THE NEED FOR A UNITED CONSERVATIVE FORCE IN QUEENSLAND
Wed 18th Jun 2008 “A regular columnist with THE AUSTRALIAN newspaper, Ross Fitzgerald is Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at
Professor Fitzgerald is the author of 29 books, most recently, The Pope's
Battalions: B. A. Santamaria and the Labor Split, published by the
'PAST PRESENT FUTURE: THE NEED FOR A UNITED CONSERVATIVE FORCE IN
SPEECH TO THE
PRESIDENT’S CLUB, Stamford Plaza Hotel, Brisbane.
FRIDAY 30 MAY, 2008, 6.30 - 7. 30pm
by ProfessorROSS FITZGERALD
The title for my talk tonight is 'PAST PRESENT FUTURE: THE NEED FOR A UNITED CONSERVATIVE FORCE IN QUEENSLAND.'
As
From December 1-7 1899, the world's first Labor premier, Anderson Dawson fleetingly ruled the colony of
Born 'Andrew'
Orphaned at an early age,
In 1893
In the 1890s, turmoil and division in the colony's conservative ranks - similar to the situation, which in November 2007 helped Kevin Rudd into the nation’s top job –prompted
Seven days later, when the House again sat, the swiftly reunited conservatives regrouped and they took the government of the colony of
Within a week of forming a minority government, Dawson and his ministry, which included future ALP Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, was defeated on the floor of the Lower House.
Although the Dawson Labor government lasted only a week, it was nonetheless a vital step forward in the long march of working men and women to improve their lot and is therefore an important moment both in the history of the labour movement and of Labor politics in Australia and the world.
Anderson Dawson himself went on to other milestones.
At the beginning of 1900,
Nevertheless at the first election for the Australian Senate in 1901 - the year of
In April 1904, with the parliament of
(Chris) Watson – this nation’s first Labor Prime Minister. Watson’s was also a minority Government, which lasted a little over three months.
Prime minister Watson appointed Dawson Minister for Defence, and despite the fact that he had a drinking problem, which was becoming increasingly noticeable,
But he became increasingly unpredictable and by the mid 1900s
There are some other poignant facts about the life and death of Anderson Dawson.
He never knew, but I was able to uncover, that the year
Even more so because like his father, Dawson was an alcoholic and, as is the nature of the illness of alcoholism, as he continued to drink, he got sicker and behaved in a more eccentric and outlandish fashion. When he was dropped from the Queensland ALP senate ticket in 1906,
One of the interesting facts about
If one looks, as I have, at the confidential dispatches of the Lieutenant governor to the British secretary of state for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain - who invented the game of snooker and was the father of Neville the Appeaser Chamberlain - it becomes apparent that Griffith appointed the minority Labor government in December 1899 as a deliberate ploy to force the warring conservatives to get their act together.
The conservatives had been in power in
As often happens with such governments, they eventually started to fracture.
One group, called the Liberal Remnants, broke off, as did another group of dissidents who also withdrew support, in large part because the then conservative Premier James Dickson had offered Queensland troops as military support for the British in the Boer War, the first colonial government to do so. And this was without Dickson even consulting the
As these dissidents and Liberal Remnants decided not to take Dickson on about a matter that would be embarrassing to the Empire, they waited a few more days and then they joined Labor to vote against the premier over what on the face of it might have seemed a minor railway bill. Even though the votes were actually 32 to 33 - Dickson snuck in with the aid of another Labor rat called Denny Kehoe, who originally hailed from Galway – premier Dickson regarded it as a vote of no confidence and he went to
In his confidential dispatches to the British secretary of state for the colonies, Sir Samuel Griffith makes it abundantly clear that what he did was a deliberate political ploy.
And that is precisely what happened. As soon as
In fact, even though the December 1899
Yet, in terms of
radical- reformist premiers T.J. Ryan and E.G. ('Red Ted') Theodore initially at the helm, to the ALP governing
1915 until the Labor Split in 1957, with the exception of two years during the Great Depression.
As for
For years, Dawson's grave at Brisbane's Toowong cemetery was unkempt and dilapidated - without any mention at all of Dawson's remarkable achievements - until in 1999 a group of Labor and unionist supporters banded together to give the world's first Labor premier a more fitting burial site.
When my book SEVEN DAYS TO REMEMBER: The World’s First Labor Government was published by the University of Queensland Press in 1999, the British Labor government of Tony Blair purchased 200 copies and a Labor backbencher from Manchester gave a speech in the House of Commons commemorating the 100th anniversary of the first Labor government in the world.
In Queensland in December 1999, ALP premier Peter Beattie gave a passionate parliamentary address on the importance of Anderson Dawson, especially focusing on his premiership of the world's first Labor government in 1899 ; on Dawson having been elected as Queensland’s first ever Senator in 1901; and on his ministerial role in Australia's first federal Labor government in 1904. The Federal electoral division of
Significantly, right from the beginning of
The Liberals in
For years, I have been arguing that the only hope that
First elected to the one-house Queensland Parliament in 1989, the member for Southern Downs was Queensland's youngest cabinet minister when in 1998, aged 29, he became minister for natural resources in the government of Rob Borbidge.
Springborg is an urbane MP from the bush whom the city can readily like and relate to. Indeed, if he led a united conservative
Yet even now some
Another obstacle, fortunately given less and less credence, is the furphy that, in the next Queensland state election due in September 2009, the state Liberals if they stand alone could win more seats than the Nationals.
Any Queensland Liberals who still think that, in the foreseeable future, they can win more state seats than the Nationals must have rocks in their heads.
For goodness sake, these dissent, stand-alone Queensland Liberals and some of their supporting apparatchiks need to be reminded that in this state the Liberals only have eight seats out of 89 in
If Queensland does not soon have a Springborg-led united conservative party, a HUGE AND IN MY OPINION UTTERLY INSURMOUNTABLE PROBLEM facing conservatives in Queensland is the optional preferential system of voting that Beattie was able to exploit by a ``Just vote 1'' campaign.
Another perceived difficulty is the fact that Peter Beattie shrewdly froze the number of seats in
In any case, somewhat balanced against this is the fact that Beattie is no longer leader of the ALP. This means that his brilliant tactic when faced with any major problem of constantly saying, ``Sorry, very sorry, I will fix it'' (as though the problem weren't the making of his Labor governments) no longer applies. This quintessentially Beattie tactic is certainly not easily available to Ann Bligh who, despite her protestations to the contrary, may well call an early election some time this year.
Lawrence Springborg, who is only 40 years old, has learned a lot in the past few years in Opposition. In particular, he understands that disunity is death and that conservative forces in
Readers of THE AUSTRALIAN will know that I have long argued that the only hope the conservatives have of defeating the Labor government in
‘Reformist’ and ‘moderniser’ are not words usually associated with the leadership of the Queensland National Party- an organization that is often still stereotyped as representing the excesses of Johannes Bjelke-Petersen.
Yet in guiding the push to merge the state National and Liberal parties, Lawrence Springborg is proving himself to be a reformer and moderniser of non-Labor politics at a state, and with a bit of luck, at a national level as well.
Unlike the rest of
Commentators and citizens need to be reminded that the Liberals here hold a mere eight seats out of 89. Yet stubbornly, and against all the evidence, a number of Queensland Liberals keep running the line that they can gain more state seats than the Nationals.
This is absolute nonsense. As I mentioned earlier, the Queensland Liberals have never come close to ousting the Country/National Party as the major conservative party in this state. Indeed currently, Lawrence Springborg actually enjoys a greater level of support in metropolitan areas than that of any state Liberal member.