A carer and former jail guard donated his genuine Louis Vuitton belt to Queensland’s police and prisons minister, Jo-Ann Miller, the day she came under fire in the media for wearing a fake one to a Labour day march.
Miller has declared the belt, which ministerial services valued at $260, in the ministerial gifts register but her office said it remained unworn as it was a man’s belt and several sizes too large.
Hans Anderson, who also co-owns an Ipswich convenience store in Miller’s Ipswich electorate, said he donated the belt – a handsome leather number with a gold buckle that he bought new four years ago for between $600 and $700 – as some comic relief after her treatment by the Courier-Mail.
The newspaper reported that Miller had been accused of “supporting organised crime” by sporting the counterfeit belt in public.
A spokesman for Miller said the gift had come from a constituent who had indicated he was “appalled at her treatment” by the Courier-Mail and told her electorate officers: “Here Jo, have a real one.”
Anderson told Guardian Australia he had sent the belt “because [the government] were getting hammered pretty heavily by the media up here”.
“The Courier-Mail didn’t like them so I just did it as one of things off the cuff. I forgot all about it,” he said.
“I thought on their wages politicians could afford a Louis Vuitton belt. I’m just a battler and I had one in my cupboard so I actually sent it down to her office for a bit of encouragement.”
Miller’s spokesman said she had not worn the belt and did not intend to, although it occupied a place in her ministerial office.
“It would probably fit around her three times,” he said.
Anderson made the donation under the name of Richy’s convenience store, named in honour of his son, who took his own life in 2012 at the age of 25.
He joked that as a prison guard in maximum security he acted as “butler” to the notorious bank robber Brendan Abbott between 1998 and 2002.
His experience in the corrective services department, now in Miller’s portfolio, has given him the idea for an entirely more serious proposal that was “a completely separate issue” from his gift of a belt.
Anderson had previously put a proposal to the former Newman government that the Borallon correctional centre, mothballed in 2013, could become a self-funding centre for homeless, mental health patients and those battling drug and alcohol addictions.
The centre could do so by taking on laundry contracts Borallon previously had with major hospitals when he was supervising prison workshops.
Anderson said he was still lobbying the state government on the proposal, having written to the offices of both the premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Miller last week.
Miller last month flagged reopening the prison next year as the state’s first “earn or learn” facility for prisoners.
Anderson said he thought the cost of refurbishment meant it would be cheaper to build a new prison at Gatton and give over Borallon for Ipswich’s first ever rehab and homeless facility.
