Two months from the Queensland election, Steven Miles is caught between a $3.6bn monolith and a hard place of his own making.
Miles is reportedly considering a taxpayer-funded lifeline for Star Entertainment Group, whose landmark new casino overlooking the Brisbane river opened last week; whose employees are represented by the United Workers Union, which helped put the premier in his job.
But any bailout – even a tax holiday that would ultimately need to be paid back, on the pretence of saving workers’ jobs – would conflict with the narrative that Miles and Labor have spent the past eight months carefully crafting.
When Miles became premier, his strategists set about building two key foundations for the October election campaign.
The first was that Miles needed to distance himself from his predecessor, Annastacia Palaszczuk, whose government was unpopular and on track for an election thrashing. People needed the sense of a new government, under new management.
“What’s clear is that I’m very different [from Palaszczuk],” Miles told Guardian Australia last month.
The second foundation of Miles’s election strategy was to show voters he was on their side. Cheap public transport fares, power bill rebates, building new social housing – all initiatives tagged with the focus group-friendly slogan: “Miles Doing What Matters”.
You could almost guarantee that line won’t be attached to any announcement of a bailout deal with Star.
Labor was thrashed at recent Queensland byelections, and in the Northern Territory, where campaigns focused on law and order issues.
But polling about issues shows that voters’ key concern is still the rising cost of living, and the Labor strategy is to try to find battle lines with the Liberal National party that put the premier on the people’s side of that ledger.
The most prominent manoeuvre by Miles has been his decision to scrap expensive plans to rebuild the Gabba stadium for the 2032 Olympic Games, and instead run the Olympic 100m final in the smallest stadium since 1928, across the road from a graveyard, a self-storage facility, and a liquidated furniture outlet.
On the Olympics, it was a calculation that people wanted the Games, but didn’t want to pay for new stadiums when their own kitchen tables were bare.
The decision last month to build publicly owned petrol stations was, in part, an attempt to announce something that the LNP would simply never support – to draw them away from a small target strategy and into a cost-of-living policy debate.
Any decision to bail out Star will be premised on the jobs “saved” by the decision. And there’s an element of truth to that, especially given the influence of UWU within the state government.
But the reality is that the state can not allow its new edifice – the massive Queens Wharf casino development, which a new Labor government awarded to a consortium fronted by Star in 2015, and has been under construction for years too long – to become a sorry metaphor for its nine years in charge of the state.
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Any closure, even a temporary one, just weeks after the building opened would be politically embarrassing.
Even after Star was fined $100m and found guilty of “a serious dereliction of its anti money-laundering responsibilities”, the feeling in Queensland was always that the state had too much at stake – a joint venture partner in Brisbane’s most prominent development – to ever make a permanent finding that Star should not operate casinos.
While New South Wales maintains the company is not a suitable operator, and has refused any financial help – lauded as the “right decision” by the Sydney Morning Herald – Queensland might now provide the lifeline for a casino operator found by its own investigation to have had a “one-eyed focus” on profit at the expense of patrons
That doesn’t really align with the “I’m on your side” message that Miles has spent the past eight months trying to get across.
Voters, of course, don’t have the option of deferring their tax payments to cover rising rents, or to buy groceries. Small businesses don’t get payroll tax relief to help keep their employees. Motorists hit with fines for breaking the law don’t get to just ask for the money back because they fall on hard times.
Instead, the state would be giving that sort of accommodation to a controversial casino operator found in two states to be “unsuitable”, whose core business is removing money from the pockets of gamblers.
The temptation is to use a high-stakes gambling analogy, but Labor wouldn’t be shuffling up to the roulette table and betting it’s year-long election strategy on black.
Miles is taking Labor’s stake off the table entirely, and instead just handing the money over to the house.
