Speaker 1: From the Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey.
Speaker 1: It's Monday, October twenty eight. Some of our most vulnerable retirees,
Speaker 1: disability pensioners and veterans have been slapped with huge rent
Speaker 1: increases and now the Consumer Watchdog is probing what's going
Speaker 1: on at major provider, the Eureka Group. John Winfield, the
Speaker 1: husband of missing woman Bromwyn. Winfield left out crucial facts
Speaker 1: and appeared to make inconsistent claims in his only police interview.
Speaker 1: That's a revelation in a new episode of our podcast
Speaker 1: Investigation Bromwyn. It's live now for our subscribers at the
Speaker 1: Australian dot com dot au. Federal labor is being forced
Speaker 1: to confront a serious problem in Queensland. Over the weekend,
Speaker 1: the Sunshine State throughout its long term labor government and
Speaker 1: elected the lnp's David Chris Afooley to be premier. That's
Speaker 1: on a wave of anger about youth crime and exhaustion
Speaker 1: with labor today, why labor lost and how the Greens
Speaker 1: went backwards.
Speaker 2: Queenslanders have voted for hope over fear business.
Speaker 1: Queensland's Premier elect David Chris A fully gracious in victory.
Speaker 1: He heaped praise on Labour's Stephen Miles.
Speaker 2: To think that a son of a factory worker could
Speaker 2: be the fortieth premier of this state tells you everything
Speaker 2: you need to know about how great Queensland is.
Speaker 1: Even as Miles struggled to grasp the reality of what
Speaker 1: had happened.
Speaker 3: If you consider what we were up against, this is
Speaker 3: an extraordinary result.
Speaker 1: Miles wants to stay on as leader if Labor will
Speaker 1: have him well. Chris a fully bounced off just a
Speaker 1: few hours sleep and went straight to the gym.
Speaker 2: Not only did I speak with the prime so he
Speaker 2: was good enough to afford me about twenty minutes this morning.
Speaker 2: It was a really really good point called.
Speaker 1: Labor through everything at the cost of living in this campaign,
Speaker 1: from free school lunches to fifty cent public transport fares.
Speaker 1: But the L ANDP won anyway.
Speaker 3: It's a comprehensive when and historically it's hugely significant.
Speaker 1: Michael McKenna is, The Australian's Queensland editor. Counting is still underway,
Speaker 1: but the L and P will have a majority of
Speaker 1: between two and five seats.
Speaker 3: It's not as bad as what Labor was looking at
Speaker 3: certainly last year when Anastasia Palichet was still the premier
Speaker 3: and she was rolled. They thought that a change of
Speaker 3: leader would be enough to arrest and possibly even rescue
Speaker 3: the Labor government. But there's no doubt that Labor has
Speaker 3: been on the nose for a number of years and
Speaker 3: this campaign, while Stephen Miles and Labor are crowing and
Speaker 3: saying that they won the campaign, it's a strange measure
Speaker 3: when you're looking at losing up to nineteen seats.
Speaker 1: One of the issues that crushed Labor, particularly in the Bush,
Speaker 1: was youth crime.
Speaker 3: There was a feeling in places like townshil and Cans
Speaker 3: where recidivist youth offenders were sort of rampaging through the
Speaker 3: streets in the last five or six years that there
Speaker 3: had been in action. The Labor Party seemed just oblivious
Speaker 3: to how serious an issue this was, and then David
Speaker 3: Chris A. Fooley in the past couple of years has
Speaker 3: has harnessed this as an issue and really prosecuted Labor
Speaker 3: in terms of blaming the Labor Party for their inaction
Speaker 3: and also for in fact causing some of these problems.
Speaker 3: Because Labor when they first got into power in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: they wound back some of the youth crime laws. For instance,
Speaker 3: bail became a last resort for juvenile offenders. Came a
Speaker 3: lightning rod issue in the regions, and most recently where
Speaker 3: we had an incident just outside of Brisbane at the
Speaker 3: beginning of the year where her grandmother was stabbed to
Speaker 3: death and a shopping center in front of her grandchild,
Speaker 3: allegedly by a recidivus offender who had a long record
Speaker 3: and had been out on bail, and that got people
Speaker 3: really angry.
Speaker 4: The seventy year old had just finished grocery shopping with
Speaker 4: a six year old girl last night when she was
Speaker 4: brutally set upon by a monster lurking in this underground
Speaker 4: car park. Viilein was stabbed in front of the child
Speaker 4: and left to die while her attacker fled in her car.
Speaker 3: And you could see that both in the by election
Speaker 3: that followed in that area where there was a swing
Speaker 3: of nineteen percent, and then throughout the regions, and then
Speaker 3: as there were issues in Brisbane, it became more and
Speaker 3: more of an issue.
Speaker 1: And then there's the fact Brisbane has won the right
Speaker 1: to host the twenty thirty two Olympics, that should have
Speaker 1: been a positive for Labor.
Speaker 3: The Olympics is not popular in the regions, and then
Speaker 3: there was the shambolic mess. I mean it was an
Speaker 3: Olympic gold winning effort by the Miles governed by Anastasia
Speaker 3: Palache and then by Stephen Miles in announcing that there
Speaker 3: was going to be a new stadium at the Gabber
Speaker 3: Cricket Ground and then backflipping on that. It's such a
Speaker 3: contentious issue. We still don't know what's going to happen.
Speaker 3: The Miles Labor government has a plan to essentially give
Speaker 3: a new lick of paint and some new stands in
Speaker 3: a facility called Cusack, which was where the nineteen eighty
Speaker 3: two Conwalth Games were held. It's out in the middle
Speaker 3: of the burbs. It's got bad transport. David Chris A
Speaker 3: Foley has said that he will not be pursuing that plan.
Speaker 3: The L and P government has said this that there's
Speaker 3: going to be a one hundred day review of all
Speaker 3: of the planned facilities, but they're not going to have
Speaker 3: a new stadium, so no one really knows what that means.
Speaker 3: It has bewildered particularly the people of Brisbane. People just
Speaker 3: shake their heads because we don't know where we're going
Speaker 3: to go. But either way, we're about three and a
Speaker 3: half years on from the announcement that Brisbane had secured
Speaker 3: the riots to the twenty thirty two Brisbane Olympics, and
Speaker 3: we don't have a stake in the ground as to
Speaker 3: where we're going to have an opening ceremony or where
Speaker 3: we're going to have the athletics.
Speaker 1: All this is hot because it's Anthony Albanese's weakest state.
Speaker 1: Labor only holds five of the thirty federal seats in
Speaker 1: Queensland and if they're going to counter expected losses in
Speaker 1: Western Australia and Victoria, they need to pick up more
Speaker 1: Queensland seats in the federal election. One issue giving Labor
Speaker 1: a glimmer of hope is abortion. It became a headache
Speaker 1: in the Queensland campaign for David Chris A Fuley. He
Speaker 1: was jammed between some crossbenches and some of his own
Speaker 1: MPs who would like tighter restrictions and voters in this
Speaker 1: who don't want change. Michael Labor successfully turned this into
Speaker 1: a scare campaign, something they'd love to do federally too,
Speaker 1: if they get a sense this is a potential weakness
Speaker 1: for the coalition. Right you're right, Claire.
Speaker 3: We're hearing that there are plans, certainly from the labor
Speaker 3: movement unions, who were the ones that really fueled this
Speaker 3: campaign in resourcing social media and advertising and having leaflet
Speaker 3: drops in marginal seats and accusing David chris A fully
Speaker 3: of having a secret plan to recriminalize abortion. He didn't
Speaker 3: want to answer it. He was asked one hundred and
Speaker 3: thirty times or so what he would do, and it
Speaker 3: was only in the last days of the campaign that
Speaker 3: he said he was pro choice. He was flat footed.
Speaker 3: But I think federally, Peter Dutton is I think better
Speaker 3: on his feet. He's battle hardened and I think he
Speaker 3: might be able to give a straight answer as to
Speaker 3: what he believes in and how the federal coalition would
Speaker 3: handle an issue. But you've got to remember that this
Speaker 3: is state law, so it's a different thing in terms
Speaker 3: of the federal theater.
Speaker 1: Coming up. How it all went sour for the Greens.
Speaker 1: The Greens went backwards in the Queensland election, despite previously
Speaker 1: having taken bark off Labor in the Cities.
Speaker 5: Alban Easy was triumphant, gaining a seat off the Greene
Speaker 5: political Party. I think sends a message as well that
Speaker 5: people who elected Greene Party representatives to state in federal
Speaker 5: Parliament expected them to play a progressive role, not to
Speaker 5: play a blocking role.
Speaker 1: Earlier this month, the Act election saw another long term
Speaker 1: Labor government retain power, but their Greens coalition partner went backwards. So, Michael,
Speaker 1: what does that mean for the federal election, which is
Speaker 1: likely sometime in the first half of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3: It's really significant. Despite what many people think about Queensland,
Speaker 3: often being accused of rednecks and being all about mining. True,
Speaker 3: we are a resource state, but certainly in the past
Speaker 3: few years we've seen a real resonance among voters towards
Speaker 3: the Greens. I think the Greens have vacated their natural
Speaker 3: constituency in climate change and the environment. We heard them
Speaker 3: talk very little about those two issues, and instead we've
Speaker 3: heard them talk a lot about Palestine and Gaza and
Speaker 3: issues such as social housing, which was already being addressed
Speaker 3: by the Labor and Liberal parties with major policies. The
Speaker 3: Labor Party also ran a red hot, red shirt campaign
Speaker 3: where they adopted the strategies that the Greens have been
Speaker 3: employing in recent years, with lots of door knocks, but
Speaker 3: I think that the Greens popularity is steadily on the decline,
Speaker 3: and you've got to wonder whether it's because they're not
Speaker 3: concentrating on their strengths, which is advocacy for the environment
Speaker 3: and promotion of climate action policies.
Speaker 1: Michael McKenna is The Australian's Queensland Editor. There's another big
Speaker 1: voting day on the way. The US will cast ballots
Speaker 1: for President, the Senate and the House of Representatives on Tuesday,
Speaker 1: November five. We've got a team of reporters on the
Speaker 1: ground bringing you the best news and analysis. Check us
Speaker 1: out at the Australian dot com dot au