Annastacia Palaszczuk’s staying power is far from accidental

After seizing the job so unexpectedly, Annastacia Palaszczuk has torn up the political rule book. Who would’ve thought it?

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has carefully cultivated her image. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

She’s the accidental premier no more, with two election victories under her belt and the confidence to speak not only of where she wants to take Queensland but how she can make a mark on the ­national stage.

Annastacia Palaszczuk has grown into the job she seized so unexpectedly in 2015, blowing away the record parliamentary majority that Campbell Newman had taken into office only three years before with the Liberal ­National Party. After a turbulent term at the helm of a minority Labor government, she is about to clock up the anniversary of the election that freed her hands last November 25. It says much about Australian politics that, for now, no other state or federal leader can match her record at the polls.

Along the way, she has torn up the political rule book. Palaszczuk is more like the mayor of Queensland than the absolutist who typically makes it to the top of the mango tree in the north. Joh ­Bjelke-Petersen used to count the cranes on the CBD skyline from his office in the old Executive Building. From her eyrie on the 40th floor of 1 William Street, the gleaming “tower of power” Newman built, Palaszczuk looks out on a floor-to-ceiling view of the sprawl of Brisbane’s southside suburbs as the planes come and go from the international airport at Eagle Farm.

“I am quite different to a lot of leaders,” she tells Inquirer in a rare sit-down interview to mark last year’s election victory. “What you see with me is what you get. I hope someone tells me if I ever change.”

The question is whether Palaszczuk, with her transactional ­approach and focus on the politics of the warm inner glow, is kicking the big problems to the kerb. She was a minister under Anna Bligh when Queensland lost its triple-A credit rating a decade ago. Yet state debt forecast to hit an eye-watering $81 billion by 2021 barely warrants a mention these days.

Last month unemployment came in at a seasonally adjusted rate of 6.3 per cent, against the ­national average of 5 per cent. It would have been higher save for the 7000 extra public servants hired by the Palaszczuk government in the first half of the year.

The voters seem unfazed. Perhaps they’re tired of the churn of prime ministers at the federal level as much as the drama of the Bligh and Newman years, when both the state ALP and LNP were burnt badly by unpopular programs to sell or lease assets. Palaszczuk won’t come at privatisation, nor will she purge the 225,000-strong state bureaucracy, as Newman did. (He announced 14,000 job cuts within days of coming to power.)

The secret of her success has been to put a calm and concerned face on what Griffith University political scientist Paul Williams calls the most left-wing government Queensland has known.

Listing her proudest achievements of the past 12 months in state parliament last week, Palaszczuk started with abortion law reform, extra controls on farm run-off to protect the reef, the ­extension of the dingo fence in the west and a crackdown on cyber-bullying following the suicide of schoolgirl Dolly Everett.

The government had “created” 39,100 jobs on the back of a $6bn boost in state exports and an $11.6bn infrastructure spend for 2018-19; 213 of 498 election commitments had been delivered, she boasted, with two years of the term to run.

Note the glaring admissions? Not a word on restoring the triple-A rating, which would reduce ­interest on the state’s nation-leading debt, saving billions.

As for that millstone on the budget, the Premier says debt is lower than when the LNP was elected in 2012 — which is true, courtesy of the axe Newman took to the public service and spending.

She argues that the criticism of her financial management does not take into account how the state carries the borrowings of government-owned corporations such as electricity generators and fully funds its superannuation obligations.

But here’s what former state Treasury head Sir Leo Hielscher said in July when he came out of retirement to let fly, having worked for 10 premiers across nearly seven decades: “Sorry kids, sorry grandkids. We have lost our triple-A credit rating, a lot of our cash reserves, superannuation surpluses and suchlike have been tapped and the debt is still rising. Our budgets have been balanced from allocations from our cash ­reserves. And as … far as the economy is concerned, we seem to be relying on the momentum from previous years’ efforts. Except for casinos and high-rise accommodation there is nothing substantial and new being added.”

In response, Palaszczuk says: “I reject what Leo has said there. Queensland is a vastly different state to what it was 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 60 years ago, and we are embracing the diversification of the economy. We are trying to prepare our kids for the future.”

It’s fair to say that very few saw 49-year-old Palaszczuk coming, not even her own side. The daughter of former MP Henry Palaszczuk, who served in Wayne Goss’s reformist government in the early 1990s and who was a minister under Peter Beattie, she studied law at university before following the tried and true path of the Labor apparatchik: a job with a federal backbencher, a stint overseas working on the 1996 campaign of budding British PM Tony Blair, time in state ministerial off­ices and then into Queensland parliament courtesy of dad, who smoothed the way for young Stacia to take over his ultra-safe seat when he retired in 2006.

She had been a competent though mid-ranking minister for four years when Newman put the sword to Bligh’s government. When the dust cleared, only seven Labor MPs were left standing and Palaszczuk was thrown the hospital pass of leading them.

The expectation was she would be ground down or run down long before Labor was in a position to return to power. But to her credit she persevered, smiling and learning, as Newman made one political mistake after another.

The rest is history. Labor won 35 seats in 2015, including Newman’s, and scrambled into office with the support of independents. Beattie, who became Queensland Labor’s most winning premier after starting out in minority, said he succeeded in that first, shaky term by governing as if he had a majority of 10. But Palaszczuk was caution personified. Post-“Can-do” Campbell, the LNP opposition said she ran a “do nothing” government.

If so, the times suit her. Palaszczuk was returned on 48 seats at last year’s election, delivering Labor a narrow majority in the ­expanded 93-seat parliament. Longstanding student of Queensland politics John Wanna, a professor with the Australian National University, says her “folksie appeal” has genuine reach in the nation’s most decentralised and volatile electorate.

“It’s a disarming tactic; she’s trying to be a parliamentarian rather than a politician … in the Queensland context at the ­moment, that is annoying people a lot less than a more in your face kind of premier,” he says.

Historian Ross Fitzgerald, a hard marker, gives Palaszczuk seven out of 10. She issui generis— one of a kind in terms of the combative norm for a Queensland premier. “What it says about political leadership is it doesn’t pay to be bold any more,” Fitzgerald says, a view shared by 1990s reformer Jeff Kennett.

“Politicians today are gun shy … they are so focused on winning that the concept of leading and doing things that may offend is not seen as a political option,” the former Victorian premier complains.

Williams says Palaszczuk is the best thing going for a “fairly average” Labor government. “Occas­ionally you see a politician grow into a role, though more often they arrive with great promise and fail,” he argues. “She came in with low ­expectations and succeeded. She doesn’t look like an elite, she doesn’t sound like an elite, and that works in terms of her saleability.”

Understandably, the woman herself bristles at the suggestion that she avoids making hard decisions. On a steamy day in north Queensland during the election campaign in November last year, the frustration welled up. Palaszczuk was under the gun after announcing Labor would veto a federal loan to Indian company Adani for its controversial Carmichael coalmine. This turned out to be a shrewd move, neutralising an issue that had threatened to sink her.

But in the process, she outed a purported conflict of interest ­involving her then partner, Shaun Drabsch, who had worked on Adani’s loan application to the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund as a consultant. Palaszczuk relied on this, somewhat unconvincingly, to justify the messy policy backflip. “I have been sick and tired of people saying, ‘You don’t make ­decisions,’ ” she snapped. “I’ve made a decision. I make decisions every day.”

News broke after the election that the couple had separated and Palaszczuk still won’t say whether the Adani gambit figured in this.

“I am not discussing that, it’s private,” she says. But it hints at a ruthlessness that grates with the carefully tended image of everyone’s favourite aunt.

Palaszczuk says she feels freer to be herself now that the shackles of minority government are off. “Definitely, I think I’ve got more confidence because we … have that majority, which drew a line in the sand,” she says.

But there are limits, and Adani shows where they are. As Bill Shorten knows all too well, the issue is diabolical for Labor, wedging it between its progressive base and the Greens, who want the $16.5bn project canned, and the crying need in economically challenged north Queensland for jobs and investment.

Asked where she stands on it, whether she wants the new mine, Palaszczuk still hedges.

“As I’ve always said, it needs to stack up financially,” she says, echoing the federal Labor leader. Pressed to state a preference, she says the planned open-cut is not the “be all and end all” of mining.

In her quiet and measured way, Palaszczuk is moving up the ladder at the national level. If her friend, the like-minded Daniel Andrews, loses today’s Victorian election, she will be the longest serving of the mainland premiers. Who would have thought it?

She is excited by what the ­future holds, especially if Andrews survives, building momentum for Labor to clean up in NSW next March and in the big one, the federal election tipped for May next year. Palaszczuk wants to bring consensus politics to the fraught arena of federal-state relations and, just as in Queensland, it may be that she is on to something.

“I honestly believe we work best when we all work together … when governments work together you get the best outcomes for people,” she explains.

“What is missing in this nation is the ability for a national leader to sit down with premiers and work with them on what they see as the priorities for the state. It is always combative, it is always us and them.”