Annastacia Palaszczuk cruised into a third term of office safe in the knowledge she was the best thing a lacklustre Queensland government had going for it, possibly the only thing.
The Premier’s performance this week gives the lie to that increasingly shaky proposition.
Her once-vaunted political touch has deserted her.
The seven-year-old Labor government is adrift and Peter Coaldrake nailed it in his devastating review of public sector culture and accountability when he found the problems started at the top.
But rather than face the music on Tuesday, Palaszczuk jetted out to tour a hospital in distant Bundaberg. On Wednesday, she was at the dentist.
And on Thursday, two full news cycles after Coaldrake’s findings were released, she insisted the report was actually a plus – a “health check” every government needed from time to time. She used that term at least nine times in a 22-minute press call. She was kidding herself.
Coaldrake has gone to complaints that disgruntled Labor MPs, senior public servants and even some ministers dare voice only in private: that the government is rudderless and Palaszczuk no longer has her heart in the consuming job of leading it.
His report gave her the opportunity to reset, to demonstrate who was in charge, and she squibbed it.
Instead of owning up to the mess on Thursday and assuring voters she had the will to fix it, Palaszczuk said: “We all need to take responsibility.” That’s right, the buck stopped with them.
She insisted that incidents of bullying and ministerial staff standing over public servants related by Coaldrake, of departmental officers being too cowed to provide frank advice to the higher-ups, could be tackled with the training programs the former university boss had proposed.
“If people do not know what they can and can’t do, it is a bit hard to criticise them,” she said.
“They need to get training about ‘this is how you behave in a workplace’.”
She accepted that the presence in her office of Labor-aligned lobbyists Evan Moorhead and Cameron Milner to oversee her 2020 re-election campaign “could have” been perceived negatively and wouldn’t happen again. But she emphasised a recommendation to ban lobbyists involved in an election from dealing with the government for the next four years was “prospective” and would need to be considered by cabinet.
Talk about mixed messages.
Nothing Palaszczuk said will assuage growing concern in the Labor ranks that she is eyeing the exit door and won’t seek a fourth term at the 2024 state election, an option she unwisely opened on Thursday.
Let’s be very clear: she faces no internal threat. No one is counting votes in the caucus or canvassing a move against her. For a start, a leadership challenge would require what amounts to a special conference of the Queensland ALP to be called under existing party rules.
Neither of her likeliest replacements, Deputy Premier Steven Miles or Treasurer Cameron Dick, of the Left and Right factions respectively, have anything near the support to take on Palaszczuk.
Her colleagues want what the state needs at this critical juncture: a Premier seen as being on her game, not on the town.
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