State of attitude

Paul Williams
13 August 2005

IT'S no accident that Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce, the most recent burr under the saddle of mainstream Australian conservatism, hails from Queensland. Just as it was no coincidence that One Nation, which so severely shook the Australian party system in the late 1990s, also originated in the deep north.

Queensland, it seems, has been the perfect hothouse to cultivate the outrageously populist, often influential and sometimes extreme politics that have also generated colourful characters such as Bob Katter and Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

So what is it about Queensland? Is it sufficient to fall back on the old truism that Queensland is merely different. The answer to the latter is no and yes.

On the surface, it's far too glib to say that Queensland's political culture -- its unofficial rules, norms and expectations -- is just different, that there's something in the air that makes Queenslanders do politics in a way distinct from the rest of Australia. Of course Queensland's political culture isdifferent, just as Victoria varies from Tasmania orNSW from the west. Each state and territory enjoysa distinct history, geography and method of economic production.
But at a deeper level, it appears that while each state is different, Queensland may be just a little more different than others.

While Queensland Labor has often been a national laughing-stock for its cliques and its apparent preference to remain in Opposition, it has been the Nationals and its precursor, the Country Party, that have drawn the most interstate opprobrium. It is, therefore, not surprising that national attention should now be focused on Joyce. For while his federal colleagues appear shocked by his apparent disloyalty to the Coalition, Joyce, in fact, remains consistent with the traditional pattern of Queensland politics.

What's the basis for the national perception of Queensland as a rugged, no-nonsense yet laid-back state with old-fashioned values and black-and-white beliefs? The Queensland difference can be traced to several factors. Indeed, from its earliest days as the northern rump of NSW, the region has earned a reputation for harsh living and tough administration. In a hot climate amid rough terrain, the Moreton Bay colony was founded in the 1820s as a penal institution sufficiently far from Sydney to house the worst type of recidivist convicts. And, from Captain Patrick Logan onwards, a series of ruthlessly authoritarian commandants were dispatched to Moreton Bay to control them. From there, a tradition of authoritarian governance, even among free settlers, was born.

The colony's separation from NSW in 1859 did nothing to dilute this incipient culture. Indeed, the reverse occurred. Queensland's new sense of separateness only further validated a growing sense of suspicion of southerners and outsiders, and provided a sense of righteousness underlined not only by its great distance from Sydney and Melbourne but also by being the only colony to gain simultaneously separation and full responsible government.


From this point, Queensland developed a sense of being apart, special and entitled to the good life. Queensland, for example, was highly suspicious of the 1890s Federation process and, in the 1899 referendum, agreed to join the Federation by the narrowest margin of any colony.


Other factors also contributed to the Queensland difference. Perhaps the most important was the state's disproportionate reliance on primary industries, a trait still evident today, despite Premier Peter Beattie's smart-state program of sponsoring new-age technology industries in the hope of shaking Queensland from its farm and quarry mentality.

From the earliest free settlement, the pastoral industry was the mainstay of the Queensland economy. Moreover, the desire to explore and push the boundaries of the colony in search of new pastures brought with it a second critical factor: the development of a large though decentralised, even far-flung, population that had little use for the urban politics of Brisbane.

Indeed, Queensland remains the only state where most of its population lives outside the state capital. In that sense, Brisbane has never dominated Queensland -- economically, politically or culturally -- in the same way Sydney has NSW or Melbourne Victoria.

From the beginning, then, Queenslanders developed a regional and rural consciousness that outstripped other colonies. Political scientist Don Aitkin calls it country-mindedness, a mind-set so pervasive that it shapes more than voting patterns and party loyalties and, as such, allows the majority of Queenslanders living outside Brisbane to adopt a collective identity. This is one reason why One Nation initially performed so well electorally.

In short, voters came together from two distinct and formerly antagonistic constituencies: from a traditional National Party base in the bush disillusioned with the post-Joh Nationals and from a traditional blue-collar Labor base in the provincial cities disillusioned with Labor's economically rationalist and multicultural agendas. Interestingly, the protectionist agenda pushed today by Joyce, Katter and the Nationals MP for Dawson, De-Anne Kelly, also taps into this consciousness, with each MP enjoying support from the old Left and old Right.

Importantly, country-mindedness is a psychological world view in which rural life is painted as inherently virtuous and superior to all others, largely because primary production is regarded as the lifeblood of the nation. While also evident in regional NSW and Victoria, this attitude is especially strong in Queensland, where simple views of right and wrong political and social values prevail.

Close parallels between Queensland's agrarian socialism and midwest American populism can be drawn. In both environments, local farmers looked to governments to provide support, were suspicious of outsiders, championed local political heroes who engaged in inflammatory political rhetoric and berated bureaucrats and economic rationalists from the state and national capitals.

Despite pastoralism being eclipsed in the mid-1800s by agriculture and mining, strong regional consciousness continued as these areas remained focal points of economic activity. And as the regions' economic sway increased, so did their political demands and influence. Indeed, in terms of transport infrastructure, it's telling that the first rail links connected rural areas with regional ports on the central Queensland coast. Brisbane was relatively unimportant and it wasn'tuntil the 1920s that the capital was connected to Cairns.

Rail in many ways has been an apt metaphor for Queensland politics. Apart from embodying the traditional political and economic rivalries between Brisbane and the regions (even the rail and coal-centric Ipswich demanded it be the state's capital), the burgeoning rail network also provided succour to the most isolated rural areas and thus allowed a decentralised population to take root.

But, perhaps even more important, rail also embodied the paternalism that underpins agrarian socialism: a mind-set in which rural folk look to the government to provide the basic infrastructure in a decentralised state where such things are not viable for private enterprise.
Again, this too was common among the colonies, given that the continent suffered, according to historian Geoffrey Blainey, from the tyranny of distance. Indeed, Paul Kelly cites paternalism as a key pillar in the politically bipartisan Australian settlement of the past century. But, given that Brisbane is farther from Cairns than it is from Melbourne, it's easy to see why the vastness of the state has made Queensland especially sensitive to the politics of state paternalism, even entitlement.

In this light, it's understandable why Joyce clings to the old protectionist view that governments, not private enterprise, should provide telecommunications and university students' services.

Such a view has seen any and all state-sponsored economic development, particularly in the regions, as not only desirable but essential. As such, Queensland politics has often concerned itself with things and places, not ideas and philosophy; with ends, not means; and with outcomes, not processes.

Queensland, then, quickly fell into a pattern of what political scientist Paul Reynolds calls "connectional politics", the mode by which capital works projects were commissioned not on the basis of public accountability but on the strength of mateship, favours and mutual back scratching. Such practices, of course, quickly descended into corruption -- a pattern unearthed in Queensland during the Fitzgerald inquiry in the late 1980s that revealed the Bjelke-Petersen government to be so concerned with development at any cost that it failed to adhere to due process. Just how entrenched this twin culture of paternalism and development is evident in its bipartisan practice, with Labor governments enjoying their own days of pork-barrelling and pump-priming. From 1915, for example, T.J. Ryan oversaw the nearest thing to a genuinely socialist economy in Australia when he established a range of state enterprises, from a state-wide insurance office to government-owned hotels and butch! er shops.

Despite this radical excursion, however, Labor too quickly fell into a pattern of arch-conservatism. On the back of pastoral industries, a strong labour movement grew around shearers whose strikes in the early 1890s, in alliance with the maritime workers, paved the way for the modern Labor Party.

But then, as now, politics among farm labourers in the country and craft workers in the city were conservative and concerned themselves more with wages and conditions than with utopianism. But, paradoxically, labour politics in north Queensland did, on occasion, venture into radicalism, with Bowen's Fred Paterson, elected in the 1940s to state parliament, remaining Australia's first and only communist MP. Indeed, Queensland has been home to any number of political extremists. Apart from the red north, Queensland has also housed cells of far-right organisations such as the League of Rights and, according to some, the Ku Klux Klan.

Race issues, then, have often featured in remote Queensland politics and were, in conjunction with economic dislocation, an element of Queensland's most recent populist experiment, Pauline Hanson's One Nation.

Quite apart from the often brutal treatment early white settlers meted out to Aborigines, Queenslanders were sensitised to race in terms of its geographical position -- as the front line most vulnerable to invasion from Asia -- and through the influx in the 1860s of Pacific Islanders to the sugar cane fields and, later, the Chinese to the goldfields.

Other factors rounded out Queensland's difference. For many years, for example, education was underplayed in the state's development, with only a handful of high schools existing until the 1940s. In addition, rural Queensland is traditionally a religious and morally conservative society and this, together with the slow influx of migrants after World War II, saw new ideas and values move very slowly, if at all.

Once again, the actions of figures such as Katter and Joyce are not the politics of intransigence, as federal Liberals would argue, but merely consistent with their view of the state's moral duty to provide basic services.

Several challenges lie immediately ahead for the nation's principal political actors. The first rests with the Howard-Vaile Government: how can it reconcile what is, in effect, two warring National parties -- the progressive economically rationalist federal party and the traditionally protectionist Queensland branch? The second is Joyce's challenge: how can he extract maximum bargaining power without overplaying his hand and incurring Coalition damage? The third challenge is Labor's: how can the party exploit this crisis in Coalition unity when its own stocks are so poor?

At least since the time of Bjelke-Petersen, Queensland politicians have played a key role in determining the fate of federal governments. Once again, the future of the Howard Government may rest in the hands of the Queensland Nationals, so often the thorn in the conservatives' side.
Paul Williams is a lecturer in politics at Griffith University.

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