Jackie Trad: I won’t challenge for leadership

Jackie Trad insists she will not challenge Annastacia Palaszczuk amid party turmoil over Adani.

Premier Anastasia Palaszczuk and Jackie Trad. Picture: Peter Wallis.

Queensland’s powerful Deputy Premier Jackie Trad insists she will not challenge Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk for the state’s top job, amid internal party turmoil over Adani’s controversial coal mine proposal.

Ms Trad, the leader of the dominant Left faction and the government’s chief Adani sceptic, denied she would try to roll Ms Palaszczuk for the premiership or shift into a safer seat ahead of next year’s state election.

“I will be contesting the seat of South Brisbane at the next state election,” she told ABC Radio in Brisbane this morning.

Ms Trad would lose her inner-city seat of South Brisbane to the Greens, if the weekend’s federal election result were replicated at the next state election.

Asked whether she would challenge Ms Palaszczuk for the leadership before the poll, Ms Trad said: “That’s just a little bit ridiculous, can I say, and the answer to that is an emphatic no”.

Under Labor’s rules, a change of state leader requires not only the support of the parliamentary caucus, but the party’s wider membership and union movement.

The Australian revealed this morning that Treasurer Ms Trad has been moving to fortify her position as Deputy Premier, in the wake of federal Labor’s primary vote crashing at the federal poll and an internal revolt over Adani.

Yesterday, Ms Palaszczuk backflipped on Adani, insisting she was “fed up” with her own government’s moves to delay the proposed Carmichael coal mine’s environmental approvals. On the Premier’s orders, Adani, the state’s Environment Department, and the Coordinator-General will meet in Brisbane this morning to sort out a time frame for the outstanding approvals.

Ms Trad today said she “fully supports” Ms Palaszczuk’s move, but stopped short of specifically backing the Adani mine to go ahead.

“I want long-term secure jobs in regional Queensland and all over Queensland … and if that comes in the thermal coal sector, then that needs to happen,” she said.

“But let me also say this. We’ve got an obligation — because the federal government signed us up to the Paris agreement which I fully support — and under the Paris agreement, we have to be moving to lower our emissions. And that means, keeping carbon in the ground. That means not bulldozing native vegetation, it means moving to renewable energy, which we are doing.”

Ms Trad said voters in her electorate of South Brisbane were “desperately concerned” about climate change, “as I am”.

“But they also want the services, they also want a stronger economy, they want a whole range of things,” Ms Trad said.

She said Australia’s environmental laws were “deficient” because they did not take climate change into consideration.