For many, the lasting image of Annastacia Palaszczuk won’t be of a Premier basking in the glory of an Olympics win. It will be one of the most ridiculous scenes in Australian history: the image of families celebrating Father’s Day 2021 on the Queensland-New South Wales border at Coolangatta-Tweed separated by plastic roadblock barricades.

Like citizens of a Soviet-era dictatorship, they weren’t allowed by either state’s ludicrous governments to spend a few hours together in celebration at home, the beach, or in a restaurant, as one might expect in a civilised, modern, and free nation. Instead, these families could hug, touch, and share a meal, so long as their feet remained on opposite sides of the waist-high plastic orange barricades.

It was perhaps the most perverse nod to the insanity of a nation that allowed itself to be voluntarily ruled by power-drunk bureaucrats. ‘Separated Australian families swap hugs at the border on Father’s Day,’ read the BBC News online headline – just one of many that gave Australia its new global reputation as a place inhabited by people very willing to sacrifice freedom for perceived safety at the whim of government decree.

And while that absurd image of a modern-day abuse of power will be Palaszczuk’s visual legacy, the verbal legacy is even worse. It won’t be an inspiring line, like that of her Labor predecessor, Anna Bligh, who stirred not just the state but the entire nation with a compelling cry of resilience during the January 2011 Brisbane floods: ‘I want us to remember who we are. We are Queenslanders. We’re the people that they breed tough, north of the border. We’re the ones that they knock down, and we get up again.’

Alas, the words Annastacia has seared into the national psyche form one of the most vile separatist phrases uttered by an Australian state leader since federation. That Queensland hospitals were ‘for our people only’.

This was not a faux pas or slip of the tongue. This was a deliberate statement made with specific intention, playing on the worst of human nature and capitalising on fear amplified for political gain. Keen to emulate the parochialism-fuelled success of Mark McGowan, her West Australian counterpart at the time, Palaszczuk delivered the line at a news conference after a woman pregnant with twins was forced to fly all the way to Sydney from Northern New South Wales for emergency surgery. The lives of three people were put at risk because they were denied access to a Brisbane hospital by a cruel bureaucracy led by a political opportunist.

Let’s not let this one pass without a moment to drink in the complete horror. This expectant mother from Ballina, a two hour drive from Brisbane, was forced to wait 16 hours to go to a Sydney hospital, despite her unborn twins, just 24 weeks into the pregnancy, needing urgent care for a critical condition. In an abdication of leadership responsibility that was all-too-common around Australia during the Covid response over-reach, Ms Palaszczuk told reporters the decision about who to let into Queensland would be made by health professionals, not politicians.

‘People living in NSW they have NSW hospitals. In Queensland we have Queensland hospitals for our people,’ she told them. NSW Health Minister at the time, Brad Hazzard, called Ms Palaszczuk’s comments ‘astonishing’.

Despite this, so lacklustre was the performance of the state’s LNP opposition at the 2020 election just two months later, and so sucked-in by Covid fear and artful political gameplay were the public, Annastacia was re-elected with a 4.1 per cent swing to the ALP and a four-seat gain.

With Covid a distant memory and hospital failures, ambulance ramping, rising youth crime, and the housing crisis to deal with, Palaszczuk’s political capital has evaporated in the three years since the election. She is now very unpopular with the electorate and a recent online survey carried out by The Courier Mail indicated 93 per cent of Queenslanders did not think she would contest next year’s election. Queensland has adopted fixed four-year parliamentary terms, meaning the state election will fall on the last Saturday in October (right before the US Presidential election) every cycle. A Resolve poll for Nine Newspapers released this week has the LNP on 37 per cent, Labor on 33 per cent, the Greens 12 per cent, and One Nation 8 per cent while an early-October YouGov poll put the LNP ahead 52–48 on a two-party preferred basis and Opposition Leader David Crisafulli comfortably ahead as preferred Premier.

The Deputy Premier Stephen Miles, endorsed by Palaszczuk as her preferred successor, is not yet perceived by the electorate as mature enough for the top job due to a number of childish public comments and his youthful appearance. Crisafulli is equally young-looking but carries more gravitas and has performed better in the past 12 months. His ‘small target’ strategy of remaining as inoffensive as possible and playing it safe, will have to change if he is to comfortably secure victory.

Miles is of the Labor Left faction – dominant in Queensland – and is a career unionist unafraid of a fight. Crisafulli will need to learn not only to punch back hard, but strike first, so as not to appear the bookish picked-on nerd to Miles’ schoolyard bully demeanour. Aussies love a larrikin and a stirrer and a fighter and will forgive a degree of buffoonery. The man of better character and greater intellect does not always come out on top in a battle of public popularity. The play-it-safe and don’t offend anyone ‘small target’ strategy has lost the Liberal Party every state and federal election in Australia in the past four years except Tasmania (hooray!). The Queensland LNP were set to play the same game, which may have had a chance of finally succeeding if Annastacia remained at the helm – a highly unlikely scenario, even well before her weekend announcement.

Queensland’s Parliamentary LNP team are not seen as a terribly inspiring bunch in the eyes of the public. Queensland has had only one LNP government in the past quarter century, and that was won by a leader from outside the Parliament, parachuted in from the Lord Mayoralty of Brisbane. That position is a significant one. Brisbane is the third largest city municipality in the world and the Lord Mayor is one of the most unilaterally powerful political leadership positions in the country. Campbell Newman was enormously popular at the time and had a reputation as someone who got things done, fixed and built. Can Do Campbell won his new state seat and the Premiership in a massive victory over Anna Bligh in 2012, relegating Labor to just seven seats in the 89-seat legislature and catapulting one of the survivors, Annastacia Palaszczuk, unexpectedly into the Opposition Leader role.

Upon news of his successor’s resignation, Newman tweeted Sunday that he wouldn’t be making any media comment saying only that:

This is the time for the alternative Premier @DavidCrisafulli to lay out his vision for this great State of Queensland. We all look forward to hearing of the @lnpqld plans to get us back on track. Queenslanders deserve a better government!

Crisafulli tweeted:

Regardless of politics, nine years as Premier deserves acknowledgement and respect. I want to thank @AnnastaciaMP for her service and wish her well in her retirement.

Nice guy. Small target.

Newman’s three-year one-term reign ended at the hands of Palaszczuk in 2015 following his move to bring the public service to an affordable size by removing 12,000 positions without forced redundancies. Since then, Labor has added more than 45,000 public service jobs, to a total of 393,000 positions according to the Bureau of Statistics, or 250,000 ‘full time equivalent’ roles according to the state’s own government sources, with women making up 70 per cent of that workforce. The state is heading for a projected debt in 2026 of nearly $150-billion – an all-time record. And much-heralded budget surpluses are only the result of luck – windfalls from royalties on gas and coal exports – both of which are anathema to Labor’s renewable energy push and therefore unsustainable.

Newman also lost because he was perceived as too combative and – perhaps used to the power of the Lord Mayoralty – too impatient for change. Those of us who have held leadership roles in large organisations know the drill. Long gone are the days of the passionate, driven, high-achieving bosses who resemble sports coaches, reprimanding their teams when they deserve it, singling out under-performers for a fine balance of criticism and encouragement, and stirring the team with a focus on exceptional achievement.

No. This is the era of ‘same job, same pay’. Merit, talent, exceptionalism, and ability are subordinated to the gods of equality and equity (is there any difference?) lest someone have to bear the offence that someone else might be better at something than them, sometimes. The currency of good leadership these days – and a pleasant long career – is the ability to appease and keep the peace. Disruption, change, reform, and high-achievement will all bring conflict and drama and pain. Holding people and power-centres to account will bring rebellion and resistance, and better service delivery for clients. But nobody wants any of that anymore. Your HR ‘360 Review’ scores will plummet. The primary goal of the modern leader must be popularity with the staff above all else. The interests of the client are always secondary to the needs of the employees and the organisation itself. Until, of course, the business goes under for lack of clients. But that’s a long-term problem. And nobody cares much about those these days.

In Australian state government, clients vote only one every four years, so they’re the last group anyone really cares about. Daily hosing-down of short-term troublemakers is the name of the game, and so we applaud the ‘fine job’ that Premier of Queensland Annastacia Palaszczuk did during her nine years in office. She caused no offence to the public service, did what the unions demanded, gave in to stakeholders’ desires on the basis of their power to make waves, and joined the rest of Australia’s so-called ‘leadership’ during Covid in abdicating all power (and thus responsibility) to the health bureaucrats.

In the weeks before Palaszczuk’s 2015 election victory, Brisbane’s Courier Mail opined in a lead editorial, that Newman had delivered ‘real results’ on ‘every significant measure of government – from the economy to leadership, law and order to health and education.’ Newman lost the election with 41.3 per cent of the primary vote – a figure Palaszczuk has never matched. She won with just 37.5 per cent and 101,000 fewer votes than Newman. Her two subsequent victories were hers, however. 35-33 per cent of the primary vote in 2017 against Tim Nicholls, and just shy of 40 per cent, to 36 per cent against Deb Frecklington in 2020.

The woman they call ‘the Chook’ and the strategy of union and public servant appeasement she has led, has left the state in far worse shape than in 2015. Hospital care and efficiency has declined significantly and excessive ambulance ramping is now the norm with patients dying outside hospitals in ambulances while awaiting entry. The bikies are back in business and youth crime is through the roof. Queensland has the highest mining taxes in the world and investment in new mines has nose-dived. Education results have declined, there are integrity issues, and the unions have greater influence over government strategy than ever as Labor’s left faction dominates.

At her resignation news conference, Annastacia was asked if she had support of the highly-influential United Workers Union, to which she did not give a direct answer, saying only that she continued to have the support of the whole labour movement, denying there was internal pressure on her to resign.

In hindsight, the LNP should never have allowed Labor to terrify it, and control the narrative by turning Newman into a false ‘bogeyman’. They should have instead strongly defended their very sound legacy, and worked to further lift the healthy 41.3 per cent Newman left them upon his exit. Instead, they ran scared from the ‘ghost of Campbell Newman’, falling into Labor’s trap, themselves amplifying the false bogey-man effect by accepting Labor’s distorted framing of him, and overestimating the public’s love of big government. As recently as two weeks ago, Crisafulli loudly reassured public servants at a major event, that the party had ‘learned the lessons of the past’ and would not seek to reduce the size of the public sector. Given small government is a core liberal centre-right value, the Opposition Leader has already handicapped himself and is allowing Labor to frame the debate. This strategy won’t work long-term against a fighter like Stephen Miles and the unions that support him. Crisafulli needs to not only win the game, but move it to another playing field altogether. He’ll need a big audacious vision and bold, brave messaging to achieve that.