Don’t expect to see the so-called generational change at federal level trickle down locally.
All major-party sitting MLAs are standing again. Some deferentially say that they are standing for pre-selection again, but in this environment it is the same thing. (Incidentally, is it only in English-speaking countries that one stands for a seat?)
Anyway Labor’s Bill Wood, aged 68, and Ted Quinlan and Wayne Berry, both 61, and the Liberals’ Greg Cornwell 65 will all stand again, though Cornwell’s official position is that it is unnecessary to decide until nominations for pre-selection close. Come the end of the next term the four will be 73, 66, 66 and 71 respectively.
But in the ACT context I’m not sure age is as important as attitude and drive. Maybe this is a harbinger. In an aging population we will soon have a quarter of the population over 65, so we should expect to have a quarter of or MLAs over 65. Generational change for its own sake is not as important as change directed at making the plant thrive. And in the plant that is the ACT polity we might have some old dead wood, but we have also got a fair bit of young dead wood, too. We should not worry about the ages of MLAs but what they are (not) doing.
The Assembly’s last sitting for the year is next week. Then it goes into election year.
The stakes are high. The next election will be for a four-year term. Previously it was three, but the major parties colluded in extending it. Labor is in the box seat to win, and could quite easily get majority government – the first majority Government since self-government in 1989.
So perhaps it is as well that Ted Quinlan is standing again. Someone has to keep an eye on the books, and even former accountant Quinlan has on occasions been too ready to up revenue rather than restrain expenditure – but at least he understands the need to be on the right side of Micawber’s equation. However, it will be more difficult to persuade his colleagues of that need if they are in a majority government than in the present minority.
Ultimately, the ACT Government balance sheet is the most important thing for the well-being of the ACT. No other state or territory is so susceptible to businesses pulling up stumps and going to another jurisdiction if government tries to take too much. For small businesses, Queanbeyan is usually closer than the next ACT town centre. For medium and large business, the move to Sydney is not a big one.
But back to change. The ACT has a new, young Opposition leader. But this term, the Stanhope Government has got away with it because the Opposition has been weak.
No, let me rephrase that.
This term, the Stanhope Government has got away with it because the Opposition has been spineless, inept, lazy and dumb and the media often supine.
You see, youth and newness in an Opposition leader is not enough.
The Opposition has been spineless because it has allowed the aura of the Hero of Bendora Dam to blind it from an obvious government weak point. Maybe nothing could have saved the 500 houses from the maelstrom. But the Government had enough information to warrant a warning on the morning of January 18 to all ACT residents on the perimeter to pack their sentimental valuables and prepare for evacuation. That the Government was more concerned about causing panic was at best a misjudgment.
Sure, Stanhope was lucky (and didn’t himself realise it at the time at Bendora; he just did the decent thing). But that should not prevent an Opposition looking at broader questions about the fires.
The Opposition has been inept because it has failed to seize upon some government weaknesses in health and planning – cancer patients being forced interstate, rubbery figures on elective surgery, failure to recruit nurses, mental health woes and so on. On the planning side, the fuse is lit for major neighbourly rows over hugely increased densities near shops under Variation 200, but the Opposition does not know how to expose or exploit it. Planning Minister Simon Corbell is probably welcoming the property downturn so it does not happen, even if Quinlan is worried about where the money will come from if the property bubble bursts.
The over-reliance on property for revenue growth is another weakness the inept Opposition cannot seem to seize. The ACT is in surplus because of luck, not good government management.
No one in the history of self-government has had such an easy run in health and planning as Simon Corbell. Chief Minister Jon Stanhope gave him the double poison chalice precisely to keep him occupied and made to look anything but leadership material. But because of its ineptitude the Opposition has choked, not Corbell.
One of the older Labor hands told me that he has often had to tell his colleagues this term: “You’ve got it easy; you should have been in Government when Carnell was Opposition leader. Whatever you thought about Carnell, she was not lazy.”
This Opposition is lazy because it cannot marshal the detail to sustain the arguments on these issues and keep hammering at them.
Or maybe it is too dumb to see the opportunities. Look at the endless plans the Government puts out – the spatial plan, the economic plan, the social plan, high quality sustainable development, sustainable population and so on. Industry stakeholders dare not attack them. They have to get along with Government.
This insatiable planning is a kind of small b bolshevism – a belief that an all-knowing government can direct things for the best without actually killing or imprisoning people in the process like the capital B Bolsheviks.
Where is the opposition? What if individual businesses say bunk to IT and environmental consulting and go instead for insecticide production and salt mining instead?
We know the Opposition could be capable of miraculous things. Its leader (not a widower) got married (for a second time) in a Catholic cathedral. But where is the energy in affairs of state?
And then there is the Labor Lawyers’ agenda – the Bill of Rights and industrial manslaughter. They are both harmless enough. I doubt they will make a jot of difference, but there is a community concern out there. However, the best the Opposition can do is a few press releases and drag out its Colonel Blimps to call for police in schoolyards and increased maximum sentences. How inept is that? This is Canberra, not redneck Queensland.
And do we hear much more than a boo about water? Is there any clamour from the Opposition about the necessity for Level 3 restrictions when the dams are 57 per cent full? Is there any clamour for more detail about the circumstances in which the nearly full Bendora Dam can fulfill our water desires? Or do we sit back a take whatever Nanny State has decided.
And I haven’t even touched education.
Labor is now heading for a richly undeserved majority government.
The worst of it is that highly educated Canberrans – particularly those working in the federal sphere (private or public) — have a smug disdain for local politics yet are the first to whinge when they are directly affected by what it does.
In the ACT, under the Hare-Clark system, the old saying that the people get the Government they deserve has a wider application. The people also get the Opposition they deserve. Those declining numbers who vote Liberal can still vote Liberal without necessarily voting for sitting Liberal MLAs.
And forget generational change. At this stage any change would be good. It does not matter what age the candidates are, but what they do and how they think (if at all).