Patrick Condren: City hall hellraiser
He gave Peter Beattie a ‘nipple cripple’ and referred to young women as ‘hornbag’. Now he wants to be Brisbane Lord Mayor.
He’s the life of any party, the self-styled terror of the media pack at state parliament in Brisbane for the best part of two decades. Patrick Condren was the no-holds-barred journalist who publicly simulated masturbation to one would-be premier and gripped another with his trademark “nipple cripple”.
He nearly came to blows with a colleague at a journalism awards night after the man took offence on behalf of his wife at an off-colour remark by Condren about her breasts; covering election campaigns, he cheerfully referred to one female reporter on the press bus as “hooters”. A second young woman became “hornbag”.
In the #MeToo era, some would say it’s appropriate that Condren, 57, no longer commands a spot on the nightly television news, where he made his name as Network Seven’s longstanding state political editor in Queensland. Instead, he is Labor’s great hope to wrest back the lord mayoralty of Brisbane, the biggest job in local government in the country.
To his credit, he has enlivened an otherwise lacklustre election race since being parachuted in as candidate seven weeks ago at the expense of former state ALP vice-president and investment banker Rod Harding, who was unceremoniously dumped. The veteran newsman certainly knows his craft: Condren has been everywhere in the local media, reinvigorating a Labor campaign that looked to be drifting towards yet another Liberal National Party victory at the council elections next March.
Racecourse rd and KSD intersection back to 1 lane again. Local businesses still feeling the pinch. pic.twitter.com/o0cJQ4UnFs
— Patrick Condren (@PatrickCondren) November 21, 2019
But his contentious past has emerged as an issue, pushed strongly by former LNP premier Campbell Newman. The bad blood between them has infused the campaign, overshadowing the main game involving Condren and relatively new mayor Adrian Schrinner, Newman’s successor twice removed.
Oh, the irony. Newman came from nowhere to win city hall in 2004 and two terms later used it as a springboard to become premier. His initial election as mayor 15 years ago was at the expense of Labor’s Tim Quinn, who too had taken over from a successful, long-served incumbent, only to be run down by an upstart opponent in Newman.
Oncer @campbellnewman refused a demand from @lnpqld to consider resigning from the party over criticism of the election campaignhttps://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/campbell-newman-takes-aim-at-peta-credlins-lnp-gig/news-story/e8cbae8931e107146f3496b1b1530ad9
— Patrick Condren (@PatrickCondren) November 22, 2019
This could be the template for the script Condren is trying to write with the backing of the ALP’s formidable campaign machine. Schrinner has struggled to step out of the shadow of his popular predecessor Graham Quirk, Newman’s replacement after “Can Do Campbell” switched to state politics in 2011, and who retired in March. Labor aims to pull off an upset by harnessing Condren’s fresh face with an “it’s time” insurgency against the LNP, mirroring what Newman did all those years ago to a powerfully entrenched Labor council.
The municipal elections in Brisbane count like no other. The council is far and away Australia’s biggest — more a city-state, it boasts more residents than the combined population of the Northern Territory, Tasmania and ACT with an annual budget of $3.1bn, covering the wages of 10,000 staff. The job pays accordingly: Schrinner pulls down $318,659 in annual salary and superannuation, topped up by an expense of office allowance of nearly $100,000. The prime minister barely does better.
As Newman tells it, Condren’s bad behaviour as a journalist is the story the Brisbane media won’t touch, abrogating its responsibility to the local community. “There’s no shortage of people in the media here who know the history, they know about the lack of judgment and the poor character of the Labor candidate, and yet they are not speaking up,” the combative ex-premier says. “They are very happy to do stories about LNP candidates who do the wrong thing … so why won’t they go after the Labor candidate who has got history? I am quite appalled at the double standards and/or lack of courage that is being exhibited by people who claim to be professional journalists.”
In fairness, the story has been taken up — though perhaps not with the vigour that might be expected. Last weekend, The Sunday Mail unearthed a videoed exchange between a shorts-clad Condren and Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk during the 2017 election campaign in which the then reporter quipped she was lucky he had “put any trousers on at all”.
The same article had former LNP leader John-Paul Langbroek claiming that on at least a dozen occasions at press conferences Condren had stroked a woolly TV boom microphone, simulating masturbation. The Weekend Australian has confirmed that this happened on at least one occasion in the presence of Newman government minister Lawrence Springborg, probably while he was state opposition leader. Newman himself said he had heard the stories, but had not witnessed the alleged conduct by Condren; the retired Springborg declined to be interviewed.
In a written statement, the ALP candidate does not dispute the particulars of the claims but says he has been subjected to a sustained smear campaign by “the likes of Campbell Newman”.
“Not one of the accusers has ever raised any issues with my behaviour until now and that is because now I’m taking on their mate, the unelected Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner, and seeking to stop the LNP rorts at city hall,” Condren says.
Newman says he has vivid memories of an Australia Day 2012 run-in with Condren when he was on the cusp on being elected premier. He was talking to another reporter when the Seven man walked past. “He does one of those fake sneezes and goes, ‘bullshit’,” Newman recalls.
“Then he does the cock-in-the-mouth motion. That’s what I’ve seen … there is just a pile of stories.”
Newman says the incident formed part of a complaint about Condren that was made to the network by his office after he came to power. Seven’s then Queensland managing director, businessman and cricket administrator Max Walters, insists Newman’s concern was with the balance of the political coverage on “three or four news stories”, not Condren’s personal behaviour. The reporter was spoken to, “not coming down either way”, and asked to be careful with his work. “We heard Patrick was a bit of a larrikin, but everyone knows that,” Walters says.
What's going on here? @PatrickCondren interviewing ALP Leader of Opposition for Channel 7 for a story that goes to air? pic.twitter.com/0wvuFqRXxV
— Campbell Newman (@CampbellNewman) November 12, 2019
That much people can agree on. Condren self-evidently cut a colourful figure as a journalist: gregarious and loud, he could dominate a news conference or hijack it, depending on your point of view. In his younger days as an ABC radio reporter, he won a coveted Walkley Award and worked for the BBC in Britain while his wife, Margaret Little, trained to become a paediatric oncologist. They have been married for more than two decades and have two children, aged 19 and 17.
In the confines of the Queensland parliamentary press gallery, which Condren joined in 2002 in his Seven guise, opinion is sharply divided about his antics. Some say he hammed it up to throw politicians off their stride, a good thing when the spin in woven tight. Others argue that too often his language was improper or sexist, claims that Condren has privately rejected. Importantly, there is no suggestion he was physically inappropriate with women.
A favourite prank was the “nipple cripple”, an eye-watering twist of another man’s breast. Condren performed it not only on colleagues including this reporter, but, on one memorable occasion during the 2006 state election campaign, on none other than Peter Beattie after the then Labor premier ventured on to the press bus. “Yes, he did the nipple nonsense but it was done in fun and I never took offence. He would not do it to people he was not comfortable with,” Beattie tells The Weekend Australian.
Condren was a “pain in the neck” — to both sides of politics, Beattie insists. “He was not a wimp and was not cowered by premiers or ministers. I thought he was non-political and was stunned when he became Labor’s lord mayoral candidate … with Patrick, you either liked him or hated him: I respected his independence.”
Walters says the switch to politics did not strike him as unexpected given that Condren had always seemed to be “a bit restless … very ambitious”. He questions, though, whether it is reasonable to impose contemporary values on past behaviour. “You know what the hurly-burly of a newsroom is like … in these things you tend to template 2019 values on 20 years ago and I don’t know if that’s fair. Nonetheless, there was certainly nothing you would call serious that came to my attention concerning Patrick,” he says.
Another deeply contested incident took place late on a boozy night at the Clarion awards in Brisbane in 2009, the local media’s big annual get-together. A senior female reporter from the ABC, a friend, had come up to say hello while he was holding forth to a group. Condren said something about the woman having the “best tits” in the business, profoundly offending her. When her husband, a former foreign correspondent for the ABC, angrily confronted Condren there was an altercation between the two men and they nearly came to blows. Condren later offered a heartfelt apology to the woman, which she accepted.
Yes, it all smacks of being slightly juvenile on Condren’s part — but that’s exactly the point Newman is hammering on the former journalist’s fitness to follow him as lord mayor. Witheringly, Langbroek, also a former LNP leader, calls him “a juvenile trapped in a man’s body”.
Condren has told the Labor campaign that the allegation he suggestively stroked boom microphones is false — which is news to the journalists who saw him do it. He also disputes that he coined the nickname “hooters” for a now high-profile ABC on-air personality; she came up with the moniker and he merely used it when the young woman was on the road, supposedly to general hilarity.
The former female newspaper reporter he addressed as “hornbag” speaks for many in the press gallery in saying that it was all in good fun, and she took no umbrage. In common with the working and past journalists approached for this piece, she would not be quoted by name. “It was Patrick being Patrick and joking around,” she says.
The ALP says the attacks on its man show that he is making inroads into the LNP’s formidable lead in the mayoral race, with Schrinner inheriting the 10-point buffer his immediate predecessor, Quirk, established at the 2016 BCC election. The usually talkative Condren declined to be interviewed, saying by way of the statement on Friday that his record as a journalist speaks for itself.
“Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve always been a straight talker who is about fairness,” he says. “I’ve spent decades … calling out politicians of all parties without fear or favour.”
The mud is certainly flying — from both sides. Schrinner wasted no time in gunning for his new opponent after Condren was approached by Labor state secretary Julie-Ann Campbell on September 27 and fast-tracked into both the candidacy and the party, claiming he lacked both the experience and the temperament to manage the council’s budget and multi-billion-dollar capital works program. (He had not thought to join the ALP until Campbell called.)
Labor campaign staff now say their opposites are approaching journalists to spill the beans on Condren, which the LNP denies. Darkly, they warn that Schrinner should beware because he has skeletons that could be rattled in the coming months.