An interesting by-election

An 8.4% swing against the Labor party was more than the normal by-election swing of about 5% but it may be even worse for them than that looks

If the Gippsland by-election result was replicated around Australia, the Rudd government would be in strife, a senior academic says. Dr Nick Economou, a senior lecturer in politics at Monash University, says Gippsland was an excellent result for the coalition, with its strong anti-Labor swing. "Swings against the government in a by-election are not unexpected - that tends to be the norm," Dr Economou told AAP. ``But I draw Labor's attention to the disastrous results in what should be very safe Labor voting areas (of Gippsland) - Morwell, Churchill and Traralgon. "It's dangerous for Labor and it's the sort of pattern observable in 1996 when safe Labor electorates turned against them and Labor lost in a landslide."

He said the result sent a warning to Labor and the collateral damage was that it will lose support in traditional blue-collar electorates. "Labor has a number of those in NSW, Queensland and Tasmania, and if the sort of reaction to Mr Rudd seen in the La Trobe Valley was replicated in those other states Labor would be in a lot trouble," Dr Economou said.

Dr Paul James, a professor of globalisation and social sciences at Melbourne's RMIT, believes Mr Rudd's relationship with the electorate has changed after making some bad decisions. "He's been trying to micro-manage his public relations in a way that prime ministers should never do," Dr James said. Dr James says the fuel tax issue and Mr Rudd's intervention in the Belinda Neal affair from Japan had not done him any favours. "John Howard would never have responded to a minor altercation back home - such as one of his backbenchers doing something crazy," Dr James said. "On a whole lot of issues (Mr Rudd) has shown himself to be petty or increasingly, a kind of school master approach, in how he deals with the public service. "Those things have an effect and the by-election is an example of that."

Ms Neal, the federal MP for the NSW Central Coast seat of Robertson, and her NSW MP husband John Della Bosca, are being investigated after a run-in with staff at Iguanas Waterfront at Gosford.

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Rudd, the lone ranger

Rudd's two closest advisers are a pair of 28-year-olds who've risen almost without trace and whose relationship with their 50-year-old boss is more like that of sons to their father. Alister Jordan is his chummy deputy chief of staff and Lachlan Harris his legendarily terse senior press secretary. Sinodinos's notional successor as chief of staff is David Epstein, who worked in the same capacity for Kim Beazley. Paul Keating once described him as someone so indecisive he wouldn't get out of bed in the morning without a poll to work out on which side. Lyons says this sells him short and that he's a political pro, having been in and around politics for 20 years. But, he says, "Epstein's history is largely in spin; in the Hawke and Keating governments he ran the propaganda unit, known as Animals: the National Media Liaison Service." He also credits Epstein with Beazley and Rudd's utter preoccupation with the 24-hour news cycle.

The unmistakable impression is that Rudd, a former head bureaucrat in the Goss government in Queensland, is acting as his own chief of staff. Plainly he's a control freak who doesn't trust most of the people who work for him and can barely delegate tasks even to senior ministers. Nor does it sound as though any of his inner circle can tell him things he doesn't want to hear. This was reinforced by Lyons's anecdote about the Prime Minister sitting in his office at Parliament Office at the beginning of this month, watching Senate estimates, of all things. Apparently he became infuriated by the accusation that he'd broken an election promise to give every secondary student a computer.

Julia Gillard and "the team" were summoned, minions were told to chase down everything he'd said on the subject before polling day, and there was a flurry of meetings. Every transcript was analysed and the day's scheduled appointments were cancelled. This is no way to lead a party -- let alone to govern the country -- and the abler people in caucus all know it.

On any given day, prime ministers always have far more pressing and important tasks to attend to than watching Senate estimates. After all, hardly anyone else pays them any heed. It's beginning to sound like a whim-driven office, run by a Prime Minister with too much time on his hands and no higher priority than trying to manage the 24-hour media cycle. In media management terms, if potentially damaging accusations emerge, a cheer squad of Labor senators is always there to counter them and there are staff galore to sift the evidence, without tying up the Government's two most senior ministers, the people most able to get the Government back on the front foot.

Lyons says that if Rudd keeps governing as he is doing now, "he'll earn the nickname Captain Chaos". He's alluding in passing to Captain Wacky, the nickname former ALP national secretary Gary Gray gave to Keating in the lead-up to the 1996 federal election. Another anecdote from last Saturday's story goes a long way to justifying the prediction.

Last month cabinet's national security committee was scheduled to meet but the meeting was delayed for several hours and Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Michael L'Estrange were left loitering in corridors. In the old days Sinodinos would at least have invited them into the cabinet antechamber, offered profuse apologies and asked for their thoughts on the day's agenda. It was widely construed as a snub, although it may simply have been appalling management. In any event, this is no way to conduct matters of state and it's hard to conceive of other business that could plausibly be given a higher priority.

Rudd's management style and his worsening relations with top-level bureaucrats were the subject of another fascinating piece in The Australian on Wednesday by Paul Maley entitled "Yes, Prime Minister". It's worth noting that the two main people quoted in the article were Community and Public Sector Union national secretary Stephen Jones and Australian National University politics professor John Wanna. Neither could be considered as hostile to the new Government, yet it can have drawn little comfort from their conclusions.

Jones voices the complaint of many public servants who are required to produce reams of advice and research papers at very little notice and without much confidence that they're even being read, let alone attended to. "I'm also hearing that everything is centralised. Based on the way I run my own office, there's a limit to how much information you can process, and I'm running a union, not the country."

Wanna agrees, seeing Rudd as presiding over a government that's busy but not particularly effective. "What you hear is that there's not much process, that people don't know what's going on. That a lot of stuff goes into Rudd's office and they're waiting for it to be spat back out again, and that there are time delays."

Will many people outside Canberra care about overworked bureaucrats getting their noses out of joint and feeling under-appreciated? Perhaps not, or at least not yet. However, the level of obsessive micro-management and the chaos in the Prime Minister's office tell us quite a lot about his character and don't augur well. They suggest that he'll be hopeless if he ever has a real crisis to deal with and hard decisions that need to be made quickly.

Wanna also says Rudd seems to have reverted to his modus operandi as head of the Queensland Cabinet Office, where he acquired the nickname Dr Death because of his fractious relations with the public service. He's surprised the Prime Minister hasn't learned from the experience. "He worked 100-hour weeks. "They tried to control everything and the more they tried to control it, the more the public service and the interest groups stepped outside the control."

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School has a "plan" to deal with bullying (but does nothing)

As long as the paperwork is in order, who cares about anything else?

A high school student accused of bullying may be legally banned from going near his 12-year-old victim. In a landmark court case, the 13-year-old Year 8 student is facing an application for a peace and good behaviour bond, which could prevent him attending his school on the Darling Downs. In the Children's Court last week, the parents of his alleged victim said the Education Department failed to act to protect their son from daily attacks. They are considering suing the State Government for neglect, arguing the department failed in its duty of care. "The department has been treating (the accused boy) with kid gloves, yet he is running riot," said the alleged victim's father, who cannot be named for legal reasons. "When we complained to the school, we were told our son had anger-management problems. The school is 100 per cent liable, yet will not admit any liability."

The case will be considered at a hearing early next month. The court could ban the student from going within a certain distance of his alleged victim, which could keep him out of the school grounds. The father told The Sunday Mail: "Thousands of parents would go through this every day, and the schools don't want to get involved."

The alleged victim, who has been put on detention himself over the conflicts, says he is subjected to regular threats of assault, including blows to the back of the head.

The mother of the alleged bully has defended her son, despite admitting he had a history of schoolyard violence which included being suspended from primary school for bullying. She said he was recently suspended for five days following an attack. "He is not totally out of control," the mother said. "I am not saying he is 'a home angel and a street devil'. I have had a lot of contact with the principal since the incident and (the boy) has been removed from the class. There is not much more the school can do." She said she would fight a court order, on the grounds her son was too young.

A check of court records shows there is no case in Queensland of a student being granted such a bond over another student for bullying. However, in the New South Wales city of Newcastle, a 13-year-old school bully was placed on an 18-month good behaviour bond in September 2003 after grabbing a small boy by the neck and demanding he give him $5 the next day.

Queensland Education Minister Rod Welford last week defended Nerang State High School, where an alleged bully has avoided suspension despite attacking a former fellow student at a bus stop.

Education Queensland has declined to comment on whether it has breached a duty of care to the alleged victim in the Darling Downs case. A spokeswoman for Education Queensland said only: "Under common law, teachers owe to all students a duty of care to adhere to a reasonable standard of care to protect them from foreseeable harm. The department respects the process of law and will respect the terms of any decision made by the court." [Big of them!] She said the school had a responsible-behaviour plan in place as part of last year's introduction of the state-wide Code of School Behaviour.

Commissioner for Children and Young People Elizabeth Fraser said if students were not satisfied with a school's response, they could raise concerns with the commission's complaints team, which could be an advocate for them.

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Another childcare meltdown

The proper place for little kids is in a loving home



A TODDLER went missing from his Strathpine childcare centre and wandered along a busy main road, and nobody noticed for two hours. Tiny two-year-old Tyler Brown - nicknamed "Midget" - walked out of the unlocked fire escape of Strathpine Trainease Childcare Centre and sauntered 500m down Gympie Rd, past an open stormwater drain and the railway line. He ended up in the car park of a small shopping complex where a courier driver noticed him toddling between the cars about 10.30am yesterday.

The driver took the boy inside to a chemist who figured he must belong to a playgroup operating at children's clothing and artwork shop, Patch Place. But owner, Fiona Patching said he was not one of theirs. "He had a Westfield Strathpine balloon so we called them to see if they had any missing children reported but they hadn't. So then we rang Petrie police and advised them," Mrs Patching said.

While waiting for police, Mrs Patching thought she'd try a nearby childcare centre on "the off chance" he belonged to them. "I was told 'no, we're not missing any children', and then the director came on the phone. She said, 'I'll come down and make sure'," she said. The child was quickly identified as Tyler and the centre then contacted his mother, Elizabeth Brown, just before midday. "When I got down there, and police were there with two lady officers I said, 'Right, I want answers'," Mrs Brown said. "I said, 'Have you looked at video surveillance?' and the police looked at Robyn (the director) and she said she didn't know how to work it. There's so many unanswered questions, like how did he get the balloon?"

Mrs Brown said she took Tyler straight home and would not be returning to the centre. "They couldn't explain why he got out, but he obviously wasn't being watched," she said. "He took my hand and showed me how he got out, through a fire escape door. Any child could have done the same."

Director and licensee of the centre Maurizio Pizzato said the incident had been very distressing to staff. "This child has just gone past our guard. It should never have happened and we're trying our hardest now to make sure it never happens again," he said. He confirmed the child had "escaped" through the fire door which he said had to remain unlocked in line with fire safety regulations.

The Commissioner for Children and Young People and Child Guardian, Robin Sullivan, said she had referred the matter to her department to make sure no other children were at risk. Police said the investigation into the incident was now in the hands of the Department of Communities. A spokesperson from the department said the matter was being treated as a "serious safety breach". "Regional officers have already conducted an unannounced inspection of the service this afternoon, and will continue their investigation," the spokesperson said.

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