Yesterday, I mentioned my proudest time in more than a half-century in journalism was the time The Independent spent getting stuck into the Queensland LNP over the disgusting, devious, deceptive and downright unethical and politically morally bankrupt way they stole the Brisbane City Council’s intellectual property and made it their own.

In a short while, I’ll tell you the saddest thing I ever heard from a supposed journalist over all my time in this craft.

But firstly, just a reminder of how long The Indie’s cleat cheat campaign as an inner-CBD community newspaper went on for. At top and below are extracts from the 2 May 2012 edition of The Independent, including a montage of the cleat-cheating then Lord Mayor Graham Quirk and his candidates were getting up to, and his answer to questions on that, especially asking if the council rule banning the cleat from political use had changed and why Brisbane voters could be excused for thinking they were one and the same.

Quirk was of course telling a red-hot porky. Just look at the two images to the left of the main montage. Blind Freddy is probably the only person who could tell them apart.

Now, the worst thing I’ve ever heard a “journalist” say? I was driving up on the M1 from the Gold Coast during a previous council election campaign and the young woman host on 4QR was conducting one of the very rare discussions I had ever heard a mainstream media outlet address the cleat-cheat issue.

I can’t quote her verbatim but she basically said this as a way of resolving the issue: “Maybe the City Council should just stop using the LNP’s design?” Luckily I managed to keep the car on the highway.

But her comments made me realise – if I hadn’t already known – that the Queensland LNP had won the battle and the war. The LNP and the BCC were one. The LNP was the council’s official political party.

Which, dear reader, was the exact aim – the only aim – of the exercise when Lord Mayor Campbell Newman started the cleat-cheat exercise and those who have followed have wilfully endorsed, with absolute gusto and nary a blush of contrition or remorse.

So, while we now know why the LNP did what it did, want to know why they’ve since used the same blue and yellow colours in the alternating rectangles as in the city council’s official cleat?

When the LNP Queensland was formed as a single entity, their one and only real claim to success was the Brisbane City Council. And so they used the blue and yellow from the City Council’s cleat.

No real harm or political skulduggery in that, to be fair. That only began in earnest when they decided to use those two colours and run alternating rectangular blocks of them down the left-hand-side of council election political material.

I’m sure they all hoped Brisbane residents would see that what they were using looked nothing like the official City Council cleat and that any possible mistaken belief that they were one and the same could be kept to an absolute minimum!

Don Gordon-Brown

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