Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Speaker—to be told that a group of businessmen had lost faith in Mr Howard and had launched a ‘Joh for PM’ campaign. On 31 January 1987, Sir Joh addressed a rally in Wagga and launched the ‘Joh for PM’ campaign, telling a small group of admirers:

I’m starting a bushfire today and it will go all over Australia.

He said:

I have some very, very good news for you today. The Coalition is finished.

In explaining the reasons for his decision to destroy the coalition, he said:

You can’t walk with a foot on either side of a barbwire fence. It’s very uncomfortable.

He went on to say:

And we will annihilate them and they will not be able to sustain their position. You cannot do the things they are doing and expect to win. You cannot win particularly when you have the record they’ve got. They are losers.

He was not talking about the Australian Labor Party; he was talking about the Liberal Party. The Prime Minister then announced the 1987 election when Sir Joh was in Disneyland. Peter Charlton reported:

The reaction when we rang Joh and said, ‘Look, the election’s been called and you haven’t even got a seat, you haven’t been preselected, you haven’t got your organisation. What do you think?’

Sir Joh replied:

That Hawke hasn’t called an election, has he? Oh that’s ... goodness gracious ...

The ‘Joh for PM’ campaign destroyed any chance that Mr Howard might have had of winning the 1987 election. Now, 20 years later, the Prime Minister gets to relive his nightmare: the Queensland Nationals are about to destroy the coalition again, but this time they are going to destroy the coalition by agreeing to be taken over by the Liberals.

This time it is not Sir Joh who is in Disneyland but the National Party leader. The Prime Minister knew two weeks ago about the talks that were going on but did not tell the National Party leader. His National Party colleague the member for Maranoa participated in the talks for two weeks, but he did not tell the National Party leader. The President of the Queensland National Party, David Russell, organised the talks but did not tell the National Party leader. The Queensland Nationals are about to abandon provincial Queensland—seats like Dawson, Hinkler and Wide Bay. We say to the people of Dawson, Hinkler and Wide Bay: you have no better friend than the Labor Party—a party committed to a nation building agenda; a party committed to making regional Australia a new engine of national economic growth. As Sir Joh famously declared 20 years ago, ‘The coalition is finished. Don’t you worry about that.’

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