Wallace Brown, Friday May 8th 1998
Courier Mail
‘The Queensland Liberal Party’s decision to give its preferences to One Nation candidates is merely the latest in a series of highly controversial, politically questionable moves.’
The Liberal Party of Western Australia long has been regarded, with good reason, as the Achilles heel of the Howard Government.
Factional and personal divisions caused by Noel Crichton-Browne have cost the Coalition votes there and spawned a host of independent MPs.
The Liberal Party in Queensland appears to be rapidly reaching the stage where it, in national terms, can be put in the same category.
The Hanson issue is a telling factor and most Australians, indeed most Liberals if they think about this, can only hope the Queensland executive of the Liberal Party will come to its senses when it meets in Brisbane tonight.
Prime Minister John Howard, either unable or unwilling to show decisive leadership on this context, will be one of those watching on the sidelines.
He knows that the state which delivered him so much in the 1996 federal election could just as easily cost him so much in the next one.
The Queensland Liberal party’s new power brokers have done some strange things, more so because they made out they were acting in the interests of hard-headed party pragmatism since they tossed Bob Tucker from the presidency.
To effectively dump senior Liberal Senator David MacGibbon has been one such event. To refuse to endorse Sir James Killen for the new federal seat of Blair has been another, because all they have done is ensure it will be won by the Nationals.
The Liberals’ waffle about, and softly-softly approach to Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party as the state election looms is just as strange, though not unexpected.
The Liberals and the Nationals, from Howard and Tim Fischer down, have been equivocating about where One Nation would be placed in their parties’ official voting preferences distribution since she first raised her funny head.
Even now Howard sticks to his mantra that the decision will be made by the party on a state-by-state, seat-by-seat basis.
So it is in Queensland, the first part of the nation where all this will be put to the test at the ballot boxes.
Yet any decision by the Liberals, and presumably the Nationals, to allocate preferences to One Nation candidates is bizarre. This conclusion may mot be conventional wisdom but it is bizarre precisely because it is not pragmatic.
And it is not pragmatic because to give Hanson preferences is to give her credibility.
Just as the opinion polls had her withering on the vine nationally; just as she was disappearing from our television screens; just as more voters were beginning to realise that she had no real answers to her rhetoric and simplistic questions; just as some of the beat-up merchants on radio talk-back shows were starting to forget her; just as Premier Rob Borbidge and Queensland Liberal leader Joan Sheldon were insisting that Hanson was no problem - what happens? The Liberals themselves give her this boost.
This is not smart for another reason. A disgraceful and unprincipled preferences swap with the One Nation people is not even necessary, not even in those areas of Queensland, such as the Burnett, where their support is highest - up to 20%, according to some Nationals.
The reason given by the powers-that-be is that if the Liberals (and presumably the Nationals) give preferences to One Nation ahead of Labor, so One Nation candidates in return will allocate their preferences to the Liberals ahead of Labor.
Yet where else do the gun lobbyists, anti-Aboriginal, anti-immigrants, anti-Jewish, League of Rights types and other Far Right conservatives who vote for whatever Hanson stands for have to go with their preferences ultimately, other than to Liberal or National Party candidates?
No deals to be done, no simplistic drivel spouted, no damaging headlines made, no further harm done to Australia’s international image, no credibility given to Hanson. Because surely no-one is seriously suggesting One Nation candidates would allocate preferences to Labor under any circumstances. And certainly not in the National-held seats of Barambah and Gympie in the state election.
Meanwhile in the wider scene there are already signs of a backlash. The Liberal Party is tight when it comes to revealing its financial membership. Suffice to say that in Queensland it is low and either stagnant or falling.
Some of its stalwarts are singularly unenthusiastic about giving it support.
The tourism industry, already hit by the Asian slowdown is understandably dismayed. Australian ethnic communities, particularly those with Asian backgrounds, likewise.
Have the Liberals forgotten, for example, that they probably would not have won Moreton in the 1996 federal election had the local Chinese communities not switched off then Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating and on to the Coalition?
In the suburbs of Australia’s metropolitan conurbations where most voters live, the Liberals will need to be careful and unequivocal in the 1998 election.
So bring on the Queensland election next month.
And bring on the federal election in its wake. And may there be no weird preference distributions tried by any parties.
And if there are, may the sensible small-l liberal voters in the Liberal, National and Labor parties ignore them.