That is an Australian State. The Labor Govt has been wiped out in an election that has seen it lose so many seats that it may not retain a party status (means loss of cars, secretarial support, all that sort of thing).
The opposition was lead by a person who was not even an elected member of the State Govt. He is now.
Seems like his party (Liberal Natioanl Coalition) will win about 60 seats and the previous Govt will win around 9.
That is a rout.
I’m always intrigued by major shifts in parliamentary systems. Is the Liberal National Coalition a new party, or were they the previous Opposition? How long was Labour in power? what triggered their collapse?
The most dramatic shift at the provincial level here in Canada in recent years was the election of the Liberals in New Brunswick in 1987, when they won every seat in the House.
They have been around under various names for a century. Country Party, National Party, Liberal Party Alliance…
Labor was in power for 14 years, and a lot of that was due to a totally useless opposition.
The oppositiobn seem to have united under a new leader who made heimself a name as the Lord Mayor of Brisbane (capital city).
The previous Govt was wracked by scandals and inefficiency. Whether a new one, with so many new members of Parliament can do any better remains to be seen.
Well, what are they? Ideologically, demographically, historically?
They are a centre right party (or coalition at the national level).
Wouldn’t a close second be Quebec in 2007, where the ADQ came out of nowhere to almost get a majority and become the Official Opposition (and then fall apart completely in elections a year later)?
Where do they stand on decriminalization of heterosexuality?
In the 1993 the ruling Progressive Conservative Party went from having a 151 seat majority in the House of Commons to having 2 seats. The Bloc Québécois, in it’s first contested election, ended up Her Majesty’s “Loyal” Opposition.
I was living in Canada at the time, in the district lost by Kim Campbell.
Giles’s short answer is right, but it’s a pretty complicated story.
The “Liberal” part of the Liberal-National coalition is a predominantly urban and suburban party that tends to support a somewhat laissez-faire attitude (in modern-day terms, at least) to economics and social policy. That is, it tends to be push for lower taxes, reduced public services, smaller government, and other economic policies that are sometimes associated with the Republican Party in the United States but, like the right-wing many other western democracies, its policies are considerably to the left of the Republican Party of most economic issues.
Liberals from the cities and suburbs also tend, for the most part, not to be too invested in the culture wars. There’s not the same level of antipathy to homosexuality or abortion that you find here in the US among large swaths of the right. There has always been an element of social conservatism in the Liberal Party, and it seems to me that it escalated when John Howard was Prime Minister in the 1990s and then extended into the 2000s, but it’s not as pronounced as the social conservatism of the United States, and the Liberal Party was, in its earlier days, responsible for many policies that would be considered socially liberal today.
The Nationals are, in many ways, a more complicated bunch.
The party used to be called the Country Party, and the name change resulted, at least partly, out of a concern that the old name hurt the party with urban and suburban voters who, in a highly urbanized country like Australia, make up the large majority of the population.
As the old name suggests, the National (nee Country) Party has been the party most concerned with representing rural interests in Australia. Some of the peculiarities of Australian history and geography make this, at times, a rather difficult thing to do with any consistency.
In many cases, the National Party shares with the Liberal Party a sort of economic conservatism that pushes for smaller government and lower taxation. The problem is that, in a very large country with a small population, there are some services that would never make it to rural areas at all if things were left to the free market, so the National Party and its supporters have often found themselves in the position of defending government programs that help rural and regional Australia. Things like phone service, and local radio and television, would never have been extended to remote areas during much of the twentieth century without government intervention, and so rural voters who often make general criticisms of government spending are also, for example, often strong supporters of the publicly-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, because some of the best rural radio and TV programming comes from the ABC.
While the Liberal-National Party is a coalition of the two parties, and unites against the center-left Labor Party, the Liberals and Nationals have often not seen eye-to-eye on economic issues that affect (or are thought to affect) rural dwellers differently. Some of their biggest disputes involved the privatization or semi-privatization of public utilities like Australian Telecom (now Telstra).
The National Party and its supporters also tend to be considerably more socially conservative than their Liberal Party coalition partners.
I’m not sure, however, that all of this was very important in the Queensland election that the OP is talking about. Admittedly, i now live thousands of miles away and don’t follow Aussie politics as closely as i used to, but it seems to me that actual policies were less important in this election than the perception (quite justified, in many cases) that the Labor government that had ruled Queensland for the last two decades was corrupt and out of touch with its electorate. Federal controversies, from leadership squabbles in the Austrlaian Labor Party to debates over a carbon tax, also contributed.
They stand together behind closed doors.
I suspect that they are in favour of it – why, even the Premier-elect of Queensland is a partner in a heterosexual marriage. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.)
Mhendo’s comprehensive answer did a far better job than I could have of trying to sum up the Liberal National Party politics. I would think that in a few years the old Country Party will be dead and gone and replaced totally by the Liberals. Apart from West Australia of course, which is still about 30 years out of touch with the rest of Australia.
The more “radical” if you like elements have already switched to things like the Katter Australian Party after being with Pauline Hansens lunatic fringe
What do you think lead to this perception of corruption in particular and what accusations in that respect do you see as quite justified?
Personally I don’t perceive Bligh’s government as having been corrupt but I did view it as a weak pitiful thing whose method of devising policy comprised reading the popular news story of the day and panicking.
Princhester, I think that there had been a whiff of corruption or at the least scandal around the Govt for a while although a lot of it did precede Anna Bligh. Wasn’t one of the Ministers thrown in the clink for accepting payments from the mining magnate (now dead)? Also Bill D’Arcy ended up in the slammer as well, although for other matters.
Also the Health Dept in itself would have bought down a lot of Govt’s.
No question that wins when you’re talking about Federal elections.
And not just in Canada - I believe I’ve seen polisci types say that it was the most dramatic melt-down of a government party for a Westminster parliamentary system.
Questionable, depending what you mean by “recent years”. The 1976 Quebec election and 1971 Alberta election arguably had greater shifts (in seats, if not vote percentage), but you may not consider that to be recent. For that matter, the 1990 Ontario election also featured a major shift.
The thing is, this is not uncommon at the provincial (or even federal) level in Canada. The unexpected thing about the 1987 New Brunswick election was seeing all opposition parties get completely shut out. I don’t think it’s happened before or since. How does a legislature work without an opposition?
I may have misspoken a bit, and i agree, at least in part, with your second sentence.
I don’t mean corruption in the literal sense of illegal behavior, or subverting the course of justice, or that sort of thing. I mean the more generalized notion that the Labor Party, having been in power so long, tended to take its own power for granted, and to be more concerned, when making policy, with its own internal needs and conflicts than with the actual needs and wants of the electorate.
I was a Labor voter for basically my whole adult life before leaving Australia, but the way that the party tended to be dominated by cronyism and factional disputes that were more about internal power grabs than actual politics used to drive me crazy. I recognize that it’s one of the almost inevitable side-effects of a Westminster-style political system, and i’m not sure the Coalition is much better in this regard, but when one party dominates power in a state for an extended period, that sort of inward-looking factionalism tends to get worse over time. The electorate gets sick of it, and even if they know that the other guys might not be much better, they decide that a new version of cronyism might be a good thing.
Sure, but ADQ pretty much came out of nowhere in 2007, and then just fell apart a year later. 1976 was the year that PQ came into its own (and no doubt that had more dramatic effects both for Quebec and the ROC, and 1990 was significant because it was the first time that the New Democrats won and won big in the east, but they had an established presence before and again after.
And what they did in 1987 was appoint some Liberals to serve as the “official” opposition, and also let the PCs submit written questions for Question Time. You’re right, it was bizarre.
It had happened one time before in Canadian history…PIE elections in 1935. The Liberals swept, which I think was the fist time it had ever happened, not just in Canada, but anywhere in the Commonwealth.
Pssst - Captain Amazing - when come back, bring PEI. 