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Comeback Campbell: The angry ex-premier and his battle for regional Queensland
Former Queensland premier Campbell Newman, the self-styled anti-establishment libertarian, is resurrecting his political career, and he’s starting with the Coalition’s conservative base.
By Zach Hope
High on a hill in suburban Brisbane, surrounded by framed memories of his epoch as a Coalition guiding star, Campbell Newman talks of lockdowns and liberty, the trigger points, he says, for a political resurrection.
The former Queensland premier argues the virtues of self-reliance and free enterprise, honed from raw ideology in the past seven years of profitable — yet powerless — private business.
And he explains, without prompting, that his 2015 electoral demise while leading the greatest majority in the state’s history was not as calamitous as they, his enemies in politics and media, have written into the popular narrative.
Campbell Newman, with wife Lisa, announces his Senate run with the Liberal Democrats. Credit: Matt Dennien
But in his home office on this day, as his former party tears itself in two from Canberra, the Coalition’s turn towards a policy package of net zero emissions by 2050 has the new Queensland Liberal Democrats’ Senate candidate most animated.
“This state wouldn’t be able to pay for police, and firefighters, and nurses and doctors in our public hospitals if it wasn’t for coal,” says Newman, who says he rebuffed overtures from Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer after quitting the LNP this year.
Never mind civil libertarians have likened his one-term premiership to authoritarian rule — Newman, the son of two former federal ministers, is casting himself as the true libertarian and anti-establishment crusader.
His redemption with ordinary Queenslanders is prefaced on cutting through pandemic politics.
The accompanying radio jingle — an appeal to the heartland in the style of John Williamson and Mojo adman Allan Johnston — evokes the Diggers and a Trumpian nostalgia for an “Australian way” lost, apparently, somewhere in COVID-19, wokeism and Big Government.
In his essay published in the centre-right anthology Australia Tomorrow last month, he writes of his former party’s abandonment of Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People.
He suggests the alternative epithet, “the Disregarded Toilers”.
Among them, the coal communities of regional Queensland and their comrades in extractive, heavy and blue-collar trades who are frightened, angry or both of the well-to-do of inner suburbia coming for their jobs.
“I can tell you now: great,” Newman says, rubbing his hands at the coming fight against those candidates of his former party pushing climate action in the conservative heartland of regional Queensland.
“I’m going to campaign on it really, really hard. And if I win, it will be one of the key things that people get behind me on.”
Newman compares the LNP’s landslide victory over Anna Bligh’s Labor government in 2012 to a rubber band straining under the pressure of a fully drawn pendulum.
When it snapped, the political needle was cast in the other direction with such velocity the former Brisbane lord mayor — wildly popular in his city —not only won his seat and government from outside parliament, but left the nascent Annastacia Palaszczuk with only seven Labor members to command.
Among a raft of reforms in this tumultuous “can do Campbell” era, the LNP weakened the status of same-sex civil unions and sacked more than 10,000 public servants.
Campbell Newman and his vanquisher Annastacia Palaszczuk at 2015 leaders’ debate. Credit: Renee Melides
Anti-association laws targeting bikies, but with broader ramifications for democratic notions of the right to assembly, were lashed by LDP party colleagues he would later join.
“Contrary to some of the stuff that’s out there, I’m very libertarian,” says Newman.
He adds: “I supported gay marriage before Penny Wong would even do so - 10 years ago. Socially, my position is, ‘I don’t want you to tell me how to live my life’.”
In the lead-up to the 2015 state election, Newman was attacked by conservative radio host Alan Jones for, among other things, being “best friends with mining giants who are plundering” the broadcaster’s home state.
One of those giants, Palmer, came at him (“Goodbye, Campbell”) for refusing a rail link from the Galilee Basin to the coast.
Then-premier Newman Campbell with future LNP leader Deb Frecklington in 2014.Credit: Chris Hyde
Police union president Ian Leavers called Newman a liar in a stoush over funding for late-night, anti-violence strategies.
In Newman’s version of history, these fights, along with his good friend Tony Abbott’s decision days before the Queensland election to grant Prince Philip a knighthood, roundly attacked for being out of touch, sealed his conservative party’s fate.
“If any of those factors had been removed, we would have just ticked across the line,” he claims.
When the pendulum swung back, the LNP was left with just 42 of the state’s 89 seats and Newman, abandoned by those who helped bring him to power, was finished in state politics.
Labor still uses his name to warn Queenslanders of what happens when votes are cast to the other side.
On Newman’s office wall hangs a framed certificate from the LNP recognising “Outstanding Parliamentary Service”.
“That’s what I got,” he says wryly of his decade-and-a-half as one of the party’s most important figures. “That’s great.”
The former premier quit the LNP in July, but it was a long time coming. He brings up the 2015 election results on his 60-inch wall monitor and points to the 41.3 per cent share of the primary vote.
He moves to 2017 and 2020, 33.7 per cent and 36 per cent, respectively.
“The LNP spent the next seven years running away from the things they did in office,” he says.
“They curled themselves up in a little ball, and they rock from side to side in the dark, sucking their thumbs, saying ‘we’re sorry, we’re sorry, we’re sorry. It was him, that bloke over there. He’s not part of us any more’.
“It’s terrible. And that’s why they’ve done badly. The votes have gone to all those people.”
He is pointing to One Nation, Katter’s Australian Party and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.
Current LNP Opposition Leader David Crisafulli (left) with Newman in Cairns as Cyclone Ita approaches in 2014.Credit: Glenn Hunt
Newman has a “working relationship” with Hanson and has made peace with Palmer, though preference deals will be a matter for the Liberal Democrats party machine, he says.
“What I can tell you at this stage is we’ll be preferencing minor parties that have taken a stand on freedom on the lockdowns. So yeah, of course we will be dealing with Clive and with Pauline, and we expect that’ll be reciprocal.”
Newman wakes most mornings about 5am to let Sassy, the terrier-cross he and wife Lisa rescued from a lost dogs’ home, outside for ablutions. He reads The Australian and The Courier-Mail in bed with Lisa and is up shortly after 6am bound for the gym three times a week and a 5.5-kilometre run with Sassy on alternate days.
He goes to work upstairs, running a commercial property fund with $150 million under management for investors.
Newman at the home office with Sassy.Credit: Fairfax Media
The office is powered by solar panels and a Tesla battery.
“But I’m Campbell Newman, and that might not be within the means of other Australians,” he says of the tech.
To scratch his chronic political itch, Newman makes regular appearances on Sky News’ “after dark” programming and tweets viciously against “woke” society, which he says includes much of the federal Coalition leadership, and pandemic restrictions.
He is double-vaxxed with AstraZeneca, but opposes mandatory jabs. Masks have a place on crowded public transport, he says, but not in supermarkets or the streets. If he was still premier, the Queensland border would already be open to NSW.
“My mother died three years ago with Alzheimer’s. She was about 80. She would be beside herself if she knew that the whole country locked down to look after people like her,” he says.
The decision to run for the Senate came in early July while he and Lisa were celebrating their anniversary at the Queensland Club, the reception venue for their wedding 30 years earlier.
“She actually raised it,” Newman says. “She said, ‘you really should go again’. She just knew.”
He admires Mark Latham, the former federal Labor leader whose career from party luminary to grenade-throwing villain of another party bears resemblance to Newman’s own trajectory.
Like Latham, “there’s always an adjective in front of my name”.
Does he miss the cut and thrust of the political fight? “No, no, no. I miss the ability to actually meaningfully put forward a position that has to at least be considered.”
Has he changed since his time as Queensland premier? “I am who I am,” he says.
“I’m not trying to win the premiership. I’m not trying to win as lord mayor. I’m just trying to say, ‘Here’s who I am. This is what I stand for. Please get behind me. And if you don’t want to, well, that’s OK’.”
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