Saturday Extra

How can the 8.5% swing to Labor in Queensland be explained?

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Geraldine Doogue: The formal swearing-in of the new Rudd government happens on Monday. Then we're well and truly into a new era, and there are lots of angles to pursue on this, which we'll try to do in the weeks remaining of our Saturday Extra year, and of course we'll be on the case next year.

But one backdrop we wanted to explore, because I think it's been a bit overlooked in all of this: how did Queensland become such a breeding ground for Labor politicians of a modern stripe, such that our new Prime Minister and Treasurer, for the first time in our nation's history come from that State.

Of course that ultimate political marketer, Peter Beattie, he'd go on about it all the time, that Queensland was different now, that it was changing more than any of us realised, that apart from anything else 2,000 people arriving a week to live, had to change the place. But the terrible vote of the coalition, plus the remarkable fact of the two leading men going to the same High School, Nambour High, was pretty vivid. Some big shifts were clearly under way in the Sunshine State, and we'd like to drill down now beyond the obvious answers, to look for the genesis of this change.

Two keen observers are joining us, both pretty proud, but dispassionate of course, Queenslanders: Julianne Schultz, the Editor of The Griffith Review, which won its first Walkley Award, by the way on Thursday night for an essay by the writer Frank Moorhouse on civil liberties in Australia; and Dennis Atkins, who's the Chief Political Reporter for The Courier Mail. So welcome to you both.

Both: Thank you.

Geraldine Doogue: Look, let's be frank, Queensland has always mattered in Federal elections because it has a lot of seats and has a very dispersed population, but it's not often won the powerful offices, has it Julianne, to you first?

Julianne Schultz: No it hasn't, the centres of power in Australia have very much been in the south and the east of the nation for a very long time. It's quite nice because of my connection with Griffith Review that Sir Samuel Griffith, who was of course one of the very important founding fathers and one of the very important early High Court judges, now has an electorate named after him that's occupied by the Prime Minister.

Geraldine Doogue: Yes, it is, it's a lovely term. Now there have been other Prime Ministers, haven't there? I mean Frank Ford for a very short time, Arthur Fadden, standing in for a very short time, and of course Andrew Fisher, who was a Scotsman but actually a Queenslander. I think Kevin Rudd's determined to put him much more on our consciousness. But that's it, isn't it?

Julianne Schultz: Yes. Well as I say the centre of power was always in the south and the east. Partly it was that Queensland was quite different in many ways to the rest of Australia.

Geraldine Doogue: It almost liked to be, I think.

Julianne Schultz: It liked to be. But it's always been complicated. It had very early migration especially into settling Central Queensland, and in the North, very early pre-war migration that continued. But once the industrialisation of Australia started in the post-war period, Queensland missed out on that for a very long time. So that the diversity and the industrial development that occurred elsewhere in the nation didn't occur at the same pace in Queensland. Queensland levels of education were much lower, it was much more inward-looking, and it was also a much more decentralised State than any of the others. So it developed its own sort of political and economic culture, which only really started to move in significant ways with the sort of mining stuff that happened from the '70s on really.

Geraldine Doogue: Do you see it like that, Dennis?

Dennis Atkins: Yes, a lot of what Julianne says is quite right, and it's interesting she talks about education, because one of the things that I noticed during this election campaign - I think Queenslanders made up their minds fairly early to vote for Kevin Rudd, long before the election campaign started. But the thing that really took off for me in the election campaign, well there were two things. One was the idea of having a Prime Minister and Treasurer from Queensland, and Queenslanders thought that was a fantastic thing, and they decided. When their minds shifted from that being an abstract notion to a potential reality, they just went for it. But the other thing was education. Education took off as an issue in Queensland because Queenslanders I think more than anyone else, well perhaps Western Australian people do too (I'm in Perth at the moment). Queenslanders see more than most people just how hard up against the capacity constraints of this economy we are, and we need skills, we need people being trained, we need people to really get a good education, and when Kevin Rudd started talking about that, you could just see people nodding in the streets.

Geraldine Doogue: Julianne?

Julianne Schultz: Well I think the other thing with that is that of course Kevin and Wayne, but Kevin especially, is the perfect walking example of how education can transform your life. So that wonderful line when they went back to Nambour High, that you can take the boy out of Nambour, but you can't take Nambour out of the boy, I mean that resonated on all sorts of levels, and it's part of that whole routine, the Queensland thing that's been going on. But he is a manifestation of what's happened to our generation in a sense, that the opportunities that are available now to people from their mid-'40s through to their mid-'50s, are there largely as a result of the education that we had access to during that period when universities became free and so on. When you look back at Queensland, Queensland in the '40s, '50s, and even into the '60s, had a handful of schools, a handful of State schools, the leaving age for schooling was much lower than anywhere else in the nation. There was a big Catholic system but that was to compensate for a really, really poor State system. So the process of education and the importance of education you can see it throughout that State, and there's a generational marker, which comes in with people of our age.

Geraldine Doogue: Very interesting. I wonder when you both date - well you've alluded to when you date this from, and of course sometimes the genesis of these things, you've got to remind yourself that when they actually began, because things don't actually start to come through till maybe 10 or 20 years later; but I think Julianne, you actually also believe that the Bjelke-Petersen era was a tipping point in a sense, though it wasn't obvious at the time really, what it would yield. What do you mean by that?

Julianne Schultz: Well I think that the Queensland during the period of Joh Bjelke-Petersen I mean we all now know about the sort of corruption that was around, because that's been subjects of Royal Commissions and Inquiries and so on. I think what's less well known out of Queensland was the degree of - repression's not quite the right word, but there was a tightness - repression is probably the right word - there was a sort of political surveillance, there was an inward-lookingness, that was quite frightening. And so for people - you look at this generation who are now there in the highest offices in the land, but they're also there in very senior positions throughout the country - is you find that the point where they intersect to some degree, is at the University of Queensland. So the University of Queensland from the late '60s through to the early '80s, under the Vice Chancellorship of Sir Zelman Cowan and then Brian Martin, was a university which sat alone in this City-State which was changing, where there was a corrupt and omnipresent government that was very conservative, very populist, but very narrow in its focus. There was a sort of Tammany Hall Labor party and Labor Council which was not something that really you wanted to engage with. And out of the university came a sort of civil liberties and liberal-liberal sort of movement.

Geraldine Doogue: But obviously politically savvy too.

Julianne Schultz: Politically savvy, but being watched and so on, quite tangibly. And so you can see from that a group of people who in that environment were tussling with ideas, they were rejecting stuff that was happening on the left and the right around them, and the analogy I come back to because I see these people now all around Australia, is that in a way, there wasn't a sense of a lack of capacity or ability or ego or energy or anything like that, but there were enormous obstacles. So for instance in 1976 when the election in the State after the Whitlam government was kicked out, I think the Labor party went back to 11 seats. So it was sort of unimaginable that by 1989 you'd have a Labor government being elected. But the people who were elected in that government were formed in that cauldron. And in a way, the things that then happened in the cauldron of the Goss government have informed the lessons that you see now. So the technocratic stuff that was around in the Goss government, when they've learned that you've got to humanise, you've got to engage with people, you've got to be - not that the big agenda's wrong, but you've got to find -

Geraldine Doogue: Tell a bigger story.

Julianne Schultz: Absolutely. And I think Kevin's the perfect sort of manifestation of that in a sense.

Geraldine Doogue: See Dennis, when you look back, I don't know whether you agree or not with Julianne, but do you think you can see a sophistication coming through? The reason I ask that is we had a letter-writer, a listener wrote to us I think two weeks ago saying that she thought that all this discipline was learned in adversity during the Bjelke-Petersen era, and that it formed a whole lot of new political operatives that really Queensland hadn't seen before.

Dennis Atkins: Yes, I think there is some truth in that, and the point about the emergence of the Goss government and the way that changed Queensland is very important in what I think will be the narrative of the Rudd government. Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan were central to the Goss government. Kevin ran the Cabinet office, Wayne ran the Labor party, and they made mistakes, lots of mistakes, and in the end some of those mistakes led to the demise of the government. But I think both Kevin and Wayne have learnt from all those mistakes and that experience I think will make this government potentially a much better government.

Geraldine Doogue: And what about the rise of women here too? Because there's very much a macho feel I suppose to Queensland politics. When I think back to interviewing Russ Hinze, I can tell you what that was alpha male in a full way. Now we've got Anna Bligh who is the Premier, and we've got a State governor who's a woman.

Dennis Atkins: And we've got Therese Rayne.

Geraldine Doogue: And we've got Therese Rayne.

Julianne Schultz: And we've got the Head of the Court of Appeal and we had the former Head of the Labor Council. I mean there are women at high points of most public offices in Queensland.

Geraldine Doogue: So again, Dennis, you watching, reporting on this, in your position at The Courier Mail, when you look back, is there a time, is there a particular give years when you realise that there were people bedding themselves down and gaining maturity?

Julianne Schultz: I'd say the early '90s. These people were positioning themselves for a role in national politics, and Wayne Goss was too, and tragically he got cancer and majestically he survived it, but that stopped him from doing that, and he's now gone and done it in that he's doing other things. All of these people in the early '90s, the Goss government was their sandpit for national government, if you like.

Geraldine Doogue: Yes. Julianne?

Julianne Schultz: Yes, I think Dennis is absolutely right about all that. One of the other things though I think about the position of women, which is really interesting, and they haven't grown up in that very macho, very horrible sort of environment, I remember once my first job interview going for at The Courier Mail, and the Editor saying to me at the time, 'I don't know what it is with you girls; what was wrong with teaching and nursing?' But one of the things that really struck me is that that group of people who came through that period in the '70s and into the '80s, through the whole civil rights movement and so on, that there was a bunch of people who were very actively involved in that whole, you know. In my mind it's sort of like a bunch of lion cubs, they're all in the basket together tussling and jostling and seeing who's going to be the biggest cub at the end of the day. But there were women in there as well, because the feminist movement was very strong in that sort of formative process. And so the women were in there, fighting, through that whole process, and so I don't think it's surprising that you see people like Quentin and Anna and the others who have assumed those sort of positions of power, because it was part of that jostling and development and maturing that happened in a situation where there was no-one really sitting on top of them. You had to create your own space.

Geraldine Doogue: But it's true, isn't it, that in a way, this was a very interesting new development for Labor as well, Julianne, because Queensland had been a Labor State, but it was a particular type of Labor, Vince Gair Labor, and then it became a Bjelke-Petersen State. And then it seemed to transform. So this was an overwhelming shift, and this is before lots of mining revenue started to flow.

Julianne Schultz: Yes. Queensland is a funny sort of electorate in a sense, that on one level it swings with greater volatility than any other State, so you see the big swing in this election, you saw the big swing in '96. And then you see the big landslide that Beattie's won in various parts. So you get this big lock-on, but then you have these quite long periods where if the game's played right, they'll go with you. But they'll turn, and they'll turn so that - I mean it was Wayne Goss' wonderful line about sitting with the baseball bat on the verandah, I mean nobody was ever advertising that. But you knew it had turned, and I'm interested to hear Dennis say that he thought people had decided a long time ago in Queensland that they were going to vote for Rudd. That was my feeling as well. They weren't going to make a big song and dance about it, but they'd sit, they'd watch, and then make a decision.

Geraldine Doogue: How much was this led by Brisbane Dennis? What's your estimation? It's such an extraordinarily diverse electorate - not electorate-state, and we've always been cautioned about assuming that Brisbane represented the rest. What's your judgment?

Dennis Atkins: It's interesting. Inner city Brisbane didn't swing that much. As you got further out the swings just got bigger and bigger and bigger. Mal Brough's electorate is probably the classic one, where he had a 6%, just under 7% margin, he got a 10% swing, but there was this strip down the western side of the Bruce Highway where the swing went as high as 18%. And I called him the other day in The Courier Mail, 'The Silent Assassins'. They were people who especially if they turned up in a Hilux or a Twin Cab, they walked straight into the polling booth, they didn't take 'How to Vote' cards from anyone. Often their heads were bowed, and they had decided sometime, maybe 10, 12 months ago, OK, this deed will be done. And they marked it down on their calendar. Do this. Then Christmas.

Geraldine Doogue: Oh, beautiful description, well done. We've only got a couple of minutes left. What about, I think Brisbane itself, I mean the changes around Expo were extraordinary, Julianne. Looking back, were they profound?

Julianne Schultz: I think there are two things that we're seeing very briefly. That whole transformation of the South Brisbane precinct on the other side of the river from the main part of the city, has been amazing. As you say, Expo coming up from 20 years ago transformed it initially, but South Brisbane had a particular place in Brisbane's mind. It wasn't a place that really nice people went because it was poor, it was black, it was grimy, it was where there was a railway station. During the Second World War it was where the black troops were stationed, they weren't allowed on the north side of the river, they were on the south side of the river. Expo started to change that. That precinct now is the best example of urban regeneration anywhere in Australia. It is full of apartments and restaurants and cafes, it has the best cultural precincts anywhere, it has the big Gallery of Modern Art, the Library, the Gallery, the Museum, Performing Arts Centres of Griffith University is there, the Conservatorium, I mean it is an extraordinary, vibrant place. Now in a way, that's a really good sort of manifestation of how Brisbane's changed. Interestingly, that's in Anna Bligh's electorate and it abutts Kevin Rudd's electorate as well. So that sort of transformation of Brisbane on one hand has been quite profound.

With the big movement of people that's come in and I think that the people that Dennis is talking about, a lot of them would be people who've come in, this big migration over the last decade or so. Now they've moved for all sorts of reasons, but it has to be remembered that for all the money of the mining boom, there are lots of very, very poor areas of Queensland. And a lot of the people who've moved up have not had access to good jobs and good money and so on, so they're living in situations where they're paying lots for their houses, they've got a lot of money to spend on travel and petrol and so on. It was a point that Matt Price made very early on in the election campaign when he went up there. He said, 'It's going to change, and I've seen it because I've seen the traffic jams north of Brisbane'. So the economics that were facing these people, coupled with the opportunity that was being presented by the incoming government, I think was irresistible.

Geraldine Doogue: Yes, we went up there and we certainly found that. I must just mention seeing you mentioned Matt Price, I know Dennis that you were very, very good mates with Matt Price, and you've been over, in fact we're speaking to you from Perth airport lounge, because you've been over there for the funeral.

Dennis Atkins: And I'm wearing a 'Matt 07' badge.

Geraldine Doogue: Wearing a 'Matt 07', aah, it must have been a very sad - I only saw bits of it on the news last night, but it must have been a terribly sad - or was it a sad occasion? Tell me.

Dennis Atkins: Well yes, of course it was.

Geraldine Doogue: Was it a celebration of Matt, that's really what I was getting at.

Dennis Atkins: Well it was. Suzie, Matt's gorgeous, gorgeous wife, she said to me afterwards 'Was it all good?' and I said 'Suzie, it was all good except for that one thing.'

Geraldine Doogue: Yes, I thought I must say I did think of you all, I really did. Look, thank you very much indeed both of you, for musing about one of the more important shifts. I might add when I mentioned on Fran Kelly's Breakfast yesterday that I was doing this, the Queensland Orchestra people quickly rang me and they said, 'Now you do know that the Queensland Orchestra won the 2007 ABC Limelight Award for Best Orchestra Performance, don't you, for Piers Lane Plays Beethoven. Yes, they're very proud of themselves anyway, and I've got a whole lot of press releases in front of me explaining how well they've done. So the cultural revival goes in lock-step with the political revival.

Julianne Schultz, thank you very much indeed from the Griffith Review.

Julianne Schultz: Thank you Geraldine.

Geraldine Doogue: And Dennis Atkins, thanks to you.

Dennis Atkins: Thanks very much.

Geraldine Doogue: From The Courier Mail. And do let us know, will you, what you think. You may live in Queensland or live outside it or you've moved there, whether you think this is a correct analysis about the profound shift in power towards Queensland.

One very quick little postscript about the election. Do you remember we looked at the McCormack family, all through the election, the changing vote patterns within that very diverse family. And we interviewed Gerard McCormack, who said he was going to stick with the coalition. This is a man who'd worked in the Post Office and had become a postal contractor, well I'm here to tell you that at the very last minute, walking into the polling booth, we now hear that Gerard McCormack changed his vote to Labor in the seat of Macquarie, won by Bob Deebus, who's actually become the Home Affairs Minister. So we thought that was a pretty extraordinary sort of revolution in the McCormack family, one which they weren't expecting.

Guests

Dr Julianne Schultz
Editor
Griffith Review

Story Researcher and Producer

Julie Browning