Steven Miles’ AG quits months after vowing to run under Annastacia Palaszczuk

Labor insiders predict more cabinet resignations are likely to come after the budget as ministers weigh up how terminal the government’s electoral prospects are. So who else is getting ready to go?

Queensland Health Minister Yvette D’Ath and then-Deputy Premier Steven Miles walk through a Covid vaccination hub during the pandemic. Picture: Sarah Marshall

It doesn’t bode well for Steven Miles that one of his most senior cabinet ministers has announced she is quitting just months after he took the top job.

Late last year she pledged to contest the October poll when Annastacia Palaszczuk was still premier, but Yvette D’Ath has had a change of heart and thrown the towel in two months after Miles became leader.

What is it they say about rats fleeing the sinking ship?

Not only is D’Ath’s exit a bad look for Miles, it leaves her bayside seat of Redcliffe vulnerable to the Liberal National Party.

The LNP has chosen serial candidate Kerri-Anne Dooley to run again in Redcliffe, one of its 14 target seats.

While Dooley may have lost to D’Ath at four consecutive elections, she has built up name recognition and will now have a better chance against an unknown Labor face.

D’Ath won Redcliffe with a 6.1 per cent buffer at the 2020 pandemic election, but political strategists believe the margin is inflated after older voters backing Labor’s tough border regime in Covid.

It will be much harder for Labor to retain this time around.

And Labor is already facing a test at next month’s byelection in Ipswich West, after the stabbing murder of grandmother Vyleen White in the neighbouring seat of Bundamba.

White’s murder, this month allegedly at the hands of a 16-year-old boy, has pushed law and order to front of mind for voters in the once-safe Labor seat.

Byelections in Ipswich West and Palaszczuk’s old seat of Inala, will be gauge how voters have responded to the leadership change ahead of the October 26 state poll.

Yvette D'Ath with then-opposition leader Annastacia Palaszczuk in 2014. Pic Tim Marsden

D’Ath says she started thinking about retiring at Christmas, days after Palaszczuk’s shock resignation, but insists the change in leader did not prompt her decision

“This isn’t a decision about who’s the leader or any changes, this is a personal decision,” she said on Thursday.

“I’ve prided myself on my integrity, and my reputation, not everyone wants to report that, but at the end of the day, I’m very proud of my integrity and the decisions I’ve made and how I have held myself in this role for so many years.”

It’s a self interested rewrite of history for D’Ath who allowed Star casino to host and pay for her political fundraiser before the 2017 election while she was AG and in charge of regulating the state’s casinos (which were later revealed to be riddled with bad behaviour).

As the Australian revealed in 2019, Star was lobbying the Palaszczuk government at the time of the fundraiser to drop plans for a second, rival casino on the Gold Coast, and had submitted plans for a $2bn upgrade of its own Gold Coast casino to D’Ath, which she later approved.

She also went on to lift the cap on the number of gaming tables for Star in Brisbane, but rejected departmental advice to do the same thing for all casinos in Queensland.

As health minister, she spent months rejecting calls for an inquiry into the state’s DNA laboratory - despite mounting evidence there was something sinister happening.

D’Ath may have been following advice of public servants in her department when she failed to probe problems in the lab, but her blind acceptance of their counsel goes to the heart of her ministerial style.

Labor insiders predict more cabinet resignations are likely to come after the budget as ministers weigh up how terminal the government’s electoral prospects are.

So who else is getting ready to go?