High Steaks: Federal Member for Groom, Garth Hamilton
His seat is no longer safe, and his background leaves him standing alone in the list of representatives’ former careers, but Qld MP Garth Hamilton has a vision for an LNP government that leads with compassion. THIS IS HIGH STEAKS
Can engineers ever make good politicians?
We may never know, given Garth Hamilton is the last one standing in the Australian House of Representatives, and his seat is not as safe as it once was.
“Do you realise that about 40 per cent of the Coalition’s new front bench are former staffers?’’ the Federal Member for Groom asks.
“It’s not so much a criticism as an observation, but it’s a trend that has been growing for a long time.’’
Engineers, the very people who, if you go by Cambridge Dictionary definition, design and build machines, engines, electrical equipment, roads, railways and bridges using scientific principles, know how to create the infrastructure providing the bedrock of our economy.
Yet they are rarely found in modern representative politics which prefers lawyers, managers, consultants and, as Garth points out, an ever-growing list of political staffers.
“As for engineers, I’m the last one standing in the lower house.’’
Garth, like the Coalition itself, received a sharp rebuke in the May election and just last week he labelled his party out of touch and blamed policies like using super for housing for the party’s disastrous loss, saying: “can we get real”.
He still held his seat out on the rolling Darling Downs behind Brisbane, along with his belief that Australians are ready for a Conservative government, provided it’s a compassionate one.
He has campaign posters from the 1980 Ronald Reagan campaign in his political memorabilia collection and professes a great admiration for the former Republican US President whose trajectory mirrored his own – from the political left in his younger years to the political right as he grew older.
“Australians have been given a real wake-up call with the rising cost of living, and I think they are looking for a more conservative approach to government expenditure,’’ he says.
“But they want to know that Conservatives can also be compassionate.
“You look at David Cameron (former British Prime Minister) and how he successfully got that idea of being a modern compassionate conservative across, and that led to the string of successes for the British Conservatives.’’
Whether Garth will one day lead the federal Coalition back into power looks, at this stage at least, like a long shot given his background in engineering.
Spearing a piece of Sir Thomas Mort Sirloin at Bergen Restaurant in Toowoomba with his fork, Garth nods eagerly in agreement with my hypothesis that these logical, analytical thinking, “left-hemisphere-of-the-brain’’ oriented individuals seem to have been quarantined from political leadership.
And he has a ready explanation as to how he personally managed to cross the divide.
“I was not a very good engineer,’’ he explains cheerily.
He was once the project manager for the underground section of the Argyle Diamond Mine in Western Australia.
Engineering propelled him across the world, overseeing projects from an airport terminal in London to the creation of tube stations to sporting facilities in Saudi Arabia.
He’s being modest when he downplays his technical abilities but insists that his engineering years taught him something about himself which has little to do with the construction of box girder bridges.
“What I was good at, and what I learned, was how to keep the show moving,’’ he says.
“I loved that sense of a campaign – like, ‘we gotta get something done in a certain amount of time so let’s do it’.
“And, like, who is the shared villain here?
“Is it regulation, is it the overbearing paperwork that we get put through, the thing that we can all complain about together but rise above it to get the project done no matter what?
“I do miss the camaraderie of that.’’
The poetry of politics, he readily concedes, is far removed from the more muscular prose of engineering.
Yet communicating a vision and motivating people to pursue it may well be one of the definitions of being a politician.
An engineer is trained to identify a problem, come up with a solution and implement it speedily – traits perhaps best encapsulated by “Can-Do’’ Campbell Newman, the former military engineer who won power in Queensland in 2012.
Fearlessly, Newman confronted problems, brazenly he proposed solutions, and valiantly he led his party over the electoral cliff after just one term.
As Garth points out, politics is more about emotion than reason, and when reason and emotion collide, emotion always wins.
“That is not to say that reason does not matter,” he says.
“You need the reason – the reason is what gives people an assurance that you are not a lunatic.
“But without the emotion, you are not going to motivate people to change their behaviour.’’
The son of a concreter, he grew up working class in Ipswich before earning a scholarship to Ipswich Grammar School where he admits a slight chip on the shoulder played a role in his adolescence.
“As a kid, I’ll be honest, I was at the Grammar School and I sometimes felt a little bit like a fish out of water,’’ he recalls.
“We would turn up in the rusty old HiLux filled with concrete and one of my best friend’s father was a dentist and they were quite well off.’’
But he soon discarded any residual resentment, and when John Howard was elected prime minister in 1998 when garth was still a teenager and he saw a man from an equally humble background leading the country, “defending the things he believes in’’.
“I just saw that it doesn’t matter about your background, your name, how much money you have – it’s just you getting up and having a go.
“It is enticing, the knowledge that you can do that – get into that fight.’’
The social mobility that Australia provides everyone is grossly undervalued, he says.
“A couple of hundreds of years ago a peasant did not look at the King or Queen and say – ‘I think I’ll go and do their job’.’’
He marvels that Labor, and the broader political left, have become the nation’s “Establishment,’’ leaving himself and his Coalition colleagues representing the very people he grew up with – tradespeople, small business types the people living in the regions and the outer suburban ring.
Now aged 45, it was wife Louise who brought Garth back from the hectic pace of international engineering projects to the southeast where the couple are raising three children.
The MP who describes himself as a humble but happy backbencher has a range of local issues to focus on, but the macro issue which has fixated his mind (as it would the mind of any engineering project manager) is productivity.
“There has been a 5.6 per cent drop in productivity since 2022 and that is the greatest drop in productivity that Australia has ever experienced since the 1950s when he started recording it,’’ he marvels.
“What that means is that, across the economy, we are going backwards.
“We’re killing off high-productivity sectors like mining while flooding the market with caring industries and public servants.’’
He likes mining, grasping the tremendous value it represents to the broader economy, but more than anything else, he admires those Australians who do the grunt work to keep the economy moving – the miners, the carpenters, the boiler makers, the roof tilers and the farmers who form the bedrock of the national economy.
And he has a deep familiarity with their daily lives.
Asked about his more treasured childhood memories he doesn’t offer the cliche of family celebrations or holidays.
One of his happiest memories goes back to his 16th year when he helped his father concrete a driveway near Ipswich.
The work, spread across more than 13 hours, was gruelling, and at one stage transformed him into a human mule, pulling equipment up the steep driveway by a rope wrapped around his body while dad pushed the equipment from behind.
At sundown, work finished, his father didn’t even say “thanks’’ but the pair got some beer through a nearby drive-through, and he was permitted to have one.
“I have never, ever, forgotten it,’’ he says.
“The sun going down, my father beside me, drinking a beer, the work finished in front of us and I’m just thinking:
“We did it. We got the job done!’’
STEAK: Two medium rare Sir Thomas Mort Sirloin steaks, accompanied by a simple potato and onion grattan.
VENUE: Bergen, Toowoomba
RATING: 10/10
Originally published as High Steaks: Federal Member for Groom, Garth Hamilton
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