A popular electoral reform is turning out to have robbed Steven Miles of a traditional political advantage entering what looks like the final months of Labor’s pretty well uninterrupted three and a half decades of government.

The reform is the bilaterally supported shift to fixed four-year terms with the state election due on the final Saturday of October every leap year – or as we might prefer right now, every Olympic year.

The argument for the shift was the prospect of better administration as governments could put more thought into medium or longer term policy without the imperative to spend a third of their three-year (sometimes less) terms campaigning for re-election.

The fixed date, so it was said, would remove the jockeying around election dates with the distraction that creates as we are currently seeing with the will-he, won’t-he poll positioning of Anthony Albanese. (My view: he’s politically timid and he won’t).

What the voters liked in endorsing this was the prospect of a little less politics and a little more government from the 93 State MPs and their exploding ranks of staff. And, in exchange, the emphasis on some more strategic thinking that would deal with the issues troubling them – whether it’s crime, the health system, energy transformation or housing shortages.

It appears that as we near the end of this first four-year term, we are seeing both a government and opposition that hasn’t taken advantage of the opportunity.

From a government struggling to survive, we are seeing junk policy such as a short-term reduction in public transport fares, a cash handout to subsidise electricity bills until after the election and a vague and undeliverable promise of state controls over fuel prices. There’s no big imaginative policy approach that justifies four more years.

From the Opposition, it’s little better. David Crisafulli has promised early action on health, crime, housing and Olympics venues but this is all just government business as usual but with a different brand. Where is the policy initiative, carefully thought through and capturing the public imagination enough to justify four years of government?

My hunch is that the Premier, certainly, must be having some regrets about being locked into an election date.

In our system of government, the powers of leaders to act unilaterally are limited. One power that a premier has had is to visit the Governor and call for the dissolution of parliament and an election. The fixing of terms robs a a premier of that power.

But it can be a powerful political tool. A question either side of
Queensland politics often asks itself is “what would Beattie do”, a reference to the electoral canniness of Labor’s most successful modern leader, Peter Beattie.

One thing Beattie would do is keep the wheels spinning on early election speculation which he would then carry through – each time dominating the agenda with whatever issue he defined as needing voters to go to the polls months early.

Beattie called (and won) and early election in 2001 to clean up his own party after an inquiry found it was contaminated by electoral rorting, in 2004 to clean up his government’s foster care system after a different inquiry found it was failing and in 2006 to clean up his government’s health system after ….. you know what.

Beattie’s willingness to own the failure and promise to do better (in the face of divided oppositions made him the winner of our discontent through his ability to set the electoral agenda from the moment the election was called.

This advantage – the ability to set the agenda by owning the timing – is lost to the current and future premiers. And there is no going back.

There is, however, the opportunity to do what was intended – to craft a strategy that flows through a four-year term: say, take the first year to honour promises and take on the unpopular measures, then two years to govern well and bank the gains from the tough decisions of year one, and a final year to first set up the future challenges then campaign on how to address them.

This would turn down the political temperature but voters would welcome a retreat from the crisis mentality that pervades politics.

We try not to live our own lives lurching from crisis to crisis, yet we see that this is how government now runs. Governments blame oppositions for this and oppositions say governments would do the same in their position.

They’re both right more’s the pity. And there’s no going back from that either.