In the aftermath of the arrest and charging of broadcaster Alan Jones, many public figures formerly associated with him have elected to keep their own counsel. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Liberal-affiliated business Maurice Newman, and former PMs John Howard and Tony Abbott have all elected to keep quiet on the allegations.
One insight into behind-the-scenes conversations has come with the leaking of a WhatsApp group called “Restoring Your Liberal Party”. Responding to the news of the arrest, former Liberal Party vice president Teena McQueen said “It’s absolute bullshit”, and promised to pass on “on any defamatory comments, [Jones has] been through enough.”
This, it turns out, is fairly mild by McQueen’s standards. Indeed, she’s one of the most baffling minor characters in Australian politics.
Veep
Though it took roughly nine months for the shock to properly land (more on why later), it was a surprise to many when McQueen jostled her way to the role of Liberal Party VP in June 2018. As David Crowe later put it in the Nine papers, McQueen “was the unlikely winner from a crude exercise in power by the angry faction of a divided gathering, where a few factional heavies were so determined to elevate one of their own that they shrugged off the damage to the wider party”.
It was widely speculated at the time that McQueen had been installed to replace the previous holder of the office, moderate Trish Worth, as retribution for Worth’s description of former prime minister (and McQueen ally) Tony Abbott as a “spoiler”. It was from this exulted perch that McQueen made her most indelible contribution to Australian politics.
Tell me QandA, QandA, QandA
Just imagine what it takes to get yourself described as the “worst panellist in Q+A history“. Consider the weirdness, the dissembling, the outrages and the gaffes one has to clamber over to reach that summit. In March 2019, McQueen managed it, and set forth the flurry of questions as to how (short of dodging up a business card) she had earned the title of Liberal Party VP.
Less than a fortnight after an Australian had murdered more than 50 people in a mosque in Christchurch for explicitly racist reasons, McQueen dedicated much of her Q+A appearance to explicitly and implicitly defending the wrong side of the argument, accusing then Greens leader Richard Di Natale of unspecified “hate speech” that was worse than dumped One Nation senator Fraser Anning blaming the massacre on its victims.
Adding a graceless note to her tone-deaf performance, McQueen was unable to observe anything of then NZ PM Jacinda Ardern, at the time receiving international acclaim for her handling of the shooting aftermath, other than to allege she was “copying” John Howard’s gun control reforms. It elicited groans from the studio audience and presumably from senior Liberals, who came out to “disown” McQueen in the days that followed.
Higgins joke misses the mark
In early 2021, as the Brittany Higgins saga forced a reckoning on the treatment of women in Australian politics, McQueen added another doozy to her record of expertly reading rooms by reportedly joking to a closed-door meeting that she “would kill to be sexually harassed at the moment”, and that there should be more discussion about “women not getting drunk at work”. McQueen denied using “those exact words”.
Much Ado Abbott Nothing
But McQueen isn’t just bad at representing the Liberal Party, she’s also bad at running campaigns. During the 2019 federal election, McQueen worked on Abbott’s insular and locked-down Warringah campaign. In a seat he had held without serious bother for 25 years, Abbot suffered an 18% swing against him, losing to independent Zali Steggall and ushering in the Teal independent era.
Stop the Teal
Crowe’s assessment that McQueen’s elevation was done heedless of the health of the wider party proved prescient. After the drubbing the Liberals received in 2022, thanks to socially progressive independents scooping out the party’s heartland seats with the efficiency of a grapefruit spoon, McQueen wasn’t bothered. She told the CPAC Australia conference later that year that “the good thing about the last federal election is a lot of those lefties are gone. We should rejoice in that”.
“People I’ve been trying to get rid of for a decade have gone, we need to renew with good conservative candidates.” Once again, her colleagues called on her to resign.
The end of the road
In June 2023, Liberal moderates and “many conservatives” united to block McQueen from being reelected to the party’s federal executive.
Victorian Liberal figure Sali Miftari told the Nine papers that the party had “taken the decisive step to reject Teena McQueen’s divisive, out of touch and frankly wrong (and now failed) campaign to join the federal executive of our party”.
“It may go unnoticed, but it’s very important.”
How pleased Miftari must be with Liberal’s sensible and grounded campaigning since.
Shot to the Rinehart
McQueen has since found a professional home, and no doubt a fair bit of political common ground, with mining billionaire Gina Rinehart. It will surprise no-one to hear that, in that capacity, she was seen living it up at Donald Trump’s post-election celebrations earlier this month. Given McQueen’s previous defence of Trump, and Rinehart’s long-time fandom of the once and future US president, this is potentially a space to watch.
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