Premier heads to regions as ministers become beset by problems
It shouldn’t surprise that Annastacia Palaszczuk made for the regions as news was about to break of a sports grants scandal, writes Steven Wardill.
Opinion
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It shouldn’t surprise that Annastacia Palaszczuk made for the regions yesterday as news was about to break that her Government had been beset by a sports grants scandal.
The Queensland Premier has made a habit of making herself scarce whenever trouble strikes and there are tough questions to answer.
Around the same time Palaszczuk was tucking into a chicken sandwich at a service station near Nebo yesterday, Sports Minister Mick de Brenni was swapping one foot for another trying to explain how he’d personally awarded sports grants.
De Brenni’s excuse about why he’d intervened 33 times in the process boiled down to a claim that he knew better than his department experts about where grants should go.
On two of those occasions he found grants should go to proposals in his own electorate that were not recommended.
Palaszczuk might be to looking for a chicken sandwich in a much more remote part of Queensland today with revelations concerning her Transport Minister Mark Bailey.
Bailey has admitted to The Courier-Mail he had been in contact with Jim Soorley about the plight of a restaurateur who’d allegedly paid the Labor luminary $2500 cash in a car park.
Soorley was not a registered lobbyist at the time and the conversation was not recorded in Bailey’s ministerial diary.
The former Lord Mayor insists he wasn’t lobbying and Bailey insists he took no action.
However, this won’t pass the pub test for some and these kinds of cases are precisely why Queensland’s lobbying laws were introduced in the first place.
Bailey should know better given he’s already been caught out breaching ministerial rules and so should de Brenni given he’s courted controversy throughout his Cabinet career.
And surely Palaszczuk deserved to eat her chicken sandwiches in peace for a change.