Lobbyist schools Queensland Labor on negative campaigning
G’day readers, and welcome back to Feeding the Chooks, your peek behind the scenes of the mysterious, marvellous and murky world of Queensland politics. This is our first column back after a midwinter hiatus, so strap yourselves in.
Agent of Infection returns
He’s back.
The “Agent of Infection”, lobbyist and political muckraker Eamonn Fitzpatrick, has been schooling Queensland Labor HQ in the dark arts of digging dirt.
The former Sydney Morning Herald journalist was given the dubious agent moniker by the LNP ahead of the 2012 state election, for his prowess in feeding attack stories on Labor’s opponents while working for then premier Anna Bligh.
Fitzpatrick later served as a media adviser to prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard before setting up his own Sydney-based lobbying firm, now one of the busiest in NSW and Canberra.
Chooks had been told that Fitzpatrick had been engaged to work on Labor’s campaign ahead of the October 26 election.
ALP state secretary Kate Flanders disputes this, saying “not at this time” while admitting it may be possible closer to the poll.
But wait for it: Flanders, who Chooks acknowledges has always been a straight shooter in our dealings, says she brought in Fitzpatrick to HQ a little while back to do a workshop with her staff.
And what, pray tell, was the theme of the session? How to run negative messaging in a campaign.
No surprises there.
Since taking the top job last December, Steven Miles has attempted to redirect policy, rebrand Labor, rewrite history and shower voters with rebates.
But the loss of Ipswich West in the by-election in Labor’s heartland and successive polls indicate it hasn’t worked as well as he hoped.
So, when all else fails, go negative.
But Fitzpatrick’s involvement does raise a question and that relates to the “dual hatting” laws brought in to stop lobbyists from playing a “substantial role” in a campaign for a political party.
The laws came on the recommendation of the Coaldrake Inquiry which followed revelations by The Australian that three Labor-aligned lobbyists – Evan Moorhead, Cameron Milner and David Nelson – ran Annastacia Palaszczuk’s successful 2020 re-election campaign.
In the year after that campaign, their firms (along with Hawker Britton) secured 70 per cent of the meetings with the Palaszczuk government.
Talk about payback!
After working on Palaszczuk’s 2015 upset victory over Campbell Newman, Fitzpatrick — the then Sydney-based director of lobbyist, Hawker Britton — moved to Brisbane to reopen the lobbying firm in Queensland. Within a year, Hawker Britton had 30 clients — including Caltex, QBE Insurance, Motorola and developer Sunland — and later built its list to more than 60 companies.
Fitzpatrick was briefly registered as a lobbyist a few years back in Queensland, but no longer.
He couldn’t be reached for comment.
Albo saves?
Anthony Albanese has swooped in to save another one of his Queensland bloke MPs from their own party’s strict gender quota rules, backing backbencher and published novelist Graham Perrett to run again.
In fact, the PM has declared it’s “job done” for Labor’s affirmative action policy, now that he leads a government that’s majority women.
Chooks readers will recall the PM’s rescue mission for Blair MP Shayne Neumann, after state Labor assistant minister Jennifer Howard lobbed an expression of interest to challenge the veteran backbencher for the Ipswich seat.
Howard was forced to withdraw after Albanese intervened and declared Neumann – who he dumped from his frontbench as soon as he won government in 2022 – had his “full support” to run again.
If Albo was following the letter of the law (aka Labor’s affirmative action rules), two sitting male federal Queensland Labor MPs would have to give up their spots for women candidates at the next federal election; Neumann and Perrett have long been on the chopping block of gender equality.
Only one of Labor’s five Queensland seats is held by a woman, Aged Care Minister Anika Wells, and only one of Labor’s three state Senators is a woman, Nita Green.
Albanese is in Brisbane for a three-day candidate-announcing blitz, so Chooks took the opportunity to ask whether he had the same confidence that Perrett should remain as a candidate as he had in Neumann.
“I do, I think that whoever wants to recontest here in Queensland has my support,” Albanese said.
“With regard to affirmative action, I lead a government that’s the first government in history, which is majority female. Job done. We are the most diverse caucus in Australian political history.”
Albanese took a dig at the LNP, accusing it of just “selecting blokes”.
“I mean, it is unbelievable that they can’t find a single woman to replace people like (retiring McPherson MP) Karen Andrews, their Senate team.”
(The LNP in Queensland has so far preselected just one woman to contest a federal seat it does not hold, barrister Maggie Forrest in Ryan. And it has one female senator, Susan McDonald.)
Perrett – who impressively increased his margin at the last election from a skinny 1.9 per cent to a safe 9.09 per cent – didn’t get back to Chooks, but last time we asked, he said he wanted to recontest but was a “passionate believer in affirmative action”.
Until now, Labor insiders assumed Perrett would shuffle off into retirement to make way for former ALP state secretary Julie-Ann Campbell.
But has the PM’s intervention thrown Perrett a lifeline?
New LNP MP to exit
Darren Zanow was an immediate LNP hero when he secured an enormous swing to him in the Ipswich West by-election in March, winning the seemingly unwinnable seat deep in Labor heartland.
But Zanow will retire at the October 26 state election, Opposition leader David Crisafulli has revealed, after he was diagnosed with a brain condition called Microvascular Ischemic Disease,.
“Inside and outside parliament, Darren Zanow has fought all his life for the people of Ipswich,” Crisafulli said on Friday. “He now enters a new fight of his own after being diagnosed with (MID).”
“His time in parliament will end in October, but his character and generosity of spirit will be forever admired.”
Oodgeroo who?
Former LNP Senator Amanda Stoker has questioned the name of the electorate she’s trying to win at the October state election: Oodgeroo.
On Facebook, that hotbed of sensible political debate, one of Stoker’s followers asked about the seat moniker. “It’s the name adopted by Kath Walker, an indigenous poet. The ECQ changed the electorate’s name a few years ago. No disrespect to Ms Walker, but people knew what we were talking about more when it was called Cleveland.”
A Redland City Community Information page chided Stoker: “perhaps educate people then …”
Cleveland was abolished in the 2017 redistribution, and was named after Oodgeroo Noonuccal, the traditional name Walker chose in 1988 (Oodgeroo means paperbark tree and the Noonuccal are the traditional owners of North Stradbroke Island, or Minjerribah, where the poet grew up).
In 2017, the Electoral Commission of Queensland explained why it had decided to retain the name for the seat. “North Stradbroke Island (Minjerribah) which is entirely contained within the electorate was, in many ways, Oodgeroo’s spiritual home. Her contributions as an educator, poet and activist make her worthy of recognition.”
The Australian Dictionary of Biography describes Oodgeroo, who died in 1993, as “the nation’s much loved poet and activist” and says she was “direct, charismatic, quick-witted, and dignified … and taught the spirituality of her ancestors, responsibility for the earth, and the connection of all people”.
Pro-Labor Luke
Labor has an unlikely repeat supporter: federal Liberal National Party MP Luke Howarth. Chooks has previously noted Howarth’s enthusiastic backing of the Miles Labor government’s 50-cent public transport fare policy, and now, he’s put his money where his mouth is. An electronic billboard on the Deagon Deviation out to Redcliffe, in Howarth’s electorate of Petrie, in Brisbane’s outer northern suburbs, was changed on Thursday to say: “Income tax cuts. More money in your pockets. Luke Howarth MP”. Chooks understands it was changed to coincide with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s planned drive out to Dolphin stadium on Thursday night, to watch his beloved South Sydney Rabbitohs play the Redcliffe Dolphins (the local boys ended the PM’s Bunnies’ five-match winning streak).
But it did not have the desired niggle effect on Albo.
Still in Brisbane on Friday morning, Albanese name-checked Howarth’s billboard for advertising Labor’s tax cuts. “I thank the LNP for praising those tax cuts. It’s a pity they didn’t vote for them”.
Howarth told Chooks that Dutton and Co did vote for them, and that in his opinion, they were the LNP’s tax cuts, and he was going to take credit for them. “I’m 100 per cent claiming them. If the Coalition hadn’t legislated them initially, do you think that Albanese would have?”
“They are our tax cuts as far as I’m concerned.”
Howarth was disappointed not to see Albanese at the Rabbitohs game on Thursday night; he was apparently a late scratching.
Spotted up north
Mines Minister Scott Stewart had a visitor at his Townsville office this week: an anti-Labor mobile billboard funded by billionaire coal baron Chris Wallin.
The QCoal founder is sponsoring a third-party campaign ahead of the October 26 state election, protesting against Labor laws he insists discriminate against his workers.
Energy Resources Queensland, registered as a third party with the Electoral Commission of Queensland, is legally able to spend up to $1m on its statewide campaign.
As revealed by Chooks a few months ago, Wallin’s intervention was prompted by a Queensland government law change requiring QCoal’s Byerwen mine to shut down its miners’ camp and shift workers to the nearby town of Glenden by 2029.
Chooks understands the third-party campaign has been scaled down to just social media and billboards but plans to “come home strong” in September and October focusing on marginal Labor seats where mining families live, including Cairns, Barron River, Townsville (held by Stewart), Mundingburra, Thuringowa, Keppel, Mackay, Rockhampton, Nicklin and Caloundra.
Going, going, gone
It turns out LNP deputy leader Jarrod Bleijie is not just adept at Elvis impersonations (see: far too many previous Chooks columns). The crowd at the LNP convention gala dinner were treated to the above spectacle, captured for posterity by the LNP’s candidate for Inala, Trang Yen. Bleijie, wearing an inflatable pair of trousers and a blow-up horse, gallops around a dancefloor to Leroy Van Dyke’s 1962 ditty “The Auctioneer Song”.
Bleijie was the auctioneer for the evening, selling off such treasures as a pair of budgie smugglers signed by former PM Tony Abbott (sponsored by LNP Women) and a signed and framed Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen campaign poster (sponsored by the Young LNP).
When Chooks asked the Kawana MP to please explain, he replied: “The convention centre would not allow me to ride a real horse in, so I had to resort to other means whilst performing ‘The Auctioneer’ raising vital money to change the terrible Labor government in Queensland”.
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