Protests, policy and panhandling: ALP national conference in Brisbane
G’day readers, and welcome to Feeding the Chooks, your insight into the behind-the-scenes drama of Queensland politics. After a winter hiatus, this week’s column is reported by Michael McKenna, Sarah Elks, Lydia Lynch and Mackenzie Scott.
CONFERENCE CALL
Protests, policy and panhandling: Labor’s love-in is coming to Brisbane.
The first ALP national conference since before the pandemic, and the first in Queensland in 50 years promises to deliver more than the usual orchestrated pantomime.
Some in the Left faction are planning protests and a pugnacious debate over the Scott Morrison-conceived and Anthony Albanese-backed $386bn AUKUS submarine deal.
But Chooks has learned that beyond policy priorities, state and federal Labor leaders are also hoping to raise a bit of campaign coin at the conference later this month
For just $10,000, the well-heeled can buy a seat at a cosy boardroom dinner with Prime Minister Albanese and hometown Treasurer Jim Chalmers.
Chooks can reveal the Federal Labor Business Forum – the ALP’s national cash-for-access program – is holding the dinner with Albanese and Chalmers on the evening of Tuesday August 15.
The business-attire event – at an as-yet undisclosed location in the Brisbane CBD – starts at 6pm for pre-dinner drinks and costs a whopping $10,000 per ticket.
“Federal Labor Business Forum invites all members to join the Federal Labor Party in championing gender equality. We encourage equal representation when nominating your event guests,” the invitation reads.
Two nights later, there’s a cheaper party: a $550/head Labor Premiers’ Reception, co-hosted by the QLD ALP.
But all anyone is talking about is why Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was absent from the ‘guest of honour’ list of premiers when the first invitation went out.
Circulated by Queensland Labor’s director of business partnerships Whitney Luzzo-Kelly on July 26, the missive to business leaders spruiked a networking event with NSW Premier Chris Minns, SA Premier Peter Malinauskas, and WA Premier Roger Cook.
Luzzo-Kelly sold it as an “opportunity to meet and greet interstate Premiers” during the conference.
Where was Palaszczuk, given it’s her hometown, and the national conference is in QLD for the first time in half-a-century?
Her office couldn’t offer any insights.
Perhaps she was reticent to be seen at a cash-for-access event after she banned her ministers from attending them in July last year (a conviction that disappeared a few months ago when it became clear Labor wasn’t raising as much money as the LNP).
A week after the first invite, Luzzo-Kelly issued another, which trumpeted Palaszczuk as the top-billed Premier donors could pay to meet and greet.
RENNICK REDO
An internal review of the preselection contest that ousted Queensland’s sitting senator Gerard Rennick from the Liberal National Party Senate ticket at the next federal election will deliver its findings mid next week.
Chooks hears that an internal probe by a specially-convened “disputes committee” – made up of former Liberal president Bob Tucker, former Brisbane mayor Graham Quirk and lawyer Craig Ray – will soon recommend a recall of last month’s preselection for the third spot on the LNP senate ticket.
The probe is looking like it will recommend a recall of last month’s vote.
Members of the LNP’s state council who attended the July 7 preselection backed LNP treasurer Stuart Fraser 131 votes to Senator Rennick’s 128.
But Rennick complained about “voting irregularities” and named about five people who he and his allies spotted voting that he suspected shouldn’t have been given a ballot.
On Monday, The Australian revealed that Opposition leader Peter Dutton was even wrongly refused the chance to cast a proxy in his absence even though Nationals leader David Littleproud and Brisbane’s LNP Lord-Mayor Adrian Schrinner were allowed to have votes cast on their behalf despite also not attending.
Apparently, it came down to Dutton – who was going to vote for Rennick because he is a sitting senator - getting different advice from LNP HQ than was given to Littleproud and Schrinner, both supporters of Fraser.
Locking out the federal leader from a vote to save the political career of one of his party room members?
Unleash the conspiracy theorists!
But Chooks has been assured that issues with the vote is more of a “stuff-up” than any sort of Machiavellian scheme to sabotage Rennick.
Which then reminds Chooks of the timeless line first delivered by Bob Hawke after Andrew Peacock rolled John Howard: “If you can’t govern yourselves, you can’t govern the country”.
If the committee finds the preselection invalid the LNP will have to decide how to run the vote, which is likely to involve a call-out to the six candidates for the ticket’s third spot and the 400-or-so eligible State Council electors to come back and do it all again.
THE PRICE IS RIGHT
After months of grassroots griping, Labor has finally got its act together and will announce its candidate for Brisbane Lord Mayor on Sunday: lawyer Tracey Price.
As Chooks foreshadowed in June, Price is the party’s pick to take on the Liberal National Party’s incumbent Adrian Schrinner at the ballot box at the upcoming council elections in March.
Price will be endorsed by the QLD ALP’s all-powerful admin committee on Friday night, before the announcement of the Brisbane City Council election candidates at Holland Park on Sunday morning.
But it’ll be an uphill battle for Price and Co. Labor holds just five of Brisbane’s 26 council wards, and has been out of power in the city since former LNP mayor Campbell Newman’s victory over Labor’s Tim Quinn in 2004.
LAMING, HOBBS STOKE OODGEROO FIGHT
Chooks hears the brawl for LNP preselection in the bayside state seat of Oodgeroo is bruising.
The nominees are former LNP Senator Amanda Stoker, former federal MP for Bowman Andrew Laming, and an Anglican priest called Daniel Hobbs, with all three furiously pressing the flesh ahead of the yet-to-be-set branch vote.
There’s already been complaints to party HQ about campaign tactics and competing networking events. Stoker appeared at a “local women’s forum” hosted by her key backer, retiring Oodgeroo MP Mark Robinson, on Friday July 28, with the flyer describing her as “ex-senator, Sky News reporter and local mum”.
She has lived in the electorate since March.
A Chooks spy said there were more empty seats than attendees at the free cost-of-living forum, held at the Alexandra Hills Hotel.
Robinson and Stoker again popped up at a better-attended Christian Business Network breakfast in the Redlands on Friday morning, while Laming has been splitting his time between campaigning in Redlands - holding an “Ideas Dinner” at an Italian restaurant in Ormiston - and working in Cairns.
Laming pointedly posted on Facebook this week, crunching the numbers of election results in his old bayside seat of Bowman to claim that compared to the rest of the party’s vote in QLD, “Redlands shifted to an LNP stronghold after I arrived in 2001”.
“Where will it be in a decade do you reckon?”
Hobbs, who now works for former Howard government minister Larry Anthony’s lobbying firm SAS Consulting as a media consultant, is lower-profile, but some of Chooks’ sources say they wouldn’t be surprised if he sneaks up the middle and wins the preselection vote.
LOBBYING LOOPHOLES
The woman in charge of regulating Queensland’s lobbyists has warned that Annastacia Palaszczuk’s planned ban on political lobbyists moonlighting as election planners would be inconsistent with the findings from the damning Coaldrake report.
Integrity Commissioner Linda Waugh says legislation introduced to parliament by Palaszczuk in June has loopholes that could still allow lobbyists to shape election strategy, because the ban only relates to the election campaign and not the crucial period before the writs are issued.
Chooks wasn’t surprised Palaszczuk didn’t jump at the chance to strengthen the legislation when asked this week, given she falsely insisted for years that Labor lobbyists had no inside running with her government.
“Well, Professor Peter Coaldrake was consulted on these reforms and they are before a committee at the moment and we will look at what the committee recommends before government makes its final decision,” she said.
But what was surprising was the fact Opposition leader David Crisafulli refused to back Waugh’s calls to fix up the laws.
Crisafulli has been critical of the government’s so-called “integrity inferno,” particularly its relationship with the lobbyists who ran Labor election campaigns, including Evan Moorhead, David Nelson, and Cameron Milner.
Under the draft laws, the ban on lobbyists working on political campaigns would begin about one month before polling day, when writs are issued for an election.
Waugh says this is problematic given the majority of campaign strategy is formulated six to 12 months before the formal campaign begins.
When asked if he believed the ban should start up to a year before the formal election campaign begins, small target campaigner Crisafulli said: “Let’s have a look at what comes through the committee process and we will make a considered position after that”.
As Chooks revealed last year, the LNP has a longstanding relationship with campaigner-lobbyists Crosby Textor, and lobbyist and former Queensland Premier Rob Borbidge sat at the campaign committee table at the recent federal election.
POWER TRIP
Budget estimates hearings have started, that special period in the Queensland parliamentary year where ministers are supposed to be held to account and the government’s expenditure and effectiveness is meant to be examined.
If only the government MPs entrusted to chair the parliamentary committees would get out of the way.
Take Tuesday’s effort from Labor backbencher Linus Power, the chair of the economic and governance committee who has quite reputation for blocking scrutiny.
In Treasurer Cameron Dick’s session, Power repeatedly interjected as Opposition Treasury spokesman David Janetzki attempted to quiz Acting Under-Treasurer Maryanne Kelly about the government’s controversial royalties rise for coalmining companies.
Janetzki: “Acting Under Treasurer, has Treasury received any feedback from industry or capital markets in relation to increased investor concern for Queensland since that decision?”
Power: “Is the question whether businesses like paying more tax?”
Janetzki: “I do not need you to rephrase the question, Chair. That is completely disorderly. We have had to be lectured by you all day.”
Opposition Integrity spokeswoman Fiona Simpson: “Point of order, Chair. That is out of order.”
Janetzki: “It is a straightforward question.”
Power: “I do apologise. I was out of order, and I thank the member for Maroochydore for pointing that out. I probably should not do that and I respectfully thank you.”
It’s important to note here that committee chairs are paid an extra $60,000 a year on top of the base MP salary of more than $160,000.
This is the first time Chooks can remember a chair ruling themselves out of order.
SHE’S BARBIE. HE’S JUST (THE MEMBER FOR) KEN(NEDY).
Barbie-mania has swept the nation and far-north Queensland has not been immune.
In fact, federal member for Kennedy Bob Katter has revealed he was in the running to play Ken - he does already have the wardrobe after all - but turned it down, allowing A-list actor Ryan Gosling to step in.
How magnanimous.
Based on a poll on the Katter Australia Party’s Facebook page, 81 per cent of people reckoned the Cloncurry-born 78-year-old wore the hat better than Barbie’s official on-screen boyfriend.
While Chooks has been unable to verify this fact with Warner Brothers or Mattel, we do wonder whether the movie could have been improved with a crocodile or two.
GO ON, FEED THE CHOOKS
Got a yarn? Tell us about it.
mckennam@theaustralian.com.au
lynchl@theaustralian.com.au
elkss@theaustralian.com.au
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