Lydia Lynch
Queensland’s election ‘soft campaign’ launches this weekend
G’day readers and welcome to the latest edition of Feeding the Chooks, your weekly insight into what’s really going on in Queensland politics.
Backbench Stoker?
David Crisafulli may have catapulted straight into Campbell Newman’s cabinet after the 2012 election, but the LNP leader won’t be offering the same kind of promotions to newbies if the party wins next month’s election.
Crisafulli this week ruled out any frontbench reshuffle post-poll.
“The team I am taking to the election is the team we will have after the election, if Queenslanders give us the privilege of governing and those team members are all returned,” he said.
There is plenty of concern in senior ranks of the LNP that there is a lot of “dead weight” in the 19-member shadow cabinet who don’t deserve a ministry just because they had slogged it out in opposition.
“Some of the LNP candidates that are probably going to win their seats are far, far more talented,” one LNP source said.
MPs have privately told Chooks that a reshuffle is inevitable, and necessary, to bring more women onto the frontbench (there are six women at the moment).
The top contenders are Amanda Stoker – the former senator who served as assistant attorney-general in Scott Morrison’s federal government – and Brisbane’s former deputy mayor Amanda Cooper.
LNP insiders privately question how Crisafulli could possibly justify denying frontbench spots to Stoker and Cooper.
Cooper, the erstwhile vice-president of the LNP, quit her cushy gig on council to contest the seat of Aspley at the 2020 election, but missed out.
Labor Transport Minister Bart Mellish holds Aspley, on Brisbane’s northern fringe, on a tight 5.2 per cent margin.
The LNP’s star candidate at this election, Rebecca Young, is also considered a hot chance for a cabinet position if she can win the seat of Redlands from Labor’s Kim Richards.
Go time
It’s on.
Queensland’s first four-year fixed parliamentary term is over and the campaign has begun ahead of the October 26 election.
Both the Labor government and the Liberal National Party opposition are wasting no time, and certainly not waiting for the writs to be issued on September 30, to hit the hustings this weekend.
David Crisafulli’s predicted path to power will shift up a gear with this Sunday’s unveiling of his team’s campaign bus, emblazoned with its newly reworked slogan of the “Right Plan for Queensland” (a tweak on the previous banner of the Right Priorities for Queensland).
In what is being described as a soft campaign opening, the bus is expected to head north to the promised lands of Labor-held regional seats that even the ALP has privately conceded are likely to fall.
Despite successive public and internal party-polling showing Labor is on the nose, as well as this year’s by-election loss of the then government-held seat of Ipswich West in its heartland, the party’s leadership and some bright-eyed backbenchers believe there is a chance the government can hold on with a little help from their friends.
This week the call was put out by the unions and ALP for the true believers to join a “Knock for Queensland” army which will begin to fan out across the state in coming days.
After the Greens’ success with mass doorknocking of targeted electorates in the last state and federal campaigns, Steven Miles is hoping the red army’s march around the suburban streets of southeast Queensland will help convince voters to install the Labor government for a fourth consecutive term.
Labor is also hoping its “Fortress Brisbane”, where it holds 34 of 42 seats, will be further buttressed by Greens’ preferences after the ALP’s surprise reintroduction of compulsory preferential voting in 2016.
At a parliamentary soiree on Thursday night, to celebrate the end of the term, one senior Labor insider told Chooks that the LNP’s refusal to put the ALP last on its how-to-vote cards will make the election a lot tighter than it could be.
“In 2012 the LNP had its decapitation strategy to kill off all future leaders by putting the Greens ahead of Labor and that helped deliver its record wipe-out,” they said.
“But the LNP aren’t doing that this time around and Greens preferences will ultimately help quite a few Labor MPs hold on to their seats.”
Both major parties are in the final throes of their campaign prep including hustling for patsies to stand in electorates they have no hope of winning.
An email appeal went out during the week from Labor for candidates in nine remaining seats of Buderim, Kawana, Burnett, Lockyer, Southern Downs, Callide, Condamine, Warrego, Hinchinbrook.
Labor’s powerful admin committee this week endorsed Bauke Hovinga for Whitsunday, James Green for Toowoomba North, Susan Teder in Mirani, Georgia Heath for Traeger, Rebecca Humphreys in Gregory and Val Heward in Nanango.
The LNP is yet to announce candidates for Woodridge, Gladstone, Jordan, Ipswich and Stretton.
Crisafulli and Miles will face off in their first debate of the campaign in Brisbane on October 3. And negotiations are being finalised for the terms of engagement for the showdown, which will be televised live on Nine.
Living La Vida Local
Labor launched a fresh line of attack on David Crisafulli this week, accusing him of “secretly” living in Brisbane.
Chooks revealed back in 2021 that the Broadwater MP and his wife Tegan Crisafulli sold their Hope Island property on the Gold Coast for $2.35m, and then forked out $745,000 for a two-bedroom pad just near the LNP offices in downtown Brisbane.
Last year, the Tegan sold the apartment for $855,000 and bought another home in Bulimba in Brisbane for $1.03m.
Labor attack dog Cameron Dick took aim at Crisafulli this week, claiming he was being “a fraud’’ for saying he has been representing the Gold Coast while living in Brisbane.
“David Crisafulli is living a lie in Bulimba,” he said.
Chooks would like to point out that Dick does not live in his electorate of Woodridge, but in the neighbouring seat of Waterford (though he is pretty close to the boundary to be fair).
Annastacia Palaszczuk did not reside in her Brisbane seat of Inala either.
Labor’s MP for Capalaba in greater Brisbane’s outer southeast, Don Brown, asked his social media followers this week: “Should the Capalaba MP live in the electorate or in Brisbane?”
He followed up in the comments “I am proud to be a product of the Capalaba community” and later noted that a “Brisbane blow-in didn’t work for the LNP last election” and that his current opponent – Russell Field – lives in Brisbane, as did three of the last four LNP Capalaba candidates.
Field – who lives in Belmont, in the electorate of Chatsworth next to Capalaba – is a victims of crime advocate whose son Matthew Field, daughter-in-law Kate Leadbetter, and unborn grandchild were killed when they were hit by a teen driving a stolen car in 2021.
Brown’s previous social media comments that “youth crime is a media beat-up” prompted Field to challenge the Labor MP for Capalaba, the electorate where the tragedy occurred.
Brown tells Chooks his “Brisbane blow-in” comment was about his former LNP opponent and the post related to the “topical news of Crisafulli living in Bulimba”.
The Rennick ultimatum
The LNP issued an ultimatum to Gerard Rennick’s parliamentary staffers: either quit working for the renegade Queensland senator or be expelled from the party.
Rennick left the LNP last month following a tortured (and ultimately failed) battle to overturn a vote by state council members to boot him off the Senate ticket.
He is attempting to launch his own party, People First, and over at LNP headquarters, the knives are out.
Rennick’s staffers are taxpayer-funded and employed under the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act – not by the LNP.
But that hasn’t stopped the party issuing the warning.
The conservative senator tells Chooks that four of his five staff members have chosen to stay with him, including one who had been a member of the party for decades.
“This is why they got rid of me, because they couldn’t control me,” Rennick says.
“They talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. If anyone thinks the LNP believes in free choice, they’ve got another thing coming.”
LNP HQ points to a clause in the party’s constitution which states that: “Any member who state executive determines has actively assisted a candidate standing against an endorsed candidate of the party shall cease to be a member”.
Greens fight
They might be known for their look-at-me populist ideas but it seems the Greens’ latest pitch to create a state-owned mining company was not so popular with their own Jonno Sriranganathan.
The Greens candidate for lord mayor of Brisbane at March’s council election, Sriranganathan took to social media this week to challenge state MP Michael Berkman about the policy this week.
Commenting on Berkman’s Facebook post announcing the Greens would create a publicly owned company to mine critical minerals in the state’s northwest, Sriranganathan blasted the proposal as “colonialism disguised as social democracy”.
Sriranganathan, who has never been one to shy away from conflict, said any profits from the mining of stolen Aboriginal land should be returned to the rightful Aboriginal landowners.
Berkman quipped back in the comment section saying the hypothetical state-owned company would not mine anything without free, prior and informed consent of First Nations groups.
While Sriranganathan says that’s “all great stuff”, consent can’t really be given until Indigenous treaties are negotiated and “the injustices of colonisation have been reversed or fairly compensated”.
50 cent fare fan club
While we’re nattering on about Jonathan Sriranganathan, what does the Greens activist have in common with Steven Miles and federal Liberal MP for Petrie Luke Howarth?
They’re all enthusiastic advocates for the Labor government’s 50-cent public transport fare policy. As Chooks has reported in the past, Howarth raised the ire of his conservative colleagues when he endorsed the ALP’s six-month trial, while Miles – unsurprisingly – is using it to woo cash-strapped voters.
Sriranganathan told his followers he was “extremely grateful for affordable public transport” after catching a bus to take him the 15km from Mackay to Walkerston. He was in regional Queensland firming his opposition to the government’s Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro project.
And here’s a fun fact – guess how much Queensland taxpayers spend subsidising and administering every single bus, train, ferry and tram trip, even without the 50-cent fare splurge? A whopping $19.09 per passenger, per ride.
Gone troppo
Labor Speaker Curtis Pitt’s last-minute retirement revelation left ALP HQ flat-footed. The branch members in his electorate of Mulgrave didn’t even get a chance to vote on his replacement in the far north Queensland electorate because he left his announcement so late.
Enter the party’s powerful admin committee, which this week endorsed former Cairns councillor Richie Bates as the candidate over another, unnamed contender.
Interestingly, Bates’s endorsement rival wasn’t Pitt’s hand-picked choice: the actor and producer Aaron Fa’Aoso, a board member of Screen Queensland and SBS.
Pitt’s a film obsessive (he’s a self-confessed Marvel nerd and was Birch Carroll & Coyle cinemas regional marketing manager in a pre-politics life) and the smart money is on Pitt to nab a job linked to the industry after he leaves politics at next month’s election.
But back to Bates.
The Right faction is crowing because Bates is one of theirs, and Pitt defected to the Old Guard some time back.
In August 2020, Queensland’s council watchdog, the Councillor Conduct Tribunal, ordered Bates to make a “formal admission that he engaged in misconduct” for failing to declare his membership of the Australian Workers’ Union, and political donations from the AWU and Transport Workers’ Union, at meetings where the unions’ enterprise bargaining agreements with the council were discussed.
Chooks hears the misconduct findings against Bates were not deal-breakers for the admin committee in endorsing him as an ALP candidate.
Spotted
Local Facebook pages are often the bane of politicians' existence but the Tarragindi Community group proved a godsend to Mark Bailey this week.
The former minister, who was demoted to the backbench by Steven Miles in December, lost his bank card after it slipped out of his pocket when he was out and about in his electorate recently. A helpful neighbour found it, and posted a photo of Mark C Bailey’s card: “Does anyone know who this belongs to?”
A good Samaritan, but maybe not a politics tragic.
From the archives
Political spinners try desperately to control every aspect of an election campaign – making the capture of an awkward photo even more delectable for journalists. Here are some of our favourites from the archives this week.
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