Imperfect lessons in democracy
It’s been a quiet campaign in my Brisbane electorate of Stafford, writes Sally Baxter.
Not a single piece of election mail has crossed my threshold and no
hopeful candidate full of promises has knocked upon my door.
I can see why.
Stafford http://www.abc.net.au/news/qld-election-2015/guide/staf/
was the little electorate with the big 19.1 per cent message for the
LNP in the by-election of July 2014. Perfectly reasonable for all
parties to assume feelings haven’t changed much here in the interim and
to concentrate their efforts and resources elsewhere.
Consequently I’ve been getting my democracy fix vicariously,
following events across the state and waiting patiently to wave the
sizzled sausage of democracy at my fellow citizens on Saturday.
It’s a tradition I value highly, as I came late to voting.
Hong Kong, where I grew up, was untroubled by democracy.
I did learn about it, mostly from honorary auntie Leela Tankha, whose
kitchen was a magnet for a hungry kid when we visited the outlying
island of Cheung Chau on weekends.
Leela was a story-teller but the stories she told were dramas of
history – from the Mahatma’s salt marches to Britain’s suffragettes –
all relayed as if she had just returned from the scene and I was the
first person to hear the news.
She’d stand at the stove and stuff me with puris (my favourites) and
other treats while telling me grisly tales of the force-feeding of Mrs
Pethwick-Lawrence and Emmeline Pankhurst.
She wasn’t a teacher, she was a sub-editor. And a great cook. Food and well told stories – the pattern was set early.
My first recollection of Australian democracy was the Whitlam
Dismissal, news of which did reach us in far-off Hong Kong. And that was
the first I’d heard of Whitlam. The only thing I was aware of, out in
the colonies, was that a democratically elected government had been
dismissed by an unelected imperialist.
I’ve since been assured it was way more complicated than that.
And the first time I heard democracy mentioned in the context of Hong
Kong’s future was in the early stages of the negotiations between China
and the UK in the 1980s.
I was at a dinner of about a dozen people, all Hong Kong Chinese,
when conversation turned to what they hoped, expected and feared for the
future.
It was our host who proposed something so startling it took us all
aback. Why shouldn’t Hong Kong people decide what happens to Hong Kong?
It’s an idea that’s still catching on.
I moved to the UK in 1987 but didn’t realise I was entitled to vote in that year’s general election.
I cast my first ballot in the next council elections with an air of
grave solemnity, the hungry ghosts of the suffragettes crowding into the
booth beside me and bringing with them a distinct whiff of curry.
I was late to the party but quickly became fascinated by politics in a
parliamentary democracy. I came up hard against it in 1990 when the
Conservative MP for Eastbourne Ian Gow was assassinated by the IRA.
I was working on the Eastbourne Herald and had assigned a
photographer to some local opening Gow was attending that morning. “He
hasn’t turned up,” was closely followed by the news of why.
The subsequent by-election didn’t seem like any contest. “You could
stick a blue ribbon on a dog in this town and people would vote for it,”
the Herald’s local government reporter said sagely.
He was wrong and a Liberal Democrat, David Bellotti, took the seat
comfortably by 4,550 votes. Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe said the IRA
would be toasting his success.
My first general election was in 1992 and all signs pointed to a humiliating defeat for the Tories.
“There’s no way they can win,” I confidently told my father the Big
Baxter in one of our trans-Atlantic calls. “They stink like rotting
carcasses.”
Just before polling day the Herald’s politics reporter returned from
his morning rounds in great excitement. He’d seen the results of the Lib
Dems’ internal polling and they were showing a clean sweep of the
southeast for the minor party.
That lunchtime three of the Herald’s finest – the politics reporter,
the local government reporter and the heavily pregnant business reporter
(me) – toured the town looking for a bookie who’d take an accumulator
bet on just that outcome.
Not one would.
Conservative candidate Nigel Waterson duly won Eastbourne in John Major’s unlikely victory that year.
That’s polling for you.
I first exercised my democratic duty in an Australian election in
2004. I could have, and should have, voted before then while overseas
but I never got that particular memo.
In 2007 I jumped aboard the Kevin 07 Express and was deposited with a
clutch of how-to-vote leaflets outside a small primary school on the
outer edges of one of Brisbane’s leafy northern suburbs.
Its location wasn’t helped by its omission from the list of polling
stations in the local paper. It was a quiet day, with electors flooding
through the gates at the uninspiring rate of one or two an hour.
My blue-shirted rival was a skinny old guy named Lance who enjoyed an intense interest in political systems of the world.
On hearing that I had grown up in Hong Kong, he revealed that he had once spent 10 months there in the 1980s.
He outlined the makeup of the Executive and Legislative Councils,
both official and unofficial members, at a level of detail with which
most long-term Hong Kong residents (myself very much included) would
struggle.
Turning his attention to the UK Parliament, Lance described his visit
to the House of Commons in the early 1990s. He listed the names of all
the MPs he had heard speak and then the names of all of those he had
missed.
When he mentioned Winston Churchill’s grandson I attempted a
diversion by conjuring visions of Churchill’s granddaughter, frolicking
naked at Glastonbury, but Lance was treading a firm path and would have
none of it.
I made my escape at around 4pm, tiptoeing past Lance who by now was
snoring gently in his chair, blue leaflets clutched to his skinny chest.
And now it’s almost time to exercise my rare and privileged right to
vote once more. As for picking a winner, you’ll note my record is
undistinguished.
Polling data (which got really troubling today) never looked that flash in Ashgrove during
this short, sharp shock of a campaign. Logic always suggested the
return of the LNP with a reduced majority and without Campbell Newman at
the helm.
Which is why this voter, at least, has never stopped wondering about
that apparently non-existent Plan B. At no point in this campaign has it
been an irrelevant question and yet it’s hardly been asked, let alone
answered.
Don’t believe me? In the words of the Premier, go ahead and Google it.
Until today, there have been a few news items on the subject but
hardly as many as you’d expect for such a big and important question for
Queensland, and even fewer providing any insight into who the LNP would
choose.
When it has been addressed, as in this article in The Australian, the
choice seems to fall between Treasurer Tim Nicholls (a pre-merger
Liberal) and Health Minister Lawrence Springborg (former Nationals
leader and one of the architects of the Liberal National Party).
Now I’m not privy to the inner workings of the LNP but I well
remember the former Coalition losing the 2006 election almost as soon as
it was called.
Why? Because they couldn’t answer a simple, and reasonable, question
from a journalist: Who would be Premier – Nationals Springborg (and
Leader of the Coalition) or Liberal Bruce Flegg – in the event the Libs
took a majority of seats in the Parliament.
The loss of an election which should have been in the bag prompted
the merger in 2008 which gave birth to today’s Liberal National Party
but it took the extraordinary step of bringing in outsider Campbell
Newman to prise victory from the grasp of a tired ALP in 2012.
What worked in 2012 from the outset has looked shaky in 2015, with
polls consistently showing Newman behind in his seat of Ashgrove while
pointing to an LNP victory across the state.
Questions about what would happen if that polling was replicated on
Saturday have been consistently answered with the frankly unbelievable
claim that there is no Plan B and a loss in Ashgrove will condemn
Queensland to an ALP government.
In some ways, therefore, it’s 2006 all over again – who will lead Queensland, a former Liberal or a former National?
The failure to address this rather pertinent question may have something to do with the latest swing in support towards the ALP.
The prospect that perhaps there really is no Plan B could, it seems,
deliver the impossible. Perhaps the question of who would lead the LNP
after Newman should have been addressed earlier.
Queenslanders, no doubt, have been chewing it over for weeks before
having to turn up for a sausage and a vote on Saturday. In the end, it’s
they who will answer the question, and it’s surely a tricky one.
Good luck, Queensland. See you on the other side.
Further reading:
Queensland Election 2006 – Research brief prepared for the Australian Parliamentary Library by Scott Bennett and Stephen Barber
New political force for Queensland – Marissa Calligeros, Brisbane Times 28 July, 2008
Queensland election 2012: a likely win for Newman and the LNP – Clive Bean, The Conversation 25 January, 2012
Once I was a Girl Reporter, now I’m an interested
observer covering the past, present and future of journalism and
anything else that takes my fancy. Read more Baxter here.
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