The son of two Federal Liberal Ministers, Campbell Newman AO has been an army major, a high-flying management consultant, Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Australia's largest council and Premier of Queensland. In 2022 he was the Liberal Democrats Senate Candidate for Queensland.
At present, he is the Chairman of Arcana Capital, syndicating commercial property investment opportunities for sophisticated investors, a Director & adviser to a number of start-up technology companies and a regular commentator on SkyNews Australia.
Campbell has been in the public spotlight for decades. He is well aware that the media can portray anyone as a hero or a villain according to their current chosen narrative.
The politics always prevails.
Campbell has been a high profile public figure under the microscope. It's not easy. He will share his thoughts on how he and his family have had to adapt to survive the scrutiny.
TRANSCRIPT:
Thanks very much, Michelle. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Great to be here, to Damien and Stewart. Great to hear what you had to say, and I'll try and plug into a few of your thoughts. I want to acknowledge Jewel, who is our real convener, and it's sad that she couldn't be with you this evening, but thank you for bringing us all together, Jewel, and we hope you get well. Now, I'm not here to whinge about anything, but I've been asked to talk about this topic. It's sort of suggested in the topic that in some way that it was about me and Lisa and the family learning to cope with the media. I don't know that we successfully did, because to be perfectly frank about it, I think we're probably fairly scarred. But we don't dwell on it. We've got on with our lives. I run a business these days.
I'm not on a pension. We get nothing from the government. People think, "Oh, former premier." No, I don't get a pension. I'm not on any government boards. I've not got any sinecures. And so I'm a self-employed individual who believes in liberty, believes in self-reliance, believes in personal responsibility, and believes that I want the government out of my life.
Now, you wouldn't know that. You wouldn't know that from the narrative of the media and what they did, not just in the period, probably 2012 to 2015, but what they have continued to do since that time, and indeed, and Damien was sort of alluding to this, the Liberal National Party allowed the Labor Party and the media to do. Because I want to just reflect on what happened between 2012 and '15. So there's a bit tongue in cheek, bit tongue in cheek. Well, I remember those times, ladies and gentlemen.
Do you remember those times? They were bad times. Do you remember the camps? The arrests at night, the bags over the head, the searchlights in the face, people being dragged off screaming from their families, incarcerated without trial. The dogs at those camps, the vicious guards. Because in the words of Jim Chalmers, sorry, Dr. Jim Chalmers, who was in the last year or two on the ABC, of course, he referred to the atrocities of the Newman government while in office.
I was so taken by Dr. Jim Chalmers' misuse of the language. I went and grabbed a dictionary, looked up what atrocities mean. And I can tell you now, it's a pretty extreme use of language, but he's now running the nation's finances. Let me, to recalibrate, read from an article or just a couple of things. And this might surprise you. It's entitled Newman's A Grade Result for Queensland.
And I'll read you a few passages. "On every significant measure of government, from the handling of the economy to leadership, law and order, health and education, the Newman government has exceeded expectations. Campbell Newman was handed a broken government when he became premier in 2012. After years of mismanagement, economic vandalism and turmoil, the voters of Queensland declared it was time Labor disappeared for a while to rebuild itself. Queenslanders wanted the united LNP under the new energetic leader to get a chance to get up our state for a prosperous future. Almost three years later, Labor is a long way from rebuilding anything. And the Newman government is considerably way down the path in setting up Queensland for a great future."
Believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, that's December 2014. It's the only about four weeks from the 2015 election. That's the Courier Mail's editorial, their official policy position.
So what happened? So that's more what I'm going to talk about.
So again, I'm not whinging. Well, Damien really explained things very, very well earlier on. There needs to be a good guy and there needs to be a villain and you're looking at the villain. And the reason I was picked as a villain, to be frank, and it's, I don't want to sound a bit egotistical by talking about myself, but well, Jewel asked me to come along. The reason I was selected as the villain is the Labor Party are very good at what they do and the Liberal National Party are really bad at what they try to do. Simple as that. Now I am, as many people in the room would know these days, I'm not in the Liberal National Party, but I was saying that prior to leaving in disgust about 15 months ago.
The Labor Party are professional. The Labor Party understand what Damien says. And the Labor Party knew that in Newman, after seven years of achievement and accomplishment and delivery at City Hall, they had to bring me down. And so in 2011, when I put my hand up to run for premier outside the parliament, the work began. They spent the whole of 2011 into 2012 really getting stuck in and the family stuff.
We're crook, their shonky dealings, all sorts of things going on. And they spent a whole 12 months trying to actually stop me winning, stop the LNP winning. And I got to say that when I became premier, I was already quite tarnished. They had already started to frame a narrative about probably my family more than anything, because I think later on came the other stuff. So what is the image the Labor Party have presented? Well, before I do that, perhaps who do I think I am?
Well, I said I'm a libertarian. I'm a family guy. I've been married and faithful to the one woman for 31 years. I have two well-adjusted and wonderfully accomplished young daughters in their one 30 and one 27, who live independently, had their own careers. I'm very proud of them. I believe that a man is a man and a woman as a woman.
If someone wants to change their sex, fine. I respect that, but don't expect me to remember pronouns or a baffling array of gender selections. I'm just not going to play that. I am not a First Nations person, but I can sure as hell tell you, I am not second nation, if you know where that's all going. I'm a Christian, I'm a businessman, self-employed, as I said.
I believe in duty, I believe in service from a military background. And the only reason I went into politics is to deliver for my community, but I am demanding. I don't suffer fools gladly. I'm a hard worker and a hard driver, but I have a loyal sort of retinue, I don't know what the right word is, or team of people who've worked for me over the years, and you haven't seen anybody accuse Campbell Newman of bullying a RAF flight attendant on an aircraft or being obnoxious in a restaurant or pushing to the front of the queue like certain people of the left. The point I'm making to you is the stuff I'm about to tell you is the way I've been presented by Labor with the willing, willing cooperation of the media.
This is who I am, supposedly. I am nasty. I am uncaring. I particularly don't care about people with disabilities or people who are underprivileged or less well off.
That army background is a terrible sort of albatross around my neck. And just to digress from it, isn't it fascinating? If you think back to the way I was presented in office, negative military stereotypes were used against me, and yet the same people who are presenting that, the media, or indeed the Labor Party, are quite happy to turn up on Anzac Day and talk about the sacrifice of our veterans, the service that they gave to the nation, but they're quite happy to portray people in a particular way. Someone who comes to mind, who they've been doing a hatchet job for many years, who served the community in the uniform of the Queensland Police Service, of course, is Peter Dutton, okay? Just to give you an idea. And someone like Tony Abbott, volunteer firefighter, again, someone who believes in service, sees some parallels between Dutton, Abbott, and Newman.
That's certainly there.
I'm narrow-minded. I'm right-wing, of course. I bark orders at people. I'm a bit stupid. I don't have intellectual breath. I don't like books. I'm illiterate. Ask Matthew Condon, I hope he sees the video at the Courier Mail. I hate books, I hate literature, I hate writers, all things to do that. And of course, I hate the arts. I hate the arts. So it was all tongue in cheek, but that's what you've been told. That's what's been presented. Let's just talk about journos for a second. Damien talked about the media, but let's talk about journos. You all think, no, not this crowd, but you know so many people who think that journos are like, and I'll give him credit, Headley Thomas, who are fearless seekers after truth, people who are actually prepared to go and do some social good by getting to the bottom of important issues in our community.
And you know what I'm referring to there? Well, I'll tell you now, Hedley is so far an outlier. He's out on the main road. The rest of them are over here. They hunt like a pack. They don't have their own mind. They're scared of being ... They're scared of being out there with Headley and they don't do their job properly. They, particularly in the Queensland media group, when I was premier, they used to literally decide, and it was even prior to that, they would literally decide that they'd go to the press conference. It could have been Beattie, could have been Black, could have been Newman. They'd go to the press conference, they'd hear the press conference and they'd decide what the story was actually going to be, and they'd all go and deliver three or four, ABC, 10, Seven, Nine, et cetera. They'd go and deliver the similar story.
So they're not doing their job. And particularly now the ones we've got, the young ones have absolutely no sense of history. So they constantly manipulated, again, I believe willingly when people tell them stuff, which they then just regurgitate. And so we now have a situation where the health system was in crisis when Newman was the premier. In fact, the health system had been turned around. It was the best performing health system in the nation. Ambulance ramping had been ended, but you wouldn't know that today because again, going to what Damien said, the LNP have run up the white flag and won't defend these things.
I don't want to speak for the full 20 minutes, so hopefully I'll cut this a bit short, but I just want to give you some examples of the disparity in treatment between, say, someone on the right and someone on the left. So probably the first one is in relation to just the disparity in treatment in terms of my own wife and myself.
So we used to go around and do community cabinets around Queensland every three to four weeks to talk to the community. And what happened was there was a little dedicated band, got to hand it to them of the ETU, probably about 12 to 15 who had a van. They would go around the state and they would always be there protesting. More than protesting, they'd be screaming and shouting obscenities at myself and Lisa when we turned up. Now, you remember Tony Abbott stood in front of a placard saying, ditch the witch and the furor about that.
I remember that Palaszczuk was going to the beef week at Rockhampton a few years ago as premier and some farmers geared at her. Nothing like what I'm referring to. But again, the sympathy card was out for her, how terrible the farmers would object. But I can tell you now, Anastasia Palaszczuk never apologised for union members abusing Lisa in a quite disgusting way. When I dared complain about it to the media that night, they ran to the air, the premiers having a big suck about it all. Doesn't like the treatment. So you think about bullying, these causes for the media, they don't like bullying, sexual harassment, just harassment in general, all those sort of things. It was okay, and it is okay if it's Campbell Newman and his wife, but it's not okay if it's Anastasia Palaszczuk or the Labor Party.
The presentation and composition of the New Year's articles, the typical way it was presented when we're in office was today, Channel Nine can reveal that the premier announced this new initiative, but here's Fred from Tingalpa, and Fred says, "It's a crap idea." And here's Tom who's from the union movement. "That's right, Tom. It's a crap idea as well". And here's Lisa from the Australian Labor Party. Lisa, what do you think? That's right. It's an appalling idea, but back to the premier to talk a bit more about his dumb idea. Well, thank you. That was the presentation, but tongue in cheek, but I kid you not, ladies and gentlemen, that is exactly how you were fed the news for three years of the Newman government. It is quite funny, but it is also quite sad. Another example I give you in terms of the comparison between treatment was in Australia Day 2015, I was out at the Gap State High School doing a press conference and I was asked ... I can't remember what the issue was, but I was asked to answer a question.
I gave the answer. They asked the question again. I gave another version of the answer, but the same answer basically, rewording it as you do. They then asked again, and so I gave another version of the same answer, but again, it was the same answer. And of course, that night on the news, they showed the whole thing. Now, I can tell you now Anastasia Palaszczuk does that every single time she's pressed by the media, and I've never yet seen them do her over on it. It was a deliberate attempt to make me look bad, and they continued to do that, and let her off the hook to today, apart from the Courier Mail who are doing, in my view, their job. There's also the comparison of the mistake or the slip. So one time I was in Canberra for what used to be called the Premier's Conference, and I was asked something about Queensland finances, and I made a comparison.
I said, "Look, if we don't do something about Queensland's finances and its debt will be the Spain, think of the post GFC, will be the Spain of Australia." Well, the next 24 hours we're about what a dumb so-and-so this Newman guy is. Here's Spain, that's how much debt they're in. Here's Queensland, this is how much debt they're in. What a ridiculous comparison. So I was flat alive, but I then give you the comparison where in the 2015 election campaign, the Wannabe Premier was asked about what the level of GST was, and someone who wants to be in the highest office in the state didn't know that it was 10%, but was allowed to laugh it off because she didn't have a coffee. The final one I'll give you just in terms of the way we were treated was the day that Lawrence Springbog and I, and Lawrence, by the way, was a very good health minister.
He achieved some amazing things, which he's never really got the credit for, but again, the LNP to blame for that, but we went out to announce at the PA hospital, this would have sort of been about September of that particular year, that by March the following year, we would have completely cleared the backlog of glaucoma and cataract surgery on the public waiting list. We were saying, "We're going to clear that backlog." It wasn't an election commitment. It wasn't an election promise. We had sort of a year and a half to go for the election. We were going to clear it. We said it will be done by then. Can't get any firmer or less equivocal than that. So we did the announcement, they listened, and then I said, "Well, ladies and gentlemen, any questions? Mr. Premier, Clyde Palmer day said that you have a mental health problem and you don't take your medication. Is this true? Have you stopped taking your medication?"
I said, "Does anybody want to ask a question about the health initiative?" And no, they didn't. And I can tell now, ladies and gentlemen, all the commercial stations ran that night was Clive Palmer says, "Newman's got a mental health problem." And again, think about this for a second. If I went out there and accused someone on the left, any Labor figure in this country or greens figure of having a mental health problem, the world would crash down on me like a tsunami of hatred and bile and how dare he, you don't joke about such things, but because it was Campbell Newman, that was totally and utterly permissible. So you good folk in Queensland, if you watch Seven, Nine, and 10, you never heard, particularly if you're a senior citizen and had eye issues and might have been on the list, you never heard about that initiative.
I will give credit, don't hate me, Damien, but the ABC at least did cover the substantive issue, but quickly moved into the revelations about my mental health problems. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for having me this evening. Tonight's really about your questions. It's been a great pleasure. Thanks, Michelle.
Thank you very much.
