Despite polls predicting a Labor loss in the upcoming Queensland Election, it's undeniable that Premier Steven Miles has achieved much in a short time, writes Rosemary Sorensen.
HOW GOOD IS Queensland Premier Steven Miles?
I said that to someone in regional Victoria this week and the answer was, “Who is Steven Miles?” Because state politics is not of much interest beyond borders unless there’s a Joh Bjelke-Petersen level of corruption and drama going on.
Look at how uninterested the rest of Australia was in the outlandishly awful mess of Tasmanian politics prior to this year’s State Election. There was a bit of a news flurry after the Northern Territory Election, which saw a landslide for the Country Liberal Party, the decimation of Labor and the first Greens MP elected in Darwin’s Nightcliff.
But, beyond the bad planning around the Olympic stadium, which appears to be one of the reasons Annastacia Palaszczuk resigned at the end of 2023, big media sees few click-bait-worthy stories in Queensland state politics, which is left to the (mostly Murdoch-affiliated) local media to whinge about.
That resignation and the installation of Steven Miles as Premier of Queensland was labelled a ‘reset’ according to the ABC’s report about whether he could turn the polls around going into the Queensland State Election this month, he was, as Deputy Premier since 2020, Palaszczuk’s “attack dog”.
Early on, his smiling, affable personality got him into trouble, when he was reported as “giggling” at a media question about youth crime. It was the week after a horrible murder in a shopping centre carpark and a Murdoch reporter challenged Miles on why he didn’t mention youth crime in his speech about the Queensland Government’s housing plan.
Miles’s response – to laugh at the question’s absurdity – was framed as disrespect for the grieving family and the horror of the crime. He learnt a lesson about how gotcha reporting has no limits and from a distance, he appears not to have put a foot wrong since — despite the Murdoch media’s best efforts.
Made the TikTok thing work well for his popularity? ‘Cringe-worthy... bid to grab young voters’ said NT News. Announced a clever plan to make Cairns Airport an aviation maintenance and manufacturing centre? Oh, okay, report that if we must, said the Adelaide Advertiser, but put the “Labor election commitment” at the end of the paragraph.
And then, according to that bastion of propagandist bunkum, Murdoch’s pathetic The Australian:
‘Labor MPs have distanced themselves from Premier Steve Miles and are hiding their party affiliation on campaign material.’
It turns out that is not actually true — several Queensland MPs have used their ‘taxpayer-funded electorate and communication allowances’ to pay for billboards advertising their own work in the electorate. This is not technically rorting and the ABC report noted LNP MPs had also used the allowance to put up billboards. The Opposition’s spokesperson confirmed the use of the communication budget for billboards was legitimate.
So, the report in The Australian skips the truth: the billboards don’t contain party affiliation because they are not allowed to, according to the rules.
Now we get to the nub, the answer to the question: How good is Steven Miles?
Very reluctantly, even the Courier Mail (which I also wrote for) has had to concede the Labor Premier is kicking goal after goal, making things happen in myriad ways. ‘A controversial TAFE site in Noosa will be reopened by the Queensland Government as a design school, it has been revealed’, said one recent story. Note this does not say “Labor”, nor “Steven Miles”, but the “revelation” was one of those stories that could not be ignored, as much as this rabidly anti-Labor newspaper might have wanted to.
Here are a few of the things Steven Miles has done in the nine months he’s been Premier:
- the bold move to introduce 50 cent public transport anywhere and everywhere, introduced in August and so successful the Opposition has announced it will do it, too;
- setting up a publicly owned energy retailer;
- backing an affordable homes plan with actual action, beginning construction this month;
- repurposing vacant buildings, like a retirement village in Logan, for social housing; and
- a raft of hospital expansions.
Sorry if this sounds like a Labor promotion, but it’s not. If only Labor nationally and in Victoria, where I now live, were as roll-up-the-sleeves-and-tackle-stuff as Miles is in Queensland.
According to ABC analyst Antony Green, the polls are likely correct and Miles will get the boot in the Queensland Election on 26 October, which is the way things roll. What is a pity beyond what it means for the energy and drive and optimism he has brought to politics in that state is what it means for our benighted political scene here in Australia, where carping is the major activity, while actually doing things that help gets put on the back-burner.
Where there is a reluctance to spend money on public health, transport and education – all the things that set up a community for success – there is a huge appetite to spend buckets on things of dubious, if not negative, value.
Steven Miles may well be just like all the rest, although for nine months he has been anything but. He managed, with a big smile and constant announcements backed by action, to stay ahead of the negativity and cynicism now so entrenched in political media. It was a pretty good strategy to head into an election that looked doomed for the incumbent party with someone who, it appears, reckons the job of government is to do things.
And if it doesn’t work, if he’s booted out, well, at least he can say that Queensland’s health, transport and education all got a real, significant, actual boost from what’s been put in place by this Labor Government. That’s big.
Rosemary Sorensen is an IA columnist, journalist and founder of the Bendigo Writers Festival. You can follow Rosemary on Twitter/X @sorensen_rose.
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