May 13, 2008 | Graham

Libs need $1 million dowry, Nats need an open marriage



Just as well the Queensland National Party is well-heeled. Knowledgeable insiders say that the Queensland Liberal Party has a debt of $1 million which will need to be extinguished as part of any amalgamation. So dire is the situation that it is said that the party has instructed debt collectors to visit a number of former federal candidates to recover pledges.
On the other side, the briefing notes provided by Lawrence Springborg suggest that rather than a reverse takeover of the Liberal Party by the National Party, there will be a new party, but that it will continue to have two sets of organisational DNA. Key Point number 6 says that “The new party preserves the existing relationships that each organsiation currently has with its federal arm.” So while the two parties will be in bed together in Queensland, they’re free to cohabit with their former organisations federally, and this is reflected in the arrangements for federal members of parliament.
So what of newly elected federal members and senators? Do they get to choose who they sit with, or will there be a third caucus? For how long will the fusion party maintain a system of internal apartheid? And how will federal policy be determined by the Liberal and National Parties? Will the new party’s office bearers sit on the administrative and policy apparatus of both? Stay tuned for more emerging complexity and a possible lesson in chaos theory.



Posted by Graham at 4:17 pm | Comments (2) |
Filed under: Australian Politics

2 Comments

  1. “So dire is the situation that it is said that the party has instructed debt collectors to visit a number of former federal candidates to recover pledges.”
    What else should one do with people who don’t pay their debts? The state candidates are being contacted first as their debts form the lion’s share of the outstanding moneys and are far longer overdue.

    Comment by Doug — May 14, 2008 @ 2:54 pm

  2. Ah…I recall a number of candidates being let off debts when I was a Vice-President. You take a risk when you contractually load people up with the sorts of costs that they do now if they don’t win.
    In fact, we monitored campaign fundraising monthly, and made sure that candidates had budgets that at least laid out a plan of how they would raise the money. They weren’t asked to do things they couldn’t do. And if they weren’t performing you then had to make a hard decision as to whether they were important enough to support.
    This crowd ask the impossible and then complain when people who are put under pressure and given the hard sell can’t perform. You shouldn’t have to have a spare twenty or thirty thousand lying around just to be a Liberal Party candidate.

    Comment by Graham Young — May 14, 2008 @ 7:26 pm

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