When Queensland voters go to the polls next October, Labor will have been in power for 30 of the past 35 years, having produced three of the most popular state Premiers in modern political history in the form of Wayne Goss, Peter Beattie and most recently, Annastacia Palaszczuk. Paul Syvret reports on what awaits Steven Miles, and Queensland and Australian politics.
Queensland is an odd dichotomy, though. At a federal level, the situation is reversed, with the Liberal National Party holding 23 of the state’s 30 seats, and Queensland more recently recording a crushing ‘no’ vote in the Voice referendum.
This is also a state of political flux. Long gone are the days of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen rigged electoral boundaries. Also going is the decentralised population base, which has long seen traditionally conservative regional and rural voters consistently return politicians from the right of the spectrum.
As more than 30,000 interstate migrants head over the border each year – mostly to the state’s booming south-east conurbation stretching from Tweed Heads to Noosa – the political demography is shifting.
In 2022, Queensland elected its first federal Greens MP, Elizabeth Watson-Brown (in a seat which, bar a brief eight-month Labor aberration, had been held by the Liberals since its creation in 1949), and won three seats in Brisbane. And at a state level the Greens have a solid hold on two of the 89 seats in the unicameral parliament.
This is the broad landscape that incoming Queensland Premier Steven Miles is inheriting from Annastacia Palaszczuk.
Annastacia Palaszczuk’s departure
It’s a complex mix, made more challenging by Palaszczuk’s less than clean departure, a tired Cabinet in desperate need of renewal, festering public policy issues in areas like youth justice, the Olympic Games and transport, and an electorate that – like the rest of Australia – is cranky and stressed about cost of living pressures.
There is little doubt it was time for Palaszczuk to go. Public and internal polling said it, sections of an increasingly restive Labor Caucus said it, a number of Labor elders such as the perpetually scratchy Robert Schwarten said it very publicly, and union leaders – who control the factions – helped deliver the ultimatum.
Even Cameron Milner, the former state secretary credited with Palaszczuk’s ‘miracle’ win in 2015 – but now effectively in political purgatory following a clampdown on lobbyists – was quietly brought in from the cold by party leaders about two weeks ago to deliver a predictive post mortem.
When union leaders (and there has been no small measure of self-aggrandisement here in some quarters) basically gave Palaszczuk an ultimatum to “think about it over Christmas”, this act was over. For a Labor lawyer who devoted her life to the cause, rebuilt the parliamentary party from the direst of positions, and headed the state for nine years, it was a choice between “go on your own terms, or it could get ugly.”
This was a woman born into the Labor Party, the daughter of long-serving Minister Henry Palaszczuk; a Premier who steered Queensland through COVID better than most states and territories, who remade the gender demographics of the Labor side of the house; a Premier who put a fossil fuel economy on a path to a renewable energy future.
Campbell Newman’s wreckage
Palaszczuk inherited the wreckage of the Campbell Newman landslide in 2012, which saw the Anna Bligh Labor government annihilated, and Labor reduced to just seven seats. It was the biggest electoral loss in Australian political history, and her against-the-odds victory just one term later was the biggest comeback.
That win, though, meant Labor had to deal with a party room that was unusually thin on the ground for experience. There were precious few wise heads to be found in the party room. She did well, and even raw Ministers such as then Treasurer (now Speaker) Curtis Pitt grew into their roles.
As the years passed, sage advice and a concentration on policy agendas gave way to being captured by the 24/7 media cycle. Reactive politics and a media fixation driven by spin and “announcables” (the Queensland government media unit is a beast to behold) became the norm.
For a Premier who cut her cut her parliamentary teeth as an adviser in the Beattie government, this was disappointing.
Yes, Peter Beattie was a media tart. He loved the media, understood how it worked and could perform the most outrageous of shit-eating grin stunts (swimming in a shark tank, anyone?), but it didn’t totally dictate the agenda.
He surrounded himself with smart people who were quite prepared (and not discouraged from) telling him frankly, “Premier, that’s a bad idea, you’ll look like an absolute dickhead,” or “we’ve fucked this one up; no point trying to spin it – own up, take it on the chin, detail the plans to fix it and cauterise the wound.” I was there as an advisor for more than one of those exchanges.
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Sycophants, apparatchiks and party hacks
Palaszczuk’s office, at least in the latter years, was not like that, but widely regarded as being populated by sycophants, apparatchiks and party hacks who managed to alienate too many players – inside and out of government – who should have been staunchly onside. Gone were the old hard heads like Mike Kaiser, Rob Whiddon and David Barbagello, and in were the career loyalists.
Nor did Palaszczuk’s aversion to direct conflict serve her well. Too often, she would delegate the hard conversations (even down to the departure of her former live-in partner) to a third party. Too often, she missed the opportunity – factions be damned – to clean some of the dead wood out of Cabinet. Too often, Cabinet – burdened by late submissions – became a rubber stamp rather than a room of rigorous review.
Combine this with a Murdoch press that dominates Queensland and enthusiastically views itself as the de facto opposition – right down to the cheap paparazzi shots of her on holiday overseas and a tendency to place every perceived failing on the front page and ignore or downplay the positives – and it is not a recipe for political longevity.
Enter Steven Miles
Still, within party ranks, there is a degree of optimism that, at the very least, there will not be a repeat of the 2012 bloodbath. Miles – a whip-smart 46-year-old career Labor politician who cut his teeth in the Health portfolio during the early days of the COVID pandemic – is not the world’s greatest communicator.
He is naturally a fairly shy man, and sometimes prone to a nervous giggle. But he’s also an MP who tends to come across as awkwardly genuine, and one not afraid to take the gloves off when needed.
Miles’ immediate challenge will be renewal. That means a sweeping Cabinet reshuffle (partly dictated by the factional deals stitched up between the left and the AWU faction to boost his numbers) that is really Labor’s last chance to put a fresh coat of paint on a government perceived in many quarters as past its use-by-date.
How smooth this transition is remains to be seen, with blue-collar left unions such as the ETU, CFMEU and AMWU not exactly elated with the backroom games played by the AWU – a union bleeding members and money in Queensland at a rapid rate of knots. Here, campaign funding declarations should be interesting reading when the dust on 2024 has settled.
In Miles’ favour is an opposition headed by the saleable but relatively unknown David Crisafulli, and still populated with a lot of the left-overs of the Campbell Newman era. Already Crisafulli has been forced to promise no forced sackings of public servants – an echo of Newman’s promise in 2012, which after winning office quickly translated to some 14,000 jobs (many of them front-line) lost.
Labor’s ‘cuts and chaos’ attack ads for next year have already written themselves.
This is the chalice the Miles inherits. It may not be poisoned, but it is not brimming with ambrosia either.
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Recovering former Murdoch columnist. Proud unionist, lover of cats, beaches, heavy metal, horror and Z grade films and cryptic crosswords.