Country born David Crisafulli settles at the Gold Coast as a trump card for LNP
David Crisafulli has settled into his Gold Coast seat, and back into his offices in the corridors of power, but the farms and fields, parks and people of north Queensland are never far from his thoughts, writes Michael Madigan
QLD News
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THE Queensland Opposition spokesman on tourism and the environment is holding his dad’s hand, pulling him up a steep gravel track on a steamy January morning in far north Queensland, and laughing at the old man’s wheezing protests.
“Look at him, pulling me up a mountain!” yells Tony Crisafulli, breathing heavily and sounding like a Sopranos gangster with his Sicilian accent.
“And, I tell you something, I was the one who had to drag him along all the time when he was this little boy,” Tony continues as he reaches the summit, splaying the fingers of one broad brown hand outward and letting his palm hover less than a metre above the earth to depict the height of his once diminutive son.
“When he was a little boy he was just, sooo sloooow!”
David Crisafulli, 38, the LNP’s Boy Wonder ever since he established a Conservative beachhead in the Labor-ruled Townsville City Council when he was barely 25, is looking far from “sloooow” this morning.
Up since 4am, he’s been boxing at an Ingham Gym, sipping his mum Karen’s excellent coffee while scanning newspapers for media opportunities and organising a quick bush walk up a Crisafulli-owned hill on the family’s sprawling sugar cane farm outside Ingham.
Now he’s returned from a lone gallop up the hill to help the stragglers behind, literally pulling his old man by the hand the last 100m, like a Clydesdale pulling a heavy plough.
Tony Crisafulli, 67, a far more fascinating character study than his son, arrived in north Queensland from the village of Novara in Sicily, without knowing a word of English, at the end of the 1950s and immediately set about building a sugar cane kingdom of grass castles.
He’s swung a cane knife through the swamp-fevered fields of the early 1960s then, as mechanisation kicked in, driven haul-out tractors beside those roaring early cane harvesters that spat black soot onto crews leaving them resembling Welsh coal miners as they worked deep into the night, the arc lights blazing into northern skies.
In the “slack” in the early 70s, with the harvesting finished, he’s piled into battered cars with other “wogs” (as one of Queensland’s most successful immigrant groups used to be so derisively labelled) and sped southward to NSW for the fruit-picking season.
And he’s come back home with $4000 in his pocket after two months of work and slowly, ruthlessly, raised the capital to back a gamble on those borrowings which enabled him to buy a slice of the sugar-growing land which, by the time his son David arrived in 1979, was beginning to make him the wealthy man he is today.
Tough as those narrow-leaved ironbark trees which flourish throughout the north – the sort that shrug off bush fires – Tony bluntly refuses to even be photographed, a trait which bemuses his media-savvy son who ponders if his father might be one of those increasingly rare souls who will depart the planet without leaving a digital trace.
“I think dad and mum might actually be totally off the grid,” he says, with some admiration.
In truth, Tony could easily make his way up that hill but he’s enjoying this bit of theatre and banter with his boy.
As he’s yanked along, they talk sugar prices, gossip about extended family matters and eagerly contemplate what Karen’s magnificent Italian cooking skills will conjure up that night.
Later that evening, over a Master Chef meal of gnocchi and that ancient Sicilian dish farsumauru, with the table littered with empty shiraz bottles, Tony takes to a good-natured mocking of his son for abandoning north Queensland and moving to the southeast, like a Mississippi cotton planter cursing his boy for turning into a damned Yankee.
Crisafulli junior makes a mild (and truthful) observation that the southeast does subsidise electricity prices in the north.
“Listen to this, will you!” his old man roars, gesturing southward with a thumb jerked sharply over his right shoulder. “This is what happens when he moves on down there, just like a big shot!”
Every political generation, like many American high schools, crowns their “Most Likely to Succeed”.
Well before Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington was coming into the frame, even before Lawrence Springborg was fading out of it, Crisafulli was an LNP princeling destined for the Premier’s office.
When he jettisoned his successful local government career, which included a stint (before he had reached age 30) as Townsville’s deputy mayor, and won the Townsville seat of Mundingburra in the 2012 Campbell Newman-led landslide, he was fast-tracked into Cabinet in his first term.
Crisafulli took the Local Government portfolio and proved himself a more than competent administrator as he oversaw much of the reconstruction following the 2010-11 Summer of Disaster.
Local Government Association of Queensland chief Greg Hallam, who has watched Crisafulli for more than a decade, calls him an excellent communicator.
“And there’s no doubt he is a politician who understands the Queensland regions.”
Yet, on election night January 2015, just like that, Crisafulli was gone. “Boy Wonder” was “Boy Oncer” – that humiliating appellation reserved for the flash-in-the pan politician incapable of holding the fort for a second term.
Labor’s Coralee O’Rourke took Mundingburra (and did so again in the 2017 poll) and Crisafulli, still in his mid-30s, looked suspiciously like an LNP version of Andrew Fraser, another youthful north Queensland political prodigy, born in Proserpine and appointed treasurer at age 31 before retiring from politics after Labor’s electoral humiliation in the March of 2012.
“I genuinely thought, in David, we had the prospect of north Queensland’s first premier for many decades,” mourned his old boss, north Queensland Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald, who hired Crisafulli as media adviser in 2003.
Crisafulli trotted out the standard “I’ll spend more time with my family” routine but then, just months after the 2015 election, the definitive north Queenslander did something quite astonishing.
The James Cook University alumnus, the one-time Ingham Australia/Italian Festival spaghetti-eating champion, the long-term resident of the Castle Hill-crowned capital of the north, Townsville, upped stumps and, with wife Tegan and their two daughters, moved to (of all places!) the Gold Coast.
Nearly 20 years of cultivating contacts and building a northern power base evaporated as he began afresh in a consultancy business from his new home on Hope Island.
Crisafulli was clearly thinking ahead of the game when he moved south, and we don’t have to go rummaging through his DNA lineage to find the risk-taking gene which provided the impulse – like father, like son.
Crisafulli takes risks, just like his old man.
Up on World Heritage-listed Wallaman Falls near Ingham, he and a photographer are looking for a better angle on a shot to accompany a tourism story and go several metres beyond the safety fence, copping a brisk chipping from a Parks and Wildlife officer who warns them of the dangers.
Even as a rookie Townsville councillor in hostile Labor territory he fearlessly went after the then extraordinarily popular mayor, the affable Tony Mooney, who often found himself unwittingly transformed into a sort of political sofa on which the political kitten could sharpen his claws.
Whether Crisafulli had his eye on the safe seat of Broadwater which was held by Verity Barton when he arrived on the Gold Coast is now immaterial.
Crisafulli knocked Barton out in a preselection bout and at 8pm on November 25, shot back into political orbit as the first LNP MP to claim a state seat when he won Broadwater.
Many expected an immediate second act to the political resurrection yet, in early December, as the LNP MPs jockeyed for leadership positions, not so much as a whisper was heard from Crisafulli in the party room. And those inclined to warn LNP leader Deb Frecklington to keep an eye in her rear view mirror over this term of government might save their breath. Crisafulli is a patient man.
“I sometimes think losing Mundingburra was the best thing that could have happened to me,” muses Crisafulli to a former constituent who has wandered over at the Townsville Airport to thank him for some long-ago favour. “Maybe I needed a kick in the arse.”
It’s the end of the three-day visit to the north and everywhere he’s gone he’s received affectionate greetings from people who appear to retain some regard for Crisafulli, despite his defection south of the Tropic of Capricorn.
Crisafulli is happy to go on the record saying he’s not interested in a leadership challenge.
Moreover, he’s not “at this stage” interested in the leadership at all, barring some extraordinary set of circumstances.
But being Opposition spokesman for tourism and environment is a long way from a career climax for an ambitious MP who turns 39 in April.
Crisafulli represents an intoxicating equation for the LNP – the country-bred city dweller in a conservative heartland is a classic liberal with progressive social views and a free trade, small government philosophy, all of which combine to make him a highly marketable item in the LNP leadership showroom in the decade ahead.
Where his heart lies is another matter.
Crisafulli owns a portion of his old man’s estate. Around 2000 tonnes of his sugar grows near the crystalline waters of the Herbert River near Long Pocket outside Ingham and only about 15 minutes drive from his mum and dad’s house.
On the banks of the Herbert is a century-old ramshackle house which Crisafulli owns and where his family spend holidays and Christmas.
“I will never sell it,” he says wistfully, before we leave, as he walks past a barbecue pit which has been the scene of many family feasts.
Peter Beattie was brought up just a few hundred kilometres north in the town of Atherton, William Forgan Smith spent his formative years in Mackay, William McCormack was born in St Lawrence and “Red” Ted Theodore once called Chillagoe home.
If he does reach the premier’s office on level 40 of the Tower of Power as the Member for Broadwater, the north will doubtless claim him as one of their own.
And Crisafulli won’t mind one bit.
Email: michael.madigan@news.com.au
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