Des Houghton: Labor will fall well short, but troubles lie ahead for Crisafulli

Even rusted-on Labor voters are resigned to the fact that the Palaszczuk-Miles era is all but over. I’m tipping the ALP will likely fall short by as many as 20 seats in Saturday’s state election, writes Des Houghton.

Even rusted-on Labor voters are resigned to the fact that the Palaszczuk-Miles era is all but over. I’m tipping the ALP will likely fall short by as many as 20 seats in Saturday’s state election. Yet there will be those who will tell you that David Crisafulli and the LNP didn’t really win the election – Labor lost it.

That is how Labor losers will attempt to spin an LNP victory. This is because the hard left, the centre left, and the snivelling left have always been such poor losers.

I’m sure this will be on show on Saturday night as the votes roll in.

The Labor gang that left us woke and broke will do and say everything it can to pretend this LNP victory was unwarranted, or somehow unfair. Crisafulli will be derided personally as an accidental premier with no leadership credentials.

The losers are the same people who called the sugar cane farmer’s son “invisible” and “missing in action” during the campaign. They are the same ones who scoffed at the LNP’s “policy-free zone”.

Next the LNP will be depicted as an unworthy winner in the pockets of mining companies and real estate developers. Let’s forget all that nonsense as we celebrate the end of nine lost years where Labor government service delivery fell apart, where people died on hospital ramps, where people were stabbed to death on the streets and in their own homes in crimes that Laborites called media beat-ups.

The public service operated under an integrity cloud, and bungling of recruitment meant there were not enough police, nurses or teachers to fill the gaps of those retiring or bullied out. Labor can scorn Crisafulli all it wants, but its electoral wounds were all self-inflicted. Labor lost it, but it may not have done so without Crisafulli’s calm, methodical and the somewhat annoyingly restrained approach to campaigning.

Crisafulli played an impressive game. So too, did his deputy Jarrod Bleijie, a 24-carat rolled gold conservative, not without humour who, to use some sporting parlance, was superb in both attack and cover defence. The mantle of leadership will sit comfortably on Bleijie’s shoulders when and if Crisafulli heads back to the farm.

Supporting Crisafulli and Bleijie was the formidable Ros Bates, the LNP attack shark who was effective in combating Labor’s best performer, Shannon Fentiman, across her child safety and health portfolios. On the campaign trail, Crisafulli didn’t smile enough, but he did develop an elusive sidestep. He did not allow Labor to pick fights so it could create too many phony political psychodramas for social media grabs or the six o’clock news.

He did not want voters to be distracted by side issues. Miles and his army of spin doctors could not stop Crisafulli, Bleijie and Bates turning the election into a referendum on Queensland’s youth crime crisis, catastrophic hospital failures, cost-of-living blowouts and a housing shortage that forced many young families into tents.

Crisafulli remained relentlessly “on message”, even though there were times when I thought he looked like a tightly coiled spring ready to explode.

Courier-Mail journalist Michael Madigan told me Crisafulli seemed to have inexhaustible energy; up at 4am for a jog to the annoyance of the media gang that had to follow him around. He puts Crisafulli’s indefatigability down to his Sicilian roots, and the work ethic instilled by his mother and father Karen and Antonino “Tony” Crisafulli. Madigan said he had never met a harder, more down-to-earth character than Tony.

David Crisafulli was accused of being aloof and presenting himself as a small target. But he stuck to his game plan, narrowing the campaign into digestible chunks that showed up Labor’s appalling record.

He left the ALP to drown, dragged under by the weight of its own failures. It will have to admit that Crisafulli nailed it. So did the party’s state director, Ben Riley, and his team in the LNP bunker, who suffered under the financial gerrymander.

Leader of the Opposition David Crisafulli with wife Tegan, voting at Springwood State High School. Picture: Liam Kidston

Crisafulli has troubles ahead. Buried in public interest disclosures ignored by the Crime and Corruption Commission are serious allegations against senior public servants.

With not so many friends in the media, the new premier will struggle to convince Queenslanders that he really did win on his own terms and that he deserves high office.

Crisafulli will have challenges rearranging the upper echelons of the public service to deliver his reform agenda. He also has another problem. But it is not a bad one to have.

The LNP’s parliamentary talent pool has been considerably refreshed and there are worthy backbenchers who will in the medium or long term be demanding a cabinet post.

Some of the possible future contenders are already in parliament; others are knocking on the door.

Scenic Rim MP Jon Krause, who grew up on a dairy farm at Marburg, was chair of the Parliamentary Crime and Corruption Commission in the last parliament and performed admirably at parliamentary estimates hearings and at the parliamentary inquiry into the CCC’s handling of the botched Logan Council sacking. A country conservative with metro savvy, Krause has law and accounting qualifications from the University of Queensland and has worked as a solicitor in Queensland and abroad.

Premier Steven Miles and wife Kim arrive at Kallangur State School to vote. Picture: NewsWire/ Adam Head

Bryson Head, 29, who won the seat of Callide in the 2022 by-election, is an emerging leader with a bright future. He is a geologist who was born and raised on his family’s cattle and grain farm on the Darling Downs. In his school holidays, he helped harvest melons before he went to Brisbane to complete a Bachelor of Science degree, majoring in earth science. He worked on the oilfields of Canada and the coalfields of the Bowen Basin and Hunter Valley. I love it that he helped launch the Green Shirts Movement in 2018 to “reclaim” the colour of green from extreme environmental groups he calls fake greens who have strangled primary industry.

Mother of three Amanda Cooper, the LNP candidate for Aspley, will add strength to the Crisafulli team if she manages to topple Labor’s Transport Minister Bart Mellish on Saturday. Cooper is a Brisbane City Council veteran who chaired the Brisbane Infrastructure Committee for three years and will be useful in planning for roads, schools and services to keep pace with population growth. She will be invaluable in assisting the premier, the incoming education minister Christian Rowan and works and housing minister Tim Mander, who faces the task of clearing bureaucratic roadblocks to allow churches to turn their surplus land into affordable housing sites.

Freedom-of-speech champion, lawyer and devout Anglican Amanda Stoker, the former senator, is set to win the Redland Bay seat of Oodgeroo. Stoker will arrive with a formidable CV that includes work as a Commonwealth prosecutor. Stoker was assistant minister to the attorney-general, assistant minister for industrial relations and assistant minister for women in the Morrison government and would no doubt have cabinet aspirations.

Herman Vorster, a former Gold Coast councillor who was born in South Africa, is expected to win West Burleigh, replacing Michael Hart, who retired. Vorster was born in Boksburg, 27km east of Johannesburg, to a Swiss-South African father and a Sicilian mother who fled “for the usual reasons”. He went to the Gold Coast after winning a scholarship to Bond University, where he completed two degrees, in commerce and IT.

His skill set will be valuable.

Originally published as Des Houghton: Labor will fall well short, but troubles lie ahead for Crisafulli