Annastacia Palaszczuk tells Lunch with the AFR why she was destined for politics and explains the unusual pronunciation of her name.
 |
| Annastacia Palaszczuk says she prefers the consensus style politics of one of her Labor heroes, Bob Hawke. And it's what's needed with her minority government which is clinging on by just one seat.Tertius Pickard. |
- Oct 20 2016 at 2:57 PM
- by Mark Ludlow
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is alone when she walks into the empty restaurant at the stylish Gallery of Modern Art in South Brisbane. It's appropriate because Palaszczuk – who was described as the "accidental premier" when she stunned the political world by defeating Liberal National Party leader Campbell Newman for the state's top job in 2015 – is something of a loner in politics.
It's not that she is not well liked – Palaszczuk was ranked as the most popular premier in the country in a recent poll – but she is shy and incredibly cautious, both as a premier and, it must be said, a lunch guest.
Fresh from a briefing on governing from Townsville the following week, Palaszczuk is mulling over Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's "appalling" strategy using the South Australian storms – which caused a state-wide blackout – to launch an attack on state Labor governments and their ambitious renewable-energy targets.
"I think it's appalling the federal government is playing politics when you are dealing with people's lives on the line. If a Prime Minister had done that in the middle of a cyclone up here ...," she says, shaking her head.
 |
| Student politics buddies: Annastacia Palaszczuk made friends with rising stars of the Labor movement as she got involved with issues early. Here, in the late 1980s, with Bill Shorten, right, and Chris Brown, left, who went on to become Tourism Transport Forum head. Supplied. |
Palaszczuk has ambitious plans to turn Queensland from a state fuelled by coal to a renewables powerhouse – but more on that later.
Aspired to be a lawyer
For those who know her, it was inevitable Palaszczuk, the daughter of the affable Beattie government minister Henry Palaszczuk, would end up in politics. Although she studied Arts at the University of Queensland in the mid-1980s and aspired to be a lawyer, politics has always been in her life. Her dad was a teacher before he entered state parliament in 1984 and Palaszczuk remembers a constant stream of people coming over to the family home in Inala in western Brisbane as well as endless school fetes on the weekends.
"We were always talking politics around the kitchen table. We always sat down as a family to watch the federal budget, even as a young child. We all had to be quiet," Palaszczuk told AFR Weekend as we looked at our menus.
"I can't tell you how many fetes I've been to in my lifetime. He used to embarrass us by driving up to the train station with big election signs [on the side of the car]."
 |
| Palaszczuk describes herself as a good listener. Adversarial politics does not connect with voters, she insists. Tertius Pickard. |
Palaszczuk is now fully ensconced in the cut and thrust of state politics. Her minority Labor government – which has had two MPs quit to become independents in the past 18 months – is only one more defection or heart attack away from falling over, but she claims it doesn't bother her.
"You have to govern like you've got a majority. It doesn't matter whether it's one seat, five or 10 seats," she says.
While critics thought the Palaszczuk government would crumble in its first six months, she has shown – like former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard – that minority government can work.
 |
| Palaszczuk and Education Minister Kate Jones meet with Aurukun Mayor Dereck Walpo and councillors. Public housing, multiculturalism and education are close to her heart. Twitter/Annastacia Palaszczuk. |
Has she made any tips to the Prime Minister about how to deal with running a minority government?
"I've made the offer," she says with a laugh. "I haven't lost three votes in one day." Ouch.
Causes of the day
Like most of her generation, Palaszczuk threw herself into student politics in the late 1980s during the dying days of conservative Bjelke-Petersen government. She fought for the causes of the day, including against the conservative student union trying to shut down independent radio station 4ZZZ, then became president of Queensland Young Labor, forging relationships with the rising stars of the national Labor movement. Photos of the time show her with a boyish Bill Shorten and Chris Brown, who went on to become head of the Tourism and Transport Forum.
After months of diary swapping for this lunch, Palaszczuk chose the GOMA restaurant, one of her favourite haunts ("because you can actually hear people") and it's only a five-minute drive from her office across the Brisbane River. It's also the tenth anniversary of GOMA – a gallery which many felt finally put Brisbane on the cultural map – and she is also Arts Minister.
 |
| Political point-scoring: Palaszczuk delivers jerseys to NSW Premier Mike Baird after Queensland won league and netball competitions this year. A recent poll showed that Palaszczuk had replaced Baird as most popular premier.Nick Moir, |
The Premier tells me to save room for the restaurant's signature dessert, so we both opt for Moreton Bay bugs for main. Since it's Friday, we decide to have a glass of wine over lunch.
"We should try Queensland wine," says Palaszczuk. "Do we have to?" I replied, knowing the potential palate-killing experience of most Queensland wines.
"Yes, it's changing now. We have to give Queensland wine a good plug here." I submit to the Premier's request and we order two glasses of Queensland chardonnay. It is passable.
This year also marks 10 years since Palaszczuk entered state parliament. After stints as a political staffer for former Keating government minister David Beddall in the early 1990s and then for the Beattie government in Queensland in the early 2000s, Palaszczuk decided she wanted to become a barrister.
She studied law part-time while working as a political adviser and completed her legal practice at Sciacca lawyers, the firm owned by former Keating minister and Labor veteran Con Sciacca.
Changing perceptions
But in politics, timing is everything. So when her dad decided to retire at the 2006 state election after 22 years in state parliament, she jumped at the chance to succeed him in the seat where she had spent most of her life. (She ended up being admitted as a lawyer the week after she had been sworn in as an MP.)
In her maiden speech, she thanked her father for changing the perceptions of the seat of Inala, which is still looked down upon by those who live closer to Brisbane's CBD, before touching on other subjects close to her heart – public housing, multiculturalism and education.
She also spoke of her Polish grandfather, Leo, who fled Europe after the Second World War to start a better life in Australia. He first arrived at Wacol migrant camp in western Brisbane before later settling in the neighbouring suburb of Inala with his family. (Now, all of Palaszczuk's family live within 5 kilometres of Inala.)
"He was not a doctor, nor a lawyer but a boilermaker who told me it was good work and it paid the bills. At night, he would read encyclopaedias to find out as much as he could about the world," Palaszczuk told state parliament in 2006.
"He did not have any opportunities for education when during his early adult years he was in a German slave-labour camp. He installed in my father a strong sense of education. My father became a school teacher before entering this House. He then passed those values on to me."
I ask her whether she has ever been back to Poland to explore her family's past. She hadn't and neither had her father, who was four when the family moved to Australia. She mentioned it was her father's 70th birthday next January so maybe it was time for a father-daughter trip.
The other question which had been bugging me and a few AFR colleagues was why her name – which is also one of the more difficult in Australian politics to spell – was pronounced "Pala-shay", rather than the traditional Polish pronunciation of "Palas-shook".
She says an Education Department official from teachers college in the late 1960s told her father he needed a surname that was easier for the children to pronounce. They said, "what about Mr Pala-shay?". And it's been that way ever since.
"I've got three sisters, including two teachers – one a primary school teacher and the other a high school teacher – and we've all kept the pronunciation. I still do get all these letters from people saying they are not pronouncing my name correctly!," she says.
As for spelling her name correctly, political journalists have been sticking to the formula of "Sydney Zoo, Canberra Zoo, UK". "I think that was developed in the Department of Primary Industries for my dad," she says with a laugh.
Honeymoon with voters
As our Moreton Bay bugs arrive, we move on to her long honeymoon with Queensland voters. While Palaszczuk has frustrated some political commentators, myself included, about the pace of her government, her popularity with voters has not faded.
This is mostly because she is not Newman – the abrasive former LNP premier who picked fights with key constituents during his fiery three-year reign. By contrast, Palaszczuk comes across like a friendly high school teacher.
But the Premier bristles at criticism that her minority Labor government has not done enough to help kickstart Queensland's sluggish economy after the end of the coal boom, especially her refusal to sell public assets which has left the state with spiralling debt, due to hit $80 billion – the highest of any state or territory government.
"I think I'm pragmatic," she says, pausing for a few seconds. "I have a very clear plan about where I want to take Queensland to [such as a renewable powerhouse]. And I need to take people with me on that journey. And that means not doing a thousand things at once."
Consensus politics
She says asset sales contributed to the demise of the Bligh government – where she was transport minister – in 2012 and the Newman government last year. "The people of Queensland don't want it. I am not going to break that trust," she says defiantly. (This promise doesn't extend to selling government property like excess land parcels which she is planning to sell or gift to developers to build renewal projects.)
Adversarial politics does not connect with voters, according to Palaszczuk, saying she prefers the consensus style politics of one of her Labor heroes, Bob Hawke. And it's what's needed with her minority government which is clinging onto power by one seat.
The 47-year-old Palaszczuk is intensely private about her personal life. She has been married twice before, first to former journalist now author George Megalogenis in the mid-1990s and secondly to Labor staffer Simon Every, a former chief of staff to Senator Joe Ludwig, from 2004 to 2009. Her current partner is consultant Shaun Drabsch, who used to be chief of staff to former communications minister Stephen Conroy.
She has previously spoken in the past about her heartbreak at not being able to have children, but it's a subject we don't broach at lunch.
Our dessert of Wattleseed custard arrives at the table. It looks like a brown plate with a few dozen white Smartie-size dots on it. On closer inspection, the custard had been set onto the plate and then spray-painted with Daintree chocolate, meaning the dessert needs to be cracked open like an egg. It's delicious.
Palaszczuk says she is not surprised Shorten came so close to toppling Turnbull at July's federal election, saying the Labor leader was more campaign-ready than the Prime Minister.
"I think people got to see more of him during the campaign than they had before. I don't know what's happened to Malcolm. I don't know what he stands for any more," she says, mirroring federal Labor's talking points on the PM being beholden to the conservative rump of his party.
Critics of Palaszczuk say she is keener on her government's social agenda – such as focusing on domestic violence – rather than the state's bottom line. She's not comfortable on economic matters, demonstrated by her car crash FM radio interview during the 2015 campaign when she couldn't recall the rate of the goods and services tax. (At the time, she put it down to an early morning brain fade due to a lack of coffee.)
Palaszczuk is trying to change the direction of the state away from its reliance on coal. Her government has adopted an ambitious target of 50 per cent renewables by 2030, a herculean task given clean energy now accounts for only 7 per cent of the state's energy production.
"Eighty per cent of our power generation is coal-fired – that's the reality of it," she says. "That doesn't mean you can't have a target and work towards having a combination of the two [coal and renewables].""
Aspirational target
An expert panel last week released a report that showed Queensland could reach its 50 per cent target without the closure of coal-fired power stations or power price rises. Critics aren't quite so sure, saying it's inevitable the push to more expensive renewables will push up prices. But Palaszczuk says Queensland and Australia have no choice.
"The whole world is going this way," she says, pulling out a document from her handbag to show the renewable targets of other countries. "It's an aspirational target, but I'm quite sure we are going to work hard to do what we can."
Palaszczuk also wants to derail the resurgence of One Nation before the 2018 state election – well aware the party secured 11 seats at the 1998 state election before imploding. She says the political revival is more borne out of economic anxiety, than genuine prejudice.
"I believe One Nation is offering people false hope and a false sense of security," she says. "It's up to my government to show people where these new jobs are going to be and how we are going to be protecting them."
Palaszczuk also believes Chinese tourism will provide the next wave of economic prosperity for Queensland as they chase the state's famous "big blue sky". "We will be not just a shining light but a beacon," she promises.
And after a quick coffee, the Premier steps back into the warm Queensland sunshine to meet up with her security detail and staffer who have been patiently waiting outside.
MENU
GOMA Restaurant, Stanley Place, South Bank
2 Moreton Bay bugs, $82
1 Haricort Vert, $10
2 Wattleseed Custards, $38
2 glasses Ridgemill Chardonnay, $36
Sparkling mineral water, $10
2 coffees, $7
Total: $183
