Cold comfort amid Annastacia Palaszczuk’s bleak winter of discontent

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk on Monday. Picture David Clark

This winter of discontent for a bumbling Annastacia Palaszczuk gets bleaker by the day, just like Queensland’s deeply unwelcome cold snap.

On Monday, after the Premier had state cabinet sign off on her latest salve for the political hurt inflicted by Labor-aligned lobbyists, she did what should have been done months ago: blacklist the three most egregious “double-dealing” campaign operators from doing business with government for the rest of the term.

The trouble is, it’s her third position in seven days on lobbyists and now she has finally got there, it also promises to pull ­Anthony Albanese into the integrity mire of the “mate’s state” ­operated by Queensland Labor.

Anacta Strategies, founded by two of the banned lobbyists, former ALP state secretary Evan Moorhead and one-time Labor campaign guru David Nelson, has set up shop in Canberra and the Prime Minister will need to make a call on whether he follows the Palaszczuk lead, given Nelson ­directed Labor’s ad buy for the May 21 federal election.

The third member of the ­troika, Cameron Milner of Next Level Strategic Services, another former Labor state secretary, worked side-by-side with Moorhead in running Palaszczuk’s 2020 re-election campaign from her riverfront office.

As usual, she was dragged kicking to the obvious conclusion that their access had to go if her professed commitment to integrity and accountability was to have a shred of credibility.

And, as usual, her dithering only made a bad situation worse for the besieged government.

Palaszczuk’s opening gambit last Monday was to outline a set of “new rules” for lobbyists that looked as if it could have been written by one of them.

She then prevaricated on the four-year ban for so-called “dual hat” practitioners involved in an election campaign, which had been recommended by Peter Coaldrake in his bombshell public sector review released last Tuesday, before finally landing where she should have been on day one: cutting them loose.

You can see what the former Queensland University of Technology vice-chancellor was getting at when he observed that the problems started at the top of the government.

If Palaszczuk had any doubt about the cost of the past six dis­astrous months on her once-­stellar standing with voters, it was laid bare in YouGov polling published by our News group stablemate The Courier-Monday on Monday.

Labor’s winning primary vote was down six points from 2020, leaving it neck-and-neck with the Liberal National Party on a 50-50 split after preferences, while a third of voters said their view of her had soured since the last state election.

While she retained a healthy lead over LNP opposite number David Crisafulli as preferred premier – 41-28 per cent – the margin was the tightest it had been since the pandemic began.

The winter weather forecast can only get better for shivering Queenslanders, which is more than can be said for the Premier’s prospects unless she lifts her game.