Is Australia its own Worst Enemy?

[Worrals in the wilds]

Machiavelli 101. I always liked his stuff too.

The thing with 'Whatever it takes' as a philosophy is that it requires a constant assessment of what people want. In Machiavelli's time it was 'what does the Prince want'? In our own time it's 'what do the voters want'? Not what the Greens want, not what the media want, not what the focus groups and opinion polls want (where opinion poll is defined as the five hundred people out of 14 million who didn't say ' off and die' when some random person rang their landline while dinner was turning into mushroom custard .

Either way, it involves a constant assessment of stakeholder views. IMO this is something the current government has consistently failed to do, and that's why they're as consistently popular as herpes (and seemingly as hard to get rid of ). They see the Greens and the Independents as stakeholders, which is probably right in the short term, because after all, there's a chance they might all pull their support and back the Libs. There's also a chance that a donkey might win the Melbourne Cup, but forgive me if I don't put money on it.

However, their long term stakeholders are roughly half of the voting public that vote Labor, as opposed to the other roughly half that vote Lib/Nat/FF. If too many of that half in the marginal seats get annoyed enough, doing deals with Bob and the Gang becomes irrelevant relatively quickly. The difference between the voters and Bob and the Gang is that while the Independents become part of the landscape the moment the balance of power is assured (either way), the annoyed voters are still important, because marginal seats tend to stay marginal. A better long term goal may be to retain a degree of integrity with the voters, rather than this week's balance of power polititard.

Many years ago, the Queensland Coalition learned this the hard way when they threw in their lot with Liz Cunningham of Gladstone. Years on, Liz is still there praying for Gladstone but the Coalition have spent so long in the wilderness that Bear Grylls is putting them on his show.