Bruce Flegg’s decision to leave Tim Nicholls on the front-bench after his abortive leadership coup is either an attempt to break the system of factional pay-back in the Queensland Libs, or a sign that every player in this party wins a prize.
It could just as easily be either. Flegg’s not your typical politician, as Queenslanders should have gathered by now. A typical politician wouldn’t have put Nicholls in the cabinet in the first place. Nicholls is a long-time Santoro retainer and it was a reasonable bet he would destabilise the leadership at some time. A typical politician would have preferred an ally like Glen Elmes. But Elmes has never been elected before, while Nicholls had served a term and a half in the Brisbane City Council, so experience won out.
Then again, with so many positions to fill and only 8 members, Flegg doesn’t have a lot of choice. He couldn’t have demoted Nicholls to Party Whip, because the leader has to be able to work with the Whip, which means the only form of demotion would have been to swap him with Elmes anyway. Nicholls is apparently a champion water saver, so the position of Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Minister for the Environment might have been sustainable, but then there’s the experience factor.
In any event Tim should be feeling fairly humiliated. A succession of his colleagues were keen to go on air yesterday to describe him in various shades of inexperienced and referring to “potential”, almost as a synonym for “young” and “wet behind the ears”. So Tim’s got an alibi. But what’s party President Warwick Parer’s excuse? He was the public face of the Clayton’s coup, prepared to suggest Flegg should be “chucked out” of the Liberal Party. As reported in yesterday’s Australian:
“Mr Parer refused repeatedly to express support for Dr Flegg’s leadership.
‘If you did this in the Labor Party, you would be chucked out,’ he said.”
The “this” that he was talking about was Flegg’s stand in favour of upgrading the Ipswich Motorway rather than the Prime Minister’s plan to build a bypass. Flegg has run on this platform in his local electorate twice, it is state Liberal Party policy, and it is state Coalition policy. Honouring promises and sticking by party policy are apparently sins in today’s Liberal Party.
Parer’s got it 180 degrees wrong – if anyone were to be “chucked out” it should be him. But Warwick’s probably safe because in today’s Queensland Liberal Party it seems that no-one loses their job anymore.

One moment Alexander Downer is ringing newspapers suggesting that Santo Santoro is suicidal. The next moment Santoro is proving that whilst he is “cidal” it is not “sui” but rather “Fleggi”, judging by this article inThe Courier Mail.
Bruce Flegg, with the willing connivance of Brisbane’s only daily newspaper, is portrayed as being at war with his own party for honouring a promise to his own electorate, which is in accord with Liberal and National Party policy, just because the Prime Minister has come to a different position! A more honest headline would have been “Howard at war with Queensland”, and the article would have described a federal government determined to throwaway political advantage for an unpopular policy which is supported by just about no-one. This issue is surely a sign of the decline and fall of the Howard Government, not of the Flegg leadership.
Who is the master of the Matrix? Who has the ability to bend reality in such a way that reputable and intelligent media organs miss the real import of what is going on? The answer is obvious. Santoro might not be the source of the leaks, but someone with associations with him is likely to be the perpretrator. He is the only obvious beneficiary. Highlighting the disagreement doesn’t help Howard, and while there is no heir apparent to Flegg, it doesn’t hurt Flegg within the parliamentary Liberal party, although it hurts him in the public .
There must be more to the Santoro story that such desperate efforts are being made to create diversions. It says something about the investigative reporters in the state that they have yet to come up with anything. Perhaps they are looking in the wrong place.
It says something abour his career that the mainstream press can go careering off in the wrong direction on such an obvious red-herring when he, or an acolyte, put the burley in the water in the first place. Santoro might have filled in his declarations incorrectly, but others have been letting him off the hook for decades and share the responsibility because they have not carried out their work diligently enough. This current affair is our opportunity to rectify the situation.

Bruce Flegg, Parliamentary Leader of the Queensland Liberal Party, obviously believes that there is a larger dimension to the Santoro scandal. “However, what’s been revealed subsequently was no oversight and I think it needs to be investigated further,” he told ABC Radio.
In other words – you don’t forget to declare these sorts of things, so there must have been a reason.
Is it something to do with Santo Santoro Enterprises? Just how big is it? Who administers it? How much of the Senator’s time does it take? What other entities or people is it connected to?
Santo can help on one count by detailing the number and value of his share trades. He might as well put them on the public record, as it should be possible to work it out from what is on the public record already. He can either tell us all now and have some control over the agenda, or wait for a journalist to trawl through the company registers and tell us in a few days time. After his press conference last week Santoro should have learnt that it’s better to give exact and accurate anwers up front rather than vague and inaccurate ones in instalments.
Then he needs to throw open the accounts to his campaign funds, and if he won’t the party should do it for him. For at least the last 12 years Santoro has had access to such substantial funds that he has been able to run a parallel campaign to the official ones being run by the party. If you’re one of “his” candidates he can help out with money. And being one of “his” candidates means following his directions rather than the central campaign ones.
Given the funds that appear to be at the senator’s disposal it seems likely that some of those are also invested in the share market. Is there any overlap in the shares held by these different entities?
He also needs to reveal what other interests, declared or otherwise, he might have in private companies. On my experience I’m pretty sure that there would be some.
I well remember some 30 or so years ago when we were both in Young Liberals and I had established a small gardening business being summoned to an evening meeting with Santoro in an office in The Young Liberal centre. At that stage Santoro was selling advertising space for Yellow Pages, but he had ambitions. He suggested to me that I should set up my gardening business as a franchise and call it “Kleen Kut” or something “memorable” like that.
The key to “our” strategy would be advertising in Yellow Pages. I shouldn’t have been surprised at the use of the royal plural. Santo proposed that in exchange for this simple and unoriginal idea he should have a substantial shareholding in my business. Not only that, but if I used the franchise idea without including him there would be undisclosed retribution.
I did buy some advertising space from him, but the company was named Arcadia Lawn and Garden, it was never a franchisor and Santoro was never a shareholder, but I’d be surprised if I was the only person he ever tried that one on.
The story also says something about the Santoro methodology. There’s the conflicts of interests. Employed to sell advertising space he’s trying to parlay his employer’s time and product into shareholdings in particular customers. And he’s using an office provided by the Young Liberal movement as the base to further his business interests. Then there’s the standover tactic, and the greed.
These are the types of methods that Santoro has used to control the Queensland Liberal Party, on and off, for most of the last 24 years. Flegg and others have obviously decided this is their opportunity to use Santoro’s close shave to do something about it. I hope they manage to cleanly cut him away.

Not only has Khalid Shaikh Mohammed admitted to being behind every terrorist act of the 20th Century, apart from the assisination of the Archduke Ferdinand where he merely carried the drinks, but now Santo Santoro admits to not just one, not just two, not even three, but fifty or sixty breaches of the disclosure rules. You’d think he could be a little bit more specific than that, but I’ll bet it’s toward the higher end of the range.
I’ll also bet that there’s more truth in Santoro’s revelations than Khalid’s. When the CIA torture a suspect, they’ll say anything, but Tony Nutt from Howard’s office is of a completely different order of inquisitor.
And there’s an election to be won. Howard’s not about to let Santoro or anyone else get in his way.
While the CBio kerfuffle didn’t amount to anything much on its own, this does. You can’t accidentally overlook transactions of this number, particularly as you’ve just admitted you were paying close attention to your portfolio because one of your share holdings presented a conflict of interest. And there’s more to come. So far Santoro is being coy about what shares he owned or owns – just saying that they were all publicly listed. That might be, but not making the details of his share portfolio immediately available just spins the story out a bit longer.
The size of the portfolio will be an issue. Santoro said that he’s not a “share trader” because apparently to be that you have to hunch over your computer screen and ring brokers an unspecified number of times, but certainly more frequently than Santoro has. Well, 50 or 60 shares is a lot to have bought and/or sold during perhaps the last five years, and it makes you wonder which portfolio he has been concentrating on most – the one the taxpayer paid him to administer, or the other one. Maybe that’s the real reason he didn’t declare them in the first place. Or perhaps there is another one.
But it gets worse. Santoro’s immediate plans include trying to help the Prime Minister win the next election by, amongst other things, reforming the Queensland Liberal Party state organisation (source is news radio, so can’t provide a link). Santoro’s the reason it’s in the mess that it is. If he really wants to help Howard he’ll concentrate more on his share portfolio and stay out of site until well after the next election.

We completed our first focus group on the NSW election last night. You can download the transcript from here. They were all people who indicated that they would vote against their traditional habits in this election, or had yet to make up their mind. There was a mixture of Labor, Liberal and Independents in the group. This is a summary of initial first impressions. I’ll do an article up over the weekend for On Line Opinion.
Voters are pretty disgusted with the choice they are being offered:
“Hobson’s choice…” Tony9
“i think the whole election can be described as bland versus colourless” according to Susan10.
“I was looking forward to the election, hoping to see the end of labor pretending to run the state, however, yet again, the libs have failed to produce a viable alternative.. the greens were an option however knowing their preferences are going to labor… ahhh… nsw is a pit” Julie13
A few of my impressions appear to be confirmed. First, there is a lot of sympathy and support for John Brogden, who could have made a real impact on Labor.
“to me it seems the same old spin and rhetoric we get every election. Debnam has failed to gel with the public and the ghost of John Brogdan hangsover him.” robingail
“agree with Ian about right wing of libs. I would have voted for Brogden” Ann11
“I would have too (voted for Brogden) *” Ian5
There is a protest vote (Debnam has that much right), but it appears to be going against both major parties, and to Greens and Independents (but because there aren’t enough of them in winnable seats this won’t have much impact on the actual election result).
“That wouldn’t send labor the right message and we could get caught. I’d rather vote independent” Ann11
“I think people are going to be voting green to send a message, not libs – which, with preferences will mean labor gets in again” Julie13
“not way in hell … a pox on both their houses” robingail
“haha rotate” Susan10
“the message would be via an independent/green party” Helen2
One area where I might have over-stated the case is the federal government. IR is certainly an issue, but voters appears to be quite able to distinguish between levels of government when voting.
This group also seemed disinclined to buy Iemma’s criticism of Debnam that he would cut 20,000 public service jobs and hand over industrial relations to Canberra.
But while they agree with Debnam that the greatest risk this election is “that nothing changes”, they don’t see him as the solution to it. Dispiriting times to be a voter.

It’s good to see that The Courier Mail is not as cosy with Santo as it used to be – two front page stories (one here) criticising him over his breach of the ministerial code of conduct. Time was when his spin was likely to dominate whatever Liberal Party story they were covering.
This morning the criticism is that while he claimed to have donated the profits on his undeclared share holding to a “charity” the organisation that he nominated as a charity wasn’t one. The proof of this is a nit-picking bureaucratic lawyerly one – the organisation to which he donated, the Family Council of Queensland, is not registered with the tax department as a charity. Apparently, according to the Courier Mail, the Tax Department is the arbiter of what is charitable or not. Which must come as a surprise to thoughtful users of the English language who would most likely define a charity as “An institution, organization, or fund established to help the needy” without any thought that the ATO might have a stake in the matter.
The only significance of the Tax Office’s definition is that by donating to one of its registered charities you receive a tax deduction for the money. Assuming that Santoro did not erroneously make a claim for a tax deduction, then donating the profits to a non-registered charity was an even more effective penance for his oversight. Not only did he give his profits away, but he would have had to pay tax on them as well. Depending on how he accounted for them under the capital gains laws and other gains and losses he made during that year, it could have resulted in him paying around another $3,000 to Treasury on top of the $6,000 to charity.
The Courier also manages to have a play with the fact that the Family Council of Queensland is a pro-life organisation. So did radio and television news. Apparently if you’re pro-life you can’t be charitable! Another interesting spin on the word “charity”.

It’s a pretty open secret that Santo Santoro and I aren’t the best of mates, and that I think the Queensland Liberal Party would be best off without him. But, try as I may, I can’t see too much in his latest controversy. He appears to have bought a small parcel of shares in an unlisted pharmaceutical company CBio. The company made a number of placements in 2005 (as you do when you’re losing $8 million per year).
The only possible area for a real conflict of interest would appear to be the award to the company of a $6 million grant through the Federal Government’s Pharmaceutical Partnership Program.
Interestingly, for a company making sustained losses, Santoro’s shareholding apparently doubled in value, but he laid off any possibility of accusations of personal profiteering by donating the profit to a charity – Family Council of Queensland – which is a “non-profit, non-party political, ecumenical association of pro-family community organisations and churches which seeks to promote family values and strengthen marriage and the family unit in society”. The organisation seems to be well supported, gaining sponsorships for a Family Expo that it ran in 2004 from state and federal governments as well as the University of Queensland.
Santoro appears to have been technically wrong, but practically in the clear.
What Labor needs to be careful of is that it is possible to be technically in the clear, but practically in the wrong. That’s the position that Kevin Rudd finds himself in.
Rudd’s wife’s business Igneus is a major contractor to the government, and while she is the proprietor, it’s hard not to see this as a family business. The sort of conflicts this can present to a future prime minister are evident in this 7:30 Report transcript from 2000 (and talking of conflicts of interest, the interviewer is Maxine McKew!).
The more Labor attacks government ministers over minor misdemeanours, the easier it will be for the government to level its guns at Rudd over his conflict. If Rudd really wants the Prime Ministership, his wife may need to find another job and soon. Even selling a shareholding in a business like this at a good price presents a conflict if Rudd wins the next election because its value lies in its future cashflows, not its past ones, and they depend on future government policy.