Sarah Elks
Mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s top execs fill LNP coffers
G’day readers and welcome – after a week’s hiatus – to this bumper edition of Feeding the Chooks, your unmissable insight into the fierce, fraught and fantastical field of Queensland politics.
Gina backs LNP
Mining mogul Gina Rinehart’s executives have been busy lining the pockets of Queensland’s Liberal National Party ahead of the October state election.
Hancock Prospecting’s CEO Garry Korte tipped $10,000 into the coffers last week after the CEO of operations Gerhardus Veldsman gave $10,000 late last month, both donations are listed as “non-political”. A third donation from Hancock’s CFO Jabez Huang for $5000 lobbed earlier this month, but seems to have disappeared from the Electoral Commission’s disclosure log.
And Rinehart’s minions are not the only ones handing over dollars to the LNP.
With leader David Crisafulli on track to deliver the first change in government in the state for almost a decade, according to the latest Newspoll, the party’s electoral war chest is being stuffed to the brim.
As Chooks revealed in the news pages this week, donation records show the LNP has raked in $1.63m in less than five months since Steven Miles replaced former premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, compared to Labor’s $295,573 in that period.
If Crisafulli fails to pull off the win, perhaps he could ask Rinehart for a job.
Adam Giles, the Northern Territory’s former Country Liberal Party chief minister, took up a gig with Rinehart in 2017, shortly after losing his re-election bid.
Rinehart has previously lamented Queensland’s lack of superyacht marinas, so she may be hoping an LNP government will help find more places to park big boats - just not hers.
It was in 2021, and at a Brisbane lunch event attended by then Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and former LNP leader Deb Frecklington, that a video starring Rinehart on the deck of a superyacht aired, with the billionaire bemoaning the difficulties of finding a safe haven along the Queensland coast.
Rinehart’s people have been in touch with Chooks to clarify that the mining magnate doesn’t actually own a superyacht, or any yacht at all, and the vision was probably shot on a (very, very big) charter boat.
“Her statement about more marinas a couple of years ago was more about attracting other wealthy people who do own them to Queensland as a tourist destination to support the Queensland economy,” Rinehart’s spinner tells Chooks.
No crew for sinking ship
Have Labor’s true believers lost hope that Premier Steven Miles can win the October state election?
An internal memo from ALP HQ – leaked to Chooks – reveals the party is struggling to recruit candidates even in seats it considers “winnable” in Brisbane and on the Gold and Sunshine Coasts.
The dire situation means Labor is at risk of failing to field a full 93 candidates, forcing ALP state secretary Kate Flanders to issue an “urgent call for expressions of interest” for candidates in six LNP-held “winnable” seats and 19 other seats held by the LNP, One Nation and the Katter’s Australian Party.
“The administrative committee is urgently seeking candidates to field a full team of 93 candidates in October. Women members are especially encouraged to submit EOIs. If you have thought about running but weren’t sure, please contact (Flanders),” the memo to all ALP members on April 9 reads.
The “winnable” seats so far without Labor candidates are Everton (held by the LNP’s Tim Mander on 2.24 per cent), Glass House (LNP’s Andrew Powell, 1.58 per cent), Whitsunday (LNP’s Amanda Camm, 3.26 per cent), Theodore (LNP’s Mark Boothman, 3.3 per cent), Mermaid Beach (LNP’s Ray Stevens, 4.39 per cent) and Oodgeroo (where Amanda Stoker has replaced retiring LNP MP Mark Robinson as the LNP candidate, 4.48 per cent).
After a bruising loss of the supposedly safe Labor seat of Ipswich West, and a 21 per cent swing against Labor in Inala, in last month’s by-elections, and a grim Newspoll, Labor members are telling Chooks the mood inside the party is bleak.
One Labor insider says it’s not surprising there’s a scramble to find candidates.
“Timing is everything in politics and 2024 is not necessarily looking like our time. Why on earth would you put your hand up now?”
But another senior Labor source says there is still a “level of hope” among MPs with six months to go.
“I think people have been encouraged by his (Miles’) leadership, he is very inclusive of caucus and cabinet,” they tell Chooks.
“Elections are always difficult to win, not to mention when you are seeking a fourth term, but we are still in with a fighting chance.”
In lean times, Young Labor members have been shoehorned into running in conservative seats in regional and remote areas.
As a 22-year-old, now Senator Anthony Chisholm ran as Labor’s candidate in the western Queensland electorate of Warrego at the 2001 state election (he came last on primary vote behind National Party, Independent and One Nation candidates).
Labor state secretary Kate Flanders tells Chooks the urgent call-out was not a sign that members had lost faith in Miles’s chances of an October victory, but “more a matter of finding candidates who are the best fit for each electorate”.
By the end of this week, Labor expects to have endorsed 64 candidates, streets ahead of the LNP which has formally endorsed just 25. State director Ben Riley only opened nominations for the party’s incumbent seats this week (32 of the 35 seats still need endorsed candidates), with nominations closing on April 24.
Big, big energy
Energy wars are set to dominate the agenda when Queensland parliament returns on Tuesday after a three-week Easter break.
Debate will kick-off on the renewable energy target bill which enshrines in law Labor’s plan to dump coal-fired power by 2035 and have 80 per cent of the state’s electricity generated by renewables.
The draft laws, expected to pass by Thursday, mandate that the public ownership of energy assets does not drop below 54 per cent and guarantees jobs for 900 workers at government-owned coal-fired power stations during the transition to renewables.
The state Liberal National Party has no energy policy and has so far refused to say whether or not it would back Labor’s renewable or emission reduction targets.
Queensland LNP leader David Crisafulli has repeatedly snubbed Peter Dutton’s push to repurpose decommissioned coal-fired power plants for nuclear power stations, saying the plan would never get off the ground without bipartisan support at a federal level.
But that won’t stop Labor claiming that a state LNP government would put “nuclear reactors on our beaches”.
While the government is set to go on the attack over the LNP’s energy policy black hole, the opposition will be targeting the lack of detail around the state’s $62bn energy plan.
The plan, unveiled in 2022, is completely reliant on the proposed Pioneer-Burdekin Pumped Hydro project going ahead.
But it is still being subjected to detailed engineering and environmental investigations and the government may not make a final investment decision until after the state election.
As Chooks previously revealed, the government is still waiting on a detailed analytic report which will say how much the $12bn project has blown out by.
Fight them on the beaches
Knives are being sharpened down on the southern Gold Coast after Liberal National Party HQ finally locked in a preselection date for the federal seat of McPherson.
The prized blue ribbon seat is up for grabs after five-term MP and former minister Karen Andrews made the shock announcement that she would retire at the next election.
Four fellas will go head-to-head in the preselection battle on April 21, after no women nominated.
With all four blokes passing the party’s vetting process (though that doesn’t seem too hard these days after teardrop-tattooed Brock Alexander sailed through without issue), the candidates have been given the green-light to bombard McPherson preselectors with campaign material.
As Chooks revealed last year, Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 fund is on the hunt for a community-backed candidate to support, so it is no surprise all four LNP hopefuls are branding themselves as locals with strong ties to the community.
King & Wood Mallesons solicitor Leon Rebello, who moved to the Gold Coast a couple years ago, is selling himself to the membership base as the “community candidate” and positioning his messaging around the Teal threat.
“Karen’s retirement has given us an opportunity for long term renewal but it comes with a significant risk. For the first time, the teals have set their sights on Queensland and McPherson will be ground zero,” he wrote in a letter to preselectors.
Andrews’ former staffer and rural fire brigade officer Ben Naday, also notes the Teal wave stalking the state.
“Having grown up locally and volunteered extensively, Ben has deep community ties in McPherson which is critical to defeat the Teals/Greens,” his brochure read.
In his material, Coles public affairs chief and former Barnaby Joyce staffer Adam Fitzgibbons calls himself a “long-term local” and spruiks his family’s 90-year ties to the southern Gold Coast.
In his campaign video David Stevens – who worked as a senior adviser in John Howard’s cabinet policy unit in the 1990s and later as a partner at EY in Dubai – says he chose the Gold Coast as his new home because there is “no big government, no big unions, no big tech, no big businesses running the show here”.
Our spies on the ground say the race is tight. Rebello and Naday are the frontrunners, Fitzgibbons is a dark horse and Stevens is considered an outside chance. Of the two biggest branches in McPherson, Rebello has the numbers stitched up in Burleigh and Naday has Currumbin locked down.
Party members usually put a lot of weight on how each candidate performs in their speech to preselectors so it will come down to the wire next Sunday.
Stay tuned.
Ooh ahh James McGrath
Queensland LNP Senator James McGrath, pilloried (and feared) by the party’s conservative base as the leader of the LNP’s moderate wing and closely aligned to the ascendant Young LNP, is a seasoned campaigner.
McGrath was famously the deputy campaign director for Boris Johnson’s London mayoral campaign – before he was forced to quit after suggesting Black critics of BoJo could return to the Caribbean – and ran the Maldivian Democratic Party’s national presidential campaign in 2008. (McGrath last month shared a photo of his blond mop during that campaign, apparently bleached by the tropical island sun).
He also orchestrated Campbell Newman’s successful 2012 election campaign in QLD, and the Country Liberal Party leader Terry Mills’s ascent to the top job in the Northern Territory in the same year.
Chooks hears McGrath is one of the members of the LNP’s high-powered state campaign committee for the upcoming October election, alongside state leader David Crisafulli, Crisafulli’s chief of staff Richard Ferrett, deputy leader Jarrod Bleijie, state director Ben Riley, Nationals Senator Susan McDonald, party president Lawrence Springborg, former state director Lincoln Folo, party treasurer Rob Pitt, chair of the policy standing committee Sue Quinn, and party vice-presidents Joshua Auld and Doug Hawkes.
McGrath is also popping up in LNP branches to “talk all things campaigning” to grassroots members.
We’re sure all of this extra-curricular party work is squeezed into McGrath’s spare time.
Chris Sarra’s new gig
Indigenous education expert Chris Sarra – Queensland’s 2010 Queensland Australian of the Year – is the latest heavy-hitter to be recruited into Mike Kaiser’s Department of Premier and Cabinet, in a job that’s been created just for him.
As of January, Sarra is the chief executive of the Office of First Nations Engagement and Innovation in Kaiser’s department, after just nine months as the director-general of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries.
The founder of the Stronger Smarter Institute, and a former principal of the Cherbourg State School, Sarra didn’t stay as DG of the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships (a job he’d had for nearly five years) after Leeanne Enoch was shuffled into the ministerial role by then Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk in May last year.
So what’s the new role, why is it in the Premier’s department rather than Enoch’s, and does it have anything to do with the government’s ongoing (but stalled) move towards treaties with the state’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups.
The office has no online presence to speak of, apart from appearing on Sarra’s LinkedIn profile, so Chooks asked the department. “The Office is new and led by Dr Chris Sarra. It is focused on dialogues between First Nations leadership and (the) Queensland government. The Office does not have a specific role to do with Treaty.”
Are Live Nation’s arena hopes still alive?
Labor lobbying firm Anacta lost a high-profile client from its books in Queensland this month: Live Nation, the international promoter for blockbuster live music acts like Harry Styles, U2, Coldplay, and Pink.
The company has been locked in a long-running battle with Queensland mover-and-shaker and stadium supremo Harvey Lister’s ASM Global over the $2.5bn proposed Brisbane Arena project, which is to host the 2032 Brisbane Olympics swimming events.
Live Nation wants to build and manage the federally-funded venue, while ASM Global – operator of Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, and venues in Sydney and Perth – is vying to run the 17,000-seat arena.
Lobbying register records show Live Nation dropped Anacta as its Queensland lobbyist on April 3, after hiring the firm all the way back in August 2019. Anacta declared just eight instances of contact with the government on behalf of Live Nation, all in 2021.
The recent Quirk review recommended relocating the pricey Brisbane Arena from its proposed site over the Roma Street Parklands; keeping the venue in its current proposed location would have blown the cost out from $2.5bn to $4bn.
So does this mean the international music promoter is dipping out of the race for the Brisbane Arena?
Not so, according to Live Nation’s spokeswoman, who tells Chooks: “Live Nation, along with its consortium partners OVG and Plenary, is still very much interested in the Brisbane Arena project and a contestable process”.
London calling
Speaking of Anacta, black-listed Labor lobbyist David Nelson – a founding director of Anacta alongside former ALP state secretary Evan Moorhead – is hamstrung from helping to run Queensland Labor’s election campaigns, after a damning integrity report from public sector reviewer Peter Coaldrake warned against lobbyists moonlighting as political campaigners.
Nelson, Moorhead and rival lobbyist Cameron Milner were all banned in 2022 from lobbying the Queensland government until after this year’s state election because of their role running Annastacia Palaszczuk’s successful 2020 re-election campaign at the same time as lobbying for their private clients.
So where is Nelson now? London, joining the general election campaign for UK Labour and its leader Keir Starmer. Chooks hears Nelson will be working on research and advertising for Starmer’s quest to be installed in 10 Downing Street after the election – which must be held no later than January 28 next year.
Moorhead’s also ruled himself out of helping to run Steven Miles’s campaign, freeing himself to personally lobby a future Miles Labor government – should it eventuate.
Dick’s dollars
When Cameron Dick replaced Jackie Trad as treasurer in 2020 he turned penny pinching into an art, ordering the bureaucracy to cut down on “glossy” publications, print documents in black-and-white not colour, and ensure annual reports had “less pictures”.
The deputy premier – who still has a $1 bill from his first pay packet in 1982 – has kept up his frugal ways with the latest ministerial hospitality figures showing he spent just $45.50 on “light refreshments for minor meetings” in the back half of last year.
The biggest spender on hospitality was Police Minister Mark Ryan who splashed $1985 in the same period, followed by dumped Transport Minister Mark Bailey at $869, Agriculture Minister Mark Furner at $757, then former premier Annastacia Palaszczuk who spent $697.
So what sort of “light refreshments” did Ryan dish out? He tells Chooks most of the cash went to a “thankyou” meeting for his departmental staff after estimates last year where coffee and sandwiches were served.
Farmer keeps it all in the family
Education and Youth Justice Minister Di Farmer has employed a new chief of staff: her ex-husband’s first wife, Cathi Collier. A former senior state and federal government adviser, Collier has been a director of both Equestrian Queensland and Equestrian Australia, and now is Farmer’s top strategist in the thorny youth justice policy area ahead of the October election.
Farmer is the state MP for Bulimba, and in the same south Brisbane neighbourhood, Lucy Collier (the minister’s stepdaughter and Collier’s daughter) has just been sworn in again as Labor’s councillor for the Morningside ward.
Spotted #1
A big welcome back to Amy MacMahon. The Greens MP for South Brisbane returned to work this week, after suffering head injuries in a terrible car accident in February, for which the other driver has been charged for allegedly speeding through a red light.
MacMahon immediately leapt back into the political fray, declaring she’s ready to lead the Greens’ charge alongside Maiwar MP Michael Berkman into the state seats of Cooper (Labor, 10.5 per cent), McConnel (Labor, 11.1 per cent), Clayfield (LNP, 1.6 per cent), and Greenslopes (Labor, 13.2 per cent) at the October election.
The Greens are expected to have candidates in the field in their target seats imminently.
While it’s worth noting that the Greens are notoriously optimistic about their electoral chances, consider yourselves warned, Jonty Bush, Grace Grace, Tim Nicholls, and Joe Kelly.
Spotted #2
Fancy sneakers may have become acceptable footwear for Australian pollies these days (see: Tanya Plibersek, Fiona Simpson) but Gold Coast MP Ros Bates may be taking the “only in Queensland” dress code too far.
Bates rocked up to a recent press conference outside Parliament House in a pair of thongs.
Did she forget she has left the golden beaches of the coast for the red carpeted halls of parliament? No. Bates tells Chooks she usually has a spare pair of heels ready to go in the back seat of her car, but they had mysteriously disappeared.
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