Queensland Liberals need a Peter Beattie and a Dennis Murphy

The expected is never quite as devastating as the unexpected, so the Queensland Liberal Party is less dispirited after the results of the Brisbane City Council election than it deserves to be. For some failure is becoming a comfortable habit.

The result is the worst ever for the party in the city council. In each of the previous two elections it has lost one seat. This time it decided to outperform and lost 2. It now holds just 8 wards out of 26. In terms of the mayoral vote it appears to have improved on the 1997 result by about 1% - close to a statistical dead heat.

So why the poor performance? The reasons are obvious. No money, too many messages (and none of them right), too little manpower, incompetent management, and constant internal faction fighting. The party is no longer capable of making a connection with its constituency. The more interesting question is what can it do about it?

For a start it should admit its failure. The party suffers from a public perception of weakness. That perception is heightened when party leaders blame internal dissidents speaking out publicly or the ALP’s massive spend for their result. The Public knows that these are not the reasons and sees the Party as even weaker because it will not acknowledge the truth.

There are a number of aspects to the lack of money. There is a massive imbalance in wealth between the non-Labor and Labor parties in Queensland. The Queensland ALP is the beneficiary of some long past financial acumen with an investment fund that 8 years ago was estimated to have $22 Million in it. Added to that, electoral disclosure laws have made it more difficult to raise corporate donations, while leaving union donations almost unaffected. What corporate donors there are hedge their bets. In a council election they tend to be in the property industry and easier for the incumbent to tap, especially if they think he will win and be in a continuing position to review their development applications.

All of these are given, and most of them are the challenges that any Opposition must overcome. And they have been overcome in the past by a combination of disciplined fundraising and clever campaigning. It is not necessary to spend $2M to counter a $2M campaign. In the 1995 State Election the Coalition did it with a joint campaign of just $500,000, because it got its message precisely right and delivered it surgically, while the ALP sprayed their $2M all over the place.

The internal faction fighting is another matter. It is not the problem - it is a symptom of the problem. Campaigns which are well managed and achieving their goals minimise faction fighting. Ones like the last one merely exacerbate it. When Party President, the dapper Con Galtos, threatens to expel people who speak out, the public aren’t duped. They know that the threat is directed selectively at those who disagree with him. If the party really believed that people who talk to journalists should be expelled, then Mr Galtos himself would be one of the first to go, followed closely by Immediate Past President Bob Carroll and Santo Santoro and just about anyone else of any eminence.

The next thing that it needs to do is to fix its factional problem. The Queensland Liberal Party only has one faction – that of Santo Santoro. It is organised along ALP lines with its leadership meeting regularly and making decisions which are then implemented by its rank and file soldiers. The rest of the party tends to coalesce around former Party President Bob Tucker, but this is a loose alliance. It is defined mostly by opposition to Santoro and contains the remnants of the small "l" Liberals who used to control the party.

Santoro has been in and out of a position of control of the party 3 times since 1983. The first was briefly as the original enforcer for John Moore when he replaced John Herron as State President after the 1983 State election debacle. He then turned on Moore, eventually replacing him with the disastrous Bill Everingham who was succeeded by his cousin Paul. This second period almost culminated in the party being taken over by the National Party. The third period started in 1997 with Bob Carroll, followed by Con Galtos.

So evenly poised have the groupings been for most of this time that when Santoro first attempted to install Bill Everingham he was seen off by John Moore at the 1988 Convention with a margin of just 5 votes out of approximately 550. When Paul Everingham resigned in 1994 Santoro backed Galtos. Tucker beat him in an Executive ballot by 1 vote out of a total of around 40.

There is a parallel to the position in which the Queensland Liberal Party now finds itself, and that is with the Queensland Labor Party in the late 70’s and early 80’s. In 1974 Queensland Labor was reduced to 11 seats out of 82 in the State Parliament, and in 1975 it lost every Federal seat that it held apart from Oxley. Its only success was in the Brisbane City Council where, in 1973, Clem Jones won all but one ward against the Citizens Municipal Organisation. (The Liberal Party did not contest civic elections then). The faction fighting was extreme with current State Premier, Peter Beattie, locked out of the Party’s Breakfast Creek Headquarters. He set up an alternative administration in the CBD. The ALP ordered federal intervention, and new factions formed which helped balance the competing interests.

Dr Dennis Murphy, an academic became President, and he and Beattie set about modernising the party, and recruiting candidates like Wayne Goss who were more in tune with the times. By 1989 it had the best campaigning capacity of any Queensland Party, and that continues today.

This would seem to be the most appropriate model for the Queensland Liberal Party to follow. It won’t.

The first key to the Labor Party’s revival was the shock therapy of its various election results, but the Queensland Liberal Party has been living with shock since its the State and Federal results in 1983. It tries to conventionally renovate the party, succeeds for a while, then it disintegrates again. It has got used to defeat and shrugs it off as someone else’s fault. The only move to try something different occurred under Paul Everingham when he attempted to merge the Liberal Party into the National Party – not a renovation but an admission of defeat.

The second key was Federal intervention. This again is unlikely for the Queensland Liberals. Not only are the Feds preoccupied with two infinitely more healthy divisions – those of New South Wales and Victoria – but there is no-one who could command the respect of all the factions. Tony Staley appears to be Prime Minister Howard’s preferred doctor, but he would be viewed with deep suspicion and outright hostility by the moderate groupings in the Queensland Liberals.

The third key was finding a President who could straddle the factions. The Queensland Liberal Party’s problem is to find a president, period. When Con Galtos was asked immediately after the election whether he was under any threat he said that he wasn’t because being Party President was time consuming, didn’t pay a salary, and required the incumbent to donate large sums of money for the privilege. Not a strong defence of his position, but an accurate one.

The one member of the current executive who could perhaps have aspired to this position is long serving Vice-President, Dr Ross Cartmill, but Cartmill has decided to contest the pre-selection for the senate position left vacant by the resignation of Warwick Parer. He will therefore either become a senator, or be damaged by his failure.

None of the other Vice-Presidents could fill the position. Robin Fardoulys is the campaign chairman, and has to share a lot of the blame for the electoral defeats. Matthew Boland was overwhelmingly censured by the State Executive in 1996,and could have faced expulsion, for his role in the rorting and branch stacking that had infected the Queensland Young Liberal Movement.

The fourth was having a State Secretary who could get on with the job, and make some tough decisions. It is possible that the Queensland Liberals could do better here. Unlike the ALP the State Director (who is the equivalent of the State Secretary) is not elected. He or she is a paid official so a good one could be procured at the right price. Unfortunately, the cash strapped party is unlikely to pay the price. A likely candidate might decide that the party’s fortunes were at their lowest ebb and be tempted by an incentive package based on performance, but then again, they might not.

The fifth was the decision by the factions to back off. Again this is unlikely to happen with the Queensland Liberals. To date no-one has been out to destroy Santoro, but he has been obsessed with destroying all of his opponents. It follows that the chances of a peaceful recovery rest with him – he has to be prepared to share power. But Santoro has never shared power. The Lilley Federal Electorate Council is his stronghold and he has driven out most independent spirits. Rod Samut, a senior and respected member of the Brisbane Business community, was destroyed as Lilley FEC Chairman because he dared to question Santoro’s authority in the area. When Elizabeth Grace was the Federal Member there was a poisonous relationship between the two because she would not toe the line.

Santoro has trouble relinquishing control of anything. Even after he was too old to be a member of the Young Liberal Movement he attended Young Liberal Executive meetings for some time. He is still an active advisor and player in Young Liberal Games, at the age of 43.

So, if the better course is impossible for the Queensland Liberals, what is likely to happen?

One possibility is that the National Party will move in and fill the gap as suggested by National Party State Director, Ken Crooke. It did hold Brisbane seats through the 80’s, and it is not impossible that this might happen again. However, it would require a major change in the complexion of that party for it to win more than a few. The Liberal Party’s problem in Brisbane is not with the right wing vote, it still gets that, but with those in the centre. Liberal voters lost by the party’s 1998 One Nation decision would be even more repelled by the National Party, for example.

Another possibility is that the party could be taken over by new players. The last year has already seen a couple of opportunists attempt to make inroads into the party by signing up huge numbers of new members. These attempts appear to be foundering. Michael Johnson, the Australian Chinese who hopes to replace John Moore as the member for Ryan, has signed up approximately 300 new members into the Centenary Branch, practically all Chinese. Centenary falls into Jamboree ward, one of those that was lost to the ALP. Jamboree has a significant Asian population, and the ALP had Chinese speaking workers on all of the key booths. Johnson was only able to turn up two, including himself. The failure of the Liberal Party to win a reasonable proportion of the Chinese community would have been one of the factors in this loss.

Johnson, and another entrepreneur, Dr Christian Rowan, who signed up 100 or so Brisbane residents to a Nambour Branch, 90 minutes drive north of Brisbane, have also fallen easily into the factional system, intensifying, rather than diffusing it.

What this illustrates is that political parties do not radically change membership overnight, and that when there are rapid influxes, it is often for the wrong reasons and does not alter the substrata on which the whole is built.

At this stage, the most likely outcome would appear to be a long Labor rule – the coalition sentenced to long opposition as the Liberal Party hobbles along, unable and unwilling to help itself. It may have to wait for a post Santoro generation for anything to change – and that is a long time away.