The political outcomes of Shepherdson and Fitzgerald are likely to be different

The tone of recent Coalition press releases exhibits a confidence that they will soon be returned to government as a result of the Shepherdson Inquiry into Allegations of Electoral Fraud in Queensland. No doubt they see parallels between the current inquiry and the 1989 Fitzgerald Inquiry, which brought to an end 30 years of conservative rule. There are parallels, but they do not necessarily lead to the same result.

In 1989 the ALP had been out of power for a generation. After a near-death experience in 1974 when it was reduced to 11 members in the Legislative Assembly it had reformed itself under the hands of Party President Dr Dennis Murphy, and State Secretary Peter Beattie. They had recruited young urban professionals like Wayne Goss into the Parliament, making the party appear youthful and energetic.

In contrast the National Party had an aging rural leader in Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Petersen was at the heart of the corruption and as the inquiry proceeded he was deposed by Mike Ahern, the amiable member for another rural electorate – Landsborough. Ahern was a reformer, but the bulk of the National Party membership never really accepted the legitimacy of the Fitzgerald findings. The Queensland Liberal Party was sitting on the sidelines having ruled itself out of power by splitting from the Coalition in 1983. The split was over corruption related issues, so they were untainted.

In this atmosphere the ALP had an extremely strong case to put to the electorate. The election was held on December 2 1989, but it was not until September of that year that the polls showed the ALP with any chance. How did the ALP turn the polls around? By a big-spending election campaign with heavy use of direct mail and some extremely clever marketing. Realising that the Liberal Party was its real opponent, it positioned the Liberals as the gormless, quarrelsome lickspittle of the Nationals and forced electors to choose between a polluted coalition and a pure ALP.

Why won’t the same dynamics apply this time?

There is the question of the type and magnitude of wrong-doing. The Fitzgerald Inquiry involved crooked coppers, drugs, prostitution, bribery and consequent corruption of the law-enforcement process. The National Party will always carry a stigma from the Joh years.

The sins uncovered in the Shepherdson inquiry are of a different order. They mostly relate to internal party machinations. As most citizens despise politicians, these are pretty close to victimless crimes. The are also not uncommon. How many people have moved house from one electorate to another but not changed their enrolment and voted in their previous electorate at the next election?

The ALP rorts involve a handful of people being added to the roll in a few electorates. It’s possible that they might have changed the results in Mundingburra in 1995 and Springwood in 1998. But this is dwarfed by the magnitude of legal fraud embodied in the National Party gerrymander.

The Queensland Liberal Party has added substance to the perception of politicians as rorters. Not only are some of their executive members "careless" about where they enroll, but there have been a number of well publicised rorts of its internal processes.

First there was the Young Liberal fraud. Now, according to newspaper reports, two Chinese members have signed up about 600 Chinese members in the Federal Electorates of Ryan and Moreton, while branches have been moved between Federal Electorate Councils, creating additional delegates to a Senate pre-selection council.

I have heard Liberal Party members say that none of this is illegal. It ought to be. Political parties have the important role of pre-vetting candidates for election. Their task in this process is at least as important as the task of voting. Tampering with it ought to be a crime.

Under Liberal Party rules anyone can be signed up to a branch in an electorate and vote in a preselection – they do not have to be an Australian citizen, live in the country, or be of voting age. This leads to attempts by candidates to "buy" preselections by signing up friends, relatives, neighbours and employees. It is illegal to pay for memberships, but cash is notoriously tight lipped about the hands it passes through. In theory, organised crime or a foreign government could control any Liberal Party preselection it wanted to.

The reason ALP operatives are going to jail is that they treat their role in choosing candidates more seriously. In the Queensland ALP, to vote in a preselection council you must be on the roll for that electoral area, which has the effect of criminalising activity that is legal in the Liberal Party.

Another difference in this election is that neither side can plausibly mount the "It’s time" argument. The Borbidge/Sheldon coalition government was only recently in power and Borbidge is still the National Party leader. Added to that is the odium of the Liberals’ One Nation preference decision which, coupled with the faint lingering scent of Fitzgerald, will hurt the coalition in the Brisbane Metropolitan Area.

Beattie is unlike Bjelke-Petersen. For most politicians a declaration of their honesty is a sign of either desperation or dishonesty but when Beattie puts his hand over his heart and says he knew nothing, he is believed. Unlike Bjelke-Petersen, Beattie is also embracing change and moving ahead of the commission’s findings to make reforms. There is one similarity with Bjelke-Petersen, however: Petersen survived for so long because he broke the rules of engagement of conventional politics – so does Beattie. That helps to make him more than "just another politician".

As State Secretary and a prominent parliamentarian, Beattie must have known about the rorts. But knowing about rorts and being in a position to do something about them are two different things. If the will and the opportunity to reform are not there within the party, you are faced with two alternatives: to work within and make what compromises you must, or get out. Working inside, one can often be a more potent force for good than working outside, so the decision is often made to turn a blind eye to malpractice so that more important goals can be achieved. That is a more difficult moral path to tread than retreating, and it is a path that I am sure has seen Beattie’s scuff marks.

So, will Beattie lose the next election? At the moment, I think that is only a 50% chance. He has the materials for a successful campaign. He will need to focus on reducing the standing of all politicians (a successful theme of the "No" case in the Republican Referendum) with the aim of heightening his own. He needs to make the next election presidential, trading on his own high approval rating and marginalising the party organisation. He is presently very quick to admit wrongdoing by his party, and to present his argument vehemently and colloquially – this should continue. The next election is likely to be about electoral corruption and nothing else – Beattie should continue with his 8 point plan to fix it. That way he pits Beattie the Reformer against Borbidge, the man who will tolerate problems in his Liberal Party coalition partner, just so he can get back into power.

Beattie should also encourage the public perception that the City Country Alliance, popularly still called One Nation, will survive. Potential instability in government favours Beattie because he still commands the largest bloc. It also means that the Coalition is likely to depend on, or be in coalition with, CCA members. Imagine the letterbox drops in Brisbane: "A vote for the Libs is a vote for One Nation".

What sort of campaign should the coalition run? First, they need to lift their game on corruption within the Liberal Party. While the branch stacking continues not only will the Liberal Party be tainted, but the leaks and internal disunity will continue. Frustratingly for Borbidge, he has no control over this. Second, they have to continue the job of tying Beattie to Labor Party corruption. They will have to position themselves as an alternative government, and they will have to sell the message that they will wipe out the CCA. This will be a new play for recent Australian politics where the strategy has been to position yourself as the underdog. A "We will win" campaign invites the electorate to bring out the brush cutter to the tall poppies, but in this case, the Coalition has no alternative.

It also has to whip along community dislike of ALP rorting and screw it to the point where electors want to punish the ALP and will bypass Independents to do it.

Both sides will need to take out some insurance on independents. What if the electorate decides that independents are the best way of keeping the bastards honest? It would be a good idea to ensure that independents in key seats will support their side of politics, just in case. As a result of that, and genuine community feeling for an alternative to the current system, I expect this election will see the greatest number of well resourced independents ever.

Both campaigns also have a common interest in being seen as leaders in reform. Beattie has a plan for internal ALP reform and a less detailed plan for external electoral reform. The Coalition has a plan for external electoral reform but it is undercut by Liberal Party rorting. But Beattie’s plan isn’t perfect, it’s just that no-one (apart from Carmen Lawrence) has pointed out the obvious flaw: Union domination of internal processes is at the root of many ALP problems. Beattie needs a further plan for reform that accentuates the Liberals rorting problems, and the Coalition needs one that accentuates Beattie’s union ones.

A left-field possibility, which would best serve the side that first promoted it, is to revolutionise the role of political parties in the political process. To recognise that they are as much a part of the mechanism as the Parliament or the Electoral Commission, and that their debating-club rules and membership structures are an anachronism. Why have so many Young Liberals and Chinese who live nowhere near Ryan been signed up to that area’s FEC? Because winning the preselection virtually guarantees election. To a person wanting to be the member for Ryan the general public don’t count. Only the 300 or so Liberal Party members who vote in the preselection do, and there is no need for them to even be Australian citizens!

Logically, the law should lay out minimum standards to be met by political parties in their preselection processes, otherwise the whole process of government can potentially be dominated by corrupt (or foreign) forces. If Beattie was to adopt a wide-ranging policy along these lines, stipulating that preselectors must be drawn from the local electoral area, then he would shift the spotlight onto the Liberal Party’s scandals. By contrast, if the Coalition were to propose their own policy restricting the automatic right of unions to representation in preselection ballots, they would shift the spotlight onto the root of Beattie’s problems, the AWU.

This election is unlikely to give a clear result. Independents and minor parties are likely to be a significant factor in government. It does, however, give both the Coalition and Labor an opportunity to clean up their own internal squalors, giving them some hope of stable government in the medium term.