Vanquished Miles to remain as Labor leader despite election loss

Vanquished Labor Premier Steven Miles will stay on as Opposition leader after rivals Cameron Dick and Shannon Fentiman capitulated to avoid a contested ballot of branch members, unions and MPs.

Outgoing Queensland Premier Steven Miles arrives with wife Kim for drinks with friends and party members at the Breakfast Creek Hotel following his party’s electoral defeat. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen / The Australian

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Outgoing Labor Premier Steven Miles will stay on as opposition leader after rivals Cameron Dick and Shannon Fentiman capitulated to avoid a contested ballot of branch members, unions and MPs.

Declaring that the ALP had run a strong campaign that secured a better than expected result, Mr Miles said the party now needed to rebuild and “reconnect” with ­regional Queensland after experiencing devastating losses north of Brisbane.

“We will need to listen to them and hear from them precisely what they want to see us do differently, and then based on that, we’ll build over the next four years a program to take to the next election,” he said.

Mr Miles said there was no malice in his decision not to congratulate Liberal National Party leader David Crisafulli or concede on election night, insisting the result was still unclear when he addressed supporters at a pub in his outer-Brisbane electorate of Murrumba.

Mr Dick, the Right faction minister who served as Mr Miles’s deputy, and outgoing Left faction Health Minister Shannon Fentiman both ruled out challenging the Left’s Mr Miles for the leadership if he wanted to stay on.

Ms Fentiman made it clear to confidants that she did not want to split the Left faction vote.

A source close to Mr Dick said he believed Mr Miles had run a “good campaign” and had the “right to retain the leadership” after earlier considering a tilt at the Labor top job.

The outgoing Treasurer had told the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday morning that whoever the leader was needed to “rebuild trust in regional Queensland” and said the issue of crime had damaged that trust.

The Labor leadership pair of Steven Miles and Cameron Dick is likely to stay on despite the ALP’s defeat at Saturday’s election. Picture: Adam Head

Under Labor rules, the leadership is automatically spilled after an election result, and if there is more than one candidate for leadership positions, there is a formal ballot of parliamentary party MPs, grassroots members and affiliated unions.

It’s not clear who will serve as Mr Miles’s deputy, but it’s understood Mr Dick would be the most likely option.

Before the election, Labor had a majority in the 93-electorate parliament with 51 seats. As the count continues, it appears to have lost at least 17 seats to the Liberal National Party, but won back the heartland seat of Ipswich West from the LNP after the March by-election.

In a major psychological and ideological victory for the ALP, Labor won South Brisbane back from the Greens just one term after the minor party unseated former Labor deputy premier Jackie Trad in that electorate.

The seats of two former Labor ministers are still in doubt: Transport Minister Bart Mellish in Aspley and, crucially, Housing Minister Meaghan Scanlon in Labor’s sole Gold Coast seat of Gaven.

Ms Scanlon is seen as a future leader of the party.

There will also be factional calculations as the count continues, and operatives are doing the numbers to see whether the power balance in the caucus has shifted.

Left faction convener Gary Bullock, national director of the United Workers Union and Mr Miles’s self-described mentor, has lost a chunk of UWU-aligned MPs; six of the 17 who lost their seats were members of his union.

Of the other 11 defeated MPs and candidates, six were members of the Right; the rest were members of other Left unions.

Labor sources told The Australian the UWU now had an even number of MPs as fellow Left faction union the AMWU.

Mr Miles joined his caucus and union officials at Brisbane’s Breakfast Creek Hotel on Sunday for an election post-mortem, where the make-up of Labor’s frontbench was already being discussed.