Has David Crisafulli put the ‘youth crime crisis’ on hold for Peter Dutton?
Dickson reinforcements
Is the youth crime crisis that David Crisafulli rode into power paused for the federal election?
Former one-term LNP MP and experienced campaigner Matt McEachan – hand-picked as chief of staff to youth justice minister Laura Gerber – has been seconded into the Brisbane headquarters of the LNP, to help steady Peter Dutton’s stuttering campaign.
Chooks hears the Queensland Premier personally signed off on McEachan spending three weeks – unpaid – in Dutton’s Qld campaign HQ, despite the alleged urgency of “Labor’s youth crime crisis” forcing him to rush Adult Crime, Adult Time laws through parliament as his first act as premier.
McEachan’s seen as a safe set of hands on a campaign, having worked on every Qld conservative electoral effort since the early 2000s, before becoming a Campbell Newman government staffer and an MP in 2015.
Perhaps Dutton’s insistence that he’s not at all worried about losing his ultra-marginal seat of Dickson is hollow.
Labor’s Paul Erickson used internal ALP polling showing the ALP can allegedly win Dickson, to gee-up true believers this week, telling supporters he was spending an extra $130k on ALP candidate Ali France’s campaign – if only they’d chip in a few bucks.
Already, Erickson and his Queensland state secretary Kate Flanders are rolling out negative ads attacking Dutton in Dickson for allegedly abandoning his constituents for a Sydney billionaire’s fundraiser as Cyclone Alfred was bearing down.
Dutton told the Today show on Saturday morning that Labor’s efforts were a “beat up” and a marketing ploy to drive donations, but it is true the Coalition’s dirt unit has been in overdrive shovelling mud onto Teal candidate Ellie Smith in the seat, and a conga line of Albanese government ministers has been trooping through Dickson with France in the first fortnight.
Pure coincidence also that this weekend’s destination for the Young LNP campaign “flying squad” is Dickson?
McEachan is in HQ from Monday. Chooks hears he may never go back as Gerber’s chief of staff; if that eventuates, he’ll be the second COS the new minister has seen off in just 150 days. Veteran conservative government staffer David Fraser has already made his exit, transferring to another ministerial office.
On Sunday, Crisafulli wouldn’t say whether McEachan would return to Gerber’s top job after the campaign.
A bit susso?
Corruption fighter Tony Fitzgerald made a rare contribution to the political debate in Queensland last weekend, when he declared the LNP’s nomination of director-general John Sosso to the state’s electoral redistribution commission represented a potential return to “the bad old days of biased electoral boundaries”.
There’s so much history to unpack here, and Chooks can reveal there’s historical enmity between Fitzgerald and Sosso, who briefly served together on Fitzgerald’s eponymous inquiry.
Sosso has been a long-serving public servant for both sides of politics, but he’s only been a card-carrying member of one (the Liberal Party, back in the 1970s, though he applied to join Young Labor as a 14-year-old).
Most recently, Sosso was one of a handful of members of David Crisafulli’s transition to government committee, and – after the LNP’s election win – he became Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie’s director-general of state development.
Attorney-General Deb Frecklington’s nomination of Sosso as one of three members of the commission charged with the regular redrawing of the state’s electoral boundaries drew criticism from Labor, which said the appointees should be impartial – and be perceived as impartial.
In Fitzgerald’s seminal 1989 report into political corruption and police misconduct, he recommended the establishment of an Electoral Administrative Review Commission to decide whether the electoral boundaries of the day were fair.
He said that the EARC – a precursor to today’s Queensland Redistribution Commission – should be conducted by people “of undoubted integrity whose judgment will be acceptable to all political parties and the general community”.
Deputy opposition leader Cameron Dick called the current situation “just susso” – a brave move for a Dick to make a joke of someone’s surname – while Labor leader Steven Miles said because Fitzgerald rarely made public comments “for him to speak out today, that is a really big deal”.
So how did Fitzgerald come to speak out? Chooks can reveal Labor frontbencher and former Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman asked him to.
“I rang him. I thought it was important to see if he had concerns, and I asked him whether he would put something in writing,” Fentiman – now the Opposition’s Treasury spokeswoman – tells Chooks.
And Fitzgerald did, emailing Fentiman on Friday morning.
“As I told you I’d prefer not to take part in political debate. However, as I also said I’m concerned that Qld might be reverting to the bad old days of biased electoral boundaries – the notorious Qld gerrymander. I sincerely hope that isn’t so. Biased electoral boundaries fundamentally conflict with democracy,” Fitzgerald’s email to Fentiman reads.
The fact Fitzgerald’s statement was released to The Courier-Mail via a Labor frontbencher raised some eyebrows in the political establishment; the man himself politely declined to speak to Chooks.
“I don’t propose to say any more on this matter, thank you,” Fitzgerald said.
Fitzgerald and Sosso have a long history. Sosso was briefly a government-appointed secretary to Fitzgerald’s inquiry. In a submission to a parliamentary committee in 2014, Fitzgerald described Sosso as one of a “small ambitious group of Justice Department bureaucrats” who “advised and influenced” the National Party Attorney-General in 1987.
“Sosso didn’t last long in that role but returned to the Justice Department, which … did little to willingly assist the Inquiry.”
And all the way back in 2011, in an interview for the Queensland Speaks project, Sosso described Fitzgerald and his counsel assisting Gary Crooke as “very difficult to deal with” during the inquiry process because they had “good reasons” to be paranoid about the public service and had formed a “very negative view” of everything.
Sosso cryptically referred to a dispute he had with Fitzgerald and Crooke over a building to house the inquiry.
“For reasons which I won’t disclose … which left a nasty taste in my mouth,” Sosso told Queensland Speaks.
But Sosso did say the commission of inquiry resulted in “fair electoral laws” in Queensland, and said the public should be grateful to Fitzgerald for his work.
Chooks understands Sosso’s recent nomination to the redistribution commission came as a surprise even to the veteran bureaucrat.
Perhaps Frecklington should come up with another option, and save everyone the argument.
On Sunday, David Crisafulli doubled down, describing Sosso’s “career across both sides of politics as beyond reproach,” and gave no sign he was preparing to withdraw the nomination.
Sign snafus
We get it. Election campaigns are busy, and chaotic, and everything is everywhere all at once. And in that chaos, things go awry, even for the most well-oiled political machines.
Take this Liberal Party attack billboard, authorised by the Victorian Libs’ Stuart Smith, castigating Anthony Albanese and a Labor Premier as “double trouble: more debt, more crime”. The only problem? That’s Victorian Labor Premier Jacinta Allan and the billboard is smack bang in the middle of the Greens-held seat of Brisbane, in the Queensland capital.
Next up, an irritated local in Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather’s Brisbane seat of Griffith complained in his local community Facebook group that the tyro politician was polluting his property with corflutes emblazoned with his face – allegedly without consent.
And to make matters worse, “after I took them down, they came and put more up”. “I understand it’s a close election in this seat but you should be asking permission before you do this,” Seb Langdon Macmillan griped.
According to LinkedIn, Macmillan, who did not get back to Chooks, is a canvasser for the Labor-affiliated Together Union.
A Greens spokesman explained a previous tenant of the property had requested the signs before they moved out; the corflutes have since been removed.
Spotted: Vox Pop
An online “news” organisation, Empact News, spoke to a gaggle of unnamed voters in Brisbane’s Queen Street Mall recently, pulling together their views on the upcoming federal election.
Captioned “Voters in Australia seek change” and spruiked on the news channel’s Instagram account, Embed spoke to people who mostly appeared enthused about the idea of Peter Dutton as Prime Minister.
Some were even equipped with fairly convincing LNP talking points. Take the middle-aged bloke in a snappy blue suit, bemoaning the fact “cost of living’s been going through the roof” and his kids and neighbours aren’t better off now than they were three years ago, and talking up Dutton’s plan to reduce migration.
“I think the government’s got a lot to answer for,” the bloke says into the microphone. Asked whether the government deserves a second chance, he’s definitive: “I think they’ve had a big chance to be honest. And I think we need a change.”
Strong stuff from the man on the street. Or it would be, if the man on the street didn’t happen to be former Howard government minister Larry Anthony (Nationals MP for the NSW federal seat of Richmond between 1996 and 2004), who until recently was federal president of the National Party, and is the founder of a lobbying firm with strong links to Dutton’s LNP.
An eagle-eyed Empact viewer identified Anthony, and mused the video seemed “very skewed towards Dutton” to which Empact News responded: “We had no idea!”
“I wish you could all see how hard it can be to get people to talk to us and share their very personal views. Being on camera is not for everyone and politics is so personal. We appreciate everyone who stops for us!”
Spotted: Trumpet of Patriots
Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots boasts a ragtag bunch of candidates running across the country for both House of Representatives seats and the Senate.
There are familiar names, particularly for Palmer, who is related to at least two of his candidates. Take Ryan Mensink, son of Palmer’s nephew Clive Mensink famously missing overseas for years to avoid being called before the Federal Court to answer questions about the collapse of Palmer’s Townsville nickel refinery. Ryan Mensink is running for the Trumpets in the Brisbane bayside seat of Petrie.
Another of Palmer’s nephews, Martin Brewster, is running for Palmer in the Townsville-based Herbert, after previously serving Clive as procurement director at the refinery, and as a candidate in earlier iterations of his political party.
Then there are the former pollies. Stephen Andrew, the recently defeated QLD MP for Mirani (who was dumped by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation before temporarily joining Katter’s Australian Party) is contesting the central Queensland seat of Capricornia for Palmer.
Bob Day, a former South Australian Senator for the Family First party, has also switched to the Trumpets and is running for the Senate in that state.
Palmer appears to have bought up every available billboard on the eastern seaboard to trumpet his Trumpets, but it remains to be seen what impact – if any – his new party will have on the May 3 result.
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G’day readers and welcome to Feeding the Chooks, your weekly guide to what’s really going on in Queensland politics.