BY JIM McILROY
BRISBANE — Panic is sweeping the Liberal-National Coalition around the country after the crushing ALP victory in the February 17 Queensland state elections.
As 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly goes to print, the Labor Party has won 66 out of a total of 89 seats in the single-chamber state parliament. The National Party has won 11 seats, the Liberal Party three (it had nine seats in the previous parliament), Pauline Hanson's One Nation three, independents three and three seats are still undecided.
The ALP won almost 50% of the primary vote statewide, a swing of 10.4%. In Brisbane, Labor won 57% of the primary vote, with the Liberals being reduced to a single seat. The National Party's statewide vote collapsed to 13.6% and the Liberals' vote collapsed to 14.1%.
In the bloodletting which followed the conservative disaster, both the Nationals and the Liberals' state leaders — Rob Borbidge and David Watson — have resigned.
One Nation's statewide vote of 8.9% was significantly down from the 23% it won in the 1998 state election. However, the statewide figure is distorted by the fact that the party contested only 39 seats compared to 79 in 1998. In most of the seats where it had candidates, One Nation's vote fell by only 6%.
Although the Queensland Greens only received 2.3% of the statewide vote, they gained an average of 7% in the 31 seats it contested.
The Australian Democrats fared relatively poorly, and may lose their Queensland Senate seat in the next federal election. No doubt, their poor showing is a result of their role in helping the federal Coalition government introduce the GST.
Democratic Socialist Party candidates Adam Baker and Coral Wynter won about 1.34% in the seat of South Brisbane and 1% in Brisbane Central respectively. While a modest result in terms of votes, the Democratic Socialist campaign gained valuable publicity and profile for a socialist alternative.
In the wake of the Queensland result, maverick National Party federal MP Bob Katter declared angrily, "The vote shows the policies of the Coalition national leaders on national competition policy and other matters affecting country people are as popular as a brown snake in a sleeping bag. Anyone who said there were no federal overtones in the result tonight would be living in fairytale land."
The results of the WA and Queensland elections forced the federal government into a humiliating backdown on the GST's Business Activity Statement, changing it from a quarterly to an annual report to the Australian Tax Office.
The controversy over preference swaps with One Nation has thrown the Nationals into a shambles. The recent decision by federal National Party ministers to recommend to federal electorate councils to put One Nation last in the federal election, while allowing local candidates to do preference deals with One Nation is a recipe for further disaster for the Coalition.
During the election campaign, One Nation concealed its racism and stressed opposition to "economic rationalism". Since then, Hanson has been beating the racist drum. On February 18 she said that Aboriginal people were better off than many Australians and called for the dismantling of Aboriginal specific programs, on the grounds that Aborigines such as Cathy Freeman and Charles Perkins were not disadvantaged!
One Nation policy also called for a referendum on capital punishment, mandatory sentencing and the immediate forcible repatriation of illegal refugees on their arrival.
The ALP's unprecedented victory was not just a result of the Coalition being racked with division facing an effective Labor campaign in which Premier Peter Beattie sidelined the issue of ALP electoral rorts. The ALP's victory was also a result of the return to Labor of a section of working-class voters who had defected to One Nation in 1998.
Business leaders, as reflected in the editorial policy of Brisbane's only daily newspaper, the Courier-Mail, were satisfied with a Beattie win as a victory for "political stability." The alternative would have been a minority Coalition government, reliant on a bunch of independents and One Nation MPs.
Now that the Labor government has such an overwhelming majority it has no excuse left as to why it cannot implement progressive reforms on issues such as environmental protection and land clearing, an end to the building of more prisons and providing genuine land rights for indigenous people. It no longer has an excuse for not increasing funding for the ailing public hospital system and initiating a major program of public works to create thousands of new full-time jobs.