It might seem that Steven Miles cut himself loose from reality when he went out on a limb and wielded the chainsaw to claim that Scott Morrison was using COVID-19 as a cover to distract voters from the Brittany Higgins rape affair.
“No doubt the Prime Minister will continue to use the vaccine rollout and Covid more generally to distract from the government’s other problems,” Mr Miles told reporters on Monday.
“That’s been a very orchestrated campaign to try to stop you talking about Brittany Higgins and rape and sexual harassment and all the things that have happened in Canberra,” he said.
It was a breathtaking display of political brutality by the Labor Left faction mover and shaker who has filled the government’s political assassin role since taking over as Queensland Deputy Premier from Jackie Trad.
But there is method to the apparent madness. The Queensland government has a calculated interest in deflecting attention away from its responsibility for the twin coronavirus outbreaks at the Princess Alexandra Hospital that led to last week’s lockdown of Greater Brisbane. This involved a succession of containment breaches, for which the state’s health service bears ultimate responsibility.
Labor also knows it has no hope of winning the next federal election unless it lifts its performance in the Sunshine State, where the Prime Minister remains stubbornly popular. When he attacks Mr Morrison, Mr Miles is not only acting as Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s appointed attack dog — he is also serving Anthony Albanese’s interests by trying to bring down the Prime Minister in the eyes of Queensland voters.
Mr Miles, 43, a former official with the Queensland Public Sector Union who holds a PhD on union renewal from the University of Queensland, has had a meteoric rise since entering parliament just six years ago.
He held the health portfolio in the previous parliament and became deputy leader and State Development Minister in May last year when Ms Trad was forced to quit her post.
Since then, his theatrics have made national news on occasion. In February, he posted a video of himself ripping up an invoice from the NSW government for hotel quarantine payments.
Mr Miles goaded the Prime Minister into an argument ahead of the state election campaign last year when he accused him of taking a week off during the pandemic to campaign for the LNP.
Mr Morrison angrily rejected the claim and called on Mr Miles to “grow up”.
The PM wasn’t responding to Mr Miles’s latest attack yesterday. But in weaponising the Higgins affair, Mr Miles has shown the lengths the ALP will go to throw Mr Morrison off his stride.
Strategists say it works for any Queensland government to lock horns with Canberra. But Mr Miles’s latest political attack is a deeply retrograde step. These issues are complex and divisive enough without being deployed as news cycle fodder. Taken together with the historical rape allegations confronting Christian Porter and the appalling behaviour in Parliament House that subsequently came to light, they have had the Prime Minister at sixes and sevens, tarnishing the government’s genuine achievement of containing the pandemic and a recession in Australia.
“In a democracy, there are always points of disagreement. But to deliberately link an alleged rape to the vaccine rollout is deeply and profoundly inappropriate and unconscionable,’’ a spokeswoman for federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said.
Yet of itself, this does not pose an existential threat to the government. Mr Morrison need not hold the election until late May next year, and it is unlikely the rape allegations will be dominating the headlines then. In the near term, he will be hoping the elevation of women in last week’s cabinet reshuffle and of women’s issues on the to-do list go some way to addressing the hit to the standing of the government and his personal Newspoll numbers.
Bungling the vaccine rollout is another matter entirely. Voters wouldn’t forget nor forgive that, and nothing could save the Coalition from their wrath.
In accusing Mr Morrison of mounting an “orchestrated campaign” of distraction, Mr Miles went where none of his Labor counterparts in Victoria, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the ACT dared go, and way beyond the criticisms that have been voiced by Mr Albanese.
Mr Miles’s ludicrous overreach served only to undermine what little goodwill remained between the two levels of government. This was not in the national interest, but it is confirmation that business as usual has resumed in Australian politics.
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