Premier Miles offers crossbencher Katter key new job
Queensland’s Premier Steven Miles is bracing for a hung-parliament after the October election and has offered a key crossbencher a lucrative sweetener.
G’day readers and welcome to this week’s edition of Feeding the Chooks, your essential guide to what’s really going on behind-the-scenes of Queensland politics.
Katter to probe supermarket porkie pies
Steven Miles’ has taken his courtship of the Katter boys to the next level, offering their leader a lucrative new committee chair position.
As Chooks reported last week, Miles and his comrades have been busy cosying up to the country lads, hoping they will save Labor’s bacon in the event of a hung parliament later this year.
Now, in a move that has already irritated his backbench (we are looking at you, Les Walker) Miles has offered Robbie Katter the coveted role of chairing a new parliamentary inquiry into supermarket pricing (complete with a $66,939-a-year pay rise).
The special inquiry (known among Labor strategists as the “Supermarkets Are A...holes Inquiry”) will publicly grill grocery giants over soaring prices and hold hearings in marginal seats along the state’s coast.
The inquiry is part of Miles’ re-election strategy to make it seem he is acting on the cost of living crisis. It was announced in January after secret taxpayer-funded polling revealed voter concern about grocery prices had jumped.
So who better to sink the boot into Coles and Woolies than Katter, who has been fighting the chains for years.
His dad Bob Katter was busy trotting the halls of federal parliament this week in a strange protest against the supermarket giants, so maybe he can borrow his inflatable pig suit for the first day of hearings?
While the offer has been formally made, Chooks hears Katter has been dawdling on giving Miles an answer. We think it will probably be a “yes”.
Infighting erupts
Former Howard government minister Gary Hardgrave and powerbroker David Goodwin have been suspended from Queensland’s Liberal National Party after levelling allegations of branch stacking within the party’s youth division.
In an extraordinary move, the pair were referred to the party’s disputes committee for investigation and had their membership suspended for up to six months.
The LNP’s governing body, the 30-strong state executive – of which Hardgrave is a senior member – refused to allow him to sit in on part of its meeting on Thursday night at which it voted to take disciplinary against him and Goodwin.
The executive also considered complaints against Hardgrave and Goodwin of alleged bullying and intimidation at a YLNP branch meeting on Sunday.
The suspensions comes just a few weeks after the lifting of a previous suspension against Goodwin for publicly calling on LNP leader David Crisafulli last year to rule-out a repeat of the 2020 state election when it preferenced the Greens ahead of Labor, gifting Jackie Trad’s then-seat of South Brisbane to the minor party.
State executive’s latest move to gag the pair – over letters of complaint they sent to them and party president Lawrence Springborg this week over the alleged branch stacking, and which leaked – is likely to fuel an already bitter brawl between the LNP’s old guard conservatives and its moderates.
LNP state director Ben Riley even issued a legal notice to Chooks, who had received copies of the letters from its many sources, in a bid to stop The Australian from publishing details of the complaints.
It didn’t work and here’s the stories, published during the week: LNP row: it’s on for young and old and Moderate vs conservative: showdown over factional war inside Queensland’s LNP.
Spies told Chooks that the pair were referred to the disputes committee for investigation, with Riley also sending himself to the same star chamber for assessment.
The infighting was nasty this week with leaks pouring out everywhere. As one moderate source said: “It’s bizarre that Gary Hardgrave felt the need to inject himself into a routine Young Liberals branch meeting given, at 65, he is likely closer to death than the eligible age to being a member”.
Ouch.
The brawl comes just a week after LNP members vented their outrage over the party’s endorsement of a Brisbane City Council candidate Brock Alexander, who, it later emerged, is allegedly facing active criminal charges, and had been in jail – twice.
And there is likely to be more LNP laundry aired in the coming months with the looming defamation trial of former LNP councillor Kate Richards, who is suing the party over her treatment ahead of the last local government elections.
And Chooks wonders if LNP senator Gerard Rennick will take legal action against the party after questions were raised about a handful of votes in the preselection last year that saw him kicked off the party’s ballot.
Senator Rennick lost his spot by just three votes to party treasurer Stuart Fraser.
All this in an election year with published polling showing the LNP could actually win after holding power for just two terms (1996-98 and 2012-15) in the past 35 years.
It’s not exactly a blood red state; Liberal and Nationals MPs currently hold 25 of the 30 federal seats in Queensland.
But time after time leadership squabbles, factional infighting and dysfunction at party HQ has spilt into the public domain, and has given voters reason to second-guess thoughts of backing the LNP into state government.
Labor’s four-time winner Peter Beattie would often use the LNP theatre to his advantage, skewering the opposition by adopting the refrain “if you can’t govern yourselves, you can’t govern the state”.
Women’s Week
Does the LNP have a problem with women? Labor sure hopes so and will use next week’s sitting of parliament to turn the heat up on the opposition’s record on women’s issues.
Insiders tell Chooks that bills to overhaul sexual consent laws, allow nurses to prescribe abortion pills and outlaw coercive control will all be debated next week ahead of International Women's Day on Friday.
Abortion is of course a touchy topic in the LNP. Three MPs were threatened with disendorsement over the 2018 vote to decriminalise abortion and LNP leader David Crisafulli has vowed not to touch the laws again if elected in October.
The opposition is yet to say if it will vote in favour to expand abortion pill prescribing rights to nurses and midwives (which is aimed at improving access to women in regional areas but has been criticised by obstetricians).
The LNP has also has no position on affirmative consent yet either. The laws will essentially make it clear that before having sex, consent is given proactively – such as a “yes,” a nod, or the reciprocal removal of clothes.
The thinking behind the law change is to shift the onus from victims to a person accused of sexual assault to prove they got consent but legal groups in Queensland have raised concerns the legislation could criminalise married couples having spontaneous sex and be misused in messy divorce cases.
Labor will be hoping to use debate on both bills to transfer lingering voter anger at Scott Morrison and the federal Coalition over its handling of women’s issues onto the state team.
Chooks notes Crisafulli has been working to turn the narrative on women around for his party, already exceeding his female preselection target. We also note it was the
LNP’s then-shadow Attorney-General David Janetzki who first proposed criminalising coercive control back in February 2020.
Behind the scenes
This week’s episode of Chooks’ behind-the-scenes of Queensland parliament video docu-series features Speaker Curtis Pitt. Does he name-and-shame the worst-behaved MPs during his tenure in the Speaker’s chair? And don’t be a fool, watch until the end for a truly golden moment in the 164-year history of parliamentary debate in Queensland.
Albo’s Woodgate wedding?
Federal Nationals MP for Hinkler Keith Pitt took a 90-second break from attacking Labor and PM Anthony Albanese’s plans for a mandatory climate disclosure regime for farmers, to become a bipartisan wedding planner.
In parliament this week, Pitt extended an invite to Albo and his recently betrothed, Jodie Haydon, to hold the “wedding of the year” in his electorate in southern Queensland’s Wide Bay region.
Pitt suggested a wedding on the beach at Bargara, followed by a reception at the Bundaberg Surf Life Saving Club, or holding the event inland at the historic 1920s Paragon Theatre at Childers, or Pitt’s personal favourite option, a wedding at Woodgate, and a local menu of ocean king prawns, Hervey Bay scallops, Bundaberg Rum, and Kalki Moon gin.
“Prime Minister, I can even put in a call to my wife and suggest she gives you a week for the honeymoon at her beach house at Woodgate. You can walk the beach in the moonlight, you can talk, you can see the locals, and if that doesn’t float your boat, we can take you fishing and crabbing,” Pitt said.
Albo laughed and gave the Hinkler heckler a thumbs up across the despatch box.
The Nats MP knows how romantic a wedding in his electorate can be, marrying his radiographer wife at the St Patrick’s Catholic Church in Bundaberg in 1999.
Pitt tells Chooks, with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek and in a momentary departure from bipartisanship: “If he’s short a couple of bucks because of Labor’s cost of living crisis, I’ll try and get the seafood donated”.
Greens give it up
It’s not exactly the nuclear codes, but the Greens appear to have accidentally let slip a major detail of campaign strategy ahead of the Brisbane City Council elections next month, where the minor party is deploying former firebrand councillor Jonathan Sriranganathan to shake sitting LNP Lord-Mayor Adrian Schrinner’s City Hall reign.
The Greens has candidates in all 26 wards, but Chooks can reveal which seven divisions are being targeted as priorities by the progressive minor party.
Sriranganathan’s old ward of The Gabba – where DJ-turned-arts administrator Trina Massey is now the Greens councillor – has top billing, along with LNP-held Coorparoo, where the Greens secured more than 27 per cent of the primary vote in 2020.
In uploading their how-to-vote cards (HTVs) to the Electoral Commission of Queensland, the Greens unwittingly revealed the party is printing 30,000 A4 HTVs for each ward.
Five more LNP-held divisions will have 20,000 Greens HTVs to be distributed to voters: Paddington (Greens vote of 38 per cent in 2020), Walter Taylor (34 per cent for Greens in 2020), Pullenvale (Greens 24 per cent in 2020), Enoggera (Greens 16 per cent in 2020) and Central (27 per cent vote for the Greens in 2020).
March 16 will be a crucial test for the Greens, after sweeping to victory in three Brisbane-based federal seats at the 2022 federal election to add to their two in Queensland parliament.
Council cure-all
Chooks can’t help but marvel at the miraculous healing powers of running for council. Yes, it’s a small sample size, but the campaigns of two local government candidates have caught our eye.
Take outgoing Ipswich West Labor MP Jim Madden – he of ‘Call Me Sir’ infamy. Madden announced in April last year that he’ll retire from parliament at the October 2023 election, after “careful consideration of my ongoing physical and mental health” and definitely not because of the aforementioned allegations of coercive control published in The Australian just weeks earlier.
But in January this year, he abruptly quit parliament to run in the March 16 Ipswich City Council elections for division four, “the boundaries of which broadly mirror the boundaries of (my) electorate of Ipswich West”.
“While I am resigning from state parliament, I am not resigning from public life,” Madden said at the time.
Meanwhile on the Sunshine Coast, used car salesman and Kawana Chamber of Commerce president Alister Eiseman pulled out of the preselection contest in September to become the LNP candidate for the Labor-held seat of Caloundra, citing “personal health” reasons.
Happily, Eiseman has now launched a bid for the Sunshine Coast Regional Council’s division three spot.
In Queensland, Labor and the LNP only officially endorse candidates for the Brisbane City Council, so both Madden and Eisemann are ostensibly independents – and are obviously feeling much better.
Spotted #1
It appears you can take the man out of the main roads portfolio, but you can’t take main roads outta the man. Queensland’s former Transport and Main Roads Minister Mark Bailey – who proudly referred to himself as Bailey the Builder and quit Cabinet in December before he could be sacked by new Premier Steven Miles – was spotted by an eagle-eyed Chooks spy at the weekend decked out in fluorescent orange hi-vis while at a coffee shop with federal Labor MP Graham Perrett.
Apparently, it was one of three coffee catch-ups for the pair and local residents in their southside Brisbane electorates (Moreton for Perrett and Miller for Bailey).
Chooks asked Bailey just how perilous the morning tea was, given the safety-first attire, and he revealed the danger actually occurred before the coffee.
The Labor MP says a spot of early-morning gardening went wrong and he ended up “bleeding profusely” from an elbow wound. The shirt choice was strategic for future stain removal, Bailey says, and he got his elbow properly patched by a doctor after the constituent meetings.
Spotted #2
The LNP have a snowball’s chance in hell of breaking Labor’s hold on Annastacia Palaszczuk’s old electorate of Inala at the March 16 by-election, but that didn’t stop the party’s deputy leader Jarrod Bleijie from enthusiastically shaking a leg at candidate Trang Yen’s campaign launch at the weekend.
Bleijie needs little encouragement to channel Elvis (see: many, many past editions of Feeding the Chooks) but this hip-thrusting performance at the Tan Lac Vien Chinese and Vietnamese restaurant in front of more than 200 people was...quite something.
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