Outsider with more than enough rank
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday March 26, 2011
'Can-Do' Campbell Newman says he can run a state if he gets elected, writes Nick O'Malley. John-Paul Langbroek was probably a goner by the time cyclone Yasi blew itself out over the Gulf Country as Queensland's wet, violent summer rolled on into February.Still, when the opposition leader finally got the knife in his back on Tuesday morning the act was so brutal and so audacious you could imagine NSW Labor backroom operators shaking their heads into their Peking duck in grudging admiration.Queensland's Liberal National Party's head office had not only felled a leader but it replaced him not with a shadow minister, not even with a backbencher, but with a bloke who had never stood for Parliament, Brisbane's lord mayor, "Can-Do" Campbell Newman.Such a move is unprecedented in Australia. Asked if he could think of a similar act anywhere, Professor Ross Fitzgerald, a commentator on Queensland politics, thinks that perhaps there is an example in Canada but can't quite put his finger on it. Langbroek must have known the showdown was coming last Friday night when Channel Nine in Queensland broke a story saying that the LNP member for the safe seat of Moggill, Dr Bruce Flegg, had refused a head office demand to walk so Campbell could make a traditional run for the top job from Parliament.Since Newman won the mayoralty in 2004 there had been little doubt in Queensland's conservative circles that he would turn up in State Parliament at some stage.Newman, a former army engineer who retired as a major a decade earlier, had run an aggressive campaign from outside the council. He won and found himself ruling a Labor-dominated town hall with a Labor deputy mayor. Four years later he won again with a Liberal majority of councillors.For a time after Kevin Rudd won office in 2007 and Labor held every state government, Newman, the son of the former senator and federal minister Jocelyn Newman and a former MP and federal minister, the late Kevin Newman, was the most senior elected Liberal in Australia.On January 10 flash floods hit Toowoomba, killing 23. The next day the Brisbane River broke its banks near the central business district. The river was not to peak for two more days, by which time 23,000 homes in the city had been evacuated and several suburbs cut off by the flood.Anna Bligh, an unpopular premier leading an unpopular Labor party, was seen hourly on television news. She appeared calm but emotional, tired but tireless. Her leadership as the flood crisis bled into the cyclone crisis was universally acclaimed.The LNP president, Bruce McIver, was nervous. Before the crisis Langbroek had brought the party to a leading position - about 55-45 in two-party-preferred polls. But McIver, it is understood, thought Langbroek's lead should have been greater against a weak government. Langbroek, a former dentist, was seen as an amiable bloke with little leadership steel. Bligh grew stronger by the day.(A Newspoll published on Thursday showed Bligh's performance rating bounced from 24 per cent to 49 per cent since December, while Queensland Labor's two-party-preferred standing jumped from 41 per cent to a winning 52 per cent.)Meanwhile, Newman was all over the situation in Brisbane. He was energetic, steady and capable, every bit the soldier he had been. Suddenly the popular mayor had a statewide profile. Langbroek, with no role to play during the crisis, was nowhere to be seen.By Monday morning Langbroek's team knew a move was on but he refused to fall on his sword, telling the party he would not bow to "the faceless men".According to the LNP Whip, Mike Horan, events moved so fast that it was hard to keep ahead of them until Newman went public at midday on Tuesday.Newman's press conference was shocking. He would, he announced, stand for the seat of Ashton, held by the Labor's Environment Minister, Kate Jones, with a 7.1 per cent margin, and should he win it he would contest the leadership. So confident was he that he offered Langbroek a job on his frontbench.Langbroek and his deputy, Lawrence Springborg, resigned within the hour."It has been tough, it has been hurtful, it has been brutal," Horan says. "But only a real leader could have pulled it off and now we are united."Well, maybe, but in the Tuesday night vote another senior MP, Fiona Simpson, contested the leadership and, according to some reports, won up to 13 votes. Horan says he destroyed ballots in view of witnesses and nobody will never know the outcome."It's nasty up here," one MP says. Many on the opposition benches remain furious that their right to elect their own leader from within their own ranks has been seized by the party machine.Jeff Seeney, the spokesman for mines and energy, won the vote as Newman and the head office had determined, and immediately began explaining to Queenslanders that he was now the party's parliamentary leader, while Newman led the LNP's "election team".The next morning in Parliament the LNP came out swinging, with Seeney asking Bligh if she or her government had ever been called "Can Do". Members with laptops began showing one another an online Courier-Mail readers poll. It said 81 per cent of respondents believed Newman would beat Bligh. Unscientific, yes. But reassuring.Fitzgerald believes the LNP has cleverly cauterised Bligh's resurgence by matching one flood hero with another. But Queensland is a big state, and much of it has long felt a resentment at Brisbane-based governance. The LNP itself is a hybrid party born of a shotgun marriage between the National and Liberal parties in 2008, and Newman is nothing if not a Brisbane Liberal.Bligh is clearly cognisant of the new threat, on Tuesday attacking Newman for abandoning Brisbane when it needed its mayor most and appearing to lay the ground for an early election.Scott Prasser, a professor of public policy at the Australian Catholic University, says Newman's entry to the field has reset Queensland politics, and either leader could now win the next election, due within a year.Ominously for parliamentary leaders around the nation, he also believes the LNP's audacious move could be replicated elsewhere."It shows we are moving towards an American model where you can look outside parliament for recruitment when you don't have the talent," he says."And that is not a bad thing."
© 2011 Sydney Morning Herald