Land Tax War: Daniel Gannon’s friends include Steven Marshall and Rob Lucas, but that was before the property tax battle
Once upon a time Daniel Gannon worked with Premier Steven Marshall and Treasurer Rob Lucas, and counted them as friends — but that was before the land tax wars. After its passage in parliament, what’s next for the Property Council boss?
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When it finally happened, Daniel Gannon was not there to enjoy the big moment.
Not that he missed it entirely. He was in Sydney for a bunch of Property Council meetings but modern communications being what they are, he could still tune in.
“I was watching it all day on my bloody laptop,” he says of last week’s parliamentary vote to endorse changes to the state’s land tax laws. Which may have been just as well.
“I probably wouldn’t have been a helpful visual cue in the House anyway.”
It’s been a long five months for Gannon. He found himself in an unexpected and elongated battle with his old mates in the Liberal Party over the land tax changes.
It was an intense and very public civil war.
Gannon is head of the state branch of the Property Council. Some of his members had millions of dollars at stake, but what added a little frisson to a relatively normal conflict between government and pressure group was Gannon’s deep ties to the Liberals.
He’d spent a decade working for now Treasurer Rob Lucas and then Liberal opposition leaders Isobel Redmond and Steven Marshall.
But here he was, every day, serving it up to his former pals. Still, there is a definite sense Gannon enjoys the fight.
That he even thrives on the cut and thrust of political conflict.
“I think when you step into the ring you need to expect to have your nose bloodied, while you are doing the same to the other side,” Gannon says in a cheerful manner.
His old boss, Rob Lucas, who as treasurer is the man responsible for the land tax changes, spotted Gannon’s potential back in 2004 when he hired the then Adelaide university student who was studying history and politics.
“He had a natural aptitude for politics,” Lucas says of Gannon.
“Some people take to it like fish to water.” And Lucas, a veteran of the political battlefield, appreciates the irony that his young apprentice is now using some of the skills he learned then against his old boss.
“Having done a traineeship with me, having done four of five years with me, then with Steven Marshall, he has refined or honed his skill set base in terms of mounting a campaign and he has put those skills he has learned to good use.”
Gannon’s route to the top of the Property Council started in a Jayco caravan.
It was his home for the first four years of his life. Gannon was born in 1982 in West Wyalong, a speck on the map 470km west of Sydney. But it was a brief stay.
West Wyalong was one of 12 towns Gannon would live in before his parents returned to Adelaide when he was four years old. Gannon’s older brother was born in Wollongong in NSW. The eldest of his three sisters in Biloela, another speck on the map, this one 560km north of Brisbane.
Gannon’s father and grandfather were carpenters.
They travelled to where the work was. In a convoy of three caravans. One for his grandparents, one for his mum and dad and the kids, another for his dad’s brother.
These days the 37-year-old Gannon and wife Monique have three kids of their own, Delilah, 6, Walter, 4, and Otis, 1, and the thought of raising them in the confines of a caravan isn’t too appealing.
“It’s extraordinary to think that mum and dad raised three kids for a time in a caravan,” he says. “Hence every time I dare to complain to my parents about how complicated I think my lifestyle at times is with the kids sometimes, they remind me very quickly and bring me back down to earth very quickly. We could have our three kids, like my parents did, living in a Jayco pop-top caravan with beds that pop up at either end and bathing the kids in the sink.”
The end of the Gannon’s time on the road came when the family moved into developing their own projects.
The first was turning the old Vermont High School, in Adelaide’s inner south, into an aged care village. Gannon Lifestyle Communities now has operations in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.
Gannon was supposed to join the family company.
The plan, after he left Rostrevor College, was for him to study to become an architect. His brother Michael was to continue the family carpentry tradition.
“I would design the buildings and he would build them,” he says. But it didn’t work out. Michael became a teacher and a work experience placement at an architecture firm in year 12 convinced Gannon his future lay elsewhere.
Instead, he studied history and politics. His wasn’t a political household, although there was always a strong bent to keeping tabs on the news of the day.
“We weren’t allowed to watch The Simpsons or Home and Away. It was always one of the commercial news stations followed by the ABC,” he says.
At uni, although he was studying politics, he wasn’t active in the student version. “There are a lot of elected members around the country who were there at the time doing their shouty things, but it wasn’t really appealing to me.”
While studying honours, he also started working as a trainee for Lucas as well as another Upper House MP, Terry Stephens. Gannon had been at school with Lucas’s sons. He was also a few years ahead of the current state parliamentary speaker. “I certainly knew Vinnie (Tarzia) at school; again it’s the Adelaide way.”
It was a basic wage ($23,000 a year) and basic work but it opened the eyes of a 22-year-old who had learnt his politics from a textbook. “I was exposed to different people doing different things and certainly things that were never taught at uni about how politics actually works,” he says.
There were some big personalities in politics at the time. Mike Rann was premier, Kevin Foley was his deputy. The Liberal leader was Rob Kerin and former premier Dean Brown was still in the chamber. Gannon had an early encounter with the sometimes fearsome Foley. He was still new to the job and was a bit lost in the labyrinthine corridors of parliament. He was looking for the exit to North Tce but was about to wander into the strictly out-of-bounds Members’ Bar when Foley opened the door.
“He said to me, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’” Gannon remembers. “He asked me who I worked for and I said ‘Rob Lucas’ and he made sure he absolutely showed me how to get out of the building. He took me to the front door and made sure he closed that firmly on my way out.”
The Liberal Party was then in the midst of the long desert of opposition. But Gannon started to make a mark, building relationships with politicians, staff members and the media. He completed a Masters in Journalism while working for Lucas, probably making him technically more qualified than many in the media. He came to public prominence in the early days of social media when he was outed as the brains behind a Mike Rann Twitter parody account. It caused a brief outrage and some on the Labor side demanded he be sacked. Lucas laughed off that suggestion. He was always a dapper dresser as well. Lucas christened him “metro”. “He was the first metrosexual employed in the Legislative Council staff,” Lucas says.
In late 2010, Gannon transferred to the office of Liberal leader Isobel Redmond, who lost the election that year to Rann but had put up a decent fight. Redmond was gone by 2013. Her tenure was not helped by what was regarded as her disdain for much of Adelaide’s media.
It can’t have been an easy time for the newbie media chief but he insists Redmond didn’t “hate the media”. “Isobel, I thought, was a great leader. She was one of the more unique propositions we had in parliament and might have in parliament for quite some time.”
Her replacement Marshall could also be considered a unique proposition. It was a sign of the desperation of the Liberal Party that it turned to a first-term MP to lead it out of the wilderness.
Marshall was favourite as the 2014 campaign started but was up against a Labor machine that knew how to win.
“In politics, in campaigns, you need to understand what your campaign message is, and what your core message is, every single day. They did that very well. I think the Liberal Party also did that well,” Gannon says.
But on the day before the election, Marshall made an unfortunate slip of the tongue urging people to “vote Labor”. Some believed it was an election-changing moment, highlighting the relative inexperience of Marshall.
Gannon isn’t too keen to reflect on the significance of the moment. “I don’t really have an opinion on that.”
The election was held in March and by August Gannon had jumped ship to the Property Council. What attracted him, he says, was that it mixed his knowledge of the construction business, acquired through the family business, and politics. There was also a feeling that it was not an opportunity he could turn down.
“In Adelaide we are not blessed with a deep jobs market,” he says. “In the past it has also been difficult for various political types to get a job outside politics.”
Those first few years also laid the groundwork for what would become his biggest battle when his old friends blindsided him with the land tax changes.
“In politics, in advocacy and in business sometimes you do have to engage in some pretty close contact with individuals and that happened with car park tax, with bank tax and … with land tax,” he says.
Gannon learned about the government’s proposal to change land tax at the June State Budget. It was a complicated plan but essentially some of the Property Council’s biggest members would be up for significantly higher tax bills. Gannon also stressed “mum and dad” investors would pay more. Lucas disputed this but it became clear the government hadn’t done its sums.
The argument bogged down. Gannon met Lucas the Friday after the Tuesday Budget. The Treasurer had been booked in to address the Property Council’s usual post-Budget lunch. It was a frosty affair but Gannon and Lucas both say their private meeting was as cordial as ever.
“Communication was certainly open and we made it clear we didn’t like it and that we would be starting a campaign to outline what we saw as some risks for property owners but also to the broader economy,” Gannon recalls.
It was a bruising campaign. Gannon would meet in the Property Council boardroom overlooking Grenfell St with his 17-member board. He would meet most mornings with Property Council president Steve Maras at the nearby Pranzo coffee shop. Gannon concedes there were good days and bad. The occasional “bloodied” nose, such as the day The Advertiser ran a front-page story saying one Property Council option was to tax the family home.
“Rob is an effective politician. It was a hit on the property sector,” Gannon says.
But the effectiveness of the Property Council’s campaign was seen as the Government bent this way and that to find a compromise that would quieten the opposition. The Government had to rewrite its Bill five times before it was passed.
It was a win for Gannon. But the question remains about what it means for his future. He’s long been seen as a future MP. He lives in Marshall’s seat and could be a contender when the Premier steps away from politics. Predictably, Gannon doesn’t want to talk about any of that, insisting he hasn’t made up his mind whether he will run for parliament.
James Stevens, the member for Sturt in federal parliament, worked with Gannon when he was Marshall’s chief of staff. He believes while some will hold a grudge, his old boss won’t be one of them. Lucas says he’s happy to support his old staffer if he wanted to run. Marshall says they have a “good working relationship”.
Indeed, Stevens says, the land tax campaign should make Gannon more attractive to the party.
“Has it damaged him? Not at all,” he says. “He has a deep understanding of how government works and how public opinion is formed. He’s very effective at developing a message, understanding how to communicate it and expressing things in a way that people can understand and digest.”
Now land tax is over there will be other fights for Gannon to look forward to. But was he ever worried that it wouldn’t work out? “Never in doubt,” he says and breaks into a laughter that suggests he’s glad this particular fight is behind him.