How Annastacia Palaszczuk decided to axe Treasurer’s land tax grab
The Premier’s axing of her Treasurer’s controversial land tax followed growing internal unrest about the revenue grab.
G’day readers, and welcome back to another instalment of Feeding the Chooks, your weekly insight into what’s really going on in Queensland politics.
CABINET SMACKDOWN
It seems national cabinet couldn’t have come at a better time for Annastacia Palaszczuk, in providing cover for what was really behind her move to kill off the controversial land tax of treasurer Cameron Dick.
The Queensland premier was in Canberra when word leaked she was scrapping the cash grab after state leaders, according to her office, told her over dinner Thursday night that they were dead against it.
But the Chooks hear the truth is that Palaszczuk was under mounting pressure from within her own cabinet and caucus and had already decided that the tax was gone before going to the nation’s capital.
Blaming her state counterparts was just the “agreed pathway out”.
In order for the tax to work Dick needed information about interstate properties so he could add it to the value of any Queensland holdings and slug investors with a new and higher land tax.
The Treasurer, who has long harboured ambitions to replace his Right factional ally for the top job, has been for weeks slipping and sliding on the level of interstate consultation and how it would work as he had a go at those questioning the tax.
Several of his colleagues have expressed their wonderment at Dick’s intransigence on a tax that, at best, would raise just $20 million-a-year.
And few in the media would forget his bold-faced refusal to admit he had abandoned a pre-election promise of no new or increased taxes when, at the June budget, he hiked the top coal tax royalty rate from 15 per to 40 per cent.
The mining industry hasn’t, and the word is that Queensland Resources Council are putting the final touches on a well-funded campaign aimed squarely at Dick and the government.
Think back to then-federal Treasurer Wayne Swan’s 30 per cent minerals resource rent tax (MRRT) in 2012, during the last commodities boom, and the industry’s campaign against the Labor government.
A year later, Labor was out.
MODEL BEHAVIOUR
And here’s an interesting titbit; while there was no formal modelling done on Dick’s land tax, Queensland Treasury somehow did estimate how much revenue it would raise ($20m a year).
Also in the modelling world, Ernst & Young was paid to do the numbers for the government’s monster new $62bn renewables strategy, released this week with much fanfare. But it was left to the head of EY’s rival, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ managing partner Chris Rogan, who facilitated the Q&A with Palaszczuk at the launch of the plan at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) lunch in Brisbane on Wednesday. PwC were among the event’s headline sponsors.
PARTY IN THE UK
There’s some grumbling in the ranks of the Liberal National Party in Queensland as president Lawrence Springborg and another party official jet off to Birmingham for the UK Conservatives’ autumn conference beginning on Sunday.
As one longtime member griped: “For a party that’s grieving the loss of government, with corporates deserting them, why are they sending two people to the UK for a junket, when they should be investing in the next generation of politicians?”
LNP state director Lincoln Folo, who is about to move to Canberra to be federal director of the Nats and is not going to the UK, said the trip was a fact-finding mission.
“The Tories run an unbelievable conference, and we made some changes to our convention this year, and we’re looking to see what other parties around the world do.”
It’s not just the Tories who had Australian visitors. UK Labour’s annual conference was in Liverpool this week. Labor lobbyist Cameron Milner (banned in Queensland from plying his trade to the state government) and ALP national secretary Paul Erickson were both there.
Milner, in his column in this newspaper, said he also spotted outgoing federal ALP president Wayne Swan on his “wealth envy world tour”. David Nelson, another of the banned lobbyists in Queensland, was also apparently there rubbing shoulders.
BOOTSCOOTIN’ NEW BLOOD
Meanwhile, the LNP has hired a new state director to replace Folo.
His successor is Ben Riley, a former president of the Young LNP and federal Young Liberals, who is currently working for NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet as his chief of strategy.
Riley will start in early November, and is in for a rough ride, as Springborg told members in an email on Friday.
“The role of state director of the Liberal national party is one of the most challenging in Australian politics. We have one of the largest memberships, a complex compliance framework and contest elections across the three levels of government. It is a role which requires substantial professional political experience.”
QLD politics tragics with long memories may remember Riley was suspended from the LNP for six months way back in 2013, when he was the president of the Young LNP, after he took a pair of RM Williams boots from a merchandise stand at the party’s convention.
As it happens, Springborg was the Newman government’s Health Minister in QLD parliament at the time, and backed the LNP organisation’s decision to discipline Riley for “bringing the party into ridicule”.
“I don’t get involved in day-to-day organisation issues of the party but I just say that if people actually abuse the codes that have been put down by the LNP, that has a very, very strict code when it comes to the issue of conduct of its members, and particularly if its members bring the party into ridicule,” Springborg said in 2013.
“That is a matter for the organisation to deal with and of course I support their actions.”
EXTRA CASH
Remember the state government’s Wellcamp quarantine facility?
It’s the Covid-isolation facility Queensland taxpayers spent $223.5m on and then saw it closed after almost six months. And the state doesn’t even own it.
The bill included $48.8m to the powerful family-owned Wagner Corporation to build the compound, $149.7m to rent it back from them for 12 months, $9m to Compass group for catering, cleaning and security, and $16m to Aspen Medical for health services.
The cost to run Wellcamp for the 177 days it was open will average $1.26m a day, it was revealed a few months ago.
It now emerges that there’s another hidden cost for Wellcamp, and the finished-but-empty Pinkenba “Centre for National Resilience Brisbane” built by the federal government.
In response to a question on notice from the LNP’s Andrew Powell this week, Deputy Premier Steven Miles confirmed PricewaterhouseCoopers (despite missing out on the energy modelling, they are still getting a piece of the pie) was paid $715,000 for a contract to “provide the Quarantine Management Taskforce support in the delivery of the Queensland Regional Accommodation Centre at Wellcamp and the Centre for National Resilience Brisbane at Pinkenba”.
A couple of weeks ago, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk poured cold water on the idea of using the Pinkenba centre as emergency housing for those struggling to put a roof over their heads. The Chooks have been told a number of housing and homelessness organisations want that option – first floated by Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner – thoroughly considered before it’s dismissed.
The government confirmed last month that Wellcamp would be closed to isolation and quarantining guests as at August 1. The facility has been placed into “care and maintenance mode” until the end of the lease on 29 April next year, when it’ll be handed back to the Wagners.
SPOTTED
Two former political adversaries were breaking bread at the same table at Palaszczuk’s launch of the 10-year energy plan on Wednesday. Kirby Anderson, formerly Palaszczuk’s deputy chief of staff between 2016 and 2018, was sitting across from Matt Jeffries, who was former LNP Opposition leader Deb Frecklington’s chief of staff until her 2020 election loss. The Chooks hear Jeffries now works for a gas company.
Anderson is a lobbyist with his own firm, PolicyWonks, which has picked up eight new clients this year as rival Labor lobbyist Evan Moorhead’s firm Anacta lost 20.
Moorhead – who was banned from lobbying in Queensland along with his partner (the aforementioned Nelson) and rival (Milner) – after The Australian revealed they helped run Palaszczuk’s re-election campaign while lobbying her government on behalf of paying clients.
TIP US
As always, the Chooks love a tip. If you know something we don’t, let us know:
mckennam@theaustralian.com.au
elkss@theaustralian.com.au
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