A win is still a win: How David Crisafulli has a chance to reshape Queensland’s future
David Crisafulli says he learned from the mistakes the Newman government made when he was a rookie minister - mistakes that cost him his seat in the Queensland parliament, and nearly his political career.
David Crisafulli says he learned from the mistakes the Newman government made when he was a rookie minister - mistakes that cost him his seat in the Queensland parliament, and nearly his political career.
The question is can the Liberal National Party leader dig deep once again and become a better premier on the back of his costly errors on the hustings?
Not even his political opponents would doubt the man’s work ethic. Crisafulli is disciplined to a tee, obsessively punctual, engaging in private conversation yet also relentlessly on message, pushing the lines about the “crises” in youth crime, health care, the cost of living and housing affordability.
Damagingly, the double-digit lead in the polls he blew throws into doubt his judgment, a politician’s keenest asset. Crisafulli is in the unusual position of losing the campaign to Steven Miles, but winning the election for the LNP. He takes power with his authority diminished.
The 45-year-old father of two makes much of a background that spans both ends of Queensland’s geographic vastness, and a number of walks of life. The grandson of Italian migrants, Crisafulli grew up on a sugarcane farm outside smalltown Ingham in the state’s tropical north. His dad, Tony, says young David always had his sights set on politics. But first there was a detour into journalism, which he studied at James Cook University. He landed a job as a cadet reporter on the local paper and wound up on regional TV.
Crisafulli and wife Tegan were teenage sweethearts who married young. By 2003, aged 23, he was working as an adviser to a Townsville-based Liberal Party senator. Within a year, he ran for an elected position on the local council, regarded at the time as a closed shop for Labor. He wore out three pairs doorknocking and won; he stood for the deputy mayor’s job in 2008 and got that too.
State parliament beckoned. Crisafulli was endorsed for the Townsville seat of Mundingburra at the 2012 election that brought Campbell Newman to power. The victory - the first for the blue team since Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s last hurrah in 1986 - was one for the ages: the LNP under Newman swept 78 of the parliament’s then 89 seats. Crisafulli was promoted straight into cabinet as local government minister.
But the tide went out for the LNP as dramatically as it had surged in. What should have been a multi-term government was voted out at the 2015 election in a stunning reversal, returning the ALP to power under Annastacia Palaszczuk. Crisafulli joined Newman in losing his seat.
Looking back, he told The Australian that he was a young man in a hurry and the belting he had received at the hands of the voters in 2015 was the “life lesson” he needed.
“You can make reform, but you can do it with compassion,” Crisafulli said recently. “You can make the decisions that are needed, but you can still treat people with respect and decency.”
He moved his family to the Gold Coast - a conservative stronghold - and set up a business that failed, resulting in him shelling out $200,000 to liquidators. There, he successfully challenged sitting MP Verity Barton, one of the LNP’s few female state parliamentarians, in a bruising preselection contest for the seat of Broadwater.
How would that play today? “That’s for you to comment on,” he hedged.
Crisafulli re-entered parliament at the 2017 state election where Palaszczuk lifted Labor out of minority government. Elevated to the LNP leadership after she won her third election on the trot in the teeth of the Covid pandemic in 2020, he went to work with his trademark energy. A fitness fanatic, Crisafulli is up before the sun most days to hit the gym.
Palaszczuk’s once-stellar standing with the electorate and within her own party took a hit when the media played up her evident relish for red carpet events. Crisafulli, meanwhile, was hammering the spree of often-violent, and in some cases lethal, home invasions committed by juvenile offenders. The LNP believed it was on a winner as one opinion poll after another showed youth crime was top of mind for Queensland voters; Labor’s numbers plunged in lockstep with the crash in Palaszczuk’s approval ratings.
Facing a revolt by her union backers that threatened to spill into the parliamentary caucus, she reluctantly handed over to Miles last December. Nothing seemed more inevitable than a change of government at the approaching state election. Crisafulli, making a virtue of his narrow platform, insisted he wouldn’t be distracted from the issues that concerned voters most.
To the dismay of conservatives in the LNP, he stayed out of last year’s willing debate on the Indigenous voice and backed Labor’s development of a treaty with Queensland’s Aboriginal and Islander peoples, before backflipping when the voice referendum was voted down.
Our election-eve Newspoll showing that the LNP’s 10-point lead over Labor in the two party-preferred vote had halved during the campaign, casting into doubt whether enough seats would be secured for Crisafulli to form a majority government, confirmed his detail-light “small target” strategy had tanked. Miles’s strong performance in the campaign was rewarded with a rebound in his personal ratings, allowing him to reclaim the lead on the key measure of better premier.
But let’s not lose sight of the big picture. Ugly as the election win was, the LNP prevailed. Crisafulli is now Queensland’s 41st premier-elect and, while his governing position is not as strong as it could or should have been, the next four years are his to shape, for better or worse.
