Grieving families are tonight unleashing hurt and fury at the Palaszczuk government after a senior MP dismissed youth crime in Queensland as just a "media beat-up". @PeterFegan9 #9News pic.twitter.com/0aHfE2gej0
— 9News Queensland (@9NewsQueensland) August 28, 2023
I’ve known the Member for Capalaba Don Brown for a long time, and when I worked alongside him I always found him to be a real good bloke.
Boz – as he is known to his mates – was never the hardest worker in the union though, and despite holding 2 or 3 university degrees he was never the sharpest tool in the rack either.
He didn’t need to be, because he was union royalty in the union that now runs the Labor Party.
Don Brown’s old man was Don Brown Snr, the union boss who stepped aside and handed the former paint factory worker now turned ALP powerbroker Gary Bullock the keys to the show.
Blocker, as he is known to one and all, is a real good bloke too, one of the most genuine people that you would ever meet, and far and away one of the most loyal to a fault to his mates too.
He is very loyal to both Don Brown senior and junior, and used his muscle in the ALP to put junior into parliament, despite the huge misgivings that many of us who were honest about such things had about whether Boz had the right stuff to be an MP, doubts that have now been publicly proven to be correct.
Gary Bullock is also very loyal to Stephen Miles, whose support for him during a surprise Mick De Brenni lead leadership challenge attack when Don Brown senior stood down from his position as union boss and passed Bullock the baton, was instrumental instrumental in staving off the poorly planned De Bruyn managed assault.
That puts the kingmaker in a real dilemma right now, a huge one indeed.
This is why.
Bullock has worked for years, decades in fact, to put his union in the position of political power that they now enjoy. He didn’t do it because he’s a power junkie; Blocker did it because he genuinely believes that by doing so he could improve the lot of the low paid workers that his union represents, and which he used to be. It’s worked too. Rank and file members of his union are now MP’s, some of them Ministers even, and his influence in the governing party has reaped rewards in the form of better pay and conditions for the predominantly vulnerable Queenslanders that he represents, not least of which has been the achievement of portable long service leave entitlements for the swathe of casual cleaners or contracted security guards who never had a hope of getting it without his dedication to their cause.
It’s Blocker who put Stephen Miles where he is today, he and him alone.
And now, after years of being loyal to the Premier and the Party, in the face of horrific internal polling that shows that Anna’s gone and the party with her too, Block has decided to make the idiot I call Smiles the Premier of QLD. Not because he got the ability to do the job, but because he knows the party is cactus if Anna doesn’t go, and like most talentless clowns Miles will do the union’s bidding, and even more so because he doesn’t want Mick De Brenni to get the job.
De Brenni is not loyal you see, or not to anyone but himself.
I’ve known De Bruyn since I was in my early 20’s and he was a pony tailed teen working for the textiles union organising immigrant slaves in backyard sweatshops, and have always liked and respected him, quite a lot actually. That’s why I shared my pingers (ecstasy) and pot with him one night on the roof of the union building at a party, and didn’t ask him to kick in for the cost. But I wouldn’t trust Mick as far as I could throw him, or any further than Gary Bullock trusts him anyway, which is not at all.
In all the recent excitement about doing Anna over, Blocker forgot the golden rule. That being that while you can keep snakes calm in cages, you can never, ever take your eyes off them for a minute or they will spring up and bite you in the neck, especially snakes whose singular goal life since an early age has been to be the Premier of QLD.
Up until now De Brenni’s been a million to one of getting there, but I always knew he was just lying doggo until the perfect opportunity to strike arose, and here it is, and if you don’t think that he has some got something to do with it you’re as silly as the people who took their eyes off him while blinded by the make Miles Premier light. He has somehow been in the shadows engineering the current nightmare scenario that Gary Bullock now faces, it’s sure as night follows day.
Blocker, De Bruyn, Boz and Smiles are all from the same union.
The first three, a couple of others and me managed the joint, under the leadership of Gary Bullock.
Boz didn’t. He was a team leader a rung below, which suited him just fine because he was never really keen on hard work, and spent most of his days at work doing assignments for his law degree.
So much for degrees hey?
Don Brown has to be sacked after what he has said and done this week. If he is not the LNP is going to attack Labor for the whole year leading into the next election. Every time a youth criminal kills or maims or robs or steals, they are going to be standing up and pointing at Boz and screaming he said there was no youth crime problem, it was all just a beat up. Labor will lose a couple of points in the polls every time they do it, and Jarrod Bleijie – De Brenni’s ambition laden doppelganger – will get another boost in the polls and move him closer to his own ambition of knocking off the current LNP leader Whatshisname, and becoming the Premier himself.
The only way to stop it happening is to show Boz the door.
But that can only happen if Blocker agrees to it, and at this stage he won’t, out of blood loyalty to Brown’s dad.
Miles is wedged, and doesn’t know what to do.
He can’t sack Brown, because at the moment he’s not the Premier, and if he wants to be he has to keep doing what he has been doing for years, which is kissing Gary Bullock’s arse. If he doesn’t he’s a shot duck. Which leaves him right now as the rabbit in the headlights, going uh, uh, uh, you know, I know, blah in front of the cameras every time he’s asked the question about Don Brown, just like he did yesterday in the interview that exposed him as an idiot who isn’t fit to be the Premier and never will.
The whole world has seen it now, and everybody knows.
Which leaves the kingmaker Gary Bullock just two choices.
Swing his support back to Annastacia, which is unlikely.
Or make the new Health Minister ‘Del’ Shannon Fentiman Queensland’s new Premier ahead of Miles.
Here is the delicious irony, and Blocker’s dilemma.
Del Shannon was the girlfriend of Mick De Brenni’s co-conspirator in the failed union leadership coup against Bullock, a once rising star of the young Labor movement named Richard Alcorn, whose missed hit on Blocker left him with the mark of Cain on his head, and rendered him a wannabe politician banished and exiled and wandering the world with frustrated ambitions and without a political seat forever.
You just couldn’t make this shit up could you?
And it’s all true.
Guess who Del is real close to now?
Mick De Brenni.
The man who will one day sooner rather than later become the leader of the Labor Party and the Premier of QLD.
It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen, all because brainless Boz couldn’t keep his hands off a keyboard or his mug away from a camera.
The moral of the story?
There are two.
Under no circumstances as a politician ever, ever take a dumb arse position sticking up for murderous young thugs that flies in the face of near universal public opinion.
And never take your eyes off a hyper ambitious snake.
They will always come back to bite you.
Just ask Blocker.
See that Maroon shirt I am wearing?
It’s the union shirt.
Boz, Smiles, De Bruyn and Blocker all wore the same one too.