For Queensland Premier-elect and LNP leader David Crisafulli, there was a piece of election night analysis he would have particularly liked because it focused on two words he most wanted to borrow from his migrant nonno.
Those two words are ‘hard work’, the phrase the 45-year-old LNP leader invariably repeats when talking about his grandfather Francesco, who came to Queensland from Sicily in 1960 and worked his way up from sugar cane cutter to owner of a farm in Ingham .
In an Instagram post in September, Mr Crisafulli paid tribute to Francesco, saying that for his nonno, “Australia was the land of opportunity.”
“He jumped on a boat from Italy, traveled to North Queensland and started cutting sugar cane by hand,” the report said.
“He eventually bought the farm that my family still calls home today. He had a dream – and he knew Australia was the place for it.
‘Every year – on Australian Citizenship Day – I think of stories like his.
‘Hard work and reward for effort.’
Being rewarded for effort was what nine-election panellist Tim Arvier on Saturday evening credited with Crisafulli’s success in toppling nine years of a Labor government and winning only the second election for the Conservative side of politics since 1986.
Queensland Premier-Elect and LNP Leader David Crisafulli (pictured left with wife Tegan) takes to the stage to claim victory in the Queensland election
‘I think David Crisafulli has shown how to win against the opposition. He may have lost the campaign in the last four weeks, but that didn’t detract from the amount of good work and hard work he did over those four years,” Arvier said.
‘He has taken Labor on these important issues with very good strategy and hard work.’
Last month, Mr Crisafulli told the Courier Mail that Francesco was the “hardest working man he had ever met” and it was an ethic he tried to emulate.
“I get out of bed well before sunrise every morning,” Crisafulli said.
‘I think even my harshest critics would recognize that I work hard and am very disciplined. Those qualities are important to me.’
Despite his application, Crisafulli’s path to the top political job in Queensland has not been entirely smooth, as he has already experienced a rollercoaster of electoral success and defeat.
His first job outside farming, which saw his father Tony expand Francesco’s holdings to a series of sugar cane plantations outside Ingham, was at the local Coles deli before he went to James Cook University in Townsville in 1997 to study journalism.
While in college, he got his first job as a reporter at a local newspaper and by the time he was in his twenties he had worked in both television and newspapers, while also finding time to spend time with his wife. to marry Tegan.
His first foray into politics was taking a job as an adviser to Howard government minister and Liberal senator Ian Macdonald in 2003.
Mr Crisafulli cast his vote on Saturday, accompanied by his wife Tegan, as the LNP successfully wrestled the government away from Labor
Mr Crisafulli decided to run for office himself in 2004 and successfully claimed a spot on Townsville’s Labour-dominated council, where he eventually became deputy mayor.
While in the position in 2010, Tegan courted controversy by stating in a Facebook post that although she had had a great day at an Amateur Cup race meeting in Mackay, she was surrounded by ‘ugly’ people and ‘freaks’ .
“I still can’t believe how many freaks there were,” she wrote.
“I’ve never seen so many ugly people in the same place at the same time.”
Ms Crisafulli even suggested that a photo competition was needed to decide who was the ugliest person at the event.
In 2012, Mr Crisafulli won LNP preselection for the Townsville seat of Mundingburra and was swept into office that year as part of Campbell Newman’s electoral groundswell.
Despite his youth and relative lack of experience at a senior political level, Mr Crisafulli was appointed Minister of Local Government and later expanded his portfolio to include community recovery and resilience.
However, he lost his seat in 2015 as part of the stunning electoral defeat that reduced the LNP to just a few seats in Parliament, when Newman’s radical government cuts led to Queenslanders switching their votes.
Mr Crisabulli says his nonno Francesco was “the hardest working man” he has ever met and paid tribute to the Sicilian sugar cane cutter turned farm owner on Instagram.
Despite Labor’s attempts to brand him as a still-radical downsizing of government in the Newman model, Crisafulli, who won the seat of Broadwater in southeast Queensland in 2017 to return to state parliament, insists he is ‘centrist’.
His election campaign has exposed three areas of perceived weakness in the Labor Party, namely youth crime, overcrowded hospitals, ambulance delays and an acute housing shortage.
Labor leader Steven Miles pointed to the lack of policy detail in the LNP’s campaign, a theme he returned to in his speech on Saturday evening in which he acknowledged his party could no longer form a government.
“David Crisafulli ducked, swung and tied himself into the tiniest little target Queensland has ever seen,” he said.
‘Never before has a party gone to the elections with so few details about their agenda.’
Labor also accused Mr Crisafulli of wanting to make abortion illegal in Queensland, something he has denied.
Despite voting against the decriminalization of abortion in 2018, Mr Crisafulli said during the campaign that he supported a woman’s right to choose.
It is not the only change of heart he has undergone in opposing the LNP’s withdrawal from an Indigenous treaty and truth-telling process.
Mr Crisafulli said he opposed the Indigenous voice in parliament in the run-up to the 2023 referendum, but did not campaign on the issue.
He also appears to be at odds with the federal Liberal pro-nuclear policies led by fellow Queenslander Peter Dutton.
Mr Crisafulli is very conscious of keeping his family out of the spotlight and is rarely photographed publicly with his two teenage daughters, who did not take the stage on Saturday evening when he claimed victory.
The family lives in the Gold Coast suburb of Hope Island.
A perhaps surprising aspect of Mr Crisafulli that emerged during the election campaign was his penchant for raunchy music.
Daily Mail Australia revealed the married father-of-two has titled his public Spotify playlist ‘DU Down’, in reference to Kevin Gates’ 2017 song of the same name.
The list included other sexually explicit songs from The Weeknd, Chris Brown and One Direction star Niall Horan.
