Saturday Mercury columnist Wayne Crawford noted the wondrous warmth between Tasmanian Labor Premier Paul Lennon and Prime Minister John Howard last week.

In fact, noted Crawford, all the state and territory (Labor) leaders were very chummy with the PM after the historic COAG (Council of Australian Governments) meeting in Canberra — historic because there wasn’t a walk-out or even a harsh word or raised voice during the uncommonly brief and friendly annual get-together of the leaders of Australia’s federal, state, territory and local governments.

But, noted Crawford, there’s appeared to be a particular love-in twixt the PM and his mate Paul:

“Tasmanians are sick of blame-shifting between the states and the Commonwealth,” agreed Paul Lennon. “I want to work with the Prime Minister co-operatively in any area where this approach can deliver real benefits for Tasmania.”

This particular burst of bonhomie did have a precursor with the good Premier smiling broadly when he escorted John Howard into the Styx Valley for the announcement of the $157 million Federal contribution towards the plan to place 45% of the state’s forests under protection.

Said Crawford:

All this camaraderie between the two leaders seemed to be a way for John Howard to say thanks to Paul Lennon for his assistance in last year’s federal election campaign when the Liberals picked up two House of Representatives and an extra Senate seat after a campaign in which the Liberal Prime Minister had been hailed as a hero by cheering Tasmanian forest workers, and the Labor Premier had repudiated the forestry policy of the federal Labor Leader and embraced the one put forward by the Liberals.

Both politically and economically Lennon carved out a valuable deal from the forestry agreement with the Howard Government. As he noted waggishly at the leaders’ joint press conference after the COAG meeting: “Strange things did happen in the depths of Tasmania’s forests … when an historic agreement was signed.”

Strange things indeed involving strange political bedfellows. Ever since the agreement, the Federal Coalition and State Labor governments have jointly been running blatantly political television and newspaper promotional ads proudly proclaiming how together they have “secured a way forward for Tasmania’s forests” and ushered in “a generational change in forest management.”

Strange days indeed when an arch-conservative Liberal and an arch-conservative Labor leader sup with such enthusiasm at the same table. But notes Crawford there was one disgruntled observer of the feast:

State Liberal Opposition Leader Rene Hidding has kept his counsel, but must be privately fuming as — in the lead-up to next year’s state election — the Liberal Prime Minister has gone out of his way to provide political and economic support to Tasmania’s Labor Premier.

The State Labor election strategists can hardly wait to start trotting out the remarkable comment made by Howard when he was in he state for the forest policy announcement, that he had never seen Tasmania looking so good.

The Eminent Columnist also believes Wrong-footed Rene is not going to get much ultimate joy out of the issue for which he’s expended considerable energy: The Ken Bacon Affair”

Lennon simply passed it all off by maintaining Scott was doing nothing he wasn’t paid to do — that is, give advice to Bacon. Advice which Bacon was at liberty to accept or reject.

The difficulty the Liberals face is that politicians on both sides are routinely pressured to toe the party line — through threats of disendorsement, sacking from the Cabinet or the shadow ministry, or even expulsion from their party. Injunctions in the Criminal Code and the Parliamentary Privilege Act make it a crime or an offence to use threats or intimidation “of any kind” to interfere with the “free exercise” of a Member’s duty or to make a Member vote a certain way. But if politicians obeyed the law to the letter there would be — and could be — be no party politics or party government.

And:

A couple of years ago after the Liberal maverick Peter Gutwein had gone off on a lone crusade, bucking the party line by publicly opposing clearfelling of old growth forests, and then crossing the floor to support a Green motion for an inquiry into child sex abuse, Rene Hidding declared that voting against the Liberal “team position” was not an option. He said: “Mr Gutwein has been on notice for some time that neither I, nor his colleagues, would tolerate him continuing to act as an individual Member of Parliament.”

Gutwein resigned from the shadow cabinet and was only allowed back after he gave commitments to toe the agreed party line.

The principle of team solidarity is enforced even more strictly in Cabinet. Under the Westminster convention of “collective Cabinet responsibility,” ministers must support all Cabinet decisions and not only be prepared to refrain from publicly criticising other ministers and their actions and decisions, but also defend them publicly — or resign.

What seems to have happened in the so-called “Ken Bacon witness tampering affair” was more a matter of Bacon being reminded that if he wanted to remain in Cabinet, he must support whatever decision Cabinet took on the Sydney ferry, Spirit III — or resign. As a Minister, he was not entitled to publicly express a private view (as he had been doing in press statements and letters) — and that he must either support the Cabinet position or resign.

The interview in which Ken Bacon blew the whistle, claiming he had been improperly treated, seems to have been an attempt by the hapless former minister to shift the blame for his own failures. The irony is that the same Liberals and Greens who, during the last months of his term as a minister, were almost daily demanding he be sacked for incompetence, are now rushing to his defence, with Hodgman even encouraging resort to a lie detector to prove the truth of the matter.

While Hidding, Hodgman and Putt are all promising to continue to press their demands to expose what they claim has been a cover-up, Crawford maintains:

But if Lennon manages to keep his nerve and continue (as his critics assert) to “bluster, filibuster and stonewall” for another week until Parliament rises for two months — and unless the opposition parties can uncover something new — the esoteric issue involving arcane parliamentary forms and procedures will very soon become yesterday’s issue.

Wayne Crawford can be contacted at [email protected]