The first sign of panic emerges a few weeks before election day, at a youth centre in Rockhampton. The Liberal National party’s candidate, Donna Kirkland, messes up the party line on abortion and accidentally says they’ve “ruled out” a conscience vote.
Frontbencher Laura Gerber’s eyes widen and dart from side to side. She motions to the opposition leader, David Crisafulli, who has to step in. That week Crisafulli is asked more than 100 times the same questions about abortion, and gives the same workshopped answers.
This is not the campaign that Crisafulli – the man who could be Queensland’s next premier – had imagined.
“I don’t want a state election campaign that looks and sounds homogenous, where you just have a group of nodding donkeys standing behind a leader just in a suit and tie,” Crisafulli told the Beetoota Advocate podcast in 2021, just months after taking the party leadership.
Having begun October with a seemingly unassailable lead in the polls, Crisafulli’s campaign has been cautious and heavily stage-managed. He sticks to the talking points: “it’s not part of our plan,” “we’ve ruled it out”.
And it may have backfired.
An election eve Newspoll shows the polls closer than any point since the 2020 election. Crisafulli’s favourability ratings have been smashed in just weeks. For the first time, the Labor leader, Steven Miles, is the preferred premier.
At his final press conference before polling day, Crisafulli’s final pitch to voters acknowledged the possibility of a Labor minority government.
A divided state
The polls also show Queensland split in two – Labor’s rebound has been focused on Brisbane, while regional areas seem less content with the status quo.
To win Queensland, political leaders need to straddle the city-country divide, and the opposition leader’s personal story seems tailor-made to appeal to banana growers and bankers, at both ends of the state.
Crisafulli, 45, was born in Ingham and raised on the cane farm bought by his grandfather, a Sicilian migrant. He worked as a journalist before being elected to the Townsville council, eventually becoming the deputy mayor, and later a state MP and minister in Campbell Newman’s short-lived government. His nickname was The Kid Crisafulli.
Now, he represents the blue ribbon Liberal seat of Broadwater, on the Gold Coast.
In his first speech to parliament, Crisafulli said he was “not a political apparatchik”.
“I would have been just as happy to have continued to serve my community as a councillor in Townsville,” he said.
But others speak about someone who has always had a burning political ambition.
Even his dad, Francesco, told Channel Nine last month that as a boy, David “just wanted to be a politician”.
“His thing was for politics.”
Crisafulli interjected kindly: “I reckon that’s enough of you being interviewed.”
The public has learned snippets about the real Crisafulli: a diehard North Queensland Cowboys fan who, as a boy, attended the team’s first ever win; a devotee to the Italian decree that pineapple does not belong on pizza.
On Friday, he was asked twice how long he’s wanted the job of premier.
“Queenslanders want change, mate,” he said.
‘I want to lead a centre-right government’
Internally, Crisafulli has championed a more moderate version of the LNP, including the endorsement of women and people from multicultural communities. His strongest backers are the party’s moderates.
But the opposition leader’s personal politics have often been tough for observers to pin down.
That is partly because the LNP’s tactics since 2020 have been to amplify discontent – the “integrity crisis”, the “youth crime crisis”, the “health crisis”, etc – while avoiding the sorts of ideological traps that have brought previous opposition leaders undone.
“This is the smallest target of any opposition I’ve ever seen in my time of watching politics,” Griffith University political scientist Paul Williams told the Financial Review during the election campaign.
LNP sources say one of the reasons Crisafulli has been able to unite an LNP opposition – a cohort previously split between moderates and conservatives; former Liberals and Nationals; social liberals and the Christian right – is because he didn’t come through the ranks as an ideological warrior.
Last year, Crisafulli told former ABC reporter Kerry O’Brien at a Griffith University event that his views had “matured over the years, as most people do”.
“The enduring principles of the Liberal party, the reason why I joined it, remain true. It’s about the rights of the individual, it’s about reward for effort, it’s about being able to aspire for more.
“I always say I want to lead a centre-right government and inevitably people say that makes you the leader of the conservative party. I don’t use that term. We have conservative people in our ranks, we also have moderate people, we have free marketeers and protectionists. I’m comfortable with that.”
On the second-last day of the campaign he was asked which other political leader he drew inspiration from. His answer: he drew inspiration from victims of crime.
Even on crime, his position has not been unchanging. To emphasise the party’s promise to crack down on youth crime, Crisafulli made an extraordinary pledge in the first debate, promising to resign if he failed to reduce the number of measured victims of crime in the state.
On the last day of the campaign he backtracked.
“The fine print of his signature commitment is that there will be more victims,” Miles said afterwards. “It’ll just be per capita. That goes against everything he has consistently said.”
What does he really believe on abortion?
Crisafulli says crime is the “defining issue” of the campaign. But that’s the thing with election campaigns. Try as they might, the leaders don’t always get to define them.
Crisafulli has been steadfast in outlining his party’s position on abortion rights. His responses, over and over, that “it’s not part of our plan” and “there will be no changes” have satisfied few.
For weeks he would not respond to two key questions. Would LNP MPs – including several on the record opposing women’s reproductive rights – be allowed a conscience vote? And what is his personal view?
At the final debate on Tuesday, after mounting pressure, he declared himself pro-choice. In 2023 he told O’Brien “I don’t believe in late-term abortions”. In 2018 he voted to retain criminal penalties for abortion, because he felt the proposed laws went “too far”.
What has seemingly hurt Crisafulli, as much as the issue of abortion rights, is the way the debate has left him flailing when asked personal questions, about own his values and ethics, even his identity.
Miles has ruthlessly sought to highlight the problem. At one point he questioned what his opponent believed “in his heart”.
“What you need to do is get to know the leaders, so you know their values framework, so you know what they bring to the job, [and] so you know what they’ll consider when issues come up,” the premier told reporters in Mackay this week.
“And David Crisafulli refuses to answer all of those questions.”
Asked on Friday whether he thought voters knew enough about his values and beliefs to trust him as premier, Crisafulli said: “I love this state.”
“And I love Queenslanders, and they know what they get from me, because we’ve worked hard to show the unity of the team.”
Guardian Australia requested an interview with Crisafulli during the campaign. It was not granted.
