Premier Miles’s juvenile antics

In lying to the Queensland parliament about text messages sent to a factional ally, Premier Steven Miles has managed to turn a trivial matter into a serious integrity issue. On Tuesday Mr Miles, with his customary grin and a bit of a laugh, fielded questions and then apologised to the Legislative Assembly over text messages he sent to Ali King, now his Assistant Minister for Housing. He also has written to Speaker Curtis Pitt about the matter. Last month Mr Miles, in response to a question from LNP member Michael Hart about whether the Premier could deny he had texted Ms King during a sitting of the house on October 11 last year, said: “I thank the member for Burleigh. I can.” But Mr Miles was caught out when a photo of the text messages surfaced on Monday. It was taken in the chamber by an MP while the Legislative Assembly was sitting.

Mr Miles sent the messages to Ms King, one of his former staff members, when the Palaszczuk government – in which Mr Miles was deputy to premier Annastacia Palaszczuk – was under fire from the opposition about an extraordinary Facebook post by Ms King. She had advised her constituents in Pumicestone, north of Brisbane, to contact her directly about job opportunities in Queensland Health.

On Tuesday Mr Miles claimed he had answered Mr Hart’s question to the best of his recollection. “The text message was from sometime prior and I did not recall it at the time and therefore wish to correct the record and apologise to the House for the error,” he said. If Mr Miles was not having a Joe Biden moment, voters are entitled to wonder whether his not being straight over such a small matter could be an indication of how he might behave over a bigger issue.

When the opposition sought Mr Miles’s texts under Right to Information legislation last year, the request was refused “on the basis that they are non-existent”. Amid so many challenging issues relating to the economy, youth crime and Olympic planning, Mr Miles would have saved a lot of time and bother if he had told the simple truth.

This is not his first brush with student-style politics. In February 2021 he posted footage of himself in a stunt, tearing up an invoice for $30m from the NSW government for the costs of Queensland residents in quarantine in NSW during the pandemic. He also advised Queenslanders who had received such invoices to “tear them all up. Scrunch them up. Put them in the bin. Play office basketball. Go nuts”. A few months later, in a Labour Day speech, Mr Miles described Scott Morrison as a “c..t”, later claiming it was a slip of the tongue.

Seemingly oblivious to the need to stop digging when finding himself in a hole, Mr Miles and his colleagues made the fiasco worse on Tuesday, resorting to hyperbolic claims that the LNP had a “women problem” as he sought to fend off attacks on his integrity. “In Women’s Week, all the boys over there have is this celebration of the invasion of the member for Pumicestone’s privacy, this celebration of the harassment of women at work,” he said. “They know no bounds when it comes to celebrating the mistreatment of women at work.” Queensland needs a grown-up government.