Approaching the halfway milestone of Queensland’s four-year electoral cycle, Premier David Crisafulli has spent the past week doing plenty of talking – in speech after set-piece speech.
He has spent it talking about what his government has done, and what it’s yet to do. The latter involves fixing the more nebulous “crises” he rode to power vowing to address.
“The big four issues that I spoke about before the election remain the big four issues and the big four challenges,” Crisafulli said at his 2026 CEDA State of the State address on Monday.
“And on all of them [health, housing, crime and cost of living], we are making progress after a long period of time where the numbers went in the wrong direction.”
While Crisafulli can cite numbers heading in a better direction – and did, across several other major speeches this week, including to the property and local government sectors – more than anyone else, he should know the limits of relying on statistics.
During a Queensland Media Club appearance on Wednesday billed as featuring a “significant policy announcement” in the law and order space, no such thing came, beyond confirmation the parliament will pass a government bill next week. Nor was there anything new in any other area.
‘I want to talk today about what I call a trio of opportunities: fuel, critical minerals, and data centres. All three have challenges. All three have opportunities.’
Crisafulli in his Monday State of the State speech
This is the bind in which the government now finds itself: a list of concrete election platform items already all-but ticked off, leaving them either pushing ahead with new policy efforts in areas plaguing governments across the country and globe, or hoping its “let us cook” line finds sympathy.
Advertisements are still running for the work of the “new Queensland government”, but frustrations over this positioning are beginning to emerge – particularly on crime, where the LNP set the terms of the debate while in opposition, yet admits that public dissatisfaction remains, two years on.
Crisafulli himself seemed to acknowledge that on Wednesday. Asked when his team would shed the “new” and just become the Queensland government, Crisafulli said: “well, I hope we did that today”.
New policy is where the carefully crafted moderate pre-election image, dutifully maintained with its “calm and methodical” tagline since, most threatens to come unstuck. (Newman, anyone?)
The view under that layer, seemingly peeling back with each month this year, looks a little different. Political speech has been criminalised, objecting to mining projects has been made harder, major planning and land use powers expanded, and the state’s bail regime tightened, despite warnings about adverse impacts on the rule of law, court system, and community safety.
Then there’s the foray into a serious rebalancing of the state’s industrial relations system after a bruising set of negotiations with major public service workforces that spilled over into industrial action in schools, railways, hospitals, youth detention centres and child safety offices.
Crisafulli and his strategists seem to believe these glimpses beyond the pre-election picture they painted are too minor to spook a wider population wary of action that’s too swift or extreme.
The Labor opposition, led for now by Steven Miles, seems stuck on a small-target strategy, hoping that something – or an accumulation of things – will suddenly become too much for people to bear.
The resignation from cabinet of Child Safety Minister Amanda Camm may be the first bit of bark taken from Crisafulli that Labor would view as a win.
While Crisafulli’s LNP remain the clear favourites in this masthead’s regular Resolve Political Monitor, that polling also shows the broader mood has soured across a year that has thrown no shortage of extra problems at households and governments.
After significant improvement following the 2024 vote, the outlook for the next year or so among those surveyed for both their personal lives, and the state more broadly, has since returned to pre-election levels.
Almost more people think things will get worse in their lives than not change, and both cohorts are double the size of those who think it will get better. Compared to before the election, their view of the state’s future is now more pessimistic.
The tectonic plates long holding the two-party system in place appear their shakiest since Queensland saw Pauline Hanson’s best yet showing in an Australian parliament three decades ago. So two years could be a long time – for all involved.
How do you act, or give the appearance of acting, on fundamental social and economic problems in a way that makes people feel things have changed for the better, when you are also cautious of moving too fast or too far, let alone actually change things for the long-term good?
The Crisafulli government may have a swathe of state and national elections across the country to learn from before it has to face voters for the first time from office, but a bet on people’s willingness to wait to feel change while being told it is happening is no longer such a sure thing.
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.