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No opposition leaves Beattie in peril

By Phil Dickie - posted Thursday, 1 March 2001


If Peter Beattie thinks governing with a huge majority is going to be as much a cakewalk as getting them all elected, he probably has another think coming.

Just on the law of averages there are going to be one or two newcomers who upset the ship of state by forgetting to take their medication, conflicting their interests or running off with their secretaries. Or, possibly, all of the above.

Nearly all, if they have retained some shreds of idealism through the pre-selection process, will come to a point where they are faced with the choice of representing the interests of their electors on a burning issue or representing the interests of ALP powerbrokers. Most will find a way of arguing that the ALP powerbrokers are representing, in some odd way, the interests of their electors.

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But all of them may not be able to manage the necessary mental accommodations all of the time. There is a distinct possibility that the parliament will end this term with more independents than it started with.

Beattie's problem, and it is a problem, is that he will face almost no institutionalised opposition. The coalition will not have enough members to even mark all the ministers in any adequate sense. Members with doubtful qualifications to be backbenchers will be opposition frontbenchers. They won't be facing off Labor's best and brightest, or at least not for a while, but there will be a large difference in calibre between most ministers and their shadows for a long time yet

Ministers, far too many of whom have a regrettable tendency to employ only people who say "Yes minister" instead of "That's daft, minister", will as a consequence make daft decisions that are only recognised as daft when they are well and truly implemented.

The coalition has also lost many of its best and brightest, a lot of its institutional memory and much of its credibility. It wasn't providing much in the way of opposition before the election so realistically, we should expect even less now. If that is possible.

Queensland's problem is that, of all the sizeable States, it has the least durable democratic institutions. It has no upper house and is never likely to get one. It has the most rule-bound, least mature, and least troublesome to government committee system.

In the Senate, estimates hearings can go on for days and range far and wide over nearly anything. In Queensland, where just getting estimates committees was hailed a democratic triumph, the hearings are run to a stopwatch and the questions are rationed. Very severely rationed.

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Parliament doesn't generally question during question time, and when it does, it often doesn't get answers. Legislation is not debated or negotiated through the Legislative Assembly in any meaningful sense of either term. Consequently, Queensland's parliament is one which has a record of passing sloppily drafted bills through to the keeper.

And there are other traditions, in which government reserves the rights to make substantive amendments to legislation in quite unrelated other legislation, to proclaim legislation pretty much when it sees fit and sometimes not at all, and to draft legislation that gives government very broad authority to get itself into trouble without any further reference to Parliament. It is not called the sausage machine for nothing and not all the sausages come out well-formed.

The Speaker is not under any constitutional obligation to be a government lackey and party hack but they nearly all behave as though they are. This is probably because Speakers who give a hint that they might be considering their constitutional abilities to insist on answers to questions, make procedural rulings in favour of the opposition and so on are usually taken out the back and shot.

In other States, Auditor-Generals and Ombudsmen and other parliamentary officers have on occasion emerged as staunch defenders of proper process and democracy. Sadly, this is not such a pronounced tendency here. Mind you, the auditor-general in Queensland does work under some constraints that some of his interstate colleagues don't have to put up with.

Then of course, there is the media. As media myself, I can boast that generally we can be good at discovering and highlighting some types of individual villainy and we give a reasonable description of the everyday passing political parade. But I have to confess we are not quite so good with what's behind the parade and just where its going, and we are often pretty hopeless on ideas, history, trends, processes and institutional performance.

The devil, they say, is in the detail.. So it is. Generally, in the media, we don't do detail.

And that's in the moderately attentive bit of the media, which in this city comes down to one newspaper and one public broadcasting outlet with a disposable income of eight cents a day and falling.

There are other outlets, of course. They might know Brisbane like nobody else but they aren't letting on to very much of what they know. Be sure . . . of not much.

I am one of those simple souls who believes that opposition is an essential part of the governmental process. Ministers and governments try a bit harder and are more inclined to turn away from temptation when they know they are under a modicum of scrutiny. A little thoughtful opposition means we will have a better chance that policies will be better formed, explained and implemented.

Without it, governments make silly mistakes, believe their own propaganda and lose touch.

Beattie can, if he wishes, use his huge majority in parliament to re-invigorate democracy in Queensland. He won't be easy, and the most entrenched opposition to any such notions will come from within his own party, under the underlying philosophy of never giving the other side an even break.

Beattie can unshackle parliamentary committees and officers, especially the auditor-general and ombudsman. He can unshackle the parliament, particularly in its ability to question and get answers and have free ranging public interest debates at times when there are TV cameras about..

He can appoint a speaker who goes by the parliamentary, not the party, rule book and encourage this novel approach to the position. And he can generously resource the opposition, the independents and enhance the research capacity of the Parliamentary Library.

Even though he doesn't need to, he can negotiate legislation rather than simply spring it on the house.

This would be radical. But Beattie does have a record in this area, most recently in generously allocating more funds to enable the coalition leaders to mount a better Statewide campaign.

There is absolutely no sign that he intends to treat the depleted opposition with anything like the gleeful humiliation that National Party Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen dished out to the 11 surviving ALP members in 1974.

And Beattie is not stupid. He could well remember that for quite a few years the most troublesome opposition Joh faced was a rump of liberal-minded Liberals elected in the 1974 landslide.

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This is article was first published in The Brisbane Line, journal of The Brisbane Institute, on February 21.



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About the Author

Phil Dickie is editor of The Brisbane Line, Newsletter of The Brisbane Institute. His investigative journalism in the 1980s led to the Fitzgerald Inquiry into corruption in Queensland.

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