‘Too hard’: Palaszczuk concedes green hydrogen failure
How times change for hydrogen-hyping Palaszcuk
Rewind four years to 2021, when then-premier Annastacia Palaszczuk declared Queensland would be at the forefront of a “hydrogen revolution” to help the state hit its renewables target of 50 per cent by 2030.
Palaszczuk gushed that hydrogen would be the “secret to our long-term success,” proposing and promoting the $12.5bn Central Queensland Hydrogen Project – which was terminated in recent days with the collapse of the international consortium developing the Gladstone plant and pipeline.
In February, LNP Treasurer David Janetzki rejected state-owned corporation Stanwell’s request for $1.6bn for the next stage of the project.
Fast-forward to this week, and Palaszczuk is telling Sky News – in the first of what will be weekly spots on the news channel – that she backs the LNP administration’s decision to sound the death knell on what was one of her pet projects.
Some turnaround for the former Labor leader, now an international ambassador for the Smart Energy Council, the peak body for renewable energy in Australia.
“Hydrogen is proving to be in the too hard basket,” she said. “The price is not right.”
“Hydrogen is just too hard at the moment and until those prices come down, I don’t think we’ll see those projects taking off the ground.”
Pro bono Professor Palaszczuk
When not on Sky News, Annastacia Palaszczuk – who quit as Premier in December 2023 after a not-so-subtle shove from union and factional heavyweights – is moonlighting as a politics lecturer at her alma mater, the University of Queensland.
Chooks has been told that in the almost two months since taking on the title of Adjunct Professor in the School of Political Science and International Studies, the former Premier has given several lectures to undergraduate, postgraduate and future students about Australian politics, political leadership, public policy and governance.
And what’s more, Palaszczuk’s doing it entirely for free; UQ says it’s a voluntary position.
But for those holding out hope for a copy of Palaszczuk’s long-promised book in this Christmas’s Secret Santa draws, prepare to be sorely disappointed.
Chooks has discovered that HarperCollins has decided to push back the publication of Palaszczuk’s memoir from September until early 2026, due to scheduling conflicts for the book’s ghostwriter, a yet unnamed best-selling female author.
A post-Springborg LNP?
David Crisafulli’s Liberal National Party faces a power vacuum at the top of its organisational wing, as longtime president and father of the merged party Lawrence Springborg prepares to exit.
Chooks hears Springborg is tipped to announce his departure as early as next Friday’s state executive meeting, a move that could ignite a fight for the reins of power.
There’s long been chatter that the former Opposition leader, Newman government Health Minister, and current mayor of Goondiwindi has been eyeing an escape route, but now – after seeing the party through local government, state and federal elections all in the last 18 months – Springborg has apparently made up his mind.
If Springborg does drop the bombshell at the exec meeting, it’ll add to the drama of the gathering. Already on the agenda are branch complaints about LNP HQ top official Matt Chadwick and more than $2m in printing directed to Chadwick’s former family business, with which The Australian has revealed he and his mother are still financially linked.
The LNP’s factions are already plotting for the post-Springborg world. Smart money is on serving vice-president Doug Hawkes – managing director of Structural Integrity Engineering – to step into the president’s shoes, but eyes are also on Adam Stoker, the lawyer husband of state MP Amanda Stoker, member of the LNP state executive, and current chair of the LNP’s metro south branch.
Stoker’s been active in recent months, pressing the flesh at the LNP’s recent Latitudes North north Queensland conference in Townsville and showing up at all sorts of party events, sparking chatter he will vie for president or vice president.
But Chooks wouldn’t be surprised if there are some left-field presidential contenders. After all, a whole heap of MPs, staffers and hangers-on lost their jobs when the LNP was smashed at May’s federal election.
We’ll know soon enough. The party’s office-bearers will be locked in at its state convention next month.
Kempton manages expectations
When Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie re-signed the $7.1 billion Olympics funding deal with the feds this week, he went out of his way to remind his Brisbane audience that the benefits of the Games would be felt all over the state.
But not everyone is convinced. In fact, not even everyone in his Bleijie’s own LNP party room believes him.
Far north Queensland LNP MP David Kempton went rogue this week, telling his constituents in the seat of Cook not to expect much from the government over the next few years.
The recently revived pollie, who previously served as an assistant minister in the one-term Newman government before losing his seat in 2015, conceded to a Mareeba Chamber of Commerce lunch that “most of the budget expenditure for the next number of years will be directed towards the Olympic Games”.
“We didn’t bid for the Olympics but we need to make it work but it will suck out so many resources which means I have to lobby harder and I’ll need much more support from the community and the council to get things we need for this part of the world.”
“So, everything we get up here we will really have to struggle for.”
Kempton hedged that Mareeba – on the Atherton Tablelands, west of Cairns – “might” be able to get a sporting facility upgraded or a government-funded “beautification” of the railway station or the CWA toilet block.
Dream big, Dave.
Amid escalating tensions
Labor’s factions are on the brink of sewing up a deal that will see Steven Miles’s Left faction retain its dominance of the party’s conference floor.
Chooks can reveal that the planned statewide branch delegate elections will be cancelled – with one notable exception – after the Right, Left and Old Guard factions agreed to the three-year power-sharing agreement.
The party was about to open the ballots to elect its 212 branch delegates, split between Queensland’s 30 federal electorates, but the deal has put paid to all that messy internal democracy.
As one party insider tells Chooks: “It’s not great for democracy that rank and file members miss out on their one chance to have a say in the party”.
Branch delegates get to shape and vote on party policy on the floor of the QLD ALP’s annual state conference, which this year will be held in November.
But other Labor strategists say the factional stitch-up means the party won’t waste crucial energy on infighting when the “real enemy is the LNP”.
A Right figure tells Chooks the faction is “very very happy” with the deal, which gives their Labor Forum grouping a net gain of 10 delegate spots – an increase of about 14 per cent. (Though still very much in the minority.)
Federal Labor MP Shayne Neumann’s seat of Blair – based on Ipswich and surrounding rural areas – is the only electorate where a proper ballot will be held for branch delegates, which goes someway to demonstrate the internecine strife in the ALP’s Ipswich rank and file.
Neumann’s in the Right and his state “comrade” Ipswich MP Jennifer Howard this year defected from the Right to the Left, after her aborted attempt to challenge Neumann for federal preselection.
Also ahead of Labor’s November conference, Alex Scott’s Together union is increasing its share of union delegates, after it formally and fully affiliated with Labor when Scott decided he wanted to wield more power in the party after Annastacia Palaszczuk’s successors (the Left’s Miles and the Right’s Cameron Dick) were hand-picked by United Workers Union national political director Gary Bullock and the Australian Workers’ Union Queensland secretary Stacey Schinnerl.
Word is there’s friction in the Left, as Scott’s factional power grows and rubs up against Left convener Bullock.
Chooks’ spies tell us the relationship between the two men (and their unions) is somewhere between “competitive tension” and “an absolutely real power struggle”.
Photo finish for YLNP poll?
The LNP’s powerful youth wing – the Young LNP – is also gearing up for a changing of the guard at its convention next weekend.
Why do we care? Well, the baby conservatives punch above their weight in the party, and wield factional influence far beyond their years (membership of the YLNP is capped at 30; Young Labor members have to be 26 or younger).
And many are staffing Crisafulli government ministerial offices.
The battle to succeed current president Helen Craze (infrastructure policy adviser to Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie) is between sitting YLNP secretary Ben Kozij (policy adviser for Brisbane’s LNP Lord-Mayor Adrian Schrinner) and Samuel Chamberlain (a KPMG internal auditor, the Queensland co-ordinator of the Australian Catholic Students Association, and former staffer for federal LNP MP Henry Pike).
Then it’s Ryan McDonald (an assistant adviser to state Resources Minister Dale Last and former staffer for Senator James McGrath) versus Josie Drum for metro vice-president.
Hannah Treston (a dentist and graduate lawyer who currently works as a District Court judge’s associate in Cairns) will face off against Rockhampton horse trainer Tom Smith for the position of regional VP.
Those in the know tell us the first candidate in each of those brackets is aligned with the McGrath/moderate/centre-right faction, while the challengers are viewed as those connected to the party’s more conservative anti-HQ wing, though the description of those groupings are always hotly contested.
Smith’s ran afoul of the Queensland Racing Integrity Commission recently after being caught on video hitting yearling Better Storm in July 2024, in an apparent attempt to get the horse to swim in a training pool.
Hearing documents reveal Smith punched the horse in the jaw with his closed fist, and struck it repeatedly with a length of poly pipe.
In April, he was fined $5000 and had his licence suspended for six months – a sentence wholly suspended for 12 months.
The Racing Appeals Panel noted that Smith has staff – including an apprentice jockey and a stablehand- who rely on him for their livelihoods, but declared it was “difficult to downplay what is shown in the video footage”.
“This yearling was handled very badly particularly with the stallion chain,” the panel found.
In a separate case in April, Smith pleaded guilty after a horse he trained, Scrub Chain, tested positive to the prohibited substance cobalt after it won a February race at the Rockhampton Jockey Club.
Smith was again fined $5000 and his licence to train was suspended for 12 months – but that punishment was wholly suspended for two years.
Chooks hears there are 139 YLNP delegates eligible to vote, and observers are expecting some of the races to be neck-and-neck.
With a whimper, not a bang
Still on the inner-workings of the LNP, this year’s Metro North annual general meeting was a tepid affair, compared to last year’s blockbuster.
In May last year, former party powerbroker and on-again off-again lobbyist Santo Santoro was blocked in his controversial bid to join the party’s executive by vying for the position of Metro North regional chair.
Santoro was deemed ineligible because of rules banning “dual hatting” – holding a substantial political party campaign role while also being a lobbyist – and sitting vice-chair Tony Gleeson was elected into the top job, after a chaotic meeting in which LNP MP Tim Nicholls moved a motion against his own party HQ.
This time around, Gleeson was re-elected in a much more staid circumstances, defeating challenger and former LNP head of corporate relations Micheal Leighton 122 votes to 96.
Chooks hears Leighton called for earlier preselections and better vetting – after the party’s disastrous picking of teardrop-tattooed former jailbird Brock Alexander as a candidate for the Brisbane City Council elections last year. Gleeson appealed for stability and won the night.
Santoro was spotted in the back of the room, wearing a jaunty hat variously described as a beret and a flat cap.
Gleeson’s ally Ray Sawyer was voted in as secretary, after previously serving as branch treasurer. Sawyer’s obviously had a change of political heart, after a couple of stints as a federal candidate for the Katter’s Australian Party about a decade ago.
State versus State
The rugby league-mad David Crisafulli has a selfish reason for hoping the Maroons beat the Blues at Wednesday’s State of Origin decider in Sydney.
You see, Crisafulli has made a high-stakes bet with his NSW counterpart Chris Minns that the losing premier would film a tourism ad for the winning state.
“I can just see that handsome Chris Minns in his budgie smugglers in Cairns, I can just see it now,” Crisafulli told an American Chamber of Commerce in Australia lunch on Friday.
“And I have no desire to stand in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and tell people it’s great.”
Go Queensland.
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G’day readers and welcome to the latest edition of Feeding the Chooks, your must-read peek behind the curtain of what’s really going on in Queensland politics.