Amanda Stoker buries nuclear waste before QLD election
G’day readers and welcome to the latest edition of Feeding the Chooks, your weekly insight into what’s really going on in Queensland politics.
Stoker goes nuclear?
Has politician Amanda Stoker pulled the plug on her pro-nuclear stance, just as she’s about to make the transition from federal to state politics?
Or is the usually loquacious Stoker attempting to stop her devotion to nuclear fission widening the fissure between her old colleague Peter Dutton, and her new leader David Crisafulli on the issue?
Dutton’s major policy play as federal Opposition leader so far is a bold pitch to voters to build seven nuclear reactors, including two in his home state of Queensland.
LNP leader Crisafulli is dead against it. It’s a major split in the Queensland conservative party, and former Senator Stoker is right in the middle.
As recently as June last year, Stoker would wax lyrical about the benefits of nuclear power. She attacked nuclear opponents Anthony Albanese and his Energy Minister Chris Bowen “who prefer the head-in-the-sand approach, even if that means billions of dollars tying Australians in 28,000km of transmission lines, like some kind of strange renewable spaghetti”.
And the ex-lawyer - preselected in October as the LNP’s candidate for the safe state seat of Oodgeroo - insisted there were only two objections “ever credibly raised” to generating nuclear power in Australia: cost and safety.
“That cost argument just sits so uncomfortably next to the viability of nuclear energy in so many other nations...(and) far from being a safety risk, this very credible study (in Environmental Science and Technology) shows that nuclear energy actually saved lives,” the then-chatty Stoker said on Sky News.
So imagine Chooks’ surprise this week when we attempted to ask the candidate for the October 26 election - after which she’s tipped to rocket straight onto Crisafulli’s frontbench - whether she still believed Australia should generate nuclear power. And, if she was elected into a Crisafulli government, would she back a change to state law to allow nuclear generation?
The former Senator did not answer either question directly, telling Chooks obliquely: “It’s not part of the state LNP’s plan - which makes sense given it’s not (currently) allowed federally”.
Her federal LNP colleagues will be watching closely to make sure she sticks to her guns. “It shouldn’t just be Amanda Stoker, the whole Queensland team should be backing nuclear,” one federal pollie sniped.
A question remains. If Stoker is destined to go directly into Crisafulli’s cabinet - as many of his close confidants believe - which of his current shadow ministers will get the sack?
Lambie marches north
Tasmania-based Senator Jacqui Lambie has launched a ground offensive in Queensland, announcing her first Senate candidate on the mainland: journalist-turned-lobbyist Ange Harper.
Lambie and Harper are old military mates; as new recruits in the late 1980s, they served in the same platoon together (apparently the Army’s first all-woman platoon, pictured above) and trained at the notoriously brutal base in Kapooka.
The plainspoken Senator - who served as a soldier until 2000, including five years in the military police, before being elected to the Senate in 2013 - tells Chooks her Jacqui Lambie Network is planning on running three Senate candidates in Queensland at the next federal election, as well Upper House hopefuls in NSW and South Australia. Victoria and WA Senate candidates are also being considered.
She tells Chooks she wants to give Queenslanders an option - away from the major parties - that’s not Pauline Hanson’s One Nation or the Greens.
“This will be my last push. I’m up this time for my six-year term, I’m running again. It’s now or never for me,” Lambie says.
Harper, who works for lobbying firm SAS Consulting, says she began her career serving Australians in the Army and it was “serendipity” that her old mate Lambie had asked her to do the same again.
“Why would I say no? 35 years on (from the Army), it’s at my core, helping people,” Harper tells Chooks.
Gilbert goes
It’s just a little too tricky.
For more than a year, Mackay’s Labor’s incumbent MP Julieanne Gilbert has denied rumours she was quitting and wouldn’t contest the October 26 election.
Gilbert, who this month again categorically denied renewed speculation of her looming resignation to Chooks, announced on Thursday she was pulling-up stumps on what could only be described as an unremarkable nine-year innings in parliament.
No surprise, Mackay deputy mayor Belinda Hassan was announced on Friday by Steven Miles as Labor’s candidate.
Chooks heard last year and again this month that this was the plan all along.
But why wait?
Well, there now isn’t enough time to have a contested Labor preselection – so Hassan gets the gig – and if she doesn’t win the seat, she can go back to her Plan B job as deputy mayor.
In March, Hassan ran in the local government elections and secured a second term as a councillor in Mackay with 5.8 per cent of the vote.
Chooks’ spies say there are some in council who reckon she shouldn’t have run again for local government, if she was always going to contest the state poll.
Either way, if she does win a seat in parliament then her former council colleagues can vote to hold a by-election or instead save costs and welcome in the candidate who came 11th at the March polls..
Gilbert is one of four Labor MPs retiring at the election, alongside Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath, veteran MP Stirling Hinchliffe and Rockhampton MP Barry O’Rourke.
ALP insiders reckon there are still more Labor MPs wanting to jump ship; Leeanne Enoch is on the top of the list of names.
Teals stall
Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 fund has made a big deal about its plan to seize LNP seats in Peter Dutton’s home state.
But with a federal election due by May the fund is still yet to find any candidates to throw their money behind in Queensland.
Climate 200, which gave financial and strategic backing to 23 independents at the last election, is targeting four federal LNP seats at the next election: Fairfax and Fisher on the Sunshine Coast, and McPherson and Moncreiff on the Gold Coast.
In early May, ACT Senator David Pocock jetted to the Gold Coast to launch the search for a Teal candidate in McPherson (held by retiring Morrison government frontbencher Karen Andrews).
Climate 200 executive director Byron Fay insists that despite having no candidates there was still plenty happening on the ground with the fund splashing cash into all four electorates to help community groups accelerate the process.
Fay was tight-lipped about how much dough had gone into each seat, but said it ranged from $5000 to $42,000.
“There haven’t been many new candidates identified yet but community groups have been going strength to strength,” he tells Chooks.
Dutton was this week asked how real the Teal threat was and rolled out his usual line that a vote for a Teal meant a vote for Labor.
“So why would people vote for the existing Teal candidates? And why would you vote for a Teal candidate in a seat like McPherson, when all that means is a vote, ultimately for Anthony Albanese?
Pill testing
Queensland’s doctor of the house had a bitter pill to swallow this week when his life long mission of tackling drug abuse was squashed by his own party.
Dr Christian Rowan, an addiction medicine specialist, has previously implored the LNP to consider supporting pill testing as a harm reduction strategy.
“People will say ‘that’s going soft on drugs’, it’s not. It’s about saying ‘how do we reduce the harm?’” he said in 2019.
Turns out “people” is Rowan’s deputy leader Jarrod Bleijie, who pledged to scrap Labor’s pill testing sites and plans for drug testing at Schoolies if the LNP won government at October’s state election.
“The LNP does not support the soft on drug approach by the Labor Party in Queensland, we do not support it,” he said.
Rowan, a member of the LNP frontbench, tells Chooks he “accepted” his colleagues decision to axe pill testing services if the LNP won government.
“I think my position is pretty clear because it is on the public record however I accept the majority decision of the LNP which is its policy position,” he says.
“When you are a member of a political party, the majority decision rules.”
Spotted
It’s no secret Opposition deputy leader Jarrod Bleijie has a vehement dislike for Queensland’s militant construction union, the CFMEU.
So there was a certain poetic irony when Bleijie’s name was accidentally splashed over vision of CFMEU official Kurt Pauls this week.
Bleijie had earlier that day led the attack over the appointment of Pauls to the government’s workplace health and safety board after he was fined for breaking workplace laws.
Spotted #2
The cars of LNP’s Gaven candidate, former television reporter Bianca Stone and Labor’s Meaghan Scanlon, the sitting Gaven MP, were spotted parked next to one another on the Gold Coast recently.
A coincidence? Or were the pair meeting to lay the ground rules for the battle of Gaven over a kebab before the real contest begins?
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