Preparation key for Queensland premier hopeful David Crisafulli
David Crisafulli rarely sleeps past 4am, as the candidate most likely to end Labor’s Queensland reign looks to keep his mind and body sharp.
It’s a year out from a state election in Queensland that will be loaded with national implications and David Crisafulli is winding up his dawn workout. He rarely sleeps past 4am because – as he likes to say – it’s never too early to show the voters you’re hungry. And Crisafulli wants to be premier so badly you can almost taste the desire.
At 44, he’s the fourth opposition leader to go up against three-time election winner Annastacia Palaszczuk and the formidable campaign machine that has kept Labor in power in the Sunshine State for nearly 30 of the past 35 years.
If he fails, the consequences for his side of politics will be devastating. At the state level, the merger of the Liberal and National parties would come under renewed, if not irresistible, pressure. The LNP was created to govern on home turf and if he can’t knock over Palaszczuk’s tired and unpopular outfit, what’s the point of it?
Equally, a win for Crisafulli on October 26 next year would breach the red wall of ALP governments across mainland Australia, turning the tide in the lead-up to the federal election due by mid-2025.
What a fillip that would be for fellow Queenslander Peter Dutton. It’s a paradox of politics that the same voters who returned the Labor Party at state election after election also delivered fortress Queensland to the federal Coalition, buttressing Liberal-led governments since John Howard’s day. The line held when Scott Morrison went down last year; Labor under Anthony Albanese actually lost ground north of the Tweed, winning only five of 30 federal seats up for grabs.
Crisafulli is all too aware of the finely balanced risk-reward ratio. His side has lost 11 of the past 12 state elections in Queensland reaching back to 1995, when Labor reformer Wayne Goss went within one seat of coming a cropper, then pulled the plug on his third-term government seven months later after losing a by-election in the Townsville seat of Mundingburra. (Remember that name: it holds a salutary place in Crisafulli’s story, too.)
The opinion polls have the LNP on top of Queensland Labor and Crisafulli heading Palaszczuk as preferred premier, at least for now. His MPs have a spring in their step at Parliament House, where the 54-year-old Premier seems to have regained her mojo after a damaging 12 months of drift and distraction for the government.
Although she insists she will contest the coming election, few will be surprised if Palaszczuk follows her friend and ally at national cabinet, former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, out the door before then. Crisafulli went to town when the leading contenders to replace her, Deputy Premier Steven Miles and Health Minister Shannon Fentimen, brazenly auditioned for the job while she soaked up the sun in Italy during a recent getaway with partner Reza Adib.
Still, being the frontrunner brings its own kind of pressure. And though he denies it, Crisafulli would have to feel the weight of expectation, as pressing as the iron he pushes daily.
“It’s not about me,” he tells Inquirer in the 6.30am still of Sunday morning at his gym on the Gold Coast. “I am one person in a team that is united and focused … and I’m very confident that we will bring generational change and it will be in a government we can all be proud of.
“We are fit for government, we are hungry for government,” he continues. Hungry. That word again. Crisafulli’s day is just beginning but he seems to know exactly what he wants out of it.
Later, over the rare steak and vegetables he has ordered for lunch, washed down by mineral water, he deploys another pet term: humble. It’s not a descriptor that is typically applied to the Queensland LNP leader. Those who have dealt with him through the years speak of a man who is ambitious, driven, relentless, a don’t-get-in-my-way operator who will stop at nothing to succeed – and they’re the ones who profess to like him.
In other words, he was made for politics.
Crisafulli, though, says he learned to be humble the hard way. He’s the son of a sugar cane farmer from sleepy Ingham in north Queensland, two generations removed from the Sicilian migrant, Francesco Crisafulli, who arrived there in 1960 determined to make a go of his new life and bring to Australia the wife and children he had to leave behind.
Young David wanted something other than the farm. He became the first in the family to pursue higher education, at James Cook University in Townsville, to study journalism.
Before graduating, he landed a cadetship on the local paper in Ingham; afterwards, he switched to regional television news where he’s remembered as being fiercely competitive and for keeping his distance from the gregarious local media pack. “You didn’t get between him and a story,” one contemporary says. Crisafulli remembers: “I did like breaking stories; I did love breaking stories.”
He joined the Liberal Party, aged in his mid-20s, about the time he was taken on by Townsville-based Liberal senator Ian Macdonald in 2003. Within a year he was running for a seat on Townsville City Council, considered at the time to be a closed shop for Labor. Crisafulli wore out three pairs of shoes doorknocking and won; he went for the deputy mayor’s job in 2008 and got that as well.
Anna Bligh’s state Labor government was on its last legs when he was preselected by the LNP to contest Mundingburra at the 2012 election. Campbell Newman, parachuted into the leadership from outside parliament, pulled off one of the biggest wins in Australian electoral history, securing 78 of the 89 seats on offer. Crisafulli went straight into cabinet as minister for local government.
And he was kicked straight out in Mundingburra, alongside the Newman government, when voters next had their say in 2015, bringing Palaszczuk to power at the head of a minority government. To add insult to injury, Crisafulli’s Uncle Sam and Aunt Vincenza had campaigned for his opponent, Coralee O’Rourke, working the phones for her to the glee of the ALP. (He says he understood: both were rusted-on Labor supporters.) Still, the defeat was hard to take. Humbling.
He was being talked up, even then, as a future premier and instead had landed flat on his face. “I was a young man in a hurry and it was a lesson in life that I needed,” he says. “I’m pretty sure I’m a much better politician as a result of it and I’m certain I’m a much better human.”
What did he learn? “You’ve got to treat people with respect and you’ve got to take time to stop and listen … you have to be able to pause and ensure people know that they matter. I think in our haste as a government to bring reform to the state we lost sight of that.”
Palaszczuk hung the divisive Newman years around the necks of the one-term premier’s successors as LNP leader, Lawrence Springborg (2015-16), Tim Nicholls (defeated at the 2017 state election) and Deb Frecklington (likewise in 2020). If Crisafulli needed any reminder of Palaszczuk’s scalp-taking prowess, most of them – Nicholls, Frecklington and yet another former leader, John-Paul Langbroek, who was elbowed aside for Newman before 2012 – remain on his frontbench.
Neither was his return to parliament in 2017 controversy free. By then he had moved wife Tegan – his high school sweetheart – and their two teenage daughters to the Gold Coast, where he was eyeing off the safe LNP seat of Broadwater.
Trouble was, it was occupied by one of the party’s under-represented female MPs, Verity Barton, and she wasn’t about to make way for a blow-in. The ensuing preselection contest was willing, to say the least, with Barton’s supporters claiming the branch had been stacked against her, an accusation Crisafulli rejects as unfair.
Would he get away with that today? After all, he has pushed for women to be endorsed in at least half of the 14 key marginals to be targeted by the LNP at next year’s poll. (They need 13 to win seats on top of the 34 that they currently hold to return to government.)
“That’s for you to comment on,” he hedges. “I can only say … we’ve done nine of those preselections and eight of the candidates are women. So my political opponents can say what they like. I know what’s coming … but people can judge me when I say I was going to make sure that we attracted more women, more young people, more people from small family businesses and more people from culturally diverse backgrounds.”
Crisafulli walks the talk about being focused and disciplined. He’s reluctant to engage on the values issues that fire up the conservative base – abortion or euthanasia law reform, the Indigenous voice – except to say he voted against those particular measures. He’s about winning votes, not a culture war.
“I don’t go into areas where it’s not my responsibility,” he explains. “And … at times that means that I haven’t commented on things that might be politically advantageous.
“But long term, I want to use every precious second I can talking about the problems in Queensland, my solutions, and why we’re fit to be given an opportunity to implement them. If you call that being disciplined, I agree. It’s a disciplined approach.”
What he does talk about – banging on and on, on message to a fault – is youth crime, Queensland’s problem-plagued public health system and the soaring cost of living. Crisafulli has taken a page out of the playbook that worked a treat last year for Labor’s Peter Malinauskas in South Australia. Pick a theme and don’t stop hammering it.
After finishing up at the gym, Crisafulli has hit the road to attend a community crime “forum” – 15 concerned citizens gathered in a semi-circle in a park in northside Brisbane – to hear more stories of people being robbed and traumatised at home.
Crisafulli’s answer is, in part, more police and “unshackling” judges from the current requirement for detention to be a last resort in sentencing young offenders. His plan to reintroduce the crime of breach of bail for juveniles has already been adopted by Palaszczuk. They agree on more than you might think, sometimes to the chagrin of the true believers on his side: the LNP is on a unity ticket with Labor to achieve net-zero emissions in Queensland by 2050 and he gives the government a tick for making kindergarten free in government-approved centres from next year.
The privatisation of state assets, the political kryptonite that bedevilled both Bligh and Newman, isn’t coming back, Crisafulli insists.
Neither will he slash public service numbers, as Newman did to his deep political cost.
Until this week’s post-voice backflip, Crisafulli had offered qualified support for Palaszczuk’s Indigenous treaty project.
State debt? It’s forecast to hit an eye-watering $129bn over the budget forward estimates, but the message is: get used to it.
“Debt will continue to be part of the mix. If … we can sharpen the way we deliver projects on time and on budget that will help immensely,” he says.
If Labor wants to depict him as a Can-do Campbell clone, leveraging his time as a minister under Newman, bring it on. Crisafulli maintains he has listened, learned and absorbed the lessons of what went wrong when the LNP was last in government.
“We didn’t mount a case for the kind of generational reforms that could have been done in a way that strengthened our state rather than bull-at-a-gate style politics, and we all have an element of responsibility for that. All of us.”
He’s motoring now. A quick change of clothes and he’s ready for an appearance at the Sri Lanka Day festival where Palaszczuk, who is rarely sighted on the weekend, is represented by one of her ministers.
Then it’s on to an Italian community event in the Roma Street Parklands.
He Zooms into a video conference of LNP candidates, keen to know whether they were meeting their “KPIs” on doorknocking. Crisafulli loves doorknocking. It’s the way to show voters you are humble and hungry, he tells them.
“The weather’s beautiful this afternoon, so go out and make friends.”
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