Billy Gordon, the north Queensland MP whose dumping by Labor amid a series of rolling scandals left the Palaszczuk government still clinging to power with his support as an independent, has bowed out of the 2017 state election.
Gordon on Tuesday announced he would not contest the seat of Cook, which takes in Queensland’s northern tip of Cape York, and which he won in 2015 for Labor as only the second Indigenous man to enter state parliament.
Instead he has endorsed the Labor candidate, Cynthia Lui, a Thursday Island-born child protection worker, who would make history as the first Torres Strait Islander in parliament.
“As an Indigenous Australian I am excited at the prospect of having for the very first time a Torres Strait Islander elected to the Queensland legislative assembly,” Gordon said.
“I wish Ms Lui all the best over the next few weeks and can only imagine what her election to the Queensland parliament will mean for Torres Strait Islanders all around Australia.”
Gordon’s torrid single term in parliament exposed the minority Labor government’s tenuous grip on power. Annastacia Palaszczuk has appealed to voters to hand Labor an outright majority in the 25 November poll to enact its agenda after the experience of the hung parliament.
But the major parties face a sizeable protest vote with the main beneficiary and potential kingmaker being Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which Gordon decried as part of “an unholy alliance that trades in fear, ignorance and hate”.
Gordon was expelled from Labor to sit on the cross-bench just months after the 2015 election, when it emerged he had not declared a juvenile criminal history when applying to be a candidate.
Gordon continued to be dogged by controversies including allegations of unpaid child support payments and violence against a former partner. Gordon denied the latter allegation and police found insufficient evidence to prosecute. A woman was later convicted of attempted extortion over an explicit image Gordon sent to her.
However, Gordon continued to support the Labor government from the cross-bench, a notable exception being his sinking of Labor’s bid to reintroduce a tree-clearing ban last August.
In a statement, Gordon said he was “extremely proud” of achievements including fighting for cane farmers’ greater say in selling their sugar cane, for greater community control of primary health care in Cape York and his support for agricultural industry by opposing the tree clearing ban.
Gordon said he fought hard for “the rights and conditions of working-class people and their families” and against “the LNP’s privatisation agenda”.
“It is only under a Labor government that we can still keep our income-generating assets in public hands and it is only under a Palaszczuk-led government that the rights and conditions of hard-working women, men and their families will be protected,” he said.
Gordon is the only one of a trio of former Labor MPs elected in 2015 to remain openly supportive of Labor, with Rob Pyne in Cairns and Rick Williams in Pumicestone contesting as independents and no love lost between them and their former party.
Palaszczuk visited a Tafe in jobs-starved Townsville to announce part of Labor’s employment creation package, an extra $150 million in payments to businesses to hire 8,000 jobless over the next four years.
She accused the LNP of still having a “secret plan to sell down assets” like state energy utilities, despite its failed privatisation push in 2015.
Palaszczuk said the LNP leader, Tim Nicholls, “can’t be trusted”, even though he has ruled out asset sales, adding he still had questions to answer about a possible alliance with One Nation to hold power in a hung parliament.
Nicholls said the LNP’s commitment on Queensland’s government debt of almost $80 billion — the biggest of a state government — “was to stabilise the situation so that the patient doesn’t get worse”.
However, Nicholls said he was unable to say how the LNP would do this without selling off assets, raising taxes or cutting the public service — another line of Labor attack he has been forced to deny.
Nicholls also complained about the short notice for the November 25 polling day, which hampered the opposition’s efforts to get available charter planes to campaign in regional Queensland.
Palaszczuk will have spent the first three days of her campaign in the all-important battleground of north Queensland, from Airlie Beach and Proserpine to Townsville and Cairns.
Nicholls admitted the LNP had been stuck in the state’s south-east, saying it was “extraordinarily difficult for us to be getting planes at the moment”.
Palaszczuk said she objected to many One Nation policies but its child custody policy in the context of domestic violence allegations was “disgraceful”, and queried some of the party’s apparent anti-vaccination statements.
The disqualified former federal One Nation senator and one-time dual Indian and British national, Malcolm Roberts, who is running in Ipswich, told Sky News his party’s campaigning was “not about selling things, it’s not about trying to hoodwink people, it’s not about window-dressing, and pretending and putting up a facade”.
The One Nation state leader, Steve Dickson, added two more MPs to the list of six candidates the party would not run against, endorsing Labor MP Leanne Linard and the LNP’s Sid Cramp as “both really, really good representatives for the people of Queensland”.
Ros McLennan, the Queensland Council of Unions general secretary, said if the LNP and One Nation took government “we’d be subjected to a horror show of epic proportions”.
Palaszczuk defended her government’s support of the Adani mine, which drew protests that overshadowed the opening hours of her election campaign in regional Queensland.
