Dear Australia
Here’s what happened, love Queensland
by Professor Anne Tiernan, Dr Jacob Deem and Jennifer Menzies
‘What the hell is wrong with Queensland?’ Such comments are at the polite end of social media responses from progressive voters disappointed at the Coalition’s ‘miracle’ win on Saturday. Putting to one side the fact that the swings against Labor were no bigger in Queensland than other parts of the country, and that it had the most marginal seats, the instinct to blame and deride Queensland highlights exactly what went wrong for the ALP.
Contrary to the claims of #Quexiteers, Queenslanders are not all deeply conservative, rusted-on LNP voters, even in central and Northern regions. If they were, they wouldn’t have elected Labor governments for 25 of the past 30 years. Anna Bligh was the first woman in Australia to be elected Premier; Annastacia Palaszczuk was the first woman to be elected Premier from Opposition. Her ministry was the first in Australia to have a female majority. Voters who elected LNP members in Leichhardt, Herbert, Dawson and Capricornia on Saturday voted in ALP members at the State level in 2017 in seats like Cook, Cairns, Gladstone, Mackay, and Keppel.
The problem for the Labor Party, then, isn’t that Queenslanders don’t like voting Labor. Instead, Federal Labor, like the many pundits who predicted an ALP win, seem to have underestimated or misunderstood the variances and nuances of the Queensland electorate. As the only State where a majority of the population lives outside, rather than within, the capital city, regionalism matters in Queensland in a way it does not in other States.
Settlement patterns and economic development
Settlement patterns in Queensland did not mirror other States. Regional towns and cities developed as service centres and ports for the hinterland industries, from beef to gold and sugar, to coal and gas. The first railways in the 1860s ran from these coastal towns inland to service their hinterlands. Connection to Brisbane was an afterthought. A link to Cairns was not completed until 1924. This created an interdependence between coastal cities and the agriculture and resources sectors not replicated in other parts of Australia. Queensland’s regions developed as separate economic entities, with product shipped from the mine or farm to the regional port to the rest of Australia, or directly overseas. These economies have developed with limited interdependencies with the rest of Queensland or indeed Australia.
Any threat to the economic viability of hinterland industries thus also threatens the economic future of regional towns that service them. Their citizens vote accordingly. As regions reliant on trade-exposed export industries, they are highly susceptible to cycles of boom and bust. Many are still suffering high unemployment and depressed housing prices following the end of the mining boom. Their difficulties have been compounded by frequent and severe natural disasters.
State governments are sufficiently proximate to recognise the interests and fears of diverse communities. The national focus of federal politics is less conducive to capturing the differences between, say, Cairns and Clermont, Caboolture and Charleville. While this hurt both the major parties (as evidenced by the rise in first preferences to minor parties), Labor suffered more because its policy-rich campaign platform focused mainly on metropolitan first-home buyers and environmentalists, and did not send a signal to regional Australians that their concerns had been heard.
Who is representing the workers?
Queensland has a proud place in Labor history. The Labor movement was born in Barcaldine in 1891. The State elected the world’s first Labor government in 1899. For 25 of the last 30 years, Labor has held power at the state level. To characterise Queensland as regressive and redneck is to deny its historic and contemporary relationship with labour politics. It may be that working Queenslanders no longer see their lives or aspirations reflected in the federal Labor Party and its leadership. The pathway to from engine driver to prime minister has gone the way of the Tree of Knowledge. Labor is now dominated by professional political operatives drawn from the knowledge and professional classes — the group Bill Shorten personified.
Populism
When workers couldn’t find policy support or reflection of their concerns and fears in the ALP they parked their vote with the permanent voice of disaffection of Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer whose preferences then flowed strongly to the LNP. In the marginal seats of Flynn, Capricornia, Dawson, Forde and Petrie the LNP’s primary vote scarcely moved — indeed Ken O’Dowd suffered a 1.1 per cent swing. After preferences, swings to the LNP ranged from 5.2 per cent in Flynn to 10.7 per cent in Capricornia and 11.3 per cent in Dawson.
Federalism and Regional Understanding
Labor paid the electoral price for misjudging Queensland, but it was far from alone in doing so. North and south of the Tweed, analysts and commentators indulged the smug chauvinism of tired stereotypes. Social media lit up, exposing the cultural and political divide between urban, regional and rural Australia that Guardian Australia journalist Gabrielle Chan documented in her book, Rusted Off: Why Country Australia is Fed Up (Penguin, 2018).
Chan describes the ‘neglected classes’ — Australians locked out of opportunity by technology, economic and social change in the nation’s left behind places. An index of Prosperity and Distress in Australian localities developed by the Centre of Full Employment and Equity, identifies the seats of Hinkler, Wide Bay, Kennedy, Maranoa, Flynn and Capricornia among the most distressed; Dawson, Blair, Longman, Herbert and Rankin are classified ‘high risk’. An Index developed by Griffith University researchers identifies Gladstone, Logan (encompassing the marginal seat of Forde retained by the LNP) and Far North Queensland as ‘hotspots’ of energy poverty. The prevailing discourse that this was the ‘climate change’ election obscures the role that economic insecurity and disadvantage might have played in shifting votes to One National and United Australia that flowed as preferences to sitting LNP members.
Mechanisms to better understand the needs and interests of all Australians and to develop a nuanced sense of local context and concerns are sorely needed. Griffith University’s Data Dashboard and our coverage of Queensland seats, sought to ensure better, more informed reporting of the campaign than we have come to expect from the Federal Press Gallery, journalists and commentators whose lack of contemporary knowledge of different parts of the State seldom tempers their opinions.
What, then, can we learn from the 2019 federal election?
First, that federalism matters — perhaps more than ever. It is impossible to craft policies that respond equally well to the needs of inner Melbourne and Cairns; and maybe you shouldn’t be trying. The many economies and differentiated communities that comprise Queensland are entitled to expect responsive policies appropriate to their local context. Australia’s federal framework was premised on the principle of subsidiarity — that decision-making should be devolved to the most local level possible.
Labor’s experience in Queensland suggests that sub-national governments are better placed to accommodate regional differences, to acknowledge and try to balance competing influences and perspectives. National governments by their nature are homogenising. Social and political elites purport to support diversity and difference in theory, but in practice, often strive to force states and regions to conform to a one-size-fits-all national policy approach, usually driven from the top down. Not all wisdom sits at the centre. Federalism was not mentioned once in the 2019 federal election campaign, but the result in Queensland suggests the need to rethink and reconceptualise the role the national government plays in a contemporary federation. This could help foster a political culture that is more responsive to, and respectful of all parts of Australia — including and perhaps especially Queensland.
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