HOUSE DIVIDED: There have been complaints about the leadership style of Campbell Newman, Jeff Seeney and Tim Nicholls. Source: The Courier-Mail
LESS than a year after flying high following their stunning election landslide, the LNP have descended into what looks like a self-destructive, infighting rabble.
How did the Newman Government, in a mere eight months, go from a position of unparalleled popularity to trading barbs at each other across the floor of Parliament?
There is no easy answer.
What it is not is a simple divide between the old Liberal and Nationals or a battle between the city and the bush, although there are elements of both. It's much more complex than that.
At the heart of the calamity that's beset the Government are a number of factors that have been grinding away in the background before something broke.
Ego and ambition certainly played a significant part. So did political ignorance and naivety. And emerging to the surface of that toxic concoction has been boiling anger about an uncompromising, iron-fisted management style towards handling internal frictions.
No one in particular and everyone in the LNP are to blame.
But as Government members return to their electorates for the Christmas break, each should be asking themselves how much damage has been done? And will the festive season heal the festering in the LNP?
The three MPs at the centre of the stink, the deserter Ray Hopper, the rejected Carl Judge and the dejected Alex Douglas, hail from three distinct sections of the party but there is a common thread to their complaints.
ON THE SPOT: Darling Downs MP Ray Hopper. Source: The Courier-Mail
HOPPER HOPS IT
Hopper is a bush National, Judge a city Liberal and Douglas is from the National's former coastal beachhead of the Gold Coast. Each feels ignored and ill-treated. Each has issues with the way the leadership trio of Campbell Newman, Jeff Seeney and Tim Nicholls operate.
The LNP party room would be a textbook case for any sociologist. It's a large group with a common goal but competing interests. It was inevitable some would feel left out.
Hopper's defection last Sunday to Katter's Australian Party was probably the most surprising of the three.
A dairy farmer and dogger, Hopper won former Nationals premier Russell Cooper's old seat of Darling Downs as an Independent in 2001, joined the Nationals less than a year later and was given a frontbench position.
After campaigning on a platform of being "fiercely independent", Hopper stressed his decision to join the Nationals was borne out of the necessity for the non-Labor forces to combine to defeat Labor.
However, when Campbell Newman came into the leadership last year, Hopper was dumped from the front bench. Many saw this as Jeff Seeney exacting revenge after the pair fell out during the Deputy Premier's ill-fated stint as leader years earlier.
With little hope of elevation and an objection to coal-seam gas in his electorate, Hopper decided to quit last week.
He'd made up his mind when he toured the local University of Southern Queensland campus with Treasurer Tim Nicholls the previous Friday.
Premier Campbell Newman and Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie tried to call Hopper on the same day. He ignored their calls, changed his mobile number and then political parties.
"I wasn't going to sit in a party room under the staunch leadership where you didn't have a say," he says.
Hopper is a fairly natural fit to KAP, a party more prone to opposing rather than proposing. His condemnation of dairy regulation and globalisation during his maiden speech could have come out of the mouth of Bob Katter himself.
But there is more chance of catching Santa filling your stocking than KAP becoming the official Opposition after Christmas, as Hopper has suggested.
Hopper now leads the three KAP MPs. Another four are needed before they could challenge Labor's Opposition status.
News .MP Alex Douglas at Parliament .28.11.12 Pic Annette Dew Picture: Annette Dew Source: The Courier-Mail
DOUGLAS DEFIES
After Hopper's defection, Douglas publicly ruled himself out of leaving the LNP.
"I strongly believe in the LNP. I'm a strongly committed LNP person," he said last Sunday.
But by Thursday he had quit the LNP after a public slanging match with the Premier and fellow Gold Coast MP Ray Stevens.
Douglas has been equally dismayed with his lack of influence internally and dejec ted over his failure to be elevated to the ministry, having coveted the health portfolio.
His frustration was on full display when he publicly opposed the Government's plans for a cruise ship terminal at Southport Spit.
The decision to remove Douglas as chair of the powerful ethics committee - an act that looked distinctly like bloody revenge - was the final straw.
Initially pragmatic about his switch to the legal affairs committee, Douglas bristled at the suggestion he had been asked to move, then was dumped from that committee for demanding his old job back, got pummelled in a special party room meeting on Wednesday night and quit on Thursday afternoon.
In the space of four days Douglas went from being publicly committed to the party to opposing everything about the way it operated in Government.
Carl Judge. Picture: Marc Robertson Source: The Courier-Mail
JUDGES'S RULING
However, despite the obvious issues with Hopper and Douglas, which had both spilled into the public in the past, senior insiders picked Judge months ago as the most likely member to quit first.
The former police officer is one of the LNP's brigade of accidental MPs after winning the previously safe Labor seat of Yeerongpilly.
Judge has no real ideological alliance with the LNP and ran for the party more out of an opposition to the former Bligh government.
"A lot of Queenslanders wanted change and I was one of them," Judge said this week of his decision to join the LNP before the election.
"I didn't think we were headed down a great path in terms of asset sales and state debt was concerning."
Judge was one of many LNP MPs who came in at the March election with a seemingly inflated opinion of their importance and a misguided belief they would be able to get whatever they needed for their electorate. He became more frustrated than his colleagues with the way politics operates internally and ministers quickly tired of his demands.
When he equivocated on his commitment to the LNP after Hopper's resignation, Judge was denied access to the partyroom, ushered to another seat in Parliament and finally faced the indignity of having his fellow MPs vote to demand the party office kick him out.
Judge insisted his inability to properly represent his electorate was behind his decision to quit, along with the Government's failure to live up to its election rhetoric.
"It's my responsibility to represent my electorate and, sadly, I do not believe this Government is fulfilling its election promises," he told Parliament on Thursday afternoon.
Clive Palmer addresses the media on Thursday at Parliament. Source: The Courier-Mail
PALMING OFF
Behind all three is the spectre of Clive Palmer, the billionaire businessman who has also been ejected from the LNP amid ongoing skirmishes with the Government.
Many in the LNP believe Palmer has farmed all three dissidents and convinced them to quit.
Others are convinced Palmer is simply attaching himself to their discontent to suit his purposes.
Whichever is the answer, there is no doubt Palmer has been oscillating between agitating internally and accusing the Government of all types of atrocities at his regular press conferences.
"I'm a reluctant warrior, I don't really want to get involved in politics," he said this week.
Despite this self-declared warrior status, Palmer has been firing off letters to the LNP back bench, in an attempt to de-stabilise the leadership.
When one party member - believed to be Palmer's nephew - wrote a detailed letter of complaint about Newman to LNP headquarters in mid-November, copies were slipped under the office doors of many MPs in the Parliamentary Annexe late at night.
Given security access is needed to access all floors, the midnight mailman was most likely an MP.
This is the type of cold war-style battle that Newman and his leadership team have been secretly fighting.
And it goes some way towards explaining their fierce reaction to the dissent.
ACTION AND REACTION
However, many LNP insiders think they handled the fallout badly.
They believe Newman, Seeney and Nicholls let their egos control their reactions, with public attacks and revenge acts launched against the heretics rather than adopting the sage option of ignoring their actions and accusations.
The browbeating only helped to justify the concerns of the outcast MPs and gave their complaints credibility.
Former premier Peter Beattie found himself in many self-inflicted situations but he never got into a public slanging match with his own MPs.
If this had been Beattie, the public would have been treated to his broad grin at a photo opportunity of peace talks. In the months later he would have found ways to clinically knife the maverick.
But it's not in Newman's make-up to defend or accept anything other than strict acquiescence, as his time in local politics demonstrated.
However, given the power struggle that has been occurring behind the scenes between the parliamentary wing and influential party figures, there's an argument there was no other option but to see all three off at once rather than risk this issue dragging on.
There was a certain inevitability some MPs would become disgruntled and leave, given the size and diversity of the LNP back bench but no one imaged it would happen so early.
This week proved yet another chapter in the Government's brief history which has been dominated by issues other than governing.
Two ministers sacked and scandals over the appointments of mates have overshadowed everything the Newman Government has achieved so far.
You really have to ask what on Earth will come next.
Steven Wardill is The Courier-Mail's state political editor.
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