It’s apt that the sad comic events in Queensland state politics this past week played out just after Ridley Scott’s controversial blockbuster film Napoleon hit the big screen.

After all, Karl Marx’s most famous quips include the observation that history is made “first as tragedy, then as farce”.

Marx, the iconic leftist political thinker, was talking about the tragic world of Napoleon Bonaparte and the sometimes farcical two decades of his nephew Napoleon III, who took France to the brink of collapse in the Franco-Prussian war which led to the creation of the German empire.  As they say, the rest is history.

Just as these historical threads captivated 19th century Europe, the contemporary tragedy and farce of modern Queensland Labor is the talk of the town as Steven Miles took over, ready to be sworn in.

The tragedy has been the rolling cascade of missed opportunities since the 2020 election when Annastacia Palaszczuk defied the odds against a third straight election win for the ALP through rare application, campaigning skills many thought she didn’t possess and what has been a long running story of LNP leadership dysfunction and underperformance.

Every piece of advice to Palaszczuk in those last months of 2020 and at various times during the three years since has been that the government needs sharper focus, a more ambitious agenda, ministerial renewal and a genuine reform of the parliament and the public sector.

At every opportunity – when Overton windows slid this way and that – Palaszczuk shied away from hard decisions. In the end it was the easiest question that proved to be the hardest to answer – when and by what manner would she leave.

Three main options stood out – from the ridiculous to the best way to proceed. The now ex-premier could have stayed and made clear she wanted a line of succession after the 2024 election. This would have produced one headline but changed nothing.

The next worst would have been to seemingly mimic what Mark McGowan in Western Australia and Dan Andrews in Victoria managed and had a quick, surgical exit and replacement. For this to work, it would have to be conceived and constructed in advance – not thrown together in the usual William Street way of things.

The best and most productive departure would have been to give a decent amount of notice as to when she was going and promote a constructive conversation in party ranks about transition and renewal. This clearly had the most merit.

Finally, Palaszczuk decided herself she didn’t have another election campaign in her political fuel tank despite having harboured a belief she could prevail.

So no faceless man showed up and had a face-to-faceless meeting with the premier. Did conversations feed reflection? Yes, but that had been happening for months. There was a building weight but almost everyone in Queensland Labor went to bed last Saturday assuming the premier would stay in her job until after Christmas.

A lot of the processed-obsessed commentary of the last seven or so days has featured every silly detail about who was in what meeting at what time, plotting what outcome. The only thing missing was the colour of the underwear people had on.

Not much of this adds to the debate and all of it is amplified by self-interest and braggadocio.

The biggest windbags have been the swagger squad of trade unionists, the self-appointed, self-styled power-brokers luxuriating in their Andy Warhol-esque 15 minutes of fame.

The less importance these people have, the louder their boasts and claims of achievement and influence.
Oh, to write your own reviews after strutting and fretting on the stage of power, having a Shakespearean moment that, like Macbeth’s show-stopping soliloquy in the greatest of the Bard’s works, really does signify nothing.

Not for nothing did the greatest of real Labor union powerbrokers, the AWU’s old chief, the late Bill Ludwig, always insist the best political machine was the one no-one heard.

The irony is starkly apparent but you sense the lightbulb hasn’t gone off in the back rooms occupied by these brokers of a power that’s surely renewable.

While these unions think they’re masters of the universe, they’ve never been as powerless as they are now. From 1992 to 2022 the proportion of trade union members in Australia fell from 41 percent to 12.5 percent – in the private sector it is down to just eight percent.

Whatever the thinking in union offices – if any of this was thought through – it has soured
Miles’s ascension to the top job, taking any genuine sense of purpose or renewal out of it.

He has been fortunate to have a cyclone on his desk in these first days, allowing some action to match his “new guy” thrust into the spotlight look.

When the rain eases and the clean up is in order, Miles will be back in Brisbane full time, dusting off plans for Labor’s almost 11 months until the election and getting cracking. He won’t have a nano-second to spare – his LNP opponent David Crisafulli will not sleep until the last dog dies, as they say in the Deep South of the USA.

Miles has a banquet of issues – he has already started some sensible reworking of the grand plan for the 2032 Olympics, something increasingly viewed as a vanity/legacy project for Palaszczuk which will win few if any votes anywhere.

The other really big issue is youth crime. As people gather for street parties, work lunches and community get-togethers, it is the number one topic. If Miles fumbles this ball he will go the way of the trade unions and fade to black.

Footnote: just as a quick observation about the power structures within the ALP which have been moving on the local political tectonic plates.
The Left, united after decades being split between the old “Tomato Left” and the Industrial Left, has fractured although it should hold its coalition until after the election – something built on a shared antipathy towards the CFMEU.

This could all turn to custard if there’s a big election loss come next October. The possible winner is the AWU which had been marginalised because of dwindling membership but is experiencing a renewal. The union’s influence is now as strong as it’s been since the 1990s.