Feeding the Chooks: PM’s pals hit phones for new speaker while Spinks gets a golden parachute
There’s a lot of chatter that Sunshine Coast MP Andrew Wallace has the numbers to be the next Speaker of the federal House of Representatives.
The only other Queenslander to sit in the chair since before World War II is Peter Slipper, who also held Wallace’s seat of Fisher.
Slipper quit as a federal Liberal MP to become Speaker in a deal with the Gillard Labor government. He didn’t last long but gave an air of pomp to the role, bringing back ceremonial robes and formal processions whenever he entered the House.
Widely respected speaker Tony Smith, who is retiring, is expected to step down on Monday to allow for a vote in the Liberal partyroom for a replacement.
There are apparently two candidates: Wallace and Howard/Abbott government minister Kevin Andrews, who is also on the way out after being rolled at preselection for his Victorian seat of Menzies.
The pitch for “Father of the House” Andrews, in parliament for 30 years, has been his experience and pending retirement; making for a smooth transition to elect a fresh Speaker if the Coalition is returned to power.
It appeared Andrews had Scott Morrison’s support, but Coalition sources say some of the Prime Minister’s closest allies have been making calls on behalf of Wallace, a two-term MP.
Chooks hears Gold Coast cabinet minister Stuart Robert, a close friend of Morrison and a fellow Pentecostal churchgoer, has been evangelising for Wallace across the party.
Robert has told MPs the Libs need to vote for someone who would be “with us into the future”.
One MP said: “If Stuart’s making those calls, it’s as good as the PM making them.”
But, in what could be an interesting twist, Labor is understood to be considering nominating the losing candidate of the Liberals’ partyroom vote and backing them to become Speaker to repudiate Morrison.
Labor used a similar tactic in February last year to have then exiled Nationals MP Llew O’Brien elected as deputy Speaker over the Nationals’ preferred candidate, Damian Drum.
Spinks parachutes into Labor firm
The golden parachute was probably fitted even before Denise Spinks jumped as deputy chief of staff to Annastacia Palaszczuk.
Just two months after leaving government, Spinks – one of the political staffers caught up in the “mangocube” email scandal a few years back – has landed a job with a lobbying firm.
And given Queensland is the Mates State, and Labor looks after its own, the long-time staffer has been given a lifeline by Anacta Strategies.
It’s the firm headed by another former Palaszczuk staffer, Evan Moorhead, who — The Australian revealed last year — sat in the Premier’s office and ran Labor’s re-election campaign, along with another lobbyist, Cameron Milner.
While Palaszczuk didn’t think there was anything wrong with outsourcing the campaign, it led to the Crime and Corruption Commission warning of the integrity risks with the “blurring lines” and “overlapping networks” in Queensland politics.
Under the state’s Integrity Act, lobbyists are banned from carrying out lobbying activities “relating to (their) official dealings as a government representative’’ for two years after they leave their taxpayer-funded jobs.
You would think that would rule out Spinks getting a job with Anacta given she was in charge of the cabinet bag, guiding what was on the agenda and privy to every secret.
Anacta tells Chooks it isn’t a problem because Spinks hasn’t been put on as a lobbyist, but as a “consultant” … to a lobbying firm.
Expensive advice
It’s not enough to have 233,000 people on the public service payroll to give you advice on how to get things done.
The Palaszczuk government has continued Queensland’s well-worn reliance on big-end-of-town consultancies, with government departments spending more than $27m hiring outside consultants to help do their work last financial year.
The biggest spender of the state’s 21 departments was Queensland Health, which splashed $16.26m on professional or technical consultants, including lawyers.
Ironically, Treasury spent the second most, shelling out $3.38 million to software companies, recruitment agencies and human resources consultants.
The Department of Resources paid consultancy firm KPMG $971,380 last financial year for water allocation services and a development study.
That would be the same KPMG where Resources’ director-general Mike Kaiser, a former Labor MP and campaign guru, worked until December last year.
Only two departments were frugal and didn’t spend on outside consultants: the Department of Children, Youth Justice and Multicultural Affairs and Department of Seniors, Disability Services and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships.
Newman’s memory recalled
Voters would be given a right to recall an election to stop “power-mad politicians” in their tracks under one of the policies touted in the Liberal Democrats’ “freedom manifesto”.
Star recruit Campbell Newman has been eager to share his new party’s plans for government far and wide since it was released this week.
The Lib Dems’ proposal would decree that if a petition had enough signatures asking for a re-vote in any given electorate it could trigger a by-election, and “a petition of a set percentage of the whole electoral roll should trigger a full election”.
Citizens could also use a petition to veto legislation.
The Chooks couldn’t help but wonder if Newman regards the recall-election policy with a sense of irony, given “power-mad” was a term critics applied to his style of leadership during his term as premier.
They weren’t able to call a re-vote, but voters expressed their “recall” desires after less than three years of the Newman government when they elected a Labor government in 2015 and Newman lost his own seat of Ashgrove.
Even stevens in Moreton
The Liberal National Party has left it late to preselect candidates in some of the more winnable federal electorates in Queensland.
Moreton, in Brisbane’s south, was a blue-ribbon Liberal seat for a decade until 2004 and Labor has never held it with a margin of more than 5 per cent.
Former LNP Brisbane City councillor Angela Owen came within a whisker of winning in 2019 and the margin is now at 1.9 per cent.
You’d think the LNP would have recognised its chances and picked a candidate well out from polling day to give the party its best chance of stealing a seat from Labor.
But in an apparently defensive strategy across the state where they hold 23 of 30 electorates, the LNP has only just closed off nominations for the seat.
Undeterred by the failure of his former colleague, Brisbane councillor Steven Huang is lining up for a tilt.
In its newsletter sent to members on Wednesday, the LNP also called for nominations Kennedy, Rankin and Oxley.
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