Cost-of-living warfare as third-party union campaigns fire up
Steven Miles’ old union drops $500,000 on a new political campaign just a few weeks before strict spending caps for Queensland’s state election kick-in.
G’day readers, and welcome to Feeding the Chooks, your weekly peek behind the scenes of the mad, murky, magnificent world of Queensland politics.
Miles works Together
The union that gave Steven Miles his first job has come to Labor’s rescue with a $500,000 guerrilla campaign as the ALP tries to pick itself off the floor after suffering savage swings in two by-elections last weekend.
Queensland’s Premier looked bruised after losing the Labor heartland seat of Ipswich West to the Liberal National Party, and had to wear the indignity of a 22 per cent swing in Annastacia Palaszczuk’s take-it-to-the bank safe electorate of Inala.
Now, the Labor machine has gone into overdrive, with the help of unions spending big on polling – they are again out in the field – and on an advertising and social media campaign that is filling the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg et al.
Not that you would know it at first blush, because instead of the traditional Labor red livery, the ads are all purple and there is no mention of any political party, or union.
Queensland’s Together Union, which represents public sector workers, is behind a massive six-week campaign, hiding behind the banner of “The Coalition of Working Families”.
This is the union which conducted polling last year, helping to push Palaszczuk out of the top job and install their boy Miles instead.
The working family coalition’s ads are running on social media in the regions and in local newspapers, and feature Labor MPs in marginal seats, including Michael Healy (Cairns, 5.6 per cent), Craig Crawford (Barron River, 3.1 per cent), Jason Hunt (Caloundra, 2.5 per cent), and Aaron Harper (Thuringowa, 3.2 per cent).
“Aaron Harper, MP for Thuringowa, fighting for what’s Important to you! I have pledged to fight for more cost of living relief in 2024 … what cost of living relief in the Queensland state budget will help you most? Have your say!” Harper’s ad trumpets.
In the fine print, it reveals the ad is authorised by Alex Scott, Coalition of Working Families, Peel Street, South Brisbane, and directs the reader – via QR code – to a slick, purple-branded website featuring a video of Harper spruiking Labor’s policies including free TAFE, subsidies for swimming lessons, and electricity rebates, and asking for more budget suggestions.
As Chooks revealed earlier this year, central to Miles’s re-election plan is a big-spending, cash-splashing cost-of-living budget, to be handed down in June, in an attempt to buy voters’ affections.
But just who is Scott, the authoriser of the ad? None other than the boss of the Together Union, who recruited Miles to work for the then-Queensland Public Sector Union in the 1990s. Scott, who is among Miles’s closest friends, concedes that Chooks was right when we pointed out that “The Coalition of Working Families” was not an original idea – and was actually borrowed from the US and Democrats-linked campaigns.
“I never said I was original,” Scott admits.
The timing is crucial. Scott launched the campaign to beat the start date of what Labor boasts are the “strongest” electoral laws in Australia, putting a $1m spending cap on third parties during the official election period from April 2 to polling day on October 26.
“The ability to campaign in a third-party context, we have a greater capacity to do that in the first three months of this year than we do throughout the rest of the year … prior to the 1st of April there’s less limitations,” Scott says.
It’s what the LNP claims is a “financial gerrymander” (and they should know about gerrymanders, given the form of the late Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen) – political parties are restricted to spending only $95,964 in each seat. Donors to political parties are also capped on how much they can give.
The cap includes spending on ad material, opinion polling and consultants (though now Labor won’t be able to hire lobbyists to run its campaign as it did in 2020 thanks to new laws).
Non-union groups can also be third-parties, but the LNP argues they don’t have an organised supporter base like Labor’s union movement.
Scott claims his working families coalition is also putting pressure on the Labor government. So why are Labor MPs in crucial marginal regional seats featuring in the ads spruiking the Miles government’s virtues?
“If you’re willing to stand up in caucus and fight for these things, we will promote you to the community,” Scott says.
“That’s the reward (the MPs) get from having committed to campaigning on the issue.”
It’s not just Together planning a third-party campaign.
Jacqueline King, boss of the Queensland Council of Unions, is looking to hire two staffers – a campaign co-ordinator and a digital communications officer – for just this purpose.
“Last weekend’s by-election results demonstrate the need to run solid progressive third party campaigns to fight to keep a Labor government in Queensland,” King said on LinkedIn.
Already, three unions (Together, The Services Union, and the Plumbers Union) have registered ahead of October, and there’s been an unexpected entry in the third-party race: Energy Resources Queensland Pty Ltd – backed by reclusive Queensland coal billionaire Chris Wallin, whose QCoal has had to pay more in royalty payments after Labor’s mining tax cash-grab was introduced. Chooks hastens a guess it won’t be backing Labor.
Watch the money flow as we edge closer to October.
Power play
While we’re on Alex Scott’s Together, the union has made a major powerplay in the wake of Miles’s elevation to the top job.
After watching the hands-on role United Workers Union boss and Left faction convener Gary Bullock – Miles’s self-declared mentor – and AWU state secretary Stacey Schinnerl played in picking Palaszczuk’s successor, Scott decided he wanted more influence in the party machinations.
Internal ALP documents leaked to Chooks reveals Together has massively hiked the number of members affiliated to Labor, bumping up Together’s ALP affiliation fees by about $100,000 a year and increasing its delegates three-fold. The documents show that Together had fewer than 4000 affiliated members in 2022 and 2023, but that’s jumped to 27,197 this year – much closer to its total membership number of about 30,000.
Scott says: “I think the process of the change of the premier made it clear that affiliated unions had more say in that issue and also were able to prosecute their issues within government”.
The extra affiliated members ratchets up Together’s influence in Labor’s affiliated union ranks. Last year it was a lowly equal 12th, now it’s joint seventh.
Also in leaked documents, it reveals the healthy pay packet of Scott, the champion of cost of living relief. In the 2020-21 financial year, Scott’s remuneration was nearly half a million dollars, $490,105, of which $214,169 was annual leave and long service leave payouts.
He must be feeling the pinch.
Premature celebration
The Queensland Greens literally jumped for joy on Saturday night, screaming with delight when mayoral hopeful Jonathan Sriranganathan declared the party’s candidate Michaela Sargent had won the LNP’s Walter Taylor ward in the Brisbane City Council race.
Unfortunately for the progressive minor party, it was a premature celebration – only about six per cent of the vote had been counted – and by Thursday, Sargent was conceding defeat, falling fewer than 500 votes short of the LNP’s Penny Wolff.
The Greens are nothing if not optimistic. Backed by internal research supplied to Chooks during the campaign, the party had boasted it was on track to become the official opposition and predicted “at least five LNP wards” were “looking likely to fall to the Greens”.
In the end, the Greens ended up with just two divisions, holding The Gabba and picking up Paddington. Analysts say its grassroots polling technique (based on doorknocking data collected by volunteers) accurately predicted its primary vote in some wards, but its forecast “win number” was off, because more Labor voters backed the Greens than expected.
While the ALP was dismissive of the Greens’ performance, the minor party secured a higher primary vote than Labor in 10 of the council’s 25 wards.
Labor’s council leader Jared Cassidy praised the party’s mayoral candidate Tracey Price for recording “a small swing to Labor in the mayoral race so far, which is something that no political pundits were predicting”.
That’s definitely a rose-coloured-glasses view of the results. Price and Labor suffered a primary vote swing of more than five per cent, most of which ended up with Sriranganathan, and the ALP mayoral vote hit its lowest level since 2012.
And that swing that Price apparently scored to her? On a two-party-preferred basis – so likely due to Greens’ preferences – it was a vanishingly small 0.1 per cent.
The LNP’s Adrian Schrinner was comfortably re-elected as mayor and with the majority of councillors.
The only bright spot for Labor during a grim weekend was Emily Kim – a former president of Young Labor, staffer for state MPs Duncan Pegg and James Martin, and a competitive powerlifter (!) – who won the LNP ward of Calamvale after a hard-slog grassroots campaign from veteran incumbent Angela Owen, who had been in council for 16 years.
Kaiser hire billed as intriguing
Eyebrows have been raised at director-general Mike Kaiser’s decision to hire Bill Brett as a contract consultant in the Department of Premier and Cabinet, not long after the kerfuffle over his (short-lived) engagement of Steven Miles’ former chief of staff Danielle Cohen as his associate DG.
Brett was head of one-term Liberal National Party Premier Campbell Newman’s Queensland Health razor gang – aka the Queensland Health Renewal Taskforce – when the government was at war with the state’s doctors.
Then, when the Palaszczuk government unexpectedly swept to power and senior public servants were forced to reapply for their jobs, Brett lost his gig as deputy director-general of Queensland Health in September 2015. He parted ways again with the Labor government late last year, when he exited Queensland Treasury Corporation as a director after seven years with the government’s financing authority.
Chooks asked Kaiser’s department about the hire, how long Brett – whose LinkedIn profile says he is “consulting to the great and good” – will be on the books, how much his contract is worth, and what prompted the move. The response was frustratingly opaque.
“A contractor was engaged for a short, focused activity in support of (the department’s) Operating Model Refresh and to assist with the development of tools and processes to deliver projects,” a spokeswoman said.
Clear as mud. Oh, and the department says Chooks will have to wait until next month before the details of Brett’s contract – such as how much he was paid – are publicly disclosed.
Feel the pain
As Chooks was busy stalking the halls on Thursday, we came upon some strange moaning filtering from one of parliament’s event rooms.
Naturally we went to investigate and what we found was … surprising.
Labor’s Jonty Bush had teamed up with the LNP’s Amanda Camm to devise a truly delightful social experiment for their female colleagues.
The pair, who were co-chairing a Parliamentary Friends of Endometriosis event, organised a machine to stimulate menstrual pain and gleefully hooked up a group of curious male MPs.
Endometriosis is a chronic disease, in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside of the uterus, that affects one in six Queensland women and can cause debilitating pain and infertility.
Caloundra MP Jason Hunt thinks the machine should be rolled out to high schools, Steven Miles confessed he would struggle to do his job, Everton MP Tim Mander could barely walk, and Callide’s Bryson Head looked like he was on the verge of bursting into tears.
Bush said Speaker Curtis Pitt seemed to handle the pain the best,
“We’re asking the gents, how would you function? How would you stand and walk in heels? How would you go in a question time debate? It’s a pretty challenging experience,” she said.
Bush and Camm were joined by some smug female pollies who took great joy in heckling from the sidelines.
Camm – who has been a long term sufferer of endometriosis, undergoing eight surgeries since she was 19 – hopes the experience would educate male MPs about what needs to be done on a policy front.
“They were all pretty weak, to be honest, they were struggling to stand and were asking (for the machine) to be turned back down after like five seconds.”
While hooked up to the nerve stimulator, Treasurer Cameron Dick asked: “How much do I have to pay to make it stop?”
A new budget submission strategy?
And poor old Toowoomba South MP David Janetzki was seemingly too scared of the pain, making an abrupt exit from the event before trying out the TENS machine (though he insisted to Chooks he was running late for a meeting).
King Katter
If there’s one thing the Katter Political Dynasty (a bit like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but more creative) is adept at, it’s a stunt. Late last month, Bob Katter and Andrew Wilkie trotted through federal parliament’s halls of power dressed in giant inflatable pig suits, ostensibly to accuse the big supermarkets of having their snouts in the trough of customers’ hard-earned cash.
This week, Bob’s son Robbie Katter (the third Robert Katter, and the third to be an elected MP), and his Katter’s Australian Party compadres Shane Knuth and Nick Dametto donned king costumes – complete with large plastic swords that had to be smuggled through parliamentary security – and stuffed large quantities of fake cash into hiding places around the Queensland parliament in an effort to protest against moves towards a cashless society and to insist “cash is king”.
They moved a motion in parliament to call on the state government to mandate that all government offices accept cash as legal tender (which government minister Bart Mellish amended to note instead that state government institutions “provide a range of payment options”.)
The royal gimmick followed Bob Katter’s snafu at the federal parliamentary cafeteria earlier this year when his real-life money was temporarily rejected, as well as the closure of bank branches in rural and regional Queensland.
And this week’s Queensland effort was accompanied by a KAP-penned poem, which Chooks has resisted reprinting in full, but ends thus: “A cashless society? I’d rather a kick in the shin, Give us our cash mate, cause cash is king!”
Behind the scenes
Former Liberal National Party Opposition leader and Nanango MP Deb Frecklington shares with Chooks some surprising facts about the Queensland parliament, in this latest edition of our special behind-the-scenes video docu-series.
Spotted
An eagle-eyed Chooks spy spotted events supremo Harvey Lister in the lobby cafe at Miles government headquarters at 1 William Street on Thursday morning. The ASM Global chief executive is vying for the contract to manage proposed Brisbane 2032 Olympics venue, the Brisbane Arena. The Quirk review this week recommended the stadium be shifted from Lister’s preferred site of above the Roma Street train station to the current carpark and maintenance depot north of the nearby parklands.
Just around the corner, Brisbane Olympics organising committee president Andrew Liveris was spotted at parliament – ahead of Friday’s meeting of BOCOG, of which Steven Miles is vice-president.
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