Feeding the chooks: Landslide party vote strengthens Labor’s Left faction dominance
The leadership aspirations of Steven Miles have been bolstered by a factional shake up in Queensland; while Palaszczuk adds to her army of spin doctors.
Welcome back to Feeding the Chooks, your weekly peek behind the scenes of what’s happening in Queensland politics. And it’s a bumper edition today folks, buckle up.
COUNT YOUR CHICKENS
Steven Miles’ chances of succeeding Annastacia Palaszczuk as Queensland’s next Labor Premier have been bolstered this week, after a landslide vote strengthened his Left faction’s dominance over the party in the state.
The ballot for the party’s 212 conference delegates saw the Australian Workers Union-Right faction – whose members include the Premier, leadership aspirant and Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick, and also federal Treasurer and touted-future PM Jim Chalmers – slump to just 30 per cent of branch delegates on the conference floor.
The AWU-Right faction of one-time Labor kingmaker, the late Bill Ludwig – who saw Kevin Rudd take the Labor leadership and then helped tear down his prime ministership – has been in sharp decline in recent years, replaced by the Left and new omnipotent powerbroker and United Workers Union boss Gary Bullock.
As one Labor elder said of a future state Labor leadership tussle: “On these numbers, Miles would have a massive advantage”.
But the state number crunch also has federal implications.
The AWU-Right had helped fortify the rise of Bill Shorten in Victoria, but now with the collapse of the faction in QLD and also in Victoria – where they’ve lost a slew of preselection fights in recent years – it raises questions about Chalmers’ future factional springboard into power.
It also gives the Left unprecedented influence over Queensland party policy, which is binding on Labor’s parliamentary contingent (the parliamentary wing gets to decide the timing).
Queensland Labor leadership ballots require a vote of three sections of the party: the parliamentary caucus, the unions, and the branch delegates.
On these numbers, Dick will need Palaszczuk to anoint him as her successor, and somehow convince the unions and factions to betray their factional allegiance to Miles and switch to Dick. Surely unlikely?
And while Palaszczuk shares a faction with Dick and is besties with his brother, the new Labor federal Speaker Milton Dick, she hasn’t hidden her admiration for Miles, her so-far loyal deputy.
The Left have dominated Queensland Labor since Palaszczuk swept to the Premiership, and a lot of her ministerial problems have been borne of that faction: Jackie Trad, Mark Bailey, Mick de Brenni.
Palaszczuk’s lack of authority over her own party is evidence of this factional loss of power.
MOST OF LABOR’S EGGS IN ONE BASKET
Bear with the Chooks as we delve into the complicated and murky world of Labor factional politics for a minute, and dive into these numbers.
Queensland Labor’s power balance on its conference floor is divided into three: 212 delegates from the unions, 16 ex-officio delegates (leadership positions such as the party president, the state secretary, the parliamentary Labor leader and deputy, representatives of Brisbane City Council and federal Labor), and 212 branch delegates. There are 440 delegates altogether.
The ballots for branch delegates were returned on Wednesday night, and showed the Right down a surprising 12 delegates, with its losses picked up by the Left, Old Guard, CFMEU and Independents the beneficiaries.
This is a continuation of the decline of the AWU-Right, known as Labor Forum, which once held a strong majority with the support of the Old Guard, the faction of Peter Beattie and Kevin Rudd.
By the end of counting on Wednesday night, (and these numbers are disputed because there’s some disagreement about which factions some delegates are in) it was: 112 Left, 64 Right, 30 Old Guard (which usually votes with the Left), 4 CFMEU (just the construction division, which has split from the Left) and two independents.
The Right lost delegates by just one vote in four federal electorate councils - Fadden, Longman, Moreton and Oxley (Milton Dick’s seat) – by just one vote.
The union and ex officio numbers haven’t changed, but it’s worth laying them out.
Of the 212 union delegates, the balance is: 100 Left, 0 Old Guard (since the National Union of Workers merged with United Voice to become the super-union, the United Workers Union), 73 Right, 22 CFMEU (again, just the construction division), 15 Services Union, and two for the Maritime Union of Australia.
Altogether, of the 440 on the conference floor, there’s: 222 Left, 32 Old Guard, 141 Right, 26 CFMEU, Services Union 15, Independents 2 and MUA 2.
The Left now controls a huge 50.45 per cent of the conference floor, bolstered by 7.27 per cent in the Old Guard. The Right has just 32.05 per cent, CFMEU 5.91 per cent, Services Union 3.41 per cent and independents and the MUA each have 0.45 per cent.
As one senior Right figure said: “We are a shadow of ourselves from the (Bill) Ludwig days”.
So where did it all go wrong for the Right in this delegate ballot?
Labor sources say the Left out-campaigned the Right, and the Left had been more focused on drumming up membership in the branches.
There’s also concern that some in the Right were lulled into a false sense of security when the CFMEU’s construction division, led by outspoken powerbroker Michael Ravbar, publicly split from the Left.
Tune in to see the Left’s ultra-dominance in action when the Labor conference is held in November.
PALASZCZUK’S POACHING CONTINUES
Palaszczuk’s Queensland’s newsroom raid has seized a new prize, veteran Nine reporter Lane Calcutt.
The Premier has for years been steadily poaching reporters to join her growing army of spin doctors and will undoubtedly delight in her latest conquest.
Calcutt was the final trophy Palaszczuk had her eye on to add to her sparkling cabinet of ex-Nine reporters.
He will join a long list of former colleagues who now work to protect the Premier’s image – Spencer Jolly, Shane Doherty and Phil Willmington. Another ex-Nine journo, Shannon Marshall-McCormack, has recently joined Palaszczuk’s overstuffed team as Olympics adviser.
Calcutt will join the team next month as Palaszczuk’s principal media Adviser.
The newsroom giant told Chooks he was ready for a new challenge after 45-years as a reporter, 35 of those years at Nine.
Calcutt began his career at Brisbane’s Telegraph newspaper in 1978 when Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was still feeding the chooks.
He served as Nine’s Europe foreign correspondent in the late 90s before becoming the network’s federal politics editor in Canberra and returning to the Brisbane newsroom in 2020.
DOROTHY’S GOT TO GO
Labor backbencher Cynthia Lui has inadvertently provided fresh evidence that the loathed Dorothy Dixer must be banned from parliament.
Dixers – named after US columnist Dorothy Dixer – are pre-rehearsed questions and answers posed to ministers by Government backbenchers.
The time-wasters seldom provide any new information and allow ministers to drone on, spin and bash political opponents.
Lui was so bored by the line of government questioning during Thursday’s budget estimates, she asked the same question twice.
After reading from her lengthy script in response to a question from Corrine McMillan about how the government supports foster carers, Child Safety Minister Leanne Linard looked puzzled when Lui followed up with the exact same question.
“Member, I have just addressed many of those supports that we are doing. I can go through that again, Chair, if you would like?” Linard said.
Awkies.
SCRATCHING OUT A LIVING
It turns out there is life after politics.
After the May 21 federal election, vanquished federal MPs and Senators from Queensland are slowly but surely finding new jobs.
One of Labor’s great ministerial hopes, Terri Butler, was ousted from the Brisbane seat of Griffith by Greens upstart Max Chandler-Mather, and was rumoured to have been circled by Labor lobbying firm Hawker Britton.
But Butler resisted the lure of lobbying and has taken a gig as the chair of independent not-for-profit environmental waste-reduction company Circular Australia.
On the LNP side of the ledger, ex-Ryan MP Julian Simmonds (a former Brisbane City Councillor) has been snapped up as general manager for family-owned beef and cattle company Stanbroke, in the past a significant LNP donor. Stanbroke owns seven cattle stations in Queensland’s Gulf of Carpentaria, in the far northwest of the state, a fair trek from Simmonds’ leafy inner-west Brisbane home.
Simmonds could be busy. At the end of last month, the LNP Brisbane City Council administration nominated him to sit on the South Bank Corporation board.
Former LNP senator Amanda Stoker is writing a column for the Australian Financial Review, and we’re yet to hear what defeated Brisbane MP Trevor Evans is up to.
Simmons and Evans were beaten by Greens candidates Elizabeth Watson-Brown and Stephen Bates respectively.
FOXES IN THE INFRASTRUCTURE AUSTRALIA HENHOUSE
Speaking of jumping between jobs, LNP vice-president Amanda Cooper’s time on the board of Infrastructure Australia could be running out.
Cooper, a former Brisbane City Councillor who unsuccessfully ran for the state seat of Aspley at the 2020 election, was hand-picked by former LNP Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce for the board job late last year.
At the time, then-Opposition infrastructure spokeswoman Catherine King called the board shake-up (that included Joyce mate and former Tamworth mayor Col Murray as chair and other Coalition-aligned appointees) “little more than a Nationals stack”.
Well, King is now Minister, and wasted no time in ordering a review of Infrastructure Australia, led by infrastructure heavies Nicole Lockwood and Mike Mrdak, and flagging that some board members had “agreed to step down”.
Is Cooper one of those? She did not respond to questions from the Chooks.
CHOOKS CRASH
Surfers Paradise MP John-Paul Langbroek had a visit from one of the chooks this week, although not from the authors of this column.
One of Queensland Parliament’s resident hens scuttled over for a sticky beak while the LNP’s Langbroek was filming social media videos in the parliamentary gardens.
Parliament has four hens - Miss Hensard, Miss Dorothy Dixer, Miss ErskineLay, Miss Cluck of the Eggsembly.
The interaction was reminiscent of former premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen oft-repeated description of press conferences as “feeding the chooks’’, the namesake of this column.
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?
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.