE AUSTRALIA BETTER, BUT TO IMPROVE THE CHANCE OF HIS PARTY OF HOPELESS TWITS RETAIN POWER AT THE NEXT ELECTIONS. Beware.