My best guess is that these two lovely ladies shown above on footpath flutes are too honest for their own good and will lose rather badly as tomorrow’s Brisbane City Council’s election votes are counted.

They are Labor’s candidate for Lord Mayor Tracey Price and the party’s chance for the ward of Northgate Vicki Ryan.

Why such a dismal prediction from moi, who is also widely regarded as Australia’s most inaccurate amateur psephologist?

While you can’t judge a book by its cover, Tracey and Vicki look honest enough, don’t they? Not being LNP helps a helluva lot in that regard. They also look like they’d obey basic council rules in the event I’m wrong and they are elected tomorrow. You’d think obeying basic council rules would be an absolute necessity if they expect the people who voted them in should also do the right thing and obey council rules and by-laws, right?

Which, of course, would make them the exact opposite of each and every LNP candidate vying for BCC office tomorrow.

Tracy and Vicki, like all Labor BCC lord mayoral and ward candidates for the past 20 years, have done the decent and honest thing and stayed well clear of the city council’s intellectual property – its cleat, the alternating rectangles of blue and yellow down the left-hand-side of official council material, be it printed or online, in a brochure or on street bus timetable sign or explaining your local park rules.

Since the days of Lord Mayor Campbell Newman in 2004, the Queensland LNP has brazenly, dishonestly, unethically, used that cleat for their own selfish campaign purposes, despite council rules being very, very clear, that the cleat is not to be used for political purposes.

By the way, here are the LNP’s footpath flutes for incumbent Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner and Northgate ward councillor Adam Allan.

That pattern down the left hand side of those flutes? The colours used for the alternating rectangular blocks of roughly 2-1 dimensions? Look familiar?

When I helped run the innercity community newspaper, The Independent, into the ground, we sometimes asked the question of Labor: if you ever want to beat them, maybe you need to match their disgusting, cheating, underhand ways?

Not long before the paper’s demise – during the 2016 council elections in fact – we presented then Labor lord-mayoral candidate Rod Harding with this suggested change to his flutes, to make the campaign more of a level playing field. The addition on the left was the untouched, un-photoshopped artwork being used at the time for the LNP’s Graham Quirk. Looks familiar?

To his and Labor’s credit these long two decades in the municipal wilderness, Queensland Labor has refrained from joining the Queensland LNP in the gutter of political bastardry and ethics-free skulduggery.

Totally commendable but it does mean, though, that by mid-evening tomorrow evening, most of Labor’s BCC candidates are going to be done and dusted as the council’s official political party of choice reigns supreme once more.

Don Gordon-Brown

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