The 'can-do' commander

FORMER army officer Campbell Newman has secured an unprecedented mandate.

HIS glass jaw was supposed to shatter when the pressure came on in Queensland's drawn-out and testing election campaign.

That propensity to micro-manage, supposedly the hallmark of his seven years as Brisbane mayor, was going to rear up and bite the Liberal National Party, just like the questionable deals with developers that were alleged to have happened on his watch.

And then there was his doting wife, Lisa -- apparently a turn-off to women voters who found her too tactile by half -- and the controversies over his entrepreneurial in-laws.

With so much stacked against him, it's a wonder that Campbell Newman is where he is today: premier-elect of Queensland with the biggest parliamentary majority in Australian history and the ALP on its knees, out of the game for who knows how long in the Sunshine State.

If that is not enough, Newman has made more history by becoming the first person to become premier from outside parliament, courtesy of his individual victory over Labor's Kate Jones in Ashgrove, and as the man who beat the first woman to be elected premier, thanks to dispatching Anna Bligh's government. The magnitude of the LNP's win is breathtaking. Labor has lost more than 40 seats including those of 12 ministers and its next generation of state leaders in outgoing deputy premier Andrew Fraser and education minister Cameron Dick. The conservatives have roared back to power, after nearly 14 years in the wilderness, with up to 80 of the 89 state seats. Given they dispensed long ago with that annoying complication of an upper house in the Queensland parliament, the man they call "can do" will take office promising to fix the economy, the health system and the state's finances with more authority than any of the 21 premiers who have come before him.

But will he seize the opportunity to be Queensland's most successful conservative leader since Joh Bjelke-Petersen? Or will his command-and-control instincts destine him to the same sorry fate as that other populist politician from Queensland, Kevin Rudd?

John Wanna, professor of public policy at the Australian National University, notes how Rudd also rode the wave of public popularity on a raft of fix-it promises -- only to be knifed by his own colleagues for his "dysfunctional" leadership.

"I think he's been very belligerent," Wanna says of Newman's campaigning style, in which he discerns traces of his early years as an army officer. "The glass jaw has been on show a lot; he's been very brittle and sharp.

"That military side of him comes out -- everything has to be done his way. It's not clear from his public performance that he could work with a group of colleagues, like cabinet."

But two former premiers -- Rob Borbidge and Peter Beattie -- both believe Newman's no-nonsense reputation will serve him well.

"In many respects he'll be the premier for the times," says Borbidge, the last conservative to lead Queensland before Beattie took the reins in 1998, and handed over to Bligh nine years later.

"Public administration in Queensland has been somewhat constipated, and Campbell Newman is the sort of person who can shake it up and start getting some outcomes again. This is the sort of thing that only happens in Queensland once in a generation."

Beattie, for his part, found then mayor Newman "very good to work with" during his time as premier in spite of their obvious political differences.

"He was a person who just got on and did it," he recalls. "At the end of the day when you're in government and want to get things done, you do sometimes tread on toes. But that's what the community wants. If you want to be popular permanently, and have everyone love you, then don't get into politics."

Borbidge scoffs at any comparison between "action man" Newman and Rudd the "micro-manager". "(Newman) is impatient to get results and I would see that as a benefit, not as a drawback," he says. "If sometimes you have to thump the table to get things moving, then that's what needs to be done."

As boss of Australia's biggest municipality, Newman was renowned for his ferocious attention to detail and work ethic. The stories about him calling council staff to fix potholes he spied on his travels around Brisbane are no urban myth: his own family saw him do it. But Newman's critics -- and there's no shortage of them at City Hall -- portray him as an arrogant autocrat who does not take advice. His father-in-law, the eminent maxillofacial surgeon Frank Monsour, once described him as "a bit of an authoritarian".

Newman's stubborn streak was on display in the lead-up to the election, when he initially resisted updating his pecuniary interests declaration after the ALP targeted his investments and his wife's involvement as an office bearer in the Monsour family companies that dabbled in property development.

It didn't help when her brother, Seb Monsour, was shown to have set up a business that touted for government contracts to provide flood mapping after last year's natural disasters in Queensland. There was no allegation of impropriety, and Monsour has strongly asserted that he was entitled to seek the work. But it wasn't a terribly good look, especially in the light of Seb's chequered history with the Liberal Party: in 2006 he was preselected to run for Ashgrove but had to quit the race over claims that he had falsely talked himself up as a former representative rugby player for the state team.

During the campaign Labor seized on revelations that developer Philip Usher had donated a total of $72,000 to Newman's then mayoral re-election fund under seven different names. Although there was no suggestion that Newman had personally benefited in any way -- he insisted he did not know of the donations -- Labor depicted him in attack ads as being at the centre of a spider's web of the Usher donations and his in-laws' property dealings.

Bligh, however, was forced to concede she did not have grounds to follow through with a threat to refer Newman to the Crime and Misconduct Commission, and her campaign never recovered.

In fact, the CMC had launched its own inquiry into the Usher donations, but cleared Newman personally of any culpability.

Still, he was forced to announce during the campaign that he would put all of his and Lisa's investments in a blind trust within 90 days of becoming premier -- a decision he should, arguably, have taken much earlier to put the issue to bed.

Borbidge is far from alone in describing Queensland's five-week election campaign as "the most nasty, bitter, brutal personal campaign that I can remember". Ross Fitzgerald, emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University, says Newman proved his resilience.

"He's certainly not cowardly," he says. "He's got guts and chutzpah."

As the son of two federal Liberal ministers, Jocelyn and Kevin Newman, the premier-elect has the perfect political pedigree. His mother served as a senator for Tasmania for 15 years and as a well-regarded minister in John Howard's government, fighting welfare fraud and championing self-reliance in her portfolios of social security, community services and families.

His father was a Vietnam war veteran who rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and went on to serve as a minister in Malcolm Fraser's government.

Campbell followed him into the army, graduating from Duntroon Military College with a civil engineering degree. His training as a military engineer permeates his speech and approach to politics: he tends to frame issues in terms of obstacles to be overcome and solutions to be constructed, such as the system of new tolled tunnels he championed as mayor, and funded, to ease traffic in Brisbane.

After leaving the army in 1993 as a major, Newman worked as a business consultant for companies including Telstra, BHP Australia Coal and the Hydro-Electric Commission in Tasmania before running the operations of agribusiness Grainco Australia, where he developed a $60 million grain handling system.

When he put up his hand to run for mayor for the Liberals at the 2004 council elections, he wasn't given a ghost of a chance against Labor incumbent Jim Soorley, who was deeply entrenched at City Hall.

But Soorley moved on and Newman never looked back. His power reached beyond the usual rates-and-rubbish mandate of local government. Brisbane City Council is a $3 billion-a-year enterprise that operates a bus and ferry system, and maintains a network of parks, libraries and bike paths, the envy of other cities.

To raise revenue, Newman introduced fines for property owners who fail to clean graffiti from their front fences, or leave their wheelie bins on the streets too long. In his last budget, rates jumped 5 per cent -- nearly double the rate of inflation. But he remained a popular mayor, and has defied expectations that his appeal would not translate from the millpond of local government to the pressure cooker of state politics.

Typically, Newman rolled up his sleeves yesterday and got down to business. There is much to do. Beattie made the point on Saturday night that the epic victory Newman has secured for the LNP brings with it huge personal responsibility.

Newman will set the "tone" for the government, Beattie said, and the man himself seemed to recognise this with a gracious acceptance speech on Saturday night in which he praised Bligh's service and vowed to govern with humility, grace and dignity.

A transition-to-government team has been working quietly behind the scenes in the LNP for months and those plans will be rolled out. Newman has indicated that he will break up the "super department" structure Bligh created, starting with the DERM, the Department of Environment and Resource Management.

Its former director-general, John Bradley, who was promoted by Bligh to head the Department of Premier and Cabinet, is the first senior bureaucrat propelled out the door by the LNP broom, with Newman asking him yesterday to stand aside. Veteran under-treasurer Gerard Bradley (no relation) is tipped to follow.

Then there's the new cabinet. Newman says only two positions are guaranteed on the existing frontbench -- those of the incoming deputy premier and infrastructure minister Jeff Seeney, a former state Nationals' leader, and treasurer and trade minister Tim Nicholls.

The premier-elect has nominated "fixing" Queensland's shambolic public health system as a priority and his choice for the hot-potato portfolio will be carefully watched. If he shifts former Liberal leader Mark McArdle from health, as is considered possible, another ex-Liberal Party leader Bruce Flegg will be an obvious candidate for the job.

Newman's relationship with the Gillard government will be prickly: already he has declared he will "fight" the carbon tax, and may join the other conservative states to drive reforms outside the usual forum of the Council of Australian Governments.

Newman's mantra is to build a "four-pillar economy" based on mining, agriculture, tourism and construction. He has pledged to trim the unemployment rate from 5.5 per cent to 5 per cent within three years, to cut "red tape" by 20 per cent and to limit public service wage growth to 3 per cent each year. To achieve this, he will need to put a metaphorical bomb under the bureaucracy.

As former premiers, Beattie and Borbidge both have the same advice for the newcomer: make changes, and fast.