Opinion: Steven Miles doing better than anyone expected as premier

For the record, I did not see or hear Steven Miles “laugh” at this abhorrent crime. As if any decent person, let alone a political leader would, writes Paul Williams. WATCH THE VIDEO

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How many of you made a new year’s resolution? How many have stuck to that resolution? Most, I hope.

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often,” British prime minister Winston Churchill once said.

Premier Steven Miles undoubtedly made his own new year’s resolution to change the way many a voter saw him. “He’s got no chance,” one person told me when Miles was elevated to the top job last Christmas. “Why would (Labor) pick him? He’s hopeless,” said another.

But, six weeks on, I’m hearing another narrative: Miles is standing up, having a go and growing into the job better than almost anyone expected.

Premier Steven Miles laughs off a question about youth crime at the Queensland Media Club. Picture: Sky News Australia

Most of that feedback emerged after recent natural disasters. More came after Miles floated a rethink of the deeply unpopular Gabba redevelopment. And some last week when the Premier conceded his government got it wrong in appointing former top public servant Rachel Hunter to head a homelessness review.

It looks like Miles pinched a leaf out of the playbook of former premier Peter Beattie, whose agility in the policy backflip – accompanied by a mea culpa apology – was itself of Olympic standard.

But where Beattie’s looked like a calculated political response, Miles appears to be spontaneously genuine.

I saw this first hand on Tuesday at the Queensland Media Club where Miles, later supported by Housing Minister Meaghan Scanlon, outlined a bold plan to build 53,500 social housing homes (and many more in the private sector) over the next 20-plus years.

In terms of substance, it was a good speech, but not a great one. While undoubtedly a big (if slow) step in the right direction, Miles did not fully address the challenge of constructing more than 2,000 social dwellings a year when builders and other tradies are in such short supply.

The speech also ignored two other elephants. The first? Housing initiatives might not be so urgent if Queensland had a population policy. It’s one thing to boast that Queensland since the pandemic has attracted migrants in numbers approximating the populations of Townsville and Rockhampton. It’s quite another that most new arrivals settle in an already congested Brisbane long straining under creaking infrastructure.

The second? Miles made no mention of youth crime – a mammoth blunder given the chilling murder of a 70-year-old grandmother just days before – a point made by a journalist. A visibly annoyed Miles snapped back that the speech was about housing. For the record, I did not see or hear Miles “laugh” at this abhorrent crime. As if any decent person, let alone a political leader, would.

What I heard was a politician having a dig at a journalist who’d just had a dig at him. It was simply the type of exchange between the first and fourth estates that we expect in a robust democracy. One would hope Labor’s opponents would refrain from trying to score political points from such an appalling tragedy.

No, the strengths of Miles’s speech did not lie in what he said. It lay in how he said it.

I couldn’t help but note that the man I was listening to just 3m away was almost unrecognisable from the bloke Governor Jeannette Young swore in less than two months ago. Gone was the nervous giggler uncertain in the media spotlight. In his place was an assured premier with a confident verbal delivery who looked like he genuinely cared.

Was the speech aimed at bolstering Labor’s re-election chances next October? Of course. But Miles’s opening remarks – that he comes from a modest background with grandparents once experiencing homelessness – nonetheless struck a chord. I believe Miles when he says he “gets it” when folks talk to him about real poverty.

All this is germane because Queenslanders love a strong leader with a big voice. The Nationals’ Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Labor’s Peter Beattie owed much of their success to their “strong” personas, whereas the LNP’s Tim Nicholls and Deb Frecklington (and even Labor’s Anna Bligh) failed in part because they lacked that strong voice.

Moreover, Miles appears disarmingly honest in answering journalists’ questions. Miles resists the clever one-liners and at least tries to give a straight answer.

Will a more adroit Miles be enough to defeat Opposition Leader and fellow nice guy David Crisafulli? It’s too early to tell.

But we know the LNP faces a tougher road to victory than it did just six weeks ago.

Dr Paul Williams is an associate professor at Griffith University

Originally published as Opinion: Steven Miles doing better than anyone expected as premier