You can almost feel sorry for Bill Wood. Indeed, if I were Bill Wood, I would be thinking about wandering around to Rosemary Follett’s office asking for a Cabinet reshuffle, so I could get out of the hot seat.
No, hot seat is the wrong cliche _ hot seats would be more correct. I’d only be thinking about it, because there would be dangers, as we shall see.
One of the difficulties with ACT politics is that only four Ministers have to share the whole range of portfolios that come with the ACT Self-Government Act’s requirement to provide for the “”peace, order and good government of the ACT”.
It means that each minister has to hold several babies at once. That is fine if they are all placid babies. But if you have one pooping its nappy, another squawking for food and the other kicking restlessly, thing can get tricky.
Wood is not in a unique position. Gary Humphries, in the Alliance Government, had to carry the health and education portfolios. He had to close and hospital and some schools. They were very messy babies.
On coming to power in 1992, the Labor Government wisely thought it would not make the same mistake. It would not give the same Minister the two tricky portfolios of health and education. So Wayne Berry got health and Bill Wood got education. And each got some other minor portfolios.
The order of trickiness of portfolios suddenly changed. The land portfolio (which embraces environment and planning) suddenly became the hot potato. Health moved back a couple of slots on the trickiness scale.
Health moved back largely because Humphries took the necessary hard decision three years ago and the fruits are now coming through. Humphries had the guts to close Royal Canberra on Acton Peninsula and built the principal hospital at Woden. He also attacked some union work practices. It was obvious, but in politics the obvious is rarely easy to achieve. The health budget is still over, but it is in better shape than if Royal Canberra stayed open.
Instead of health, the land portfolio is the trouble spot. And education, which has been fairly sleepy since the big school-closure fury, is now slowly pushing itself to the front burner with the knob on High.
We’ll come back to Wood’s portfolio difficulty in a moment. He also has two other political difficulties. First, the ACT branch of the Labor Party recently changed its rules to allow block union voting at pre-selection time. It was inspired by the left. This combined with the fact Wood is male means his position on the ticket is not going to be as high as his ministerial position would otherwise warrant.
(Though the way the Labor Party in the ACT is going, it will not be long before being male is and advantage as males get the benefits of positive discrimination in a female world.)
Second, David Lamont is breathing down Wood’s neck. Like everyone who goes into politics, Lamont has ministerial ambitions. There’s nothing wrong with that; the territory (indeed the nation) cannot function without it. The trouble with Lamont’s ambition, from Wood’s perspective, is that he wants the Land portfolio.
Lamont has been shadow boxing in the portfolio since his election to the Assembly. He is chair of the important Planning, Infrastructure and Development Committee.
Often committees make recommendations to fill pigeon holes. Lamont’s committee, however, has some important statutory functions and power over the Territory Plan. Lamont and his colleagues have filled them with some prowess.
The draft plan, authored by the ACT Planner George Tomlins, with the able assistance of the Department of Environment, Land and Planning, was launched last year with great approval by Bill Wood. He put his stamp on what the department and planner had prepared.
Lamont’s committee artfully presented its changes to the draft by making each change with reference to a point in the draft plan. In fact, the thing was a total restatement of planning policy _ more green space, more power to people, greater emphasis on what residents can and cannot do in their neighbourhoods, greater emphasis in retaining the essential character of Canberra.
The community groups and NIMBYs (read, voters), if not delighted, were relieved.
Wood meantime is still battling on the land front. The community groups, buoyed with the powerful combination of altruistic righteousness and threats to Canberrans’ precious property rights, continued the fight against the Government’s 50-50 in-fill/greenfields policy.
The opponents of 50-50 are very articulate. It has long been a feature of Canberra life that the community groups will contain more than a sprinkling of economics PhDs, noted educations, a couple of scientists, a whole lot of people who know a lot about bureaucratic manoeuvring and who are not afraid of using the media and people who work in the federal bureaucracy who have the time and office resources at hand. They make formidable political opponents.
Added to these woes Wood has to find an ambit $70 million, but more realistically $35 million, in cuts from the education budget. He is going to meet head-on resistance from a teachers’ union crafted in preserving the privilege of the short working week, the short working year with virtually no external independent standards to meet. This union worships on the altar of the importance of education and has a large unquestioning congregation. Poor Bill Wood.
Do not get me wrong. Nearly all of the problems are of his or his government’s creation. ACT Labor has to be a big development, big growth Government. It is the only way to feed the supply side of its Budget and to keep building unions happy. It cannot cut the spending side of its budget because it is beholden to public-sector unions and an extravagant social-justice agenda.
In this environment the other three ministers are having an easy ride. Humphries did all the hard work for Berry, and Berry is being allowed to get away virtually unquestioned with the idiocy of putting a hospice on Acton peninsula. The meanest intelligence would demand the thing be put next to the principal hospital in Woden, not only on grounds of economic efficiency but on patient welfare. Doctors who can relieve pain more effectively and make life more comfortable are much closer. The idea that dying people want to sit outside looking at a view over the lake is romantic nonsense; people capable of getting up to look at the view prefer to go home to die.
Terry Connolly is not so much getting an easy run as making it look easy _ a bit like a parallel skier going down the moguls. I like to call him Hydra because he has so many heads popping up on television and if you chop one off by changing channels, there are two more to take its place. Again, he is getting away virtually unquestioned with a $65 million deficit on the buses. (Our rates, incidentally only drag in $90 million.)
The reason Berry and Connolly are getting away with it is that Canberrans, for better or worse, are more concerned with what they see as quality of life than wastage and inefficiency. Perhaps that is because so few have had to run a small business, and those that do are too busy to get involved in local politics.
Wood, therefore, who works very hard at his portfolios (he had to) feels hard done by. At least that is what his tone on radio suggests.
So should he seek a move to some less fractious portfolios? Should he seek a post-Budget reshuffle. The danger of that is that there is only thing worse than not getting what you want _ that’s getting it. There might be a reshuffle. David Lamont might be made Minister for Environment, Land and Planning.