Dave Riley, Brisbane
With the Labor government sitting on a massive majority of 43 seats, the result of the Queensland state election is an easy call. The big end of town may be keen to reduce the arrogance that such a lead fosters, but the ALP will surely be returned comfortably at the February 7 poll.
While the Brisbane Courier Mail has been dedicating a generous three pages daily to the election coverage, the media hype is failing to elicit appreciable differences between the major parties — mainly because there aren't many. The Queensland Liberal-National Coalition has been fraught with irrelevance since it lost the 2001 election to Labor. With the Liberals on three seats and the Nationals reduced to 12, the one-chamber Queensland parliament has been primarily an ALP plaything.
Queensland politics, after two decades of turmoil, has reached a political impasse. Even the assault that One Nation was able to launch on the parliament seems to have subsided. After taking three seats in 2001 — all formerly National Party — it now appears that One Nation may be hard pressed to hold on to any at this election.
With the leading parties competing on the same platform, is there any real opposition to Beattie's Queensland?
The Democrats will be fielding only one candidate, in a regional seat. But the Queensland Greens will be standing a record number of 72 candidates statewide. The greatly elevated Greens campaign is pulling 6% in current polling.
While the corporate media is still trying to marginalise the Greens campaign, day in, day out photos of Premier Peter Beattie's cheesy grin must have a use-by date — the Greens are likely to be treated with more respect by February 7.
Already, the party's unwillingness to commit to an across-the-board preference deal has frustrated Labor strategists, and the need to aggressively appeal to the environment vote has forced Labor to finally tackle the broad-scale land-clearing issue with a $150-million farmer compensation package.
But there are plenty of issues that don't get addressed in this election-year horse-trading.
In the second week of this short election campaign, a 12-year-old Aboriginal boy hung himself in a cupboard at the Kowanyama community on Cape York. This act of total despair, in an environment of abuse and petrol-sniffing, reflects the massive neglect of Indigenous issues. While Beattie chose to call the election after patching up the festering scandal over foster care in the Department of Families, this boy's death won't be met with a similar wad of policy initiatives.
Frustrated with Beattie's piffling "final" offer of compensation for unpaid wages for some 16,000 Aboriginal people, two candidates are standing in this election around the issue of the stolen wages.
The Socialist Alliance will be raising these, as well as other ignored issues, in its election campaigning. While, as the youngest political formation running, the alliance is not yet registered under the state's draconian electoral act, it is standing in three seats. All three Socialist Alliance candidates are respected progressive activists. They understand reality is very different to the election hype engineered by professional spin doctors.
[Dave Riley is a member of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 28, 2004.
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