Can Campbell do it?

While we were all distracted by the recent NSW election, an interesting psephological story broke in Queensland with relatively little fanfare.

The Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Campbell Newman, has announced that he will contest the marginal Labor seat of Ashgrove at the next state election, and if elected will become leader of the Liberal National Party, leading the LNP into government if they defeat Anna Bligh’s Labor Party. Just yesterday Newman resigned as Lord Mayor to focus on the state election.

A lot of the details are unclear, as to who made the decision that Newman would lead the party, or the status of Jeff Seeney, who has taken over the role of leading the LNP in the Parliament due to Newman’s lack of a seat. The basic idea, however, is that the LNP will be running a candidate for Premier who is not currently a Member of Parliament, and has no previous parliamentary experience.

It is certainly unprecedented in Australian politics, but in a sense it makes sense. Brisbane City Council is unlike any other local government body in Australia. It covers a population of over 1 million residents and covers the bulk of the Brisbane urban area. A similar council in Sydney or Melbourne would cover dozens of currently-existing local government areas. This also means that the body covers services that would be the purview of the state government in any other major city.

The local government structure in Brisbane is therefore more similar to those of big cities in the United States, as well as other big cities in Europe where the Mayor covers most of the city and is a prominent figure in local and regional politics. Think of Michael Bloomberg in New York or Boris Johnson in London. Unlike Clover Moore, who has a citywide profile but only has power over the very inner city, Newman is clearly the most significant political figure in Queensland outside of the state cabinet.

Apart from two years in the mid 1990s, the ALP has held power in Queensland since 1989. There is little experience of government in their parliamentary ranks. In this context, Newman is clearly the strongest figure in the Liberal National Party to challenge Bligh, and the one with the most experience to lead a conservative government. While he may not be able to lead the party’s offensive in Question Time, my experience indicates that Question Time in state parliaments plays less of a role in the election campaign, and Newman is far more formidable in the media than a relative unknown figure like John Paul Langbroek.

While the move is unprecedented in Australian politics, it does have many parallels in similar countries. In Canada, it is not uncommon for political parties to choose someone from outside Parliament to lead them. Current leader of the left-wing New Democratic Party, Jack Layton, was a member of the Toronto City Council and deputy mayor in 2003 when his party elected him as the party’s national leader. A year later he found a seat in the Canadian House of Commons.

In US politics, it is not uncommon for big city mayors to be elected Governor without any experience in state politics. It is common for state Governors to be elected President without ever serving in the federal legislature. Recent examples include George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.

In both these systems, the party’s leaders are chosen in some way by the public or by the party’s rank-and-file membership. In Canada conventions of the party’s membership elect all major party’s leaders, while gubernatorial and presidential candidates are chosen by primaries in the United States, and become their party’s de facto leader after winning these primaries.

If the example of Campbell Newman is the beginning of a political party exerting its power to choose its leadership over the wishes of the parliamentary delegation, that’s probably a good thing. Newman was not selected by a vote of his party’s members, but there appears to have been a push from outside the Parliament to bring him in.

I’ve argued before that political parties in Australia would be well served by having members choose their leadership, rather than parliamentarians. All political parties in Canada and the United Kingdom choose their leaders through some system which gives ordinary members a say.

As the Labor Party deals with its continuing decline in membership numbers and involvement of members, the rank-and-file selection of the leader has occasionally been raised as a way to reconnect the party with its members. While all those state Greens parties that have chosen to have a leader (Victoria, Tasmania, ACT) have gone with the elite model, as well as the federal Party Room, there remains many Greens members who believe that leaders of the Greens should be chosen by the rank and file, not imposed by a handful of parliamentarians.

If Newman’s selection is the beginning of a push by the Liberal National Party to take over this role of selecting leaders from their parliamentarians, it can only be a good thing for internal democracy in all Australian political parties.

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