Treasurer Cameron Dick shows alarming lack of judgment by politicising of 2032 Olympics
Cameron Dick’s alarming lack of judgment – even maturity – has given his Labor colleagues a very good reason not to anoint him as Annastacia Palaszczuk’s successor, writes Peter Gleeson.
Peter Gleeson
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Treasurer Cameron Dick has shown an alarming lack of judgment – even maturity – by being the first senior Cabinet Minister to politicise the 2032 Olympics.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, acutely aware of the need for bipartisanship, should hand him a yellow card and put him in the sin bin.
Dick makes most of his decisions through the prism of becoming Labor’s next leader. Yet his dummy spit against the council weakens his leadership credentials and he’s just given his Labor colleagues a very good reason not to anoint him as Palaszczuk’s successor.
The delivery of Brisbane’s 2032 Olympic Games requires everybody within the Commonwealth-State-local government troika to be rowing in the same direction. Cheap political pointscoring may play out well in State Parliament but not on the international sporting stage.
Dick fancies himself as Palaszczuk’s successor, despite not having the numbers in Cabinet and Caucus. His rival is the Left’s factional tsar Steven Miles, who has had a chequered recent history, including his errant holiday in Byron Bay.
But the Left faction love his robust and confrontational style. He’s a good old-fashioned pot stirrer. Now, whether that translates to votes among the public, is another thing. Dick went rogue last week when he criticised the Brisbane City Council and its master plan to turn a South Brisbane site into the international broadcasting hub.
He made reference to the council not helping to pay for the Olympics. This is the same council that spearheaded all the early work on the 2032 bid with feasibility studies and early discussions with IOC president Thomas Bach.
It was a far cry from the unified stance that Palaszczuk and Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner took to the IOC in Japan. It demonstrated that Dick was keen to play partisan politics, just days after the ink had dried on the contract.
It’s important to understand the background to realise Dick’s faux pas. The government and Brisbane City Council prepared a master plan for where the key sites would be for the Games. They jointly signed off on the master plan. It was publicly released six weeks ago and the broadcasting site was earmarked for a site which currently houses a glass factory.
The council was negotiating with the glass company at the South Brisbane site to close it down and relocate the workforce. In fact, the company has been actively seeking a new site and has its eye on a parcel of land at Yatala.
The aim was not to shut down the glass factory and throw people out of work but transition it over a period, get a new furnace and continue operating. Maybe Dick was grandstanding to curry favour from unions. When the Treasurer went hard against the council, he didn’t read the room. His main rival for the top job, Steven Miles, did. When Miles did a presser near the athletes’ village in Hamilton on the same day, he said all the right things about the Olympics unity ticket.
Dick, on the other hand, for whatever reason, decided to put the boot into the Brisbane council, and particularly Schrinner. Palaszczuk and Schrinner have the best premier-Lord Mayor relationship in decades, and that augurs well for the Olympics.
Dick is the man leading the state’s post-Covid economic performance. He’s a master of spin when it comes to the fiscal balance sheet. Coal royalties are keeping the state from going broke. Despite this, the Left faction would close down coal-fired power stations in a heartbeat if they could.
In his budget in June, Dick did not address any fundamental taxation reform. Instead, to pay for services, they will just jack up stamp duty and land tax. Bereft of vision. Bereft of ideas. If you listen to Dick, rather than being $100 billion in debt, you’d swear we had our old AAA credit rating back.
Dick is fond of carrying around the government’s “unite and recover’’ propaganda material under his arm. The slogan needs to change under his fiscal stewardship. “ Smoke and mirrors’’ is a much more apt mantra.