Queensland election: ‘No target’ leader David Crisafulli has taken the voters for mugs but will still win

The manner in which David Crisafulli conducted himself gives rise to valid concern about how he would govern. The detail-light small-target approach might have been tactically adept, but it was an insult to the electorate and a new low in political sophistry.

LNP candidate Russell Field, left, and the Opposition Leader David Crisafulli at the Capalaba Central Shopping Centre pre-polling booth. Picture: Liam Kidston

Four years of disciplined effort and a professional, if unedifying, election campaign are set to pay off for Queensland’s metronomic Liberal National Party leader, David Crisafulli.

On Newspoll’s numbers he becomes premier on Saturday, terminating nearly a decade of Labor rule under Annastacia Palaszczuk and Steven Miles.

This achievement should not be underestimated. The LNP went backwards at the 2020 election, presenting Crisafulli with a formidable challenge: 12 additional seats on a statewide swing of 5.6 per cent to topple Labor and replace Miles, whose strong performance has been the surprise of the campaign.

But he was up against a tired and indifferently performed Labor outfit that was clearly on the nose with voters after three terms. A convincing win for the LNP was there for the taking.

Crisafulli has gone awfully close to blowing it.

Newspoll shows the LNP will fall across the line, though not necessarily in majority government. The comfortable victory that beckoned only a month ago melted away under the blowtorch of Miles’s scare tactics on abortion and doubts about whether Crisafulli was being upfront on his intentions in office.

This is an indictment of a “small target” campaign that effectively took the voters for mugs. Newspoll shows the LNP’s 45-year-old leader paid the price personally. His approval ratings crashed and the underrated Miles reversed the lead Crisafulli had opened on the key measure of who would be the better premier.

The government will still change but, at best, according to Newspoll, Crisafulli secures a majority in the 93-seat parliament by the squeakiest of margins. Equally, he could be forced into a humiliating deal with Katter’s Australian Party to govern in minority – an option he repeatedly ruled out during the campaign.

The 5.7 per cent swing to the LNP recorded by The Australian’s exclusive election-eve poll would, ordinarily, be decisive. In this case, the 13 Labor-held seats it would yield for Crisafulli – if uniform statewide – gets his side to the magic number of 47 in the house. Barely.

He would need to manage the single-chamber parliament with a skill and dexterity he failed to produce on the hustings.

Crisafulli’s mistake was to narrow his focus to a handful of talking points, especially on youth crime, when the electorate was looking for bigger thinking. He will rue the opportunities he missed to take voters into his confidence.

The manner in which Crisafulli conducted himself gives rise to valid concern about how he would govern. The detail-light small-target approach might have been tactically adept, but it was an insult to the electorate and represents a new low in political sophistry.

“No target” would be a better description.

At the end of an admittedly short and sharp 26-day campaign, the voting public would be little wiser about the largely unknowable Crisafulli, very much a work in progress in terms of what’s on the record about his positions and plans for the Sunshine State.

Take abortion. During Tuesday’s concluding leaders debate with Miles, he finally revealed his personal stance on the issue: Crisafulli said he was pro-choice, even though he voted against Labor’s legislation to decriminalise elective terminations before it passed the state parliament in 2018.

This matters when the Katter party has pledged to introduce private member’s bills to force doctors to care for babies born alive in failed late-term abortions and, potentially, to recriminalise the procedure generally. LNP policy is to allow MPs a conscience vote on such questions – posing a thorny problem for Crisafulli given his insistence that revisiting abortion reform or voluntary assisted dying won’t happen under his government.

It didn’t help that he refused to explain why he set his personal beliefs aside to vote against decriminalising abortion in 2018 or that one of his backbenchers, Jon Krause, a known opponent of abortion reform, told a candidate forum Crisafulli was a “firm believer” who had voted accordingly in 2018.

It’s not the only example of where he has had trouble squaring the circle. Crisafulli maintains the LNP in office would cut both taxes and eye-watering state debt that’s tracking to hit $172bn in 2027-28, though not at the expense of services.

Neither he nor putative treasurer David Janetzki will say whether the LNP would freeze hirings on a public service that ballooned by nearly 60,000 positions under Labor, an obvious savings measure; on climate policy, he signed up to Miles’s target to cut emissions by 75 per cent by 2035 but remains coy about how much of this would be done through the uptake of renewables.

The release of the opposition’s election costings on Thursday filled in some blanks, but not many. The LNP’s plan to reduce state debt by $660m over the budget forward estimates smacked of chipping a popsicle off an iceberg.

Premier Steven Miles visits pre polling at the Caloundra Cricket Club on the Sunshine Coast where he met six-month-old Seamus Fouhy. Picture: Adam Head

Miles, for his part, has boosted his case for staying on as Labor leader should he want the job after the election. He has saved some of the furniture for the ALP, no mean feat considering where the party was placed when Palaszczuk reluctantly bowed out last December.

Crisafulli will no doubt take refuge in the hoary old political adage that a win is a win is a win, assuming voters come to the party on Saturday. His self-serving evasiveness did not deserve to be rewarded with a bumper election win. That, truly, would have set a dangerous precedent in Australian politics.