The article appeared in Sunday’s (yesterday’s) Sun Herald in the Naked Eye section. It’s only available now through the $2.20 payment.

Here’s some of the article as taken from print:

When John Howard became Prime Minister in 1996 he soon found the sections of the NSW Liberal Party were passionately opposed to his ultra-conservative views on Asia, asylum seekers, cutting outdated ties with the English monarchy, equality for gay people, Aboriginal reconciliation, drug law reform etc. Howard’s hard right lieutenants [Heff, Abbott, Bronnie, Ruddock, Clarke et al] set about the destruction of this moderate faction known as the Group and putting the NSW division under ironclad right-wing control.

The article suggests they could claim mission accomplished by 2004.

If the NT is any indication, the New South Welsh will clean their house or the voters will do it for them.

Stacking Liberal preselections with a mob of weirdo Godbotherers seems an odd way to convince an Australian electorate about your readiness to provide workmanlike state governance. This perception is exacerbated by a lacklustre leader who redefines mediocrity.

The deputy leader, Barry O’Farrell, would be a far better choice but it’s too late to change now.

Judith Brett argues that the only way a party leader can gain party authority is through winning an election. Only then does the party come into line. Makes it pretty hard for oppositions as by definition they are in opposition through losing an election.

Except, we have an abhorrent vibe surrounding NSW Libs, which appears to be the greater condemnation. This is in no small part a reflection of the weirdo-religious emanations growing, hard core so called right wingers – whom Howard apparently was more responsible for instituting than the widely blamed David Clarke, according to a report I read recently. If I get a moment I’ll try to find it.

It all makes for a very strange melting pot of possibilities and ‘punditations’.

I agree first of all that incumbency creates massive advantage. Oppositions always look incompetent, simply because they don’t have the shinybums to pull them up before making truly embarassing mistakes.

For a perfect example of this, compare the CLP before and after 2001. Before, it seemed to be an unbeatable, invincible juggernaut. With weeks after it was a farce. It wasn’t until voters pruned it down to the stump in 2005 that it started to regrow at all.

Furthermore both sides of politics employ various politicos, and the governing party can employ more of them. It also doesn’t hurt Howard that he established the Government Member’s Secretariat – look that up some time.

I should note that Beattie’s success is compounded by the voting system in Queensland. The Nats and Libs keep jawboning about merging because the voting system severely disadvantages them vs Labor. People too rarely understand that voting systems have massive effects on results. Rothbard observed that “Arcane matters of methodology can have surprising political consequences”.

Charles Richardson characterised the Victorian election like this:

WHILE Saturday’s election result was not a disaster for the Victorian Liberal Party, “not a disaster” is about as good as it gets for state Liberal parties these days.
The Opposition made up some ground in Victoria, winning about six seats with a two-party-preferred swing of about 3.5 per cent. But coming off Labor’s record-breaking 2002 landslide, that still leaves the Opposition a long way behind. Steve Bracks will have a majority of more than 20, and a swing of about 6 per cent will be needed to lose next time. Unless Labor falls apart dramatically, it looks like being in office until 2014.

Although the swing to the Opposition was respectable, it was mostly in the wrong places. Nine seats swung more than 6 per cent, but only two of them were Labor-held. What were marginal Liberal seats are now relatively safe but there was little movement in most of the Labor marginals.

Clearly the Coalition would have hoped to make greater gains than this, but nevertheless to label the result a landslide without acknowledging the scale of the 2002 landslide and the fact that the 2006 result represents at least a modest recovery from that nadir gives a somewhat misleading picture.

I still reckon Iemma won’t escape anywhere near as unscathed as Bracks has done in Victoria. As far as I could tell from this distance, the Bracks government has managed an ongoing fairly low key, uncontroversial if undistinguished performance over the last 3-4 years. Unline Carr and Iemma in recent times in NSW, Bracks hasn’t attracted strongly negative public reactions. If Debnam and colleagues weren’t so seemingly inept, I reckon Labor in NSW would be eminently beatable. And just holding government in NSW and federally would shift the political balance of resources significantly for the Coalition.

It’s near enough a landslide in seats, but I’d call 55% of the two party preferred vote – a 10% margin – a landslide.

Don,

I’d guess one can trace some of these ideas about Mum and Dad back at least to those studies in the 1950s into the ‘authoritarian personality’ and the suggestion (which seems right) that the right of centre mind set values authority more than the left.

But the extent of the advantage can be overstated. In the early 90s the current Australian position was almost exactly reversed, with Coalition governments in power in almost every state and territory and Labor in power federally. It seems unlikely that the mum/dad thing was less powerful then than it is now. Of course, one of the reasons why the Coalition won all those state elections was the extraordinary mismanagement/corruption of so many Labor state governments of the late 80s. But there had been longstanding Coalition state governments in previous decades too e.g. Court in WA, Bjelke-Petersen in Qld, Playford in SA (though ending in the mid 60s) and so on (not to mention the NT CLP which ruled unbroken for 23 years until 2001 and managed to appeal to an urban Darwin electorate that is demographically little different – albeit a bit younger, a bit more affluent and a bit more multi-ethnic – from other larger capital cities).

Moreover, the Coalition governments of the early 90s arguably mostly lost government because they were too obsessed with neoliberal orthodoxy and too neglectful of old-fashioned pragmatism and pork barrelling. It’s a mistake John Howard didn’t repeat when he achieved power federally, and one suspects that state Coalition leaders will take a leaf out of Howard’s book when they eventually get their hands back on the levers.

It all tends to suggest that incumbency is a far more powerful factor than mum/dad “issue ownership”, as Charles Richardson suggests in today’s Oz.

Incumbency gives today’s governments huge advantages, as election campaigns are funded more and more from the public purse, and Labor has learned to take full advantage of it. But its power is not uniform. It didn’t protect the state Liberal governments of the 1990s and the Howard Government has never been re-elected with the sort of landslide that the state Labor governments are getting.

However, Labor’s win in Victoria was not a landslide, and I doubt that the Iemma government in NSW will manage to engineer a landslide either, despite the dubious quality of Debnam’s leadership. Beattie managed it in Queensland partly because of the weakness and division of his opponents and partly because he really is an extraordinarily able political leader. Once you get one or two state Coalition governments back on the board, the incumbency picture changes, because the incumbent state Coalition governments can then help out their interstate colleagues with campaigning by sending squadrons of state payroll-funded apparatchiks. At the moment Labor has a huge employed personnel campaigning advantage, which is becoming increasingly important as party membership numbers on both sides of politics stagnate or fall (leaving aside ethnic and other branch stacking, which delivers party pre-selection votes but not bodies to assist in actual campaigning).