Defiant Jackie Trad hits the hustings with gusto, rules out return to cabinet

Annastacia Palaszczuk and former Deputy Premier Jackie Trad have ruled out her return to Cabinet if Labor wins the election.

Jackie Trad talks with local voters Georgia Robertson and her partner Louis Yanagisawa as she door-knocks constituents in Highgate Hill, Brisbane. Picture Lyndon Mechielsen

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her former Deputy Premier Jackie Trad have ruled out her return to Cabinet if Labor wins the election.

Ms Trad posted on Facebook that she had “only ever put myself forward to represent and fight for my community”.

“Let me make clear, I am not seeking a return to Cabinet,” Ms Trad said.

“I am actually in the fight of my political life - as many of my colleagues are.”

“The fact is, every MP’s job is up and it’s Queenslanders who get to decide whether or not MPs get to keep their jobs.”

On Sunday, Ms Palaszczuk would not be drawn on whether Ms Trad be promoted back into Cabinet if she won her seat of South Brisbane.

But today, Ms Palaszczuk said: “Let me say very clearly, she will not return to Cabinet”.

Defiant Trad hits hustings with gusto

They say Jackie Trad is finished, that it’s all over red rover for the woman touted as the next Labor premier of Queensland.

The Crime and Corruption Commission did a job on her back in May, didn’t it?

The Liberal National Party will hold its nose to help the Greens go in for the kill in her seat of South Brisbane on Saturday fortnight.

And Annastacia Palaszczuk won’t be drawn on whether her former 2IC and treasurer will be reinstated if the government and its most controversial MP both survive.

The odds are stacked against Ms Trad but her message to the critics and knockers is typically defiant. “There are so many from the commentariat who have written of my demise … to do with me, to do with the seat,” she told The Australian, hitting the hustings in the most tightly fought marginal contest of the state election.

“Quite frankly, I don’t care. It’s the people of my community who will pass the ultimate judgment.”

Ms Trad’s answer to a “get Jackie” alliance that extends to arch Greens-baiter Clive Palmer is shoe leather — she is door-knocking up a storm to take her case for re-election directly to the voters.

To date, she and her team of T-shirted volunteers have canvassed 5000 homes and made another 25,000 phone calls into the inner-city electorate where the Greens’ vote surged at council elections in March. Ms Trad holds the seat by a margin of 3.55 per cent.

In 2017, Greens candidate Amy McMahon carved 10 points off the Labor’s two-party-preferred vote and Ms Trad was saved by LNP preferences. Not this time.

The LNP decided earlier this year to preference Labor last in South Brisbane and was so pleased with the response it will deploy the tactic statewide, while Mr Palmer’s United Australia Party is also to preference the Greens over the ALP in Ms Trad’s seat.

Ms McMahon, returning for a second tilt, says her party’s polling puts her ahead of Ms Trad 36-30 per cent on primary votes, which would clinch it if LNP supporters followed the how-to-vote card. The question is, will they?

Former deputy premier and current Labor state member for the seat of South Brisbane, Jackie Trad, talks with local voters Georgia Robertson and her partner Louis Yanagisawa as she door knocks constituents in the seat, in Highgate Hill, Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Ms Trad’s grassroots campaign is designed to lift her primary vote the old-school way — by asking LNP and Greens voters face to face to buck the party line and back her.

The approach does have challenges with the pandemic, but she believes it is her best chance.

“There is no doubt the primary vote needs to increase,” she said. “People need to be aware of the sneaky LNP, Clive Palmer, Greens preferencing arrangements … they need to make their own call when it comes to casting their vote and their preferences.

“I am campaigning to win this seat, and that means I need as many votes as possible from all sections of the community.

“It will be people who swing from election to election, whether it’s to swing from Labor to Greens and the Greens to Labor or the LNP to Labor.”

There’s more at stake than the career of a Labor high-flier in Ms Trad who will re-enter leadership calculations if she prevails; the Palaszczuk government needs to sandbag a swag of vulnerable metropolitan seats and snatch others off the LNP in Brisbane and possibly the Gold Coast to offset its anticipated losses in provincial Queensland.

Labor’s contortions over coal — walking one side of the street to woo pro-mining regional voters, the other in progressive-minded inner-city electorates — are particularly stark in Queensland, the nation’s most decentralised state, and will play out in the fierce contest for South Brisbane.

The secretary of the local Greens branch, Joann Horton, stoked tensions by referring to the ALP as “ the nastiest skank bitch I’ve ever met” in a weekend post that was seen to be a shot at Ms Trad.

The Greens say it was a “satirical tweet” quoting the movie Mean Girls, and did not refer to Labor or Ms Trad, but the Greens themselves.

Ms Trad was leader of the dominant parliamentary Left and a driving force in cabinet until she was forced to quit as deputy premier and treasurer six months ago over the CCC’s investigation into alleged interference in the appointment of a local state school principal, the second integrity row to engulf her in a year. She was subsequently cleared.

Her critics say the anti-corruption agency did the government a favour, with Ms Trad’s exit from her high-profile roles eliminating a drag on Labor’s vote. Asked whether she was better off being free to concentrate on the seat, she said: “We will see come the election.”

The LNP’s man in South Brisbane, project planner and manager Clem Grehan, said conservative voters would have no problem preferencing the Greens, the minority party they otherwise love to hate. “The door-knocking we have done shows people have lost faith in Trad,” he said. “The No 1 issue in South Brisbane is trust.”

Campaigning in nearby McConnel, another inner-city Labor seat in the sights of the Greens, Ms Palaszczuk on Sunday ducked questions on the possibility of a post-election recall to cabinet for her former deputy. “I am very confident and happy with the team I have: Steven Miles as Deputy Premier and Cameron Dick as the Treasurer,” she said.

On her prospects of being returned for a fourth term in South Brisbane, Ms Trad said: “I have never taken one single election for granted, not one. This is a community that expects an energetic, activist local representative and that’s what I have been.”