Broken promise: Palaszczuk about-face on cash-for-access
G’day readers. Here’s this week’s edition of Feeding the Chooks, your regular peek behind the scenes of the often bizarre, always entertaining world of Queensland politics. Reported by Sarah Elks, Lydia Lynch and Michael McKenna.
ACCESS ALL AREAS
Welcome to Queensland, where the sky is green, up is down, and the truth doesn’t necessarily exist.
This week, we revealed that Labor had quietly reintroduced its cash-for-access business fundraising program, less than a year after Annastacia Palaszczuk banned her ministers from attending such events.
A clear broken promise, right?
Wrong, according to Palaszczuk, her ministers, and the Premier’s apparatchiks.
Treasurer Cameron Dick – who has a history of denying the obvious – and Police Minister Mark Ryan on Thursday went so far as to insist the ALP’s new $10,000/year Queensland Business Roundtable Program, and its boardroom dinners and lunches with ministers, weren’t cash-for-access events.
“It’s not cash-for-access, it’s a donation to a political party, and we attend events, we engage with business, both paid and unpaid,” Dick said.
Earth to the Treasurer. Businesses pay $10,000 plus GST a year to Labor for membership to the roundtable, to buy exclusive access to state ministers in small rooms over lunch and dinner. What is that, if not cash-for-access?
The Premier’s minions have been madly trying to spin the about-face, insisting that what the party is doing now is not in contradiction to what Palaszczuk has said in the past.
That’s just not true. Let’s look at the history.
In late November 2019, Palaszczuk and her then (and now) Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath gloated that they had introduced “sweeping electoral reforms” into parliament, to introduce donation and expenditure caps, increase public funding for elections and – crucially – end cash-for-access.
“To put it simply,” Palaszczuk told parliament, “voters will not have to worry about whether money talks.
“So-called cash-for-access will be gone.”
In June 2020, when the “nation-leading electoral reform and integrity laws” passed, D’Ath said the law would “remove cash-for-access from Queensland politics”.
And finally, when Labor’s self-imposed ban on cash-for-access came into effect on July 1 last year, Palaszczuk was unequivocal.
“Today, I’ve also written to the state secretary of the Australian Labor Party, saying that no cabinet minister will be participating in the Queensland Business Partnerships Network,” she said.
“And there will be no Queensland Business Partnership Network – which is the business observers program – at ALP state conferences.”
She went further, weaponising the electoral reform, and challenging LNP Opposition Leader David Crisafulli to follow her lead.
“The challenge now is to see if the LNP actually follows suit. The question today for them is are they going to cancel their business partnerships programs?”
Several paid-up members of Labor’s old business scheme have told Chooks they were left in no doubt that the regular cash-for-access lunches were a thing of the past after the Premier’s July 2022 edict. There’s now been an abrupt about-face, the donors say, and they’re being invited back into the boardroom.
The question today for the Premier and her party is: do you really believe your own spin?
IN THE CELLAR
Speaking of fundraisers, the Liberal National Party’s treasury spokesman David Janetzki is holding a couple of them before and after the upcoming state budget on June 13.
Curiously, both are being advertised as costing $990 a pop, a $10-whisker under the $1000 disclosure threshold, meaning the attendees can legally be kept secret.
The second event promises to be an intimate, three-hour evening affair, a month after the budget, and deep in the bowels of the Queensland parliament, in its cellar.
You might remember another event held there, with former LNP leader Deb Frecklington and property developers, that helped spark an investigation by the Electoral Commission.
Frecklington and the LNP were later cleared, because it could not be proved the developers had donated to the party.
PwC BOSS VIDEO EMERGES
While the scandal at PricewaterhouseCoopers deepens with the Australian Federal Police called in to investigate, an old video has emerged of its former boss, Tom Seymour, colourfully straying into the area of international tax now at the centre of the widening probe.
Seymour quit as chief executive earlier this month after confirming he had received emails that contained details of confidential government deliberations gleaned by the firm’s head of international tax Peter Collins in consultations with Treasury and the Board of Taxation.
It was revealed in estimates that Treasury referred to the AFP allegations that PwC passed some of this confidential government information on international tax avoidance laws to its global clients.
It has been reported that Collins has signed confidentiality agreements with Treasury that date back to 2013.
In 2015, Seymour – then managing director, tax & legal, PwC Australia – took to the stage at a post-federal-budget breakfast in Brisbane where he crowed about the looming “rumble” international companies would be having with the ATO.
“If you are a small business … this is a give to grow budget, there is no doubt that this a great budget for small business,’’ he said.
“If you are big business, however, particularly if you are a multinational inbound investor big business, this is ‘let’s get ready to rumble‘ budget because there is going to be more tax disputation in the international scene as a result of what was announced last night than we have ever seen before.”
EXPENSIVE OLYMPICS
Chooks can reveal it cost the Palaszczuk government and Queensland taxpayers $788,317 to have Deloitte kill off Scott Morrison’s brainchild of an independent Olympics Coordination Authority, to manage the multibillion-dollar Games infrastructure spend.
In March, Deputy Premier Steven Miles confirmed the authority had been officially scrapped, following a report from Deloitte that recommended “the best structure” for a non-independent Brisbane 2032 Coordination Office, led by Palaszczuk government director-general Graham Fraine.
In a document tabled to parliament this week, the Premier said Deloitte was engaged in May 2022 and was paid the nearly $800,000-fee, providing the report in February.
The structural switcheroo means the Queensland government will have total control over the $2.7bn rebuild of the Gabba (which has skyrocketed from the original $1bn price tag).
SECRET OLYMPICS
In another loss for transparency, Premier Palaszczuk’s department has denied access to the business plan for the Gabba redevelopment, that was used to woo the International Olympic Committee in 2021, as part of Brisbane’s candidature to host the Games.
Chooks had applied under Right to Information to see the plan, in the hope some light could be shed on the enormous cost blowout for renovating the Gabba, as the Games’ main venue.
The Premier’s RTI officers revealed the document exists, and it’s being held by the aforementioned Brisbane 2032 Coordination Office, within Palaszczuk’s department.
But here’s the rub. The business plan was conveniently submitted to the Cabinet Budget Review Committee, “meaning it will be subject to Cabinet-in-confidence” and therefore off-limits.
So much for open government.
HANSON JUMPS ON LNP DIVIDE
Pauline Hanson is hoping to capitalise on conservative rage after Queensland’s Liberal National Party voted to support Labor’s historic treaty laws earlier this month.
Opposition Leader David Crisafulli and his team are copping serious flak from the grassroot members and their federal LNP counterparts for backing the reforms, which pave the way for dozens of treaties negotiations between government and First Nations groups.
Hanson said conservative Queenslanders were alarmed and disappointed that Crisafulli had “rolled over” on Labor’s path to treaty legislation.
“It’s apparent many members of his own party are furious at Mr Crisafulli’s failure to demonstrate real leadership on this issue,” she told Chooks.
“And if, at the next state election, we gain the balance of power the incoming government will achieve nothing until the treaty legislation is repealed.”
Labor insiders fear a hung parliament is on the cards after Palaszczuk’s popularity took a nosedive in the polls.
But One Nation doesn’t have the bargaining power it once commanded with its primary vote halving at the last Queensland election to 7 per cent.
AND THE NOMINEES ARE …
The internal tussle over a coveted safe Liberal seat is under way on the Gold Coast.
Five political hopefuls have put their names forward to be the Liberal candidate for Fadden: the only female candidate Fran Ward, Cameron Caldwell, Dinesh Palipana, Owen Caterer and Craig Hobart.
Ward has the backing of retiring Fadden MP Stuart Robert. Caldwell is a Gold Coast councillor with strong local support, but has a few pirates in the closet. Palipana is the most high-profile of the lot but
Labor is still deciding whether it can be bothered running a candidate in Fadden, because they don’t think they have a whisker of a chance at picking it up.
Senior party sources say there is no shortage of keen local candidates and a decision on whether to put someone up will be made sometime next week.
SPOTTED
John Howard and Peter Dutton will be spilling the tea on what the Liberal Party needs to do to start winning back middle Australia.
The pair will speak at the launch of David Stevens’ new book “Dignity and Prosperity: The Future of Liberal Australia” on the Gold Coast next Friday.
The Liberal Party brand has fallen out of favour with many female voters and young people; let’s see how they plan to turn that around.
Join the conversation
Crisafulli: Not a conviction politician on abortion
LNP leader David Crisafulli calls himself a conviction politician. So why can’t he tell Queenslanders what he believes about abortion?
Read more
Labor to lose two Brisbane seats to Greens
Queensland Labor is at risk of losing two of its Brisbane seats to the Greens, leaked union-funding polling shows, and while Annastacia Palaszczuk’s TV debut has surprised some, others closer to the former premier say she fancies herself a talk-show host.
Read more