Meanwhile, in Queensland: Pyne’s pay cut; Clive Palmer panned; rat traps

Labor takes a cut at MP defector; Clive Palmer’s haggling revealed; Rats in the Question Time ranks.

MP Rob Pyne has been voted off a parliamentary committee by his former Labor colleagues - costing him almost $25,000 per year.

It’s the first sitting of Queensland parliament since the numbers shifted with the defection of Labor backbencher Rob Pyne to the crossbench last week. Amid calls of “payback” from LNP MPs, Pyne’s former comrades voted to discharge him from parliament’s Transportation and Utilities Committee (hitting him with a pay cut of $23,430 per year). As you all know, the Sunshine State is a unicameral arrangement, and its single house has 89 seats. Here’s how the numbers sit, post-Pyne revolt:

42 Labor

42 Liberal National Party

2 Katter’s Australian Party (Robbie Katter, Shane Knuth)

3 Independents (ex-Labor MPs Pyne and Billy Gordon, plus Speaker Peter Wellington who has a written agreement to support Labor on confidence and supply).

My colleague Michael McKenna has explained the current situation in this excellent yarn in today’s Oz.

Palmer cops a spray

The other big political story in Queensland at the moment is the always colourful Clive Palmer, the federal member for Fairfax, and the failure of his Townsville nickel refinery (at the cost of 787 jobs).

Treasurer Curtis Pitt went on the attack this morning, accusing Palmer “the self-professed richest man in Queensland” of causing “enormous uncertainty and upheaval” to the lives of north Queensland families. In more detail than we’ve heard before, Pitt says Palmer came to the Queensland government as early as late September and asked for $25m, but Palmer then denied to the media that he had made the request. In November, Pitt says Palmer came back and asked for more money. “First it was $25m, then $35m, then $40m”, all rejected by the government.

“We found that the biggest thing holding Queensland Nickel back was Clive Palmer: his decision to strip millions of dollars out of the business and lend it to himself; his decision to gift more than $15m to the Palmer United Party; his decision to pay himself a shareholder dividend of $28m just months before asking for $35m from Queensland taxpayers”.

The slanging match continues.

Here’s my story from this morning’s paper on the refinery mess.

And Clive has been on the airwaves again today, pointing fingers at everyone but himself.

Rats in the ranks

Rats were a big theme in Question Time. Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg pointed out that Labor’s MP for Capalaba, Don Brown, had called Pyne a “rat” on the interwebs. Awkwardly, Brown was sitting behind Pyne in the House today. Then the LNP’s Jarrod Bleijie, he of the sharp suits and pocket squares, stood, looking very pleased with himself, with a white stuffed toy rat perched on his shoulder. Speaker Wellington bellowed at him to remove the “prop”, and Bleijie went on to ask Police Minister Bill Byrne about his confirmation that decades ago he used a rifle to shoot rats in his Rockhampton roof. The question was ruled out of order, but the LNP’s Fiona Simpson and Scott Emerson jumped on the rat wagon and also asked rodent/rifle-related questions. For his part, Byrne insisted the matter had been fully investigated by the Queensland police and he’d been found to have done nothing wrong.

One punny member of the LNP Rat Pack yelled: “So it’s been ratified, then?”

Too many rat references are never enough.

The Courier-Mail’s Steven Wardill captured Bleijie’s ratty, I mean natty, dress-ups on Twitter here:

@JarrodBleijieMP question to @BillByrneMP over rat shooting ruled out of order. pic.twitter.com/mZTgJa7Keh

— Steven Wardill (@stevenwardill) March 15, 2016

In other news:

Queenslanders go to the polls on Saturday for council elections, and for a referendum on fixed four-year terms. Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath and her LNP counterpart Ian Walker are on a road trip down the coast (starting in Cairns today) in a last-ditch effort to get the referendum up. The government, Opposition and the Speaker are all backing the “yes” campaign, while the KAP MPs are on the “no” side.