Making the National Press

I've been a little quiet over the last 10 days as I recover from our epic trip. However, I'm prompted to post this item by getting a big billing in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald on p4. At the start of last week I fielded a long discussion with an SMH journalist, Kelsey Munro and, lo and behold, a couple of friends told me at a dinner last night that they had seen my name in print.

I won't comment on the content but let you read the article yourself in the pictures below. You'll have to magnify them in some way!

Some of it repeats what I told Tony Windsor, our local federal MP, during the week. For our overseas readers, we had a general election a week ago and returned a hung parliament. The ALP and the Coalition (Liberals - read Tories, and the Nationals = Country party) have roughly equal numbers of seats and there are at least 5 or possibly 6 independents. Tony, as probably the senior independent, is in the role of King (or Queen) maker and, interestingly, he and I have been friends for a long time (over 20 years) and correspond regularly. Anyway, our conversation has to remain private, except that I pointed out the critical importance of quality infrastructure supply to let the bush reach its full economic potential. Nearly all the independents are rural-based, which makes my comments more important, and I expect that they are in a strong position to extract extra investment.

As an aside, this poll possibly marks the start of a massive electoral re-alignment in which the the major groupings will be assigned to the trash-can of history. Apart from the independents, most of whom are middle of the road and highly thoughtful discriminating about what they will support or reject, the big winners were the Greens whose vote soared. The independents are not fly-by-nights who scrape over the line, but wildly popular people with HUGE support. Katter (the seat of Kennedy in Far North Queensland), Oakeshott (Lyne on the NSW coast nearby to us) and Windsor (New England) all received two-party preferred support of c. 72-75%. They're there for the long haul.

Our politics may devolve into smaller groupings because the support bases of conservatives and the ALP are fracturing badly:

• religious, arch-conservative
• liberal-libertarian
• union-oriented, low income
• greens
• regional-independents

And these will have to combine in various ways to deal with the wicked problems (or social messes) confronting governments these days. These cover environmental management, urban planning, energy supplies, balancing the interests of city and country, immigration, population control, and so on. Each of these problems is difficult to resolve because many of the answers are unknown and alternative interpretations of events and processes are in conflict. The old left-right groupings are quite absurd and dysfunctional in dealing with these problems. Meanwhile, there are very few differences between all the groupings on the basic configuration of the market economy. So the major concerns of the 19th and 20th centuries are more or less D.E.A.D. The outcome of next week's negotiations will be riveting.

AS