It’s been just a month since the Liberal National party emerged from Queensland’s political wilderness, and David Crisafulli has already been talking about how it can govern for decades.
And the new premier knows the precise answer to that question.
Having corralled a directionless rabble into a disciplined election-winning team, Crisafulli has to keep the Christian soldiers and climate deniers on the right fringe of the party in line.
He said as much (without actually saying it) to LNP officials and party members last weekend.
“We don’t exist for culture wars,” Crisafulli told the LNP state council.
“We won’t get everything we want. There will be times where … you have to compromise, where things are a little bit imperfect. But overall, when you govern, you can embed the kind of things that you want to see for a state.”
Crisafulli’s speech was upbeat and warmly received – the sort of reception you might expect after winning an election after decades spent mostly in opposition. But few will have missed the blunt subtext.
This can be a moment like “Honest Frank” Nicklin’s election win in 1957, which was the last time conservatives won government from opposition in Queensland, and then went on to win a second election. They were in power for 32 years.
Or it could be a moment like Campbell Newman’s 2012 election landslide, when LNP won Australia’s largest parliamentary majority and was turfed out after a term.
This time around, it cannot afford the internecine and ideological warfare that plagued Newman and diverted his government – elected on a moderate platform – on a path to hardcore public sector cuts, trashing civil liberties and conservative social policies.
Crisafulli didn’t mention the “A word” – abortion – or nuclear power but everyone present knew what he was talking about.
“We have a chance of doing what we haven’t done for a long, long time – 60 years in fact. We have a chance of bringing generational government,” he said.
“What will happen in four years’ time – the scare campaign that you were all subject to by the Labor party [this election] will not work. It won’t, it can’t.
“In four years’ time … when we have not done the things we said we wouldn’t do … Queenslanders will see what it’s like to have a government where a word counts for something.”
‘Don’t scare the horses’
One of the secrets to the former Queensland’s premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s longevity was her cautious approach. During her first term from 2015 to 2017, Labor was repeatedly criticised for “reviewing, not doing”.
But Palaszczuk and her advisers had tapped into a secret to political success in Queensland, particularly in the shadow of Newman’s chaotic single term. She set about being the “anti-Newman”, leading a government so measured, boring and indecisive that it frustrated some people. Even after almost a decade, Palaszczuk’s instinct was to avoid political fights.
Wayne Goss, the Labor premier who won the 1989 election, used to tell his ministers, “Don’t scare the horses.”
Crisafulli and the LNP will need to be careful. Even in its first month, there have been some signs of the sort of “crash or crash through” thinking that got its predecessors into trouble.
First, we’ve seen a constant stream of stories using the tired old trope – “Labor was cooking the books!” – used by governments past to justify cuts, policy pivots and other unexpected moves early in a new administration.
The cost of construction projects has increased. And the new government has sought to blame it on the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union and not the fact construction costs have increased the world over.
And so goes the justification for suspending the best practice industry conditions agreement for workers on government construction projects.
Writing in News Corp publications, the CFMEU civil construction coordinator, Dylan Howard, says the move is a “clear sign they intend to wage war on construction workers and our unions”.
“With the CFMEU in external administration, the LNP clearly sees an opportunity to de-unionise the construction sector ahead of the huge program of work coming up for the 2032 Olympic Games,” Howard says.
Crisafulli needs to tread carefully. The CFMEU is an easy target but there’s also no hiding that the move is an ad hoc decision to wind back workers’ wages and conditions. There’s a fine line between acting decisively and coming across as high-handed.
Another litmus test will arrive this week when the government tables its rushed legislation to introduce “adult time” for juvenile offenders. The haste is designed to meet an election promise but already there are significant concerns that a rushed law could have unintended consequences.
For example, what happens to impressionable young kids – aged 10 and 11 – who are arrested as backseat passengers in stolen cars? Police practice is to charge these children with “unlawful use of a motor vehicle”. The government proposal is for this offence to be subject to “adult time”.
Does anyone seriously think that sending an 11-year-old backseat passenger to a detention centre – where they would be exposed to more serious offenders on an adult sentence – would help make the community safer? Good governments have the ability to take a breath, consider these sorts of impacts, and get their laws right.
The new deputy premier, Jarrod Bliejie, a controversial figure as attorney general in the Newman years, has been front and centre of the new government’s narrative during the past month.
He suits the role of government attack dog. But the real question is whether the Crisafulli government should be deploying an attack dog so prominently, so early in the term.
Doing so might, as Goss warned, scare the horses.
