Surrounded by morons

Brendan Nelson woke up yesterday and realised: oh no, I'm surrounded by morons. Clowns in his party room, fools in his office, patronising twits in the press gallery. He had one chance to sweep it all away, and by opposing end the predicament he found himself in.

Nelson's leadership was made possible by Minchin and Abbott. Both are lost without the carrots-and-sticks available from within government. Both cover dopey policy with rhetoric about "having to make the tough decisions". Both are to blame for having stacked Nelson's front bench and his private office with dead weight, dead losses and dead shits.

It is a key performance indicator for any Liberal leader that they act in such a way that encourages a majority of voters to choose a Liberal(-National) government. With Nelson performing so poorly in this regard, maintaining him as leader was a private indulgence of these two. Peter Hartcher was right - Nelson has acted in a way that nobody takes him seriously as an alternative prime minister, and has probably disgraced himself to the point where nobody takes him seriously in any capacity at all. His AMA days are long behind him. Nelson right to decline the offer of a frontbench position, an offer that should never have been made.

Insisting that Nelson have "clear air" was like insisting that Labor be able to have a clear shot at him whenever they felt under pressure. No Liberal leader should be kept in place to allow Labor to feel better about itself: this was the folly of keeping Billy Snedden on to ward off that threatening Malcolm of yesteryear.

How silly are Bob Baldwin and Costello's two sock-puppets, Tony Smith and Mitch Fifield, for declaring in favour of Nelson? Are they going to refuse frontbench positions too? Is Costello going to take them with him wherever he goes? Even the most loyal toady gets to the point where he has to round on his master and say: no, that would only make me look stupid, do it yourself. There is a generation of Victorian Liberals, now aged from their late twenties and forties, who put all their eggs in Costello's basket, and stood to gain high-status but low-profile positions in a Costello Government. These people now face three choices:

1. the prospect of giving up on politics altogether, and starting again in some other profession;


2. sucking up to Ted Baillieu and working toward state government; or


3. sucking up to Malcolm Turnbull and working toward federal government.


4. There is no fourth option for these people. It isn't my fault they have been kidding themselves.

Now Turnbull has to convince a party room that barely endorsed him. He has to convince them about his own political pulling power, and about the policies he would introduce. Turnbull's weakness so far has been in persuading Liberals that his policies are winning policies; and that they can embrace policies on climate change, pensions and whatever else without selling out what it means to be a Liberal.

The election of Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader is the Liberal Party's most decisive step yet in putting John Howard behind them.

Turnbull is the Liberal Party's Bob Hawke: a singular talent, a personality so strong that party powerbrokers can never full own, and powerbrokers (like Minchin and Abbott, for example) don't trust someone who can't be owned. One thing Labor did was surround Hawke with their smartest political operatives; Turnbull surrounds himself with those who can weather the Ike-like storms that emanate from him. The smartest operatives available to the Liberal Party have scattered after last year's effort and they aren't flocking back (only some of these, and not so many as you might imagine, come from Victoria).

Without people strong enough to stand up to him, Turnbull will get frustrated with Liberals who won't have him lead them: he has surrounded himself with morons, and he has to find ways of dealing with that.

Gold and shit

Christian Kerr had some interesting things to say about bloggers in the paper he works for. He had some uninteresting things to say, too. That doesn't mean we can engage in false dichotomies as this:

THE greatest tool for the sharing of ideas or an instrument for reinforcing prejudice?

Probably a bit of both, I expect. A bit like the media really. You can find examples of silly posts on blogs (this one included) and I can find examples of silly articles in newspapers. If the MSM were always (or even often) the source of "balance and fact" that Kerr claims, blogs would starve rather than thrive.

I'd love to hear Kerr make the claim that an undergraduate tone is absent from aspects of the MSM in Australia - I defy him to claim that it is nowhere found in News Ltd papers. The same challenge goes for factless assertions and

so much righteous indignation, so much sneering superiority, so little analysis and so little humility in the search for balance, or even for further information that may enrich or enhance the views expressed.

If you want to be outraged, you can find something in the "blogosphere" (assuming of course that it has limits, let alone being equidistant from a given point), and Kerr has found a doozy:

A blogger on one of the smugger sites recently referred to a discussion there on the right to free speech. In their view it "took far too narrowly American and thus falsely universal a view".

How do you divorce the US and freespeech? The US was founded on freedom of expression. The US has driven the ideal. The US's love of free speech and understanding of its consequence helped inspire a keystone UN document. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proudly declares: "The advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech ... has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people."

Note that "universal" in the title. There are no gradations of freedom of speech there. They only exist in the ignorant and anti-American assertions of the online world. In that world, arguments don't happen any more. You're just referred to other blogs. Evidence isn't weighed. You're just referred to other blogs. You don't analyse data. You're just referred to other blogs.

I agree that it's silly to describe free speech as some American conceit. I disagree that "the online world" is anti-American.

If you read, as I did, the senior federal politics correspondent for The Australian insist that the polls showing a Labor victory were mistaken and that the Coalition would pull out of its death-plunge any day now ... an day now ... you'd know how silly it is for Kerr to assert that "nuance is gone" from non-professional (unprofessional?) journalism. If journalists can set themselves up as political players or historians, why can't any parvenu stumble into journalism? Hell, Christian - it worked for you.

I analyse data where it's available (unlike MSM journos who rehash press releases or merely quote spokespersons), and I don't refer people to other blogs. Actually, what I do is refer such readers as stumble upon this blog to inadequately written MSM articles - begged questions, sloppy research, motes in the eyes of others described in forensic detail notwithstanding planks in the writers' own.

Posts - sorry, I meant articles - like Kerr's show the folly of sweeping assertions in defending the ramparts of newspapers from the seemingly all-pervasive blogs. Mark Day can be forgiven for being an ignorant old fart, but while Christian Kerr is probably skulling the Kool-Aid to show how loyal he can be to his current employers, to me it rings hollow. Christian, you're going to distance yourself from that article one day so you can start by never, ever writing dross like that again. Leave the straw-man work to the idle housewife from Bronte and realise that you only have a job because Glenn Milne is too lazy to do his, and develop some humility of your own.

Blogs supplement journalism because journalism is inadequate. Journalists from the old days of the forty-year lunch, like Mark Day, knew that deep down. And while bloggers don't always do a good job of calling the MSM on their own laziness, they do it often enough to provoke an ongoing jihad ("our chief weapon is fear ...") from The Australian. Why is that? There's the question you should be investigating, with all your resources, all your authority, and your interest in having an employer that doesn't die underneath you ...

Dark night of the weasels

Joe Tripodi gave his support to Morris Iemma, and then dumped him. Tony Abbott gave his support to Peter Costello before the 2004 election, and then dumped him. Both weasels are now facing the consequences of their decisions, neither with particularly good grace.

Costello must have smelled a rat when Abbott apparently told him Howard would stand down, and if not then he'd intervene on Costello's behalf. As if. Abbott would never have tapped Howard on the shoulder, not even for the promise of deputy leadership and Treasury, for what gaineth a man etc. For Costello to have so little capacity to judge people and situations as to fall for such an obvious ruse belies the political skill Costello fans claim for their man.

Costello should have resigned. Yes, he would have been portrayed as a wrecker, but Howard was a wrecker for hanging on too long and failing to reverse dopey decisions because he was afraid of looking weak. Keating, Fraser and Menzies all flounced to the backbench before supplanting their leader, and Costello fails to establish any moral-high-ground for refusing to do likewise. The 2004-07 team was the perfect opportunity to do this. Labor was left with the hapless Beazley after Cyclone Mark had busted its levees - there might have been "no John Hewson", but so what? There was clear pressure over the economy, Kyoto and foreign policy issues to which Howard could not, would not respond. A spell on the backbench would have been the making of Costello and the unmaking of Howard, as happened to Hawke over 1991. Costello could have developed an alternative agenda, and with it a claim for leadership other than "it's my turn". By APEC it was all too late, and Costello was right to sit that out.

The class of 1996 was specifically chosen for their absence of ties to the Howard-Peacock ideological and personality divides of the 1980s and '90s. They were effectively sold a franchise model, where they could operate the Liberal brand in their electorate on condition that they outsource marketing and product development to head office. That's why there was the cult of Howard, a mystifying development for those of us who didn't take Howard as given. Asking Howard Liberal franchisees to vote for a non-Howard Liberal Party would be like asking McDonald's franchisees to vote for Red Rooster. Had Costello shown them that Howard-Costello was no longer an option, and that Howard alone was no option either, Costello's chances would have been greater than he might have thought. He'd have been Prime Minister now.

For NSW Labor, there is less dramatic tragedy involved because there's no woulda/shoulda/coulda involved, no damned-if-they-do-or-don't. Morris Iemma lay down with dogs and got bitten by fleas. Iemma sold Iemma out, and Tripodi had no right to complain about his leader trying to get rid of him. Tripodi peaked politically in the early '90s when he got his then-girlfriend up as NSW Young Labor President. Since then, his reputation as a numbers man has ebbed the more it has been exercised. Never mind Captain Underpants: retaining Tripodi in the ministry is a ticking bomb for Nathan Rees, any benefit he gains from Tripodi's First Class Honours Degree will be swept away by the next typical example of how this guy cuts a deal.

By acting as messenger boy for Sussex Street Tripodi is a shell of his former self, naked and alone in the spotlight with the entire State Parliamentary Press Gallery waiting for his next stuff-up (even an old one that hasn't yet come to light will do). He's in for a hiding over the coming mini-budget. Scared and scarred, he's bound to do something rash and stupid any day now. Karl Bitar might claim his loyalty is to the Labor Party ahead of the State, and can justify perpetuating Tripodi in office on that basis, but when Tripodi melts down whatever self-justification he can muster will ring pretty hollow.

Speaking of Captain Underpants - how creepy was that whole business on three levels:

1. Noreen Hay is not your standard femme fatale, is she;


2. When you go to a press conference to announce your resignation over alcohol-fuelled weirdness, don't bring your toddler along - the Family Man thing is pretty much shot and you could be investigated by DOCS; and


3. When you go to a press conference to announce your resignation over alcohol-fuelled weirdness, don't justify your behaviour on the grounds of your own humanity. The Rees Cabinet is comprised entirely of humans and nobody wants to think about what they might get up to after a couple of shandies.

For the first time in history, Kiama has two blowholes and is politically in play. Captain Underpants and Joe Tripodi face The Mother Of All Mid-Life Crises after 2011.

Tony Abbott faced the prospect of cutting down either Howard or Costello, but it now looks as though he has cut down both and is letting the carcass of Brendan Nelson twist in the breeze. If it wasn't for Nick Minchin, equally clueless and culpable, he'd be Tony-no-mates.

Wall-to-wall, but empty

Labor has control of all Australian governments at federal and state level. Rudd promised to use this situation to "reshape Federation". It's all been business-as-usual so far - the nearest thing we've seen to far-reaching reform in this area has been the pathetic effort over the Murray-Darling, where a state which doesn't (technically) have the Murray flowing through it and whose rivers have the worst water quality on the mainland was allowed to spike the whole deal. Whether inside or outside the Murray-Darling Basin, Australians are entitled to be non-plussed by wall-to-wall-Labor. Not enraptured, not fearful: Labor has gone around stirring up apathy, and it isn't working.

Less than a year after wall-to-wall-Labor came into being, it has delivered nothing and it looks like passing into history as a historical oddity rather than as a period of change. It's interesting that the two jurisdictions that have delivered the first signs of the end are well outside the Murray-Darling Basin, NT and WA.

In the NT, Clare Martin knew that the armed response from Canberra rendered her government irrelevant, so she got out. Paul Henderson was so chuffed to become Chief Minister that he underestimated the extent to which it had become a non-job, and overestimated his ability to convince voters that a non-entity like himself would suit a non-job.

In WA, Alan Carpenter has blown the mining boom and has become cranky at discovering that politics is not as easy as it appears to a journalist. Perth should have infrastructure like Dubai, and the fact that it doesn't is the fault of Carpenter and the other nobodies in WA Labor.

It should be easy to accept the WA Nationals' ransom of $675m for regional areas. Turning Port Hedland into a real city with proper bulk cargo facilities would cost at least that much. Whack a few rail lines to the wheat areas, paint a few schools and put some new gear into some rural hospitals, and there you have A Government That Cares About Rural Areas.

Colin "Boonce" Barnett is more in tune with WA's drivers of growth than Labor and it shouldn't be too hard to convince him that the best thing you can do - the only thing left, really - for industry is to invest in a bit of infrastructure. WA Liberals have a closer relationship with that state's business community than Liberals in any other jurisdiction, and such is the infrastructure squeeze (the sheer scale of the opportunities for miners and other exporters limited by the extent to which it can be extracted) that industry can be persuaded that kicking in for infrastructure is in their interests. Barnett is the man to do that, but he (and Buswell, and the NCB/Corman creatures thrown up by preselection processes) may be unable to resist the urge to just bend over forwards for industry and do penny-ante stuff like screwing Aborigines out of leasing rights, building ugly developments along beautiful sections of coast, or whatever NCB wants, rather than longterm capability-building for the state.

Carpenter is bearing the sort of backlash that Bob Carr should have faced in NSW. Morris Iemma was hailed as someone to watch when he entered Parliament in 1991 and I still don't know why. Here was a competent Grade 9/10 Clerk wasted. Like Carr, Iemma had the full backing of the Sydney media but Iemma's luck, and his credibility, had deserted him. Even when he resigned, nobody believed Morris Iemma at the end. Here was another talentless hack who'd equated stubbornness with toughness, and like Mark Latham has nothing to show for his political career but a pension (and having had Glenn Byers on his staff. Where will this genius show up next?).

NSW Labor's Centre Unity faction had done a better job than any political party had ever done in identifying political talent. The bad news is, well, take a look:

• Reba Meagher: when Iemma came in she was promoted as The Next Premier. Yeah, right.


• Joe Tripodi: less said the better really. The fact that Rees is still lauding his economics degree is pathetic in light of his net performance. At a time when infrastructure could not be more crucial, this buffoon should not be put anywhere near it.


• Eric Roozendaal: now stands to do to the state's finances what he did to transportation in northwestern Sydney.


• Cherie Burton: put herself in reserve to the point where she could become a future NSW Opposition Leader, if she doesn't lose her seat.


• Tony Burke: smart enough to get the hell out of Macquarie Street, the only NSW Right factional player in Federal Cabinet and barely tolerated for that. Has the Tony Abbott talent of decisively knocking down straw men he has set up himself.


• Matt Brown: has achieved nothing, which is fine so long as you have confidence in the backroom boys to get it right.


• Kristina Kenneally: has Thatcher-like focus in bulldozing opposition without hope for much of an ability to see the broader issues surrounding planning, like urban infrastructure or simplified processes.

You can tell that Rees is more interested in plugging political hioles rather than solving problems in governing NSW. He did nothing much in Water and his successor will do little better. There should not be a separate ministry for roads, and Transport is too hard for the duffer from Wollongong. Verity Firth is a lightweight, someone who thinks her job is explaining policy with her jerky Arts Revue arm movements rather than shaping it. All ministers will spend the rest of the year getting across their new responsibilities.

Rees became a garbo because he lacked confidence in anything but his workin' class credentials. Neville Wran knew that workin' class westiness was overrated as a political drawcard, and so has every Labor leader since - while Rees is now polished within an inch of his life his idea of getting things moving is to go toe-to-toe and get shouty. His experience as a staffer hasn't prepared him for front-office work, because the most effective tools of the backroom operator are irrelevant, or counterproductive, if they see the light of day. O'Farrell can make Rees out to be reactive and rebarbative if he works it properly. Rees' face has two expressions: a smug grin or a scowl, neither of which can project confidence to nervous Labor backbenchers. Rees can minimise Labor's losses if he's lucky, it's doubtful he can pull off a fifth term.

The NSW government has been steadily depleted of its policy-making capability, and after being governed by the one party for 13 years the inadequacies are starting to show. The News Cycle, the bitch-goddess of modern politics, no longer provides scope for Labor as the excuses have all been used up in empty re-announcements. They simply have no capacity to engage with the Feds, the well-resourced Victorian government or anyone else over "reshaping Federation".

Mind you, there is no Liberal voice in this debate. Tony Abbott's "idea" of centralising everything in Canberra is the nearest there is to a contribution from the other side of politics. However shaky things might look for Labor at the moment, you'd have to bet on them (outside NSW, that is) having the capacity to pull out of the terminal dive, a capacity lacking in the Liberals. The press-gallery groupthink that Labor is in trouble is a pantomime, they will get past this in better shape than the Coalition could ever hope to, even if when Nelson is replaced.

Let us now give up on the idea that Rudd and Labor can or will "reshape Federation". A shame really, it was a fine idea while it lasted. Once the recession bites there will be the usual regret that reform didn't happen ages ago, but Labor can't complain that voters didn't give them what they needed to make it happen.

Shred their credibility

Imre Salusinszky is another one who has gone from the far left to the far right without any pause for reflection on the ameliorating influence of the moderate centre. In this piece he shows a Colless-like enthusiasm for being swept up by the hype without drilling down to the core issues about privatising NSW electricity.

It's the wrong time to sell NSW's coal-fired electricity generation and distribution systems, for four main reasons:

1. None of the buyers have enough money.


2. The current government will stuff up the sale, adding "sweeteners" that will rebound for years to come.


3. The facilities are out of date - you'd hope that the private sector would invest in new facilities (just like they have with freight rail beyond the major cities!) but the technological and regulatory environment is radically uncertain.


4. The Coalition are entitled to be sick of Labor having a bag of money to beat them up at election time. The link between success in the sale process and generosity to the ALP would be strong. Sussex Street might oppose the sale for now, but they'd get over it once the donations began rolling in.

The bleating from the private sector is not motivated by far-sighted visionaries with the good of the state uppermost. It is motivated by chancers frustrated from making a short-term killing from a bunch of mugs.

Never mind that the business community will abandon the Coalition as a lost cause. Never mind that the embattled Iemma will be gifted an issue - strength of leadership - with which to cane O'Farrell.

Yeah, the business community. They've been ignoring and hectoring the Liberals for a decade, splashing ridiculous amounts of money at (what was, at its best) a second-rate government, and now the Liberal Party is the "party of business". There's more to "the business community" than rent-seekers and spivs, but you'd be forgiven for not realising this if you looked at the shills lobbyists.

David Elliott used to be a PR man for the pubs, who poured millions into ALP coffers on his advice. When he ran for Liberal preselection the far right painted Elliott as insufficiently loyal to the party. Now, Elliott is doing the same again for a different bunch of rentseekers, trying to do to O'Farrell what he did to (for?) Peter Collins. At least I'm open about being a former Liberal and not having that party's interests at heart, David Elliott has done much more damage to the Liberal Party than I have.

Barry O'Farrell should take his chances with the leadership thing. Morris Iemma has failed to lead the Labor Party toward electricity privatisation, and now he thinks he's leading the Liberal Party.

By rejecting the bills, O'Farrell can repeat his predecessor Peter Debnam's trick during the scandal surrounding disgraced former NSW Aboriginal affairs minister Milton Orkopoulos in 2006. By attempting to widen the scandal to include former NSW attorney-general (and current federal Home Affairs Minister) Bob Debus, Debnam snatched defeat from the jaws of triumph.

Nobody accepted the link between pedophilia and homosexuality, and nobody took Debnam's word for the Debus-Orkopoulos "link". Debnam was stupid to accept advise from Lynn and Gallacher - two architects of NSW Coalition failure - to that effect. Mind you, voters were stupid to believe Iemma, whose "leadership" has now collapsed and not even all the money in Sussex Street will bring him back.

Everyone accepts the link between Iemma, public assets and the capacity for an awesome balls-up that will reverberate for a century. There is no linkage between privatisation now and electricity security going forward, and it is Iemma, not O'Farrell, who has to be called to account for it. When O'Farrell becomes Premier, points 1, 3 & 4 above will have disappeared and David Elliott can help the Liberal Party for a change.

Update: The Iemma-Costa out-of-Parliament solution is the dodgiest piece of public policy since Rex Connor and Clyde Cameron attempted to find other ways of funding the 1975 budget. And didn't that end well for Labor?

Update 2, 31 August: This shows Elliott at his most pathetic. He gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every year by people who wish to avoid getting blindsided like this. Turns out that Dave should've seen it coming and acted in his employers' interests. Whoops! Get to work you clown.

An easy tool

Peter Costello will never become Prime Minister. It will be too hard for him to shake the already-calibrated Labor theme that he didn't do enough to head off the economic predicament we're now in, and the political predicament the Coalition is now in.

Never mind Tom Elliott the economic commentator/fund manager, the commentary on Costello belongs to a less-consonanted Tom Eliot from yesteryear:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all —
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

The idea that Costello had idled his way to a near-recession will counteract the hopes people have for him as an economic messiah.

There are two aspects to the economic predicament Australia is in. First, there is the US sub-prime mortgage crisis. Costello deserves no blame for this, but there is no ability to give him any credit for heading it off, or for giving pointers on how to avoid it now that its impact is being felt. Had Costello warned Swan to act, and had Swan ignored that advice, the Liberals would now have a stick with which to beat the Coalition: he didn't, so they don't.

Second, there is the impacts of global warming, and attendant measures such as an emissions trading system. Costello has done no more on the environment than anyone else. He might have been less strident a climate-change denier skeptic than Howard, but he was still in the Cabinet that spiked Kyoto in 1997, muffed water allocations on the Murray-Darling, and otherwise gave Peter Garrett too much of a platform to effect his mid-life career change.

Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” —

So: Peter Costello doesn't have the economic credibility his boosters would hope. What does that leave his fans with?

• His Parliamentary performances? These were only morale-boosters for those who were already Coalition MPs, and did nothing for those who would maintain or boost the numbers of Coalition MPs to government levels.


• His personal warmth? Might be able to match Rudd on that score at times, but that diffident reserve will not be denied.


• WorkChoices? Not quite the deal-breaker Labor would hope, but the Coalition have a lot to live down. It's not clear that one of the founding members of the H R Nicholls Society can make the case that the Coalition are not going back down that track.


• A Costello leadership means a higher profile for Chris Pyne. Oh yes.


• Walking across the Bridge in support of Aboriginal reconciliation? Yeah, probably - depends on how he handles the inevitable changes to the Northern Territory Intervention.

It's all very well for hair-shirt commentators to demand that Nelson make Costello challenge him, but he won't. Costello will leave any thrown-down gauntlet where it lies. Nelson is gone whatever happens, he'll simply be removed and replaced - but if he is replaced with Costello, Nelson will be entitled to feel ill-used. Costello won't look tactically clever for having avoided the hard decisions Nelson has faced (and not handled well) since November - if he becomes leader Costello will look, to coin a phrase, mean and tricky.

Jackie Kelly was right: Costello is not your man to win back Liberal seats in western Sydney (or, for that matter, seats like Bennelong). He's flat out finding a suitable candidate for eminently winnable seats like Chisholm.

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous —
Almost, at times, the Fool.

Opposition Leader Costello has some hard decisions to make in charting Liberal policy in a number of areas: balancing competing interests, including those feeling slighted by Rudd without taking on politically poisonous ideas, establishing clear differences with Rudd without being divisive, establishing political superiority in areas that matter. Costello would keep Rudd on his toes at times but Labor already have his measure. The next Liberal Prime Minister must be able to build an appealing and credible post-Howard Liberal narrative. Costello can't do that and won't.

Why bother?

Earlier this year 97% of Queensland Nationals and 86% of Queensland Liberals voted to merge their parties. Now it's on the rocks. It takes real political stupidity to mess up such a decisive mandate. And you wonder why nobody joins political parties any more.

the Liberal state council last night resolved to defer a convention which was intended to ratify the proposal.

See, it didn't resolve to sink it, or propose something better. It proposed to dither until it starved to death. Nice one - Anna Bligh must really be quaking in her boots.

"This is a victory for common sense for the Liberal Party and its future in Queensland," said former Queensland Liberal president Bob Carroll after the meeting.

Leaving aside the question as to whether 'Bob Carroll' and 'common sense' are at all compatible, the fact is that 86% of Queensland Liberals voted for an outcome that he helped to scupper.

"The only issue was about the fact that under the merger proposition the president would be elected from the floor," the source said. "And that was in the agreement that the members voted on in a plebiscite with an 86per cent yes vote.

"That didn't satisfy the federal president [Alan Stockdale] or (Queensland Liberal president) Mal Brough and that was the basis that they believed it was unsatisfactory to proceed."

It is a sign of weakness that Stockdale and Brough could not engineer such an outcome beforehand. 86% of Queensland Liberals voted for this outcome regardless of who the president might have been. Stockdale, Brough and Carroll thought that the job of President was more important than the thousands of members who voted for the merger.

Queensland Liberal senator Sue Boyce also reported receiving threatening emails from the chairmen of two Brisbane-based Liberal federal electorate councils.

One email warned that her anti-merger stance would "long be remembered". The second email warned the stance of federal MPs on the issue would have "implications" for their future.

C'mon Sue, smoke 'em out. They've got 14% of the vote, you could take the stick to them if you wanted to. Let's have one moderate with some guts.

The state council meeting was called by Mr Brough at the last minute. He had called for the convention to be deferred in line with federal party wishes. "It is clear that with this matter unresolved, this party will not be a division of the Liberal Party," he had said.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

"If the convention goes ahead, it will be in the full knowledge that we have not been able to reach a resolution that has been satisfactory to the federal party."

How about you inform the members and let them decide for themselves? Oh wait, you did that.

Queensland Liberal leader Mark McArdle said Mr Stockdale should have called a meeting of the party's federal executive to debate the issue. "You cannot, in my opinion, this close to a convention, pull the rug out from the rights of members," he said.

Federal executive would have voted against the Queenslanders. The other part of McArdle's analysis is spot on, though. This guy has 86% of Liberals with him: why can't he rally them to their own cause rather than just whining?

Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce had said the Nationals would reject the merger if a vote on the presidency were not allowed. "There are plenty on our side who don't want this party," Senator Joyce said.

No there aren't. 97% of Qld Nats in favour, that means 3% against - a small minority, Senator, even by the standards of a profoundly undemocratic party.

I realise that all of the foregoing makes it look like I'm supporting people like the ridiculous Santoro ahead of more sensible people like Boyce and Brandis. What this gets back to, however, is the question of what it means to be a member of a political party, for those who don't want to be politicians themselves. If you're going to scupper a merger, say so up front and take your chances with those who elect you. The executive have voted against their membership; now the executive's challenge is to elect themselves a new membership.

Update: Members overrode Brough and the merger went ahead after all. My favourite bit was this:

Mr Brough said he didn't know what his politcal future held.

"There's absolutely a career in politics if I want it, becuse that has been made very clear to me by my colleagues down south," he said.

"But whether or not I intend to do that or not is another thing all together, that's not a decision I've made."

While you're making your decision Mal, consider three things. First, your political career going forward really depends on you not telling conservative forces in the country's third-biggest state to get fucked, as you did. Second, the only thing you ever did was put out a press release about Aborigines in the Northern Territory, and it is not to spite you that they are busy cleaning up after you. Third, this is the same outfit that can't work out why the Coalition is in opposition at all, and considers Peter Costello a viable Liberal leader one day.