Labor sharpens knives to get rid of man from nowhere

Campbell Newman burst onto the scene in 2002 as Brisbane Mayor. Photo / Dale Napier

Last summer Campbell Newman stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Queensland Premier Anna Bligh as floodwaters spilled down the Lockyer Valley, overpowered the huge Wivenhoe Dam and raged into Brisbane.

Newman's handling of the crisis cemented his already powerful stature as the city's Lord Mayor. For Bligh, the floods offered political salvation, first stemming and then reversing the massive tide flowing against her unpopular Government.

This week the good vibes were well and truly gone. To Newman, Bligh was a "sleaze bucket" overseeing an Administration of "drunks, punks and desperadoes"; for Bligh, Newman is the man likely to crush Labor in a landslide defeat at the next elections.

Bligh's deputy, Andrew Fraser, has referred Newman to the state's Crime and Misconduct Commission in relation to personal financial disclosures during his time as Lord Mayor in the hope of derailing the steamroller he is aiming at the Government in his new role as leader of the Liberal National Party Opposition.

But Newman has already survived an earlier, similar referral unscathed, and is unflinching in the face of a concerted Labor attack on his integrity.

For many, Newman is the man from nowhere, exploding into Queensland politics first as the rank outsider who became Brisbane Lord Mayor in 2002, and this year as point man for an Opposition that with the exception of two brief years in the late 1990s has been unable to break Labor's 22-year run in office.

Newman is likely to change that. He appears certain to win the inner-Brisbane electorate of Ashgrove, a nominally safe Labor seat held by Government MP Kate Jones but targeted by Newman as his entree to Parliament.

A ReachTEL poll cited in the Courier Mail this week shows that Jones will almost certainly be rolled by a state-wide tsunami against Labor. Her primary vote is about 17 per cent below Newman's, and the Opposition Leader is ahead 56.5-43.5 per cent in the two-party preferred vote that wins Queensland elections.

To survive, Bligh needs to axe Newman

But this will not come easily.

Newman was raised on politics. His father, the late Kevin Newman, was a Lieutenant Colonel with the Australian army in Malaysia and Vietnam, and a federal Liberal minister for a decade. His mother Jocelyn was a Senator and minister in John Howard's Coalition Government.

Their son was a latecomer to politics, an engineering graduate who ended 13 years in the army as a major and joined the farm storage company Grainco where, he was later to tell an interviewer, he was "knee-deep in money" but unfulfilled.

He said he thought back to his parents' years of service and when his wife suggested he could become Brisbane's Lord Mayor, he gave it a go. Few knew him, and even fewer thought he had a chance.

But in 2002 he won with the slogan "can do", racking up a list of achievements that last year saw him placed fifth among 25 international candidates as the world's best mayor. He put 700 new buses on roads revitalised by a A$1 billion ($1.2 billion) upgrade, put two new bridges and 12 ferries on the Brisbane River, launched two tunnels, introduced a 100 per cent green electricity buying scheme, planted 2 million trees and saved 500ha of bushland from development.

Last March he decided to become Opposition leader, ignoring the fact he was not an MP, there was no readily available seat for pre-selection, and that a whole generation of senior party MPs stood between him and the top job.

Audacity won. In April Newman became LNP Leader, immediately announcing that all existing policies were extinct and setting out to completely rewrite the party's platform.

Since then it has been bare-knuckle scrapping. Newman has engaged in feuds with the ABC and the Courier Mail, which described him as "behaving like a toddler throwing toys from a cot. He wants things all his way or not at all".

Labor has criticised his "Napoleonic tendencies", and even one of his own MPs confessed on radio that colleagues at times found his style hard to take.

But the Government sees its doom in Newman and is targeting the integrity of his financial disclosures in the hope of wrecking his public image.

The Crime and Misconduct Commission has been asked to investigate allegations that Newman improperly failed to declare his interests in two beachfront units in Port Douglas when he was Lord Mayor.

Newman has also come under attack for his wife Lisa's holdings in a company granted a high-rise development approval in Brisbane, and for a A$30 million bid for post-flood reconstruction work by a company 60 per cent owned by his wife's family and led by her brother.

Newman denies any misconduct or conflict of interest and in characteristic style has lashed Bligh as a "liar and a hypocrite", using a "dirt team" to dig up mud ahead of a "summer of sleaze" leading to the state elections. Interesting times lie ahead for Queensland.