Like a man on the ropes, Queensland premier Campbell Newman has concluded his campaign in a punch-drunk daze, defined by his denunciation of the Labor party for Alan Jones’s accusations of bad faith. He’s reeling; his attempt to stop the sometime friendly fire from conservatives by suing Jones for defamation smacks of desperation. It’s a tactic from a nastier age, one beloved of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, whose litany of taxpayer-funded defamation actions against opposition members was legendary. Having cried foul over a non-existent Labor smear campaign, Newman then bizarrely accused Labor of accepting bikie donations. Challenged to provide evidence, he told the press to “google it”. And his robotic repetition of “strong jobs, strong team, strong plan” in response to questions on Monday didn’t right things. Enthusiasm for the premier at a business fundraiser on Wednesday was lukewarm, to say the least.



It was probably unhelpful that during the campaign the electorate were reminded of the reason Newman was there in the first place: his reputation as a socially liberal Brisbane mayor who could get things done. A video surfaced showing Campbell touting the virtues of solar energy and pointing out, reasonably, that Queensland couldn’t always rely on coal. This from a man whose first acts as premier included the cancellation of what was to be Australia’s largest renewable energy project at Chinchilla. That was little noticed at the time, overshadowed by the LNP’s swipe at the yartz – the canning of the Queensland premier’s literary awards.

Captured by the active forces of the religious right within the LNP, the then-candidate for Ashgrove, despite his proclaimed support for same-sex marriage, had also spent the 2012 campaign equivocating over the Labor government’s civil unions legislation. Newman reiterated his support for same-sex marriage in the leaders’ forum last week, but offered this as a very personal opinion, not his party’s position.

The socially liberal, “progressive” Newman has gone missing in action, occluded by a somewhat paranoid political figure obsessed constantly at lashing out at enemies. Perhaps he just couldn’t translate his “Can Do” mayoral style into the bigger theatre of state politics, or perhaps as a politician who had never faced real opposition in his council campaigns, he took it far too personally. For whatever reason, and personality must play a part, Newman as premier presented a very different figure to the relatively relaxed and urbane Brisbane mayor.



This isn’t necessarily paradoxical when viewed through the history of parties of the right in the Sunshine State, which buck the truism that they maintain their unity and cohesion more from being against Labor and the union movement. Queensland’s conservatives are different: in a state where capital always came from elsewhere, where Brisbane was a “branch office town” and where the legal and medical establishments were left to fly the “small l” liberal flag more or less on their lonesome, the state had never been fertile soil for social liberalism.

It’s often not realised that Queensland in the 1970s and 1980s had something more akin to a three-party system than a straight fight between Labor and the Coalition. The Coalition between the Libs and Nats was even shakier in Queensland than in other states – with the Liberals often putting up little more than a “ginger group” in parliament concerned to speak up for accountability, due process and often, the environment. Led informally by Terry White and then Angus Innes, both urban professionals who would lead the decimated party Joh left behind in 1983, the “trendies” were always in a state of extreme tension with the state of authoritarianism favoured by the Nationals under Joh.

Political scientist Paul Reynolds’s biography of post-Joh premier Mike Ahern reveals periodic secret deals between Labor and the Nationals to marginalise the Libs, and between the Libs and Labor to chip away at the Nats’ dominance. So, elections were more often than not fights between the Liberals and Nationals, after the party reinvented itself to appeal more broadly outside the bush. The Labor Party was sometimes trapped in the headlights, more spectator of the internecine warfare between the governing parties than contender for government itself. This changed in 1983, when the Nats gained power in their own right, grabbing a swathe of urban seats, often ones with a strong fundamentalist Christian presence. The Fitzgerald inquiry and Labor’s victory under Wayne Goss brought this creaky edifice crashing down, reducing the Liberals to a tiny party of the Gold and Sunshine coasts.

Unsurprisingly, both the Nationals and Liberals were plagued by leadership tensions. The “NSW disease” of revolving door leaders was actually a Queensland disorder before it ever infected politics south of the Tweed. By 2008, when the LNP was formed, the “small l” liberals were but a memory, and it was up to the once and future federal MP Mal Brough to try to save a separate Liberal party.



Enter, not without controversy, Campbell Newman. While his concrete achievements, critics often pointed out, were limited to seemingly endless tunnels no one drove through, his “can do” image and social liberalism were just the trick for detaching Brisbane voters from an uncertain Labor faith. Brisbane mayors have long been major figures on the urban horizon. Clem Jones sewered the suburbs and built the freeways, Sallyanne Atkinson ushered in Expo 88, Jim Soorley launched CityCats on the river and renewed the inner city. Newman, although often perceived as being too close to developers, had nevertheless made much of his commitment to climate change and to green space, and introduced a bicycle rental scheme, not so good in execution, but definitely representing a modern vision for the city. So too did the Newman administration at City Hall support iconic arts projects such as the Gallery of Modern Art.



In truth, whatever the premier’s intentions, power is still wielded largely by the LNP party administration, a very country affair, prepared to overturn the parliamentary leadership on preselections. Newman was always cursed to live in interesting times, with a fractious backbench in a bloated parliamentary party coming back to haunt him, and his back watched by deputy premier Jeff Seeney – described by one of his own Nationals colleagues as “the most hated man in the bush”.

Whether it was the youthful zeal of attorney general Jarrod Bleijie (an invisible man in the campaign), the lure of Palmer and Katter for disillusioned backbenchers, the necessity of keeping the religious right in the sheepfold, or just the governing traditions of the Queensland right (“development”, “private enterprise”, “strong leadership”), Newman reverted to type. He recast himself in the mould of premiers past: war declared on just about everyone, legislation rushed through with little consultation and in record time, process held in contempt, and enemies targeted.

His “Operation Boring” has stalled and then spluttered back into life, with allegations of cronyism around coal and coal seam gas developments dominating the airwaves. That Newman resorted to the Bjelke-Petersen tactic of trying to silence dissent through lawsuit suggests he is a prisoner of the past, not just of whatever transpired between him and Alan Jones (a topic on which I think it’s wise to make no comment) – but also on the colourful and tawdry traditions of the right in the Sovereign Sunshine State.

So it’s not surprising that the latest polls show the premier in danger, real danger, of losing his own seat of Ashgrove, itself home to many green-minded citizens and many, many public servants. Whatever the future of the LNP, in the event of a narrow loss, a hung parliament or even a Labor victory (looking more plausible according to the most recent polls), it can’t be back to the bush. Somehow, the party will need to find a way of accommodating both urban and rural voters within the one tent. And that might mean a leader less captive of, and subservient to the party’s various factions and power structures than Campbell Newman has proved to be.