If Australia’s most sometimes accurate amateur psephologist – me! – is right, despite signs of tightening polls, David Crisafulli will be Premier-elect sometime tonight.

Which is a crying shame because I wouldn’t trust the Queensland LNP to run a state school lucky dip openly and fairly.

As a political body, they have the ethics and morals of the proverbial alley cat.
They’ll cheat and they’ll thieve without a second’s thought if there’s a vote to be gained through deception and deviousness.

And my proof of that? The systematic robbery over two decades of the Brisbane City Council’s intellectual property – its visual branding of consecutive blue and yellow rectangles that run down the left-hand-side of official council publications. And bus timetable and park signs, etc, etc.

As far as I know it’s still council policy that this image – it’s called the council cleat – is not to be used for political purposes. But that has never stopped the LNP over the past 20 years immorally and unethically using the cleat, against those council rules, for their own selfish political purposes. They now own that cleat. The LNP expect the voters of Brisbane to always obey council laws yet they disobey a basic one themselves to purloin ownership of that image.

There’s no better example than the LNP’s Vicki Howard who was first elected in 2012 with her Central Ward posters displaying the council cleat (at top). As you can see from there, poor Ms Howard also thought her campaign car was a miniature council bus! The bottom panel shows a more recent example from Adrian Schrinner’s campaign team, flanked by council ads using their official cleat. Hmmm… I wonder if council now uses that design under licence from the LNP? Probably costs them a pretty penny.

This blatant, unprincipled and unethical council IP thievery started under Lord Mayor Campbell Newman in 2004 – remember Can-Do-One-Term? – and the aim from the beginning was clear. The state LNP and the City Council are one and the same. The LNP municipal candidates – from Newman’s to Quirk’s and now Schrinner’s teams – are the official city council party. They are now inseparable. The LNP and the BCC are one and the same.

They’ve won that war, which probably explains why the Labor Party campaigns so poorly at these four-yearly events. They now know they are well and truly fucked before they start.

So what can we expect over the next four years? All we can do is keep a close eye on the Queensland LNP because openness, honesty and integrity have never really been a central plank of their political playbook.

Don Gordon-Brown

PS: This is probably the last time I’ll ever rant on about the disgraceful copying and subsequent ownership of the city council cleat by the LNP but the campaign against that cleat cheating run by The Independent for many years was the proudest thing I’ve ever done as a journalist. We hammered the likes of Vicki Howard and LNP Lord Mayors and the LNP state office for years; we asked them repeatedly to explain the difference between what the LNP used on election material and the real council cleat. Their only response ad nauseam was “We do not use the council cleat”. That was and remains total bullshit. As you can see at the top of this post, both were often close enough to being identical – and often they were! – that it would have been impossible for the average Brisbane voter to tell them apart, close up or from a distance. The LNP wilfully copied the council cleat. They cheated repeatedly over the years to make it their own. And the result?: the battle for City Hall is no longer a fair or even contest.

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