Dutton’s nuclear ‘thought bubble’ targeted by LNP members

Peter Dutton concedes defeat on election night. Picture: Adam Head

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7 hours ago

G’day readers and welcome to this week’s edition of Feeding the Chooks, your regular insight into what’s really going on behind-the-scenes of Queensland politics.

Hell hath no fury like branch members scorned

As the Liberal National Party in Queensland rakes over the entrails of Peter Dutton’s crushing federal election defeat, furious grassroots members are accusing their own party of giving voters the impression “we are a blokey group of immigrant haters” with a “half-baked” nuclear policy.

There is creeping disquiet in the ranks of the LNP about the party’s campaign failure, and scathing branch reports are being prepared for consideration by former Newman government minister Ian Walker, who has the unenviable task of formally reviewing the QLD party’s performance.

Happily for Chooks, some of these documents have fallen off the back of a truck and into our hot little hands.

Take Oxley, the safe Labor seat held by Speaker Milton Dick and contested for the LNP by Kevin Burns (who was never expected to win and lost to Dick 31 per cent to 69 per cent after preferences).

Burns’ branch is fuming about how the campaign was run, and the overall story the Coalition was trying to sell to voters.

“The campaign lacked a narrative … it seemed, other than giving the impression that we are a blokey bunch of immigrant haters who think that women are ultimately wagging off work, as they often work from home,” the Oxley report says.

In the no-holds-barred document, LNP HQ is slammed for allegedly looking “upon membership with disdain,” Dutton’s nuclear policy was criticised as a “thought bubble,” and the branch complains they had a “lack of control over print and post” materials.

(More about that last gripe in The Weekend Australian. Buy the paper.)

“You can’t disagree with Labor saying ‘nuclear is going to cost X’, unless you have done the policy homework to have a credible and defensible (plan), having run the numbers to defend oneself,” the branch thunders.

“Otherwise, stop presenting half-cocked/baked ideas.”

The Oxley report – which Chooks understands was put together after a meeting of dozens of branch members but was signed off by branch chair Tamara Foong – also alleges the party failed to properly target women voters, young voters, and multicultural voters, and says more needs to be done to encourage women candidates and campaigners.

Though the LNP in Queensland did far better than the conservative parties in other states and territories, the federal election result was a shocker for Dutton’s home jurisdiction.

Five LNP seats in Queensland fell to Labor – including Dutton’s own electorate of Dickson.

The reviewer, Walker, was embedded in LNP HQ during the campaign, to avoid any rewriting of history after the fact.

Polling puffery

David Crisafulli on Monday. Picture: Tara Croser.

David Crisafulli’s ministers are suddenly totally fine with a Queensland government using hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayers’ hard-earned cash to pay for polling – and then keep that research secret from those very same taxpayers.

As Chooks’ revealed in the news pages on Friday, the Premier’s department has commissioned $650,000 in taxpayer-funded polling and market research in just five months, despite Crisafulli and Co criticising Annastacia Palaszczuk for doing the same thing when she was in charge.

Weren’t Crisafulli and his offsiders outraged when The Australian revealed before the 2020 election that Palaszczuk’s department had spent $528,000 for Ipsos to do Covid-19 polling and market research? They were particularly upset that the Labor government wouldn’t release any of the results.

It took years of reporting and repeated Right to Information requests (and a change of Premier) for Palaszczuk’s successor Steven Miles to publish the research, which took the temperature of voters on the Brisbane 2032 Olympics, the Indigenous voice to parliament, and pandemic border closures.

How things have changed now the LNP are in government, and not on the Opposition benches.

Crisafulli’s office has refused to release the polling, or even give Queenslanders a comprehensive list of what topics are being researched, and what methodologies are being used.

In Opposition, Crisafulli tried to use parliament to force the Labor government to disclose the research, in 2023 questioning why Palaszczuk would “spend hundreds of thousands of Queensland taxpayers’ dollars to save her job”.

In 2021, LNP MP Laura Gerber demanded the Palaszczuk government be “open and accountable”.

“This is public money,” she told parliament. “At the very least, Queenslanders deserve to see what they got for their half a million dollars. “Taxpayers deserve to see the results of the secret polling that they paid for.”

Chooks wholeheartedly agrees.

That’s why we’re so puzzled at Gerber’s explanation that Queenslanders don’t actually need the Crisafulli government to publish the results of the expensive research because they can “see it on the TV” in the form of government advertising.

You couldn’t make it up.

Explosive appointment

Brian Gillespie, the new CEO of CS Energy.

Who better to run an organisation plagued by power station explosions than the outgoing boss of one of the world’s biggest explosives companies?

Chooks couldn’t help but be tickled by the synchronicity this week, when government-owned corporation CS Energy announced its new chief executive officer would be Brian Gillespie.

Until recently, Gillespie was group executive of president of Latin America for global mining explosives supplier Orica, founded in 1874 to provide explosives to the Victorian goldfields.

CS Energy has been beset by problems in recent years because its Callide coal-fired power stations, near Biloela in central Queensland, keep blowing up. In 2021, under the Palaszczuk government, Callide C4 exploded and was offline for years, sparking widespread blackouts, power price hikes, and a slew of lawsuits.

In April, LNP Treasurer David Janetzki found himself in a spot of bother when he failed to mention another explosion had shut down part of Callide (C3), just days before he delivered a major energy speech, declaring coal-fired power stations would stay open for longer and sustain the state’s power needs.

After the blast (and ensuing political fallout), the government ordered the immediate exit of departing chief executive Darren Busine and the power station’s general manager was sacked.

Callide C3 is back online, but Chooks suspects Gillespie will have his hands full.

Labor HQ gender fight to brew until November

Ben Driscoll, Kara Cook, Kate Flanders.

Queensland Labor’s powerful admin committee quietly approved Ben Driscoll as acting state secretary at its regular Monday night meeting last week, allowing a factional gender fight to fester until November.

Driscoll will officially start at the ALP’s Peel Street headquarters on July 1, after the exit of Kate Flanders, who is leaving a year early but on a high after Labor’s federal election triumph. Both Flanders and Driscoll – a former senior adviser to Steven Miles as Premier – hail from the party’s dominant Left faction.

Chooks wonders how that decision is sitting with the party’s diminished Right faction and its assistant state secretary, Zac Beers, who also has a year remaining on his contract in the job.

As this column revealed a couple of weeks ago, Labor’s affirmative action rules state that either the state secretary or their assistant must be a woman, to fulfil the party’s 50-50 gender quota.

The party has rustled up advice suggesting that because Driscoll is only acting in the role, it doesn’t offend the rule. But this sets up a showdown for the party’s conference in November, where the Left will push for the Right to nominate a woman to become assistant state secretary.

While some in the Right say the faction suffers from a dearth of senior women, other Labor figures are talking about Isabella Scattini, the Right’s state organiser who already works at headquarters, as a possible successor to Beers.

Whatever happens, Chooks is wishing and hoping for a state conference like the good old days, when factional warfare and ideological infighting reigned supreme.