Peter Dutton’s failed Gerard Rennick intervention
G’day readers, and welcome to the latest edition of Feeding the Chooks, your weekly peek behind the scenes of Queensland politics. This will be our last column before a short break, while a couple of the Chooks temporarily fly the coop.
Dutton’s Rennick intervention
Peter Dutton appealed to Liberal National Party HQ to re-run the senate pre-selection that last year dumped Queensland senator Gerard Rennick but was refused.
The first-term senator lost his spot on the LNP senate ticket by just three votes to party treasurer Stuart Fraser in a ballot of the State Council.
As Chooks previously revealed there were voting irregularities in the July preselection, and Senator Rennick last month took action in Brisbane’s Supreme Court to force the LNP to allow him to appeal the outcome to the State Council.
Rennick is now waiting on a decision from the court, hoping it will fall in his favour and in time so that he can make that appeal to the State Council on July 5.
Apparently the decision needs to be delivered in the middle of next week so that constituted timeframes for written submissions can be met.
Chooks can now reveal that Peter Dutton personally appealed to the party officials last August to order that the preselection ballot be re-contested.
The federal Liberal leader, who was intending to support Rennick in the ballot as a member of his Canberra partyroom, had been denied a right to vote because he couldn’t attend State Council in person.
Not so his Nationals’ counterpart David Littleproud or Brisbane Liberal Mayor Adrian Schrinner – both Fraser supporters – who were allowed to send someone else to vote on their behalf.
Senior party sources have told Chooks that Dutton was unhappy by the inconsistency in his treatment, given he had every right to send a representative on his behalf, and called on the LNP hierarchy to do the ballot again.
Rennick is vying for the third spot on the ticket and has a massive social media following.
The Supreme Court case heard there were other problems with the ballot in July, last year, with at least two LNP members ineligible to participate in the preselection wrongly allowed to vote, and other serious questions about who participated in the ballot.
But when Rennick appealed last year to the LNP’s Dispute’s Committee they ruled against holding a re-election. The LNP claim that under the party’s constitution that decision is binding, which Rennick’s supporter’s dispute.
A spokesman for the LNP on Friday said it would be inappropriate to comment given the matter was before the courts.
Hardgrave plays hard ball
Former Howard government minister Gary Hardgrave is not going to let something trivial like a six-month membership suspension from the Queensland Liberal National Party to thwart his ambitions to serve the wider conservative movement.
Chooks was bemused to note that Hardgrave has been nominated by former PM Tony Abbott for one of four federal Liberal Party vice-president positions, to be voted on at federal council on Friday next week. How does that work if his membership has been suspended?
Simple! Hardgrave is also a member of the South Australian branch, and has nominated through that route.
He declined to speak to Chooks but sources close to Hardgrave say he’s been involved with the party since the mid-1970s and is “not going to walk away now”.
“If they want Gary to run away, they’re going to be disappointed,” one Hardgrave mate tells Chooks.
Hardgrave was suspended for up to six months alongside conservative powerbroker David Goodwin by the LNP state executive in February, pending an internal investigation into allegations of bullying and intimidation against them - allegations the pair denies.
Just prior to their suspensions, Hardgrave and Goodwin made allegations of branch-stacking, which are also being investigated by the LNP’s disputes committee.
Hardgrave’s suspension means he lost his spot as a federal council delegate, was booted out as chair of the LNP’s metro west Brisbane branch, and won’t be able to go to state convention next month.
At the federal council vote next Friday, president John Olsen (the former South Australian Premier) and honorary federal treasurer Charlie Taylor will be elected unopposed. The eight candidates for the four VP spots are: Hardgrave, former federal Senator Ben Small (WA), Michael Stubley (NSW), Menzies Research Centre director Caroline Inge (VIC), Gerry Wheeler (ACT), Holly Byrne (VIC), QLD Young LNP president Alexandra Sinenko (QLD) and former federal MP Fiona Scott (NSW).
Busy as a Bailey
Is Mark Bailey nervous?
The Miller MP was spotted walking the streets of his electorate (margin 13.8 per cent) and letterboxing homes all on his lonesome, at about 9pm on the night before Cameron Dick handed down the Labor government’s budget this week.
After being dropped from the frontbench immediately after Steven Miles took over as premier in December, Bailey does have some extra time on his hands, but he is also under fresh threat from the Greens.
The minor party has preselected Liam Flenady - campaign manager for South Brisbane MP Amy MacMahon’s successful 2020 state campaign, and Griffith MP Max Chandler-Mather’s winning 2022 campaign - to challenge Bailey. Before he ran Greens campaigns, Flenady was a musician and academic and, interestingly, contested PM Kevin Rudd’s seat of Griffith at the 2013 federal election. Not for the Greens, mind you, but for the Socialist Alliance.
Back to Bailey and on his fliers - spruiking cost of living relief - the backbencher signs off with his name and new slogan: “Mark Bailey. Local. Progressive. Effective.”
Factional face-off in Longman
As Chooks revealed last week, Labor’s 2022 defeated candidate for Longman, Rebecca Fanning, still has her eyes on the suburban Brisbane federal electorate, currently held by the LNP’s Terry Young.
Fanning’s not the endorsed candidate, but she’s out there paying for self-promoting/Coalition-attacking Facebook ads. And now, a spanner in the works. Labor HQ has closed expressions of interest for Longman, and Fanning - until last month the chief of staff for Mines Minister Scott Stewart, and before that a staffer for Steven Miles and Wayne Swan - has a preselection opponent: ALP organiser Rhiannyn Douglas.
Douglas had a brief career as a high school teacher before pursuing politics, working as a policy advisor for then Environment Minister Meaghan Scanlon before joining headquarters. Douglas is a member of the dominant Left faction, and Fanning is in the Right.
As one Right faction branch member mused to Chooks, is a 27-year-old candidate the correct person to contest an electorate with one of the oldest voter demographics in the state? Clearly Fanning (a positively ancient 41 years old, for the record) is a tad worried. Bring on the factional fight.
Now that’s austerity
Cameron Dick may have blown the bank this week to woo back voters ahead of October’s election, but he managed to bring some level of austerity to the parliament this week.
At Labor’s budget-eve night briefing, standard bottles of wine were rejected, and some teeny-tiny replacements were rolled in.
While it’s a lovely drop, Chooks notes that Wirra Wirra’s Church Block is from McLaren Vale in South Australia - might be time to get some more Queensland vino on the menu.
It was parties all week at parliament. The LNP’s post-budget reply fundraiser in the Undumbi Room was bustling with the usual suspects, with resources company execs, lobbyists, and other corporate donors hobnobbing with the Opposition leader David Crisafulli and shadow frontbenchers David Janetzki and Fiona Simpson. Not far away, Cameron Dick was hosting a rally-the-troops ALP post-budget function (no miniature wine bottles, but it was a cash bar).
Foldergate
Labor staffers were thrown into a tizzy on Tuesday when Cameron Dick lost his folder stuffed with key budget numbers and his speaking notes.
The folder vanished while the Treasurer was making the rounds at the media lock-up and staffers were frantically retracing Dick’s steps to find his budget bible before he was due to face a press conference.
No, Chooks did not nab the folder for a quick peek. The culprit was Steven Miles who “accidentally” picked up the folder on his way out of the room.
Behind the scenes
Speaking of the federal budget lock-up, Feeding the Chooks is proud to present this cinematic masterpiece/behind-the-scenes insight into what goes on in that packed parliament house room in the hours before the Treasurer delivers his budget speech.
Spotted #1
Union bosses and Labor lobbyists were among the throng that piled into the Brisbane Convention Centre on Wednesday for the ALP’s annual post-budget love-in.
Steven Miles’s “mentor” and Labor powerbroker Gary “Blocker” Bullock was seated up back, but premier went out of his way to drop past his overlord for a chat.
While Blocker and Miles were having a laugh up back, Labor’s “agent of infection” Eamonn Fitzpatrick was spotted bending the ear of Cameron Dick.
Fitzpatrick - once an ALP adviser - is a Canberra-based lobbyist these days having left the Queensland register in October 2022. He was seated beside frontbencher Glenn Butcher who holds portfolios of water, regional development and manufacturing.
Tyro MP Margie Nightingale - who replaced Annastacia Palaszczuk in the seat of Inala - was seated with Queensland Council of Unions boss Jacqueline King.
Spotted #2
It turns out love transcends everything - even party political rivalries.
Multi-hyphenate Daniel Hobbs (lobbyist, one-time LNP preselection candidate, and Anglican priest) presided over the wedding of potential Labor candidate Renee Coffey and partner Jason McKenzie recently.
A member of the Old Guard faction, Kookaburra Kids CEO Coffey is considered the frontrunner for ALP preselection for the federal seat of Griffith, formerly held by her best friend Jessica Rudd’s dad Kevin Rudd.
Chooks is told Labor Ministers Grace Grace, Shannon Fentiman and Di Farmer were in the congregation as well as ALP MPs Joe Kelly and Jess Pugh, and state secretary Kate Flanders.
Chooks’ spies say Father Dan cheekily referenced his lobbyist/priest vocations when opening the proceedings, telling those gathered: “Now, unless Ministers Grace, Fentiman or Farmer slip me a $50 for today’s homily, this interaction need not make its way to the (lobbyist) register”.
Hobbs (who unsuccessfully ran against Amanda Stoker for LNP preselection in the state seat of Oodgeroo) and Coffey have long been friends, and are now both directors on the board of the Cannon Hill Anglican Church.
Spotted #3
What will those pesky scammers think of next? Queensland Nationals MP Keith Pitt, who represents the federal seat of Hinkler, in the Wide Bay region, found himself the honey trap in a scammer’s plot recently.
A friend apparently spotted Pitt’s photo on a dating app profile, for a looking-for-love 65-year-old called Dave. For the record, Pitt says he’s never been called Dave, is happily married and isn’t on the apps, and is not 65 (he’s a sprightly 54).
Online daters, be warned.
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