Disendorsed Queensland Labor MP Rick Williams has accused Annastacia Palaszczuk of encouraging him to stay within the Labor fold until it suited her electoral timetable to dump him.
On Friday the Queensland premier said allegations that Williams had threatened a Bribie Island newspaper owner were the “final straw” that caused her to disendorse him as the Labor MP for Pumicestone and call the election for 25 November.
Palaszczuk said she had previously spoken to Williams several times about “arguments and fights” with people in his electorate.
“You need to treat constituents with respect and the final straw occurred yesterday,” she said. “He didn’t live up to my standards and he’s gone.”
But on Monday Williams said he had repeatedly told the party he wanted to leave for the crossbenches and had been talked out of it.
He said Palaszczuk told him in a meeting two months ago she was getting “good feedback” about the job he was doing.
The longtime financial planner turned tow-truck business owner was one of the boilover victors in Labor’s 2015 election win, scoring a 14% swing to take the seat of Pumicestone, north of Brisbane, from the Liberal National party’s Lisa France.
Williams said he ploughed $50,000 of his own money into the campaign.
Months after the election, sitting in a marginal seat in a Labor government already clinging to power in a hung parliament, Williams found himself the subject of media reports claiming serious business impropriety and harassment against him.
Labor’s ranks were already thinner after the party banished Cook MP Billy Gordon over an undisclosed juvenile criminal history.
A months-long police investigation into the claims against Williams ensued, but detectives found there was insufficient evidence to act. By the time police closed the book on their investigation, Williams said, he had told Labor up to five times he wanted to leave the party.
Williams said: “I had such a big cloud over my head with all the allegations coming at me. I’m the sort of person that I didn’t really want to be an embarrassment to other people and I thought, I’ll go sit on the crossbenches and then make a decision after that.
“And they talked me out of it.”
Cairns MP Rob Pyne had already quit Labor and joined Gordon on the crossbench, citing disillusion with a government whose progressive agenda did not extend as far as his own.
Williams said the party “gagged” him from speaking in his own defence and encouraged him to ride out the criticism in public silence.
If Palaszczuk was concerned about the lasting impact of the reported allegations against Williams ahead of a tight 2017 election contest, she did not show it in their 4 September conversation, Williams said.
“The feedback I’m getting, is that you’re doing a great job,” Palaszczuk said, according to Williams, who said he recorded the exchange on his phone.
“What I told you to do is get out in the community; the feedback I’m getting is you’re doing just that.”
According to Williams, Palaszczuk told Williams towards the end of their conversation: “So you’re doing a good job and I’m hearing positive reports.”
Williams now believes the premier planned to replace him all along.
“I’d been through lots and lots of crap up until that point. So wholeheartedly, I know that they’ve had a plan in motion [to replace me],” he said.
A spokeswoman for Palaszczuk said: “As the premier said on Friday, Mr Williams’ behaviour toward a constituent last week was inappropriate and unacceptable. That’s why he was disendorsed.”
The premier’s move to dump Williams prompted him to finally quit Labor, leaving the party level with the LNP on 41 seats. That led Palaszczuk to call a snap election.
Williams, who will now contest Pumicestone as an independent and has been assured of preferences from One Nation, said he was “not crying about it”.
The pro-choice MP, who was labelled “thuggish” by the LNP, accepts Labor had judged him an electoral liability, despite what some in the party told him about his good polling.
