Adani and the Jackie Trad effect

Jackie Trad is the face of progressive politics — and Labor’s big problem.

Queensland’s powerful left-wing Deputy Premier and Treasurer Jackie Trad. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

For a politician on the make, there is no better place to be than Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium on State of Origin night.

Jackie Trad was there on Wednesday, lapping up the hospitality in the National Rugby League’s well-appointed viewing box. So was her boss, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Trad’s friend and mentor Anthony Albanese, a lonesome Blue among all those one-eyed Queenslanders.

But as willing as the football was in the famed “cauldron”, it had nothing on what has been playing out inside the state Labor government since that other boil­over, the May 18 federal election.

Queensland swung harder against the ALP than any other mainland state, with voters in its regions and on the suburban ­fringes of Brisbane rejecting Bill Shorten’s big-spending and high-taxing agenda with a vehemence that delivered two additional seats to the Coalition, taking it to a high-water 23 of the 30 up for grabs north of the Tweed.

This is where Trad comes in. She holds far more than the purse strings as Deputy Premier and Treasurer to Palaszczuk. As leader of the parliamentary Left, Trad also controls the numbers in the caucus and state cabinet; she revels in her reputation as being the power behind the throne, the driving force in a government that was cruising until federal Labor came a cropper, and which now threatens to be consumed by recriminations over its drift to the left and the electorate’s brutal verdict last month on that positioning.

Sharp-tongued, vigorous and whip-smart, 47-year-old Trad is the face of progressive politics in Queensland. She is as inner city as you can get, holding the state seat of South Brisbane in the area in which she grew up, the daughter of Lebanese migrants who spoke Arabic at home. Where Palasz­czuk, a product of the ALP’s right wing, is reserved and cautious, seemingly lofty in wielding power, Trad has worked in the weeds, championing formerly lost causes for state Labor such as abortion law reform and tree clearance controls on farmers. Admirers and detractors alike acknowledge her zeal. But if there is one issue that has bedevilled Labor at both the state and federal levels in Queensland it is the Adani coalmine, the pressure point where demands for ­action on climate change intersect with real-world concerns about jobs and investment.

Shorten dithered, sending a message to green-minded voters in latte land in central Sydney and Melbourne that Labor was leery of the planned project, while assuring struggling regional communities in Queens­land that it wouldn’t stand in the way of the new open-cut mine if it won state approval.

That’s the trouble with trying to walk both sides of the street: you get hit by a bus.

Adani became emblematic of federal Labor’s disconnect from its traditional blue-collar base and those “quiet Australians” who broke for Scott Morrison, an epic misjudgment of the mood of the nation. Albanese’s test as Shorten’s successor as Opposition Leader will be to craft a new narrative to reconcile — or at least neutralise — this lethal paradigm for the ALP.

That means there is no avoiding Queensland for Albo.

When Kevin Rudd won handsomely in 2007, it was on the back of picking up 15 seats in his home state. Labor went into that election with only six MPs from Queensland, the same precarious position in which it now finds itself. It was also in power at the state level under another female premier, Anna Bligh.

A woman of the Left, she headed a government in which the Right factions notionally had the numbers but where Bligh unambiguously called the shots. The situation couldn’t be more different today as Palaszczuk, aligned with the Australian Workers Union-backed Labor Forum group, moves to reposi­tion her party with an eye to the state election locked in for October next year, to usher in an expansion of the parliamentary term from three years to four.

If Labor’s base vote is anything like last month’s dismal 26.68 per cent federal showing in Queensland, Palaszczuk’s two-term outfit will be toast. In that event, the ALP would hold office in only two states, Victoria and Western Australia, making the road back for Albanese all the more arduous.

No pressure, then, as Trad prepares to hand down her second state budget on Tuesday. The infrastructure cash that she had counted on from a Shorten government is in the wind, GST revenue is down, and stamp duty will take a hit from the softening Brisbane property market. Queensland, she claims, is being dudded by the Prime Minister of $840 million in funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and, oh yes, the time bomb of the Adani approval is ticking louder than ever, with the state environment agency due to sign off on the critical groundwater management plan for the mine two days after the budget is released.

For the first time in her fast and seemingly assured rise, Trad is feeling the blowtorch. The complex challenges she faces embody some of those confronting Labor at the federal level. In addition to massaging a set of books that is drowning in red ink — Queensland’s gross debt was forecast in last year’s budget to hit an eye-watering $83 billion over the forward estimates — she must hold the line in her marginal seat against the Greens now that the Liberal National Party has announced it will preference them over her.

The list goes on. She needs to contain the factional tensions that have erupted in the state caucus since the federal election to preserve her leadership ambitions; accommodate heavy spending on health, education and other ser­vices plus the ballooning wage bill mandated by the government’s cosiness with the public sector unions; and address the nagging suspicion in Labor ranks that so much she has worked for and represents is out of step with what voters actually want.

Then there is Adani. It all comes back to Adani.

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Rightly or wrongly, Trad is seen as the architect of the state Labor government’s woefully inept handling of the project and its Indian proponent, the Adani ports, shipping and energy conglomerate. Her critics say it has been a case of “Jackie first”, with Trad putting her survival in South Brisbane ahead of the interests of the state and, yes, the Labor government to get the mine up and running in economically battered central-west Queensland.

The spiel is that she went rogue, not for the first time, to deploy the Left’s numbers in cabinet and her command of the machinery of government to drag the chain, if not block the mine. Trad rejects this, telling Inquirer: “I would say that criticism is from people who have an unrealistic view of what happened in cabinet and don’t actually understand what happened in the government … I would probably suggest or back my hunch these are people who are unprepared to put their names to such comments, these are people who are so out of the loop but think that their relevance is far more than it actually is.”

Still, the government’s approach to Adani is mystifying. The mine has been in the works for eight years as the linchpin to develop a vast new coalfield in the Galilee Basin, 1000km northwest of Brisbane. The investment was initially welcomed by Bligh, who predicted ore would be rolling out by 2014, backed by the LNP when it came to power under Campbell Newman, and embraced so enthusiastically by Palaszczuk that on a trade mission to India in March 2017 she met the company’s billionaire owner, Gautam Adani, and urged him to buy into food production and renewable energy projects in Queensland.

Adani believed it had a commitment from the Premier to waive state royalties worth $320m in the start-up phase, and to support its bid for a $1bn loan from the federal government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility to build a rail link to port.

But then something extraordinary happened. In the last week of May 2017, Trad came out publicly against the “royalties holiday”, citing an election commitment that no public money would go into the mine, which had to stack up financially and meet environmental standards. This was in line with the position of the federal party.

Trad’s intervention had been preceded by a devastating media leak. Emerging from a meeting with then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in Brisbane on May 17, Palaszczuk was blindsided by a question from an ABC reporter on the supposedly secret royalties deal. Her office was incensed, blaming Trad for the breach.

After an emergency cabinet meeting on May 26, Palaszczuk, Trad and Curtis Pitt, the state treasurer at the time, announced a revamp of the tax regime to cover all future greenfield mine developments, capturing Adani. “There will be no royalty holiday for the Adani Carmichael mine,” the Premier insisted. Any deferred royalties would be paid with interest after a security deposit was stumped up by the company concerned. But there was a kicker.

“Consistent with our election commitments, cabinet has determined that any NAIF funding needs to be between the federal government and Adani,” Trad said in the joint media statement. This seemed unremarkable: under NAIF rules the federal money is dispensed to a loan recipient by the state, which has no financial exposure to the transaction. On May 29, Pitt declared that Queensland “would not stand in the way” of those arrangements for Adani.

Only later would the penny drop. Beset by anti-Adani protests during the opening phase of the 2017 state election campaign, Palaszczuk performed a backflip and said the government would veto the NAIF loan, citing a purported conflict of interest involving her then partner, who had consulted on the project. By then, Adani was a word Trad could barely bring herself to utter in public. Witness this exchange with The Australian’s Sarah Elks from May 2017:

Q: “Can I just ask you personally, can you state your support for the Adani Carmichael coalmine?

Trad: “Like every other member of this government, I support resource sector jobs. I know how important they are for our regions, for our regional economies and I know how important they are for the economy of Queensland.”

Q: Is there a reason why you can’t say you support that project in particular?

Trad took a question from another reporter.

Fast forward to the hushed aftermath for Labor of its election drubbing three Saturdays ago. Having initially played down the impact of Adani on the result in Queensland, Palaszczuk did another about-face, declaring she was “fed up” with the delays in the environmental approvals process and it would be fast-tracked by the state co-ordinator-general. If, as expected, the ground­water plan is ticked off next Thursday, the company is geared up to begin full-scale site works within weeks.

Trad took to social media last Sunday to clear the air on Adani, complaining the issue had been “weaponised” by the political Right and the Left. “For those opposed to the mine it has taken on the status of the only test of commitment to action on climate change,” she wrote on Facebook.

“For those supportive of the mine, this project is the only proof of a commitment to resource sector jobs in regional Queensland communities. Both arguments are exaggerated and wrong. And we now find ourselves divided.”

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It was quite a game on Wednesday night, with Queensland coming from behind on the scoreboard to clinch the opening encounter of the State of Origin series. Quite a crowd in the NRL box, too, hosted by ex-premier Peter Beattie in his capacity as Australian Rugby League Commission chairman.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Anthony Albanese at the State of Origin game on Wednesday. Picture: Annette Dew

Former US vice-president and climate warrior Al Gore was the star turn, watching the action alongside Albanese and Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack. It was easy to see who was belting whom on the floodlit field — the home side decked out in maroon, NSW in sky-blue jerseys — which is more than can be said for the heaving pit of ambition, enmity and factionalism that’s the Queensland Labor caucus.

The wonder is that Palaszczuk kept a lid on the dysfunction for so long.

It can be traced back to 2012 when Newman terminated 13 years of state Labor governments with the biggest election victory in Queensland history, reducing the ALP to only seven MPs in the then 89-seat parliament, one of them a newly elected Trad.

Having worked as an adviser to Bligh, another friend and mentor, and for the party as assistant state secretary, she succeeded the former premier in South Brisbane after a by-election. The expectation was that Palaszczuk, a mid-ranking and not especially well-regarded minister under Bligh, would be run down before or at the 2015 election, but that she would take enough bark off Newman to position the next leader, possibly Trad, for a return to office.

The tiny caucus took two critical decisions. First, it jettisoned Bligh’s unpopular privatisation program, instigated after Queensland lost its triple A-credit rating in 2009. And, second, the new team under Palaszczuk reached out to left-wing unions that had gone to war with Bligh over asset sales.

Palaszczuk’s ultra-tight election win in 2015 wasn’t the only jaw-dropper. For the first time in living memory, a Queensland Labor government was controlled by the Left, courtesy of all those new MPs who came in with left-wing union backing.

Aunty Stacia was the caring, publicly popular face of the show, but there was no doubt who wielded the whip hand: Trad, the leader of the parliamentary Left.

Her influence expanded after the 2017 state election pulled Labor out of minority government. Trad took on the Treasury portfolio, as had Bligh before she was elevated. The implosion of the right-wing Labor Unity faction, the old guard that had traditionally held the balance of power in caucus, entrenched the Left’s dominance of both the partyroom and cabinet.

Some MPs and ministers not only identify with a faction but openly align themselves with an individual union. Notoriously in 2015, the powerful boss of the left-wing United Voice, Gary Bullock, named seven government members as “United Voice MPs”, three of whom were in Palaszczuk’s first cabinet. Today, 12 of the 18 ministers are aligned with the Left.

Ordinarily, this would not matter: ministers are supposed to check their factional loyalties at the door of the cabinet room. But as the Adani debacle shows, the dynamic at the apex of the ­Palaszczuk government is highly unorthodox. The Left ministers are said to caucus ahead of the regular Monday cabinet meeting to settle agreed positions on the business of the day — a proposition rejected by Trad but backed by other insiders.

One former minister recalls: “That is something I actively disliked about my experience … there was no proper debate in cabinet, the numbers were already done before you went in.”

Pushed on whether the decision-making process in cabinet has been factionalised, Trad says: “There has never ever been a vote taken in cabinet under Labor. We reach a consensus position. That is not about factional operation, that is about consensus decision-making, and Annastacia has always said she would lead a consensus government, and she does.”

Palaszczuk’s leadership is often depicted as being “vice-regal”, the takeout being that she prefers ribbon cutting to dirtying her hands with the messier work of governing. This is Trad’s metier.

“She is attracted to the difficult decisions,” an admiring Labor figure says. “Jackie’s style is to tackle them and it sometimes brings a little friction … every government needs someone like that.”

Former MP Rob Pyne is one of the few willing to speak on the record about getting the treatment from her.

During a heated phone conversation in 2016, when Trad held the local government portfolio, he says she called him a “disloyal c..t” after he pressed for an inquiry into council corruption, contributing to his decision to quit the ALP and move to the backbench. (Pyne lost his Cairns seat at the 2017 election.)

The episode is still cited by Trad detractors who argue that she creates as many problems as she solves.

The truth is that Palaszczuk has neither the means nor the numbers to rein in her ambitious and headstrong deputy, assuming she was minded to do so, and there is no sign of that.

Equally, Trad’s professed loyalty to the Premier should be accepted at face value: a leadership challenge is even tougher to mount under Queensland Labor rules than it is federally, and Trad knows an overt move against Palaszczuk would blow up the government, and her own prospects with it.

Yet the repositioning by both women on Adani shows they recognise that federal Labor, under Shorten, disastrously misread the electorate ahead of May 18. Do they have time to reset, starting with next week’s state budget? Albo must hope so.