Katters to have four crossbench MPs after One Nation defection
Pauline Hanson’s only lower house MP defects to the Katter’s Australian Party in Queensland, while Steven Miles prepares for an awkward public reunion with Annastacia Palaszczuk.
G’day readers, and welcome to the latest edition of Feeding the Chooks, your weekly peek behind the scenes of Queensland politics.
Kingmaker Katter
Forget about the Greens and their lofty ambitious, the new powerbrokers in town are the Katter boys from the bush.
Chooks can reveal dumped One Nation MP Stephen Andrew has formally put in his paperwork to join the Katter's Australian Party.
If Andrew passes vetting, it will mean the minor party will head into October’s state election with four MPs – double the representation of the Greens which hold two seats in the 93-electorate parliament.
And in the event of a hung parliament after the October 26 state election, the Katters will be in the box seat to hold the balance of power, and potentially be the kingmaker for the future premier.
As Chooks revealed a couple of weeks back, Pauline Hanson dumped Andrew – her only Queensland MP – after he was discovered playing footsies with the Katters.
Hanson had accused the MP of going missing in parliament, sniping that he had not introduced a Private Member’s Bill in seven years.
Sitting as an independent this week, a very chuffed Andrews introduced his Public-Private Partnership Bill on Wednesday afternoon, which is aimed at improving transparency around the state’s commercial deal-making with the private sector.
Pity it will never get debated with just one week of sittings left before the parliament is dissolved for the election.
Andrew, a professional feral pest controller, has represented the Central Queensland seat of Mirani for two terms, retaining the seat in 2020 on a 9 per cent margin.
He will face a tough fight to hold the seat for the Katters, with One Nation endorsing travelling tent boxer Brettlyn ‘Beaver Brophy’ Neal as its Mirani candidate this week.
Neal ran for One Nation in far north Queensland seat of Cook in 2020, securing just 6.6 per cent of the primary vote and until recently, appeared to be readying for a run with One Nation in south-east Queensland.
In February, the former camel jockey who works as Hanson’s assistant in Brisbane, changed the name of her campaign Facebook page to “Beaver for Logan – Pauline Hanson’s One Nation”.
On July 19 she changed it again to “Brettlyn “Beaver” Neal – Pauline Hanson’s One Nation”.
Sparks to fly
Chooks can already feel the electricity that will sure to be in the air at a “Smart Energy” expo next Tuesday when Steven Miles and Annastacia Palaszczuk share a stage for the first time since the transition of power last December.
The pair will be on a panel for a session labor(iously)-titled “Queensland’s Smart Energy Opportunity, Economic Employment Opportunities from 75% Emission reduction by 2035”.
Palaszczuk may have anointed her then “loyal” deputy as her successor when she stepped (pushed?) away from the throne, but Chooks is reliably told the relationship has soured.
Not that you would know from what Miles told reporters this week.
“We are in pretty regular contact and no doubt I will see her again soon,” he said.
Chooks suspects this is a stretch, and understands that the pair have hardly spoken since December.
Palaszczuk has been enjoying the sun in the past few weeks around the shores of Italy’s celebrity summer playground of Lake Como with surgeon beau Reza Adib.
If you recall, Italy was where the lovebirds were found last August when Chooks revealed Palaszczuk was facing a putsch internally in the face of diving poll numbers.
But there isn’t any love lost between supporters of the current and former premier.
Miles’s MPs and loyalists are already ruminating about a likely defeat at the October 26 election, and are starting to openly blame Palaszczuk for holding on too long and not give the new premier enough time to change the direction of the government and the polls.
They might have a point. Peter Beattie stepped aside for his deputy, Anna Bligh in September 2007 after long touting her as his successor.
Bligh didn’t face voters until March, 2009 and she defied many pundit’s predictions by holding on to power and becoming the first elected female premier in Australia.
The Palaszczuk camp is well aware of the emerging blame game being drafted in 1 William Street, the government offices known as the Tower of Power.
Mangocube wants to keep lid on CCC
It came as no surprise this week that Mark “Mangocube” Bailey spoke in favour of gagging the Crime and Corruption Commission from criticising pollies.
Bailey was investigated by the corruption watchdog in 2017 after The Australian revealed he was deleted his private “mangocube” email account, used for back-channel communication with union officials.
He deleted the account when The Australian, who had been leaked some of the emails, put in a Right to Information request for the correspondence.
It led to a nine-month investigation and Bailey had to stand down as minister while they probed.
The CCC eventually cleared him of corruption but slammed his deletion of public records as foolish, injudicious and a technical breach of the law. He also breached the ministerial handbook.
Steven Miles’s Labor government plans to legislate recommendations from former chief justice Catherine Homes which would ban the CCC from making “critical commentary” or expressing opinion about the conduct of politicians in its investigative reports.
The LNP is not too hot on the idea and has introduced its own legislation to give the CCC the strong public reporting powers it has asked for.
Speaking against the LNP Bill on Tuesday night, Bailey said the CCC should “not be a commentator and not in any way be or be seen to be a political player”.
He claimed the LNP had a “lack of respect for people’s rights and for due process”.
As former federal court judge Doug Drummond, who led the prosecution of Queensland’s corrupt police chief Terry Lewis and dozens of others after the 1989 Fitzgerald inquiry before serving as the watchdog’s chief in the early 2000s, has said, publishing criticisms of pollies is justified in some circumstances.
Borbidge lobs into campaign
Former Queensland Nationals Premier Rob Borbidge (now a registered and active lobbyist for Damian Power’s GovStrat) will launch LNP candidate Nelson Savanh’s campaign for the Brisbane Labor seat of Ferny Grove at the local bowlo next month.
Borbidge – and the LNP more generally – reckon Savanh (the former vice-president of the Young Libs and until recently a registered lobbyist himself) has a red-hot chance in the electorate, held by Agriculture Minister Mark Furner on 10.97 per cent.
And the ex-Premier thinks the October 26 election is the LNP’s “to lose,” telling Chooks, “it’s difficult for fourth-term governments anyway, let alone long-serving governments that have had their fair amount of difficulty”.
“My view is that, notwithstanding an event of great magnitude that no one seems to be able to predict, you would have to think that the government is in a lot of trouble.”
But Borbidge’s role in the campaign will have to be severely curtailed, in line with new laws banning dual-hatting by lobbyists moonlighting as political campaigners.
Campaign launches and handing out how-to-vote cards is allowed, but playing a “substantial role” in a campaign is not, as Santo Santoro found out the hard way recently.
“Obviously (the law change) means that my involvement will have to be limited in terms of the conduct of the campaign, but that doesn’t stop me from attending campaign launches, and quite frankly, if a former Premier can’t attend campaign functions for his own political party in Queensland, I might as well go to Putin’s Russia,” Borbidge says.
According to integrity commission records, Borbidge last month lobbied the director-general of state development Graham Fraine on behalf of property developers Robina Land Corporation (specified in the records as a three-minute phone call) and also met LNP transport and main roads spokesman Steve Minnikin twice to shill for paying clients John Holland and QTECTIC.
Borbidge and other GovStrat lobbyists took Minnikin to the Queensland Club on July 2 for an audience with a handful of infrastructure giant John Holland’s execs, while Power and Borbidge took QTECTIC boss Mick Chadwick for a meeting in Minnikin’s electorate office. (QTECTIC was awarded the $4.4bn QLD government contract to build new generation rollingstock trains).
The purpose of all three contacts has been described as “commercial in confidence,” that handily opaque go-to phrase for governments and lobbyists alike.
Borbidge says he sought advice from the LNP about continuing as a member of the party’s disputes committee, and whether it constitutes the conduct of a political campaign “and the advice was that it didn’t”.
He tells Chooks he only recently finalised a disputes matter for the party but wouldn’t divulge the details, and reckons he’ll step away from any further disputes committee work now the election is nearing.
Season’s greetings
All politics is local, and for Labor MP Jimmy Sullivan, it’s neighbourhood-mailbox local.
Chooks was slipped a letter penned by Sullivan, the first-term MP for Stafford in Brisbane’s inner-north, to honour the auspicious occasion of a constituent’s recent 21st birthday.
Apparently the young voter was bemused, to say the least, to receive a missive from Sullivan reflecting at length about 2003, their “turbulent” year of birth, starting with his reflections on the Iraq war and the Columbia space shuttle explosion which killed seven astronauts.
What’s more festive on the morning of your 21st birthday than a letter from your local pollie expounding “the beginning of the Iraq war seeing thousands of Australians take to the streets in protest (and) also … one of the worst civilian space disasters … the disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia”?
Thankfully, Sullivan’s letter swiftly shifted to lighter 2003 events: the premiere of Finding Nemo, the Brisbane Lions winning the AFL premiership, and Guy Sebastian defeating Shannon Noll in the inaugural Australian Idol final (still controversial, to be honest).
So who else gets letters in Sullivan’s Stafford domain, which he holds by a (traditionally safe) margin of 11.88 per cent?
Sullivan is guarded about the specifics of his sophisticated political tactics, but tells Chooks he does get a kick out of marking significant occasions in his electorate, such as high school graduations, 50th wedding anniversaries, and 100th birthdays.
“I enjoy trying to recognise constituents’ milestones and enjoy engaging with them in that way. Small touches can mean a lot when people can be a bit cynical about politics,” Sullivan says.
Spotted #1
Embattled Townsville mayor Troy Thompson was spotted in the halls of Queensland parliament this week.
Thompson – who had his 2021 ban from the parliamentary precinct overturned when he became mayor in March – was part of a Townsville Enterprise delegation.
After Thompson was caught out embellishing details of his military service, and was referred to the corruption watchdog, Chooks hears ministers insisted he be kept out of meetings with them this week.
Spotted #2
Peter Applegarth – the former Queensland Law Reform Commission head who drafted the state’s voluntary assisted dying laws – had his judicial valedictory ceremony in Brisbane on Friday morning.
His Honour was made Queen’s Counsel in 2000 and appointed to the Supreme Court in 2008.
Applegarth’s final case is dealing with defamation proceedings brought by Shandee Blackburn’s ex-boyfriend John Peros against Nationwide News, as publishers of The Australian.
Peros is also suing Shandee’s sister Shannah Blackburn, and national chief correspondent Hedley Thomas over comments made during Episode 13 of the Shandee’s Story podcast.
Applegarth is expected to hand down a Judgement in the coming weeks about whether the episode caused “serious harm” to Peros’s reputation. If he finds the podcast episode did not seriously harm Peros, his defamation claim collapses. If Applegarth finds serious harm occurred, the matter will head to trial.
You can read more about the case here.
From the archives
The countdown to the start of the election campaign is underway (38 days to go!) and the Chooks have been taking a peek back through our photo archives in preparation for the four-week stint on the hustings.
We’ve been getting such kick out of the old snaps, we thought we would share some of the best campaign photos with our readers over the next few weeks.
Today we have the moment Pauline Hanson used her protective service officers to kick out then-Queensland Times reporter Simon Kelly and photographer Kym McEwan-Watson from a press conference at her Ipswich electorate office during the 1998 Queensland election campaign. Hanson apparently did not like the coverage her local candidate was receiving. As the then-Queensland Times editor Mark Hinchliffe quipped, it was ironic that a party which purported to stand for free speech was against freedom of the press.
Below is a young Mike Kaiser with the political world at his feet having just won the seat of Woodridge at a by-election in 2000. His state parliamentary career didn’t last long, resigning in 2001 over his involvement in a vote-rigging rort in the 1980s. Kaiser is now Queensland’s most senior public servant, heading Steven Miles department.
And finally, here is the masterclass on political advancing that then Opposition leader Lawrence Springborg – now the president of the Liberal National Party –unwittingly dished out toall aspiringstaffers during the 2004 Queensland election campaign – don’t stand in front of signs that make you look silly.
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