Michael McKenna
Annastacia Palaszczuk campaign pollster’s links to lobbyist; LNP candidate was once a Labor luvvie
G’day readers. Here’s this week’s edition of Feeding the Chooks, your must-read peek behind the scenes of Queensland politics.
Lobbyist-linked pollsters
Blacklisted lobbyists Evan Moorhead and David Nelson are back on the ALP payroll, with one of their companies shaping Annastacia Palaszczuk’s re-election campaign.
The pair were banned from lobbying in Queensland last year after The Australian revealed they were paid to run the premier’s successful 2020 election campaign while securing lucrative government deals and easy access for their clients.
It helped spark an integrity review by academic Peter Coaldrake, who recommended that “dual-hatting” be banned.
“The public is naturally sceptical about whether this is a fair way to conduct business,” Professor Coaldrake’s report said. “Most people would be incredulous at the proposition that a lobbyist working with a political leader in one capacity cannot later exercise special influence.”
While the pair appears to have stepped back from personally knocking on ministerial doors, instead having their employees panhandle to government, their firm – Anacta Strategies – still has one of the biggest lists of big-time clients in the state.
It’s like banning booze from the family Christmas party, as your two bleary-eyed uncles enjoy the afternoon drinking rum out of coffee cups.
Flush with the success of their venture, started just after Moorhead resigned from Palaszczuk’s office in 2019 (the premier later opened Anacta’s office), the pair bought-out New Zealand pollster Talbot Mills through Anacta Holdings.
Chooks can reveal that Talbot Mills has been put on to run the ALP’s focus group research as it prepares for next year’s state election.
In mandatory declarations to the Electoral Commission of Queensland, Labor paid the pollster more than $230,000 in the 12 months to June.
Chooks understands that the company remains on a retainer of $26,400 a month to gauge the hearts, minds and feelings of Queensland voters and what they think of our dear leader and her government.
ALP state secretary Kate Flanders confirmed the arrangement to Chooks but dismissed the suggestion history was repeating itself with lobbyists running Palaszczuk’s campaign.
“The research is independent and confidential (from Anacta Strategies),’’ she said.
“We use Talbot Mills to do qualitative research and none of those people do any lobbying.’’
Red to blue
Can a leopard change its spots?
In the jungle that is Queensland politics, it seems even Darwin’s law of evolution can get a move on when adaptation is helped along with a little ambition.
In August, the Liberal National Party crowed about its coup in preselecting popular first-term Noosa mayor Clare Stewart to run against independent incumbent MP Sandy Bolton
It’s a battleground seat, long-held by the LNP before it went to Labor-friendly Bolton in 2017, with statewide polls showing both major parties could fall short of majority government.
Chooks can reveal that Stewart, a mother-of-three, is a former member of the Australian Labor Party.
Stewart, who will begin campaigning after finishing up her current job with the local government elections next March, confirmed her past political pedigree when contacted by Chooks on Friday.
“Yes, that was many years ago,’’ she said coyly, before asking how we knew (we never tell).
Asked when she was a Labor branchie, the former barrister reverted to the oft-used witness box response: “I can’t even recall”.
Chooks got the same answer as to when she quit the ALP before the LNP star recruit insisted that her time among the true believers “wasn’t long”.
Stewart said she joined the LNP in 2019, ahead of her run for the mayoralty after originally considering contesting the 2020 state election but decided “it wasn’t the right time”.
And for the record, the mayor said she was now a LNP loyalist because my “values align very strongly with those of the party”.
Watch out Katters
Pauline Hanson has launched her candidate recruitment drive for next year’s Queensland state election and says she will, for the first time, run candidates in all 93 seats.
After a dismal result at the 2020 Covid-election – where the party’s primary vote halved to 7 per cent – a One Nation strategist told Chooks the party planned to field candidates in every electorate and will have 11 target seats.
Hanson agreed to steer clear of two north Queensland seats at the 2020 poll – held by Katter’s Australian Party MPs Robbie Katter and Shane Knuth – but next year the gloves are off.
The right-wing protest party is going all-out in its quest to boost its influence in its homeland state after becoming increasingly irrelevant.
With only one MP in Queensland parliament, Mirani’s Stephen Andrew, One Nation has a long way to go to reach the level of success it enjoyed at the 1998 election when it shocked Australia by winning 11 seats.
Tall ask, but with latest polling pointing to a hung parliament, there is hope inside the ranks that One Nation could hold balance of power after the election.
“I don’t think either major party will form government in their own right, so I suspect the LNP will be looking to other like-minded conservatives,” a ONP insider said.
“There is no way in hell we would help Labor.”
Old friends
For the bargain price of $25 political diehards can enjoy Campbell Newman and Amanda Stoker regale them with stories about their recent London jaunt.
More than 1500 delegates – including Tony Abbott, John Howard, Mark Latham, Barnaby Joyce and Jacinta Price – travelled to the English capital last week for a three-day conservative conference.
The Australian Institute of Progress will host a panel with Stoker, Newman, Graham Young and Dan Ryan to unpack what the group learnt at the inaugural Alliance for Responsible Citizenship shindig.
“What does the ARC offer Australia? Was it just another talkfest, or does it offer real hope of re-engineering the world order around the “little platoons” of civil society, including a reinvigoration of the family and of Western culture?” the event description reads.
Sounds like a hoot.
The state LNP has, of course, worked relentlessly to distance itself from Newman as Labor continues to draw links between David Crisafulli and the one-term premier. Chooks wonders how party HQ feels about Stoker – their star candidate for the state election – doing an event with Newman.
Spring fling
Voting for the next Young Labor president is underway and will wrap on Wednesday.
The Left’s Angus Haigh – a staffer for federal backbencher Graham Perrett – is facing-off against Right candidate Eric Yun – who works for state MP Bart Mellish.
Why do we care? The youth arm of the party has been the breeding ground for Labor talent for years.
Former Young Labor presidents (both state and national) include federal Agriculture Minister Murray Watt (the first Qld president elected from the Left in 1998), former deputy premier Paul Lucas, long serving ex-federal MP Arch Bevis, Federal Speaker Milton Dick, Transport Minister Mark “Mangocube” Bailey,and party-reformer Dennis Murphy.
Outgoing QYL president Emily Kim is running for council ward of Calamvale.
Although not from Queensland, it’s also worth noting both Anthony Albanese and Paul Keating once headed the NSW youth branch.
And since we are on the topic of playground politics, the young folk of the Liberal National Party are gearing up for their spring conference next weekend.
There are a few new treats on offer for the young and hungry pollies-in-waiting, who will take part in mock preselections and media training.
Brown whipped in court
Don Brown’s loose tongue caught up to him this week.
The Capalaba MP and chief government whip, who was in the doghouse a couple of weeks ago for claiming youth crime was a “media beat-up”, will have to cough up $50,000 after losing defamation case to a former LNP candidate Bev Walters.
Brown made a Facebook post in 2020 saying Walters only wanted the state‘s borders opened during the pandemic “because she owns a travel agency and wants to put her profits before our community”.
In her statement, after parties settled on Thursday, Walters said Brown’s comments were a “deliberate assassination of my character in advance of the 2020 state election”.
Brown is no stranger to legal fights. Walters was one of three women from the LNP to launch defamation against him in 2021.
It hasn’t seemed to keep him down. Here he is at the Halloween Movie Night in Redlands a couple weeks ago.
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