Federal LNP MPs slam Crisafulli over ‘totally insane’ emissions decision
G’day readers and welcome to the latest edition of Feeding the Chooks, your weekly insight into what’s really going on in Queensland politics.
Civil war
The Liberal National Party is ahead in the polls and on track to win October’s Queensland election.
But as the state election battle heats up, David Crisafulli and his parliamentary team have come under friendly fire from their LNP frenemies in Canberra, over how to tackle climate change.
Peter Dutton and David Littleproud’s federal LNP team are fuming after David Crisafulli’s state crew this week voted in favour of Labor’s emission reduction targets.
Chooks has spoken to several federal members who described the move as “totally insane,” “reckless,” and “very dangerous” and have foreshadowed a messy membership revolt at the party’s state convention in July.
Crisafulli probably thought he would back Labor’s plan to cut 75 per cent of emissions by 2035 to avoid being wedged on the issue ahead of the election (particularly in the must-win Brisbane city seats which have long been the ALP’s fortress), but what he didn’t consider was the reaction from the party’s base – and his federal colleagues.
With a federal election due by May next year – in which energy policy is set to be a major vote-decider – federal LNP pollies say they were blindsided by their state colleagues’ decision to vote for Labor’s laws.
And it doesn’t help that Crisafulli has repeatedly refused to back the Coalition’s nuclear energy plan.
Hinkler MP Keith Pitt – a former federal resources minister – says grassroots members had called him and were “frank and furious” about the LNP’s decision to vote in favour of Labor’s energy plan, saying it was “unaffordable, unachievable and undeliverable”.
“I have spoken to a number of members who said they would have a hard time voting for someone who would support this policy,” Pitt says.
“I would be surprised if there were not motions put (at the LNP state convention later this year).”
It was just last year that federal LNP MPs were angry that Crisafulli’s Opposition voted in favour of Labor’s Path to Treaty legislation, a decision that also enraged some of the grassroots members.
Speaking to Chooks on his way to a coal mine on Friday, Senator Matt Canavan, also a former resources minister, says the state LNP was “totally insane” to support the emission reduction target.
“It would be nice if they had to guts to take this to a state convention so it could be debated,” he says.
Groom MP Garth Hamilton says he had already had calls from the LNP membership base warning the state team’s support of the targets was a “significant step away” from the party’s position. Littleproud has also blasted the 75 per cent target as “reckless”.
In his speech to state parliament this week, LNP’s environment spokesman Sam O’Connor said it was a “significant” decision for the party to back the targets and had been “carefully considered”.
“The LNP’s decision today will provide certainty to the market about the direction in which our state is heading,” he said.
“Our support today sends a signal to investors that under a future LNP government Queensland is open for business.”
Crisafulli has been uncharacteristically media shy this week, not holding a press conference since Sunday.
There will be plenty of questions when he does front the cameras.
Out of the lion’s den
Ex-PM Tony Abbott this week described former Howard government minister Gary Hardgrave as a “true lion” of Liberal politics in Queensland.
But it seems the accolade – voiced at an event for former Nationals Senator Ron Boswell’s book – appears to mean nothing to an ambitious cub in the Liberal National Party who it seems is hellbent on ousting Hardgrave as the elected chair of the party’s metro west regional division and off the party’s state executive.
You might recall that Hardgrave and conservative powerbroker David Goodwin were this year suspended by LNP HQ for up to six months. while they investigate a fiery stand-off at a Young LNP vote that they attended because of suspicions of a branch stack by members of the rival moderate wing of the party.
Mr Hardgrave and Mr Goodwin wrote separate letters of complaint to the executive and party president Lawrence Springborg alleging the transfer of membership, within 48 hours of the vote, was a branch stack.
Mr Goodwin alleged party headquarters was “now actively managing factional branch stacking” because it had approved the transfers.
But while Hardgrave awaits his fate, the young secretary of the metro west division, Lewis Jones, has announced that a vote will now be brought forward to elect a replacement for the former veteran MP as chair.
Ordinarily, the annual vote for the position would not be due until August and could be held as late as November.
But Jones, in an email to members, said he and the “remaining members of Metro West Region” had met and “decided the best course of action is to hold an early AGM in order to ensure our region continues to be properly represented on State Executive”.
Interestingly, nominations for the chair position close on April 29 – a day before Hardgrave is due to face the LNP Disputes Committee.
The timing means that Hardgrave can’t nominate.
Jones, who has been involved with the Young LNP – which has become a powerful voting bloc – couldn’t get off the phone quick enough when contacted by Chooks.
No Greens flirtation – this time
At an election where it’s unlikely to matter, the LNP have finally come clean to say they are not preferencing The Greens ahead of Labor.
Back in 2020, LNP HQ caused quite the kerfuffle in the party and in the electorate of South Brisbane, when it directed preferences to Greens candidate Amy MacMahon over Labor’s Jackie Trad.
The decision resulted in MacMahon winning the seat and defeating Trad, thanks to LNP preferences.
But Chooks can reveal a decision has been made about the October election, following an intervention by the aforementioned suspended renegade LNP member David Goodwin this week.
Speaking on Steve Austin’s local ABC radio panel on Wednesday with former Bligh government minister Rachel Nolan (now a Deloitte Access Economics special advisor), Goodwin expressed his “personal view” that “no political party should preference the Greens”.
“Don’t preference a party that actually wants to de-industrialise and weaken our nation,” he said.
Nolan retorted: “You watch the LNP preference the Greens over Labor in every one of these actually vulnerable seats. You watch it happen.”
In Nolan’s view, the inner-Brisbane Labor seats of Cooper (held by Jonty Bush on a margin of 10.5 per cent) and McConnel (Grace Grace, 11.1 per cent) could be vulnerable to the Greens in October, because they’re genuine three-cornered contests. At the 2020 election, the primary vote both seats was a close-run race (Cooper: ALP 34 per cent, LNP 33 per cent, Greens 30 per cent; and McConnel: ALP 35 per cent, LNP 31 per cent, Greens 28 per cent).
The strategy only works if the LNP comes third on primary vote in a particular seat, a prospect both LNP and Greens strategists privately believe is unlikely.
That perhaps gave the LNP the confidence to tell Chooks on Friday that “the party has no desire to preference the extreme Greens who want to defund the police”.
Teals’ golden targets
Chooks has reported extensively about the Teal wave threatening Liberal heartland of McPherson on the southern Gold Coast but we can now reveal the tide is creeping up the golden beaches to another blue-ribbon seat.
Moncrieff, covering the Goldie’s centre, is held by two-term moderate Angie Bell, who won at the 2022 election on a very safe 15.4 per cent margin and 45.9 per cent of the primary vote.
But the Teal movement is hoping to muscle onto the Glitter Strip with a new “Voices of Moncrieff” group set up with a website and “community listening project” launched.
Simon Holmes à Court’s Climate 200 – which financially backs Teal independents – did some polling in Moncrieff late last year and found the Liberal National Party’s primary vote had dropped to 39.2 per cent (uComms polled 1522 people in Moncrieff between October 7-9).
A spokeswoman for Voices of Moncrieff tells Chooks the group was formed because “because we feel a lack of listening and action from our political representatives”.
“What we’re hearing from our community is that people feel they’re being taken for granted because we are considered a safe LNP seat,” she says.
“Climate 200 knows of our group and that we are mobilising and holding kitchen table conversations in different parts of our electorate.
“We have not approached Climate 200 for funding. Voices of Moncrieff is people powered. We have been holding activities on a shoestring budget together with help from our group members.”
The group held its first event at Lost Palms Brewery in Miami on Sunday and Bell was one of 30 attendees, telling Chooks she went along because “it was a good opportunity to listen to the concerns of the community”.
“At the last election there were nine candidates on the ticket and the time before that there was eight so it is a normal part of democracy that people would want to contest Moncrieff.”
TikTok takeover
Chinese-owned social media behemoth TikTok might be banned on Queensland government devices, but that didn’t stop it from “taking over” the parliament on Tuesday night.
TikTok was launching a report highlighting its socio-economic impact in Australia (claiming to the captive audience that it contributed $1.1bn to the Australian economy in 2023) and what good timing, given all eyes are on the United States, where president Joe Biden is backing a bill that would ban TikTok nationwide unless it separates from its Chinese owners ByteDance.
Federal Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil is closely watching what happens in the US, and last month says she’s ready to take “additional action” if necessary.
Labor Ministers Grace Grace and Leeanne Enoch, ALP backbencher Jason Hunt, LNP frontbencher Tim Nicholls, and LNP MPs Jim McDonald, Andrew Powell and Ray Stevens were all spied at the event.
As was former advancer for Annastacia Palaszczuk Amber Setchell, now a director for Labor lobbying firm Anacta, which is where the TikTok plot thickens.
Chooks readers will undoubtedly recall that Anacta’s founders Evan Moorhead (Palaszczuk’s former head of government strategy and an ex-ALP state secretary) and David Nelson were banned from personally lobbying in Queensland in July 2022, after The Australian revealed they’d secretly run Palaszczuk’s successful 2020 election campaign.
In Canberra, Setchell is a registered lobbyist for Anacta and TikTok is a registered lobbying client of the firm, but on Queensland’s lobbyist register, Setchell is nowhere to be seen, and TikTok was officially added as a client of Anacta in Queensland only on Monday.
So, with ministers and MPs in attendance, was this TikTok-spruiking event lobbying?
Chooks asked Anacta, and a spokeswoman says “Amber is responsible for organising all Anacta client events, and attended the recent TikTok event in that capacity”.
“Victoria Newton is a registered lobbyist and was in attendance should MPs have policy matters to raise. No lobbying was required.”
Labor’s Lucas returns
Shannon Fentiman sure has a sense of humour.
The health minister has appointed her comrade and former Labor deputy premier Paul Lucas to the board of the South-West Queensland Hospital and Health Service, which covers regional hospitals in Roma, Charleville and St George, all a fair way west of Brisbane where Lucas is based.
It is an ironic appointment given Lucas himself was health minister 14 years ago during the disastrous Queensland Health payroll debacle that botched pay for 78,000 workers and ended up costing taxpayers $1.2bn.
He was removed from the health portfolio by then-premier Anna Bligh in a cabinet overhaul ahead of the 2012 election after a sustained campaign by public service union boss Alex Scott. Lucas, who retired from parliament in 2012, is now a consultant and solicitor at Labor law firm Holding Redlich.
The South-West Queensland HHS board members earned between $43,000 and $87,000 last year.
Let’s hope they’re paid on time.
Gonna need a bigger boat
Queensland-based mining magnate and former federal MP Clive Palmer’s totally realistic and definitely-going-to-eventuate plans to build the Titanic II have hit the papers in the UK.
Palmer tells the Daily Star that he’ll include more lifeboats than on the original Titanic (phew!), presumably avoiding a repeat of the disastrous 1912 shipwreck that killed about 1500 of the ocean liner’s 2224 passengers and crew.
The newspaper even quotes Hollywood director James Cameron, who directed the 1997 movie Titanic which Palmer says was his inspiration.
“Frankly, if I had that much money I’d spend it on science. But that’s just me,” Cameron quipped.
Spotted #1
New Labor MP Margie Nightingale learnt an expensive lesson in her first parliamentary sitting week.
The newly elected Inala MP missed a vote on Thursday night, and copped the ire of party whip Don Brown. Witnesses tell Chooks that Brown was mad and Nightingale was “remorseful” for her error, and explained she couldn’t hear the division bells at an event for new Labor members on a different floor. To make matters worse, her smart watch had run out of batteries and she didn’t hear her phone ring.
Second-term Labor MP Kim Richards also missed the vote – she was not at a paid briefing for union leaders, but at a function for clean energy stakeholders on a parliamentary balcony, also out of earshot of the bells. Their punishment? Both absent MPs will have to pay $500 into Labor’s caucus account, which is used to fund lollies and chocolates for caucus meetings and for extra expenses at the party’s annual caucus retreat. Chooks hears it’s the first time since Covid that Labor MPs have accidentally missed a vote. No wonder the whip was ropeable.
On the LNP side, new Ipswich West MP Darren Zanow also slipped up. Posing his first ever question in Question Time, Zanow asked Steven Miles: “On 16 March the people of Ipswich West and Inala sent Labor a message that it needs to listen and fix the youth crime crisis. Will the third-term Labor government listen to Queenslanders and reintroduce detention as a last resort after removing it in 2016?”
Of course, what Zanow meant to ask was will Labor remove detention as a last resort after reintroducing it in 2016.
Spotted #2
As foreshadowed by Chooks a few weeks ago, Labor has now officially endorsed Kass Hall as its candidate in Redcliffe, replacing retiring Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath to contest the next election.
Hall is a former high school teacher, has been a police prosecutor for the Queensland Police Service, and as a survivor of cancer has been a vocal advocate for voluntary assisted dying.
Redcliffe is held by the ALP on a margin of just 6.1 per cent, boosted at the 2020 election by older people (labelled by some Labor strategists as ‘Palaszczuk’s pensioners’) who were backing in the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic.
The LNP’s candidate is Kerri-Anne Dooley, who will be running for Redcliffe for the sixth (SIXTH!) time in October.
Feed the Chooks
Got a tip?
elkss@theaustralian.com.au
lynchl@theaustralian.com.au
mckennam@theaustralian.com.au
More Coverage
Abortion formally off the table for LNP state council meeting
Internal unease about the LNP’s handling of the thorny issue of abortion during the Queensland election campaign will be kept off the formal agenda at this weekend’s state council meeting. But make no mistake, it’ll be talked about.
‘Divisive’: Crisafulli’s new director-general oversaw Labor’s ‘Wastecamp’
David Crisafulli has recruited the bureaucrat who oversaw the highly politicised Wellcamp Covid quarantine facility to head his department, as Labor’s Right faction accepts a proxy vote from a suspended MP.