The walls of the Queensland parliament have always kept the secrets of its politicians.
In the late 1970s, the former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen had a secret spa bath quietly installed in the penthouse suite of the annexe – the purpose-built hotel for MPs, attached to parliament house.
Anyone who has spent more than five minutes around the state parliament has heard stories about what goes on in the annexe.
“You can physically hear MPs entering one another’s rooms,” one MP says.
The parliament this week descended into a chamber of “rumours and innuendoes” as claims and counter-claims about the romantic lives of ministers and MPs were made on the floor of the legislative assembly, under parliamentary privilege.
The episode has left few – either in government or opposition – with enhanced credibility.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailMPs on both sides of the house told Guardian Australia this week they were uneasy with elements of their party’s strategy, just days before this weekend’s Stafford byelection, and with voters increasingly balking at the spectacle of politicians talking about themselves.
The story of how state parliament became like an episode of Love Island began, unsurprisingly enough, in the annexe.
Rumours of a romantic link between the sport and Olympics minister, Tim Mander, and the child safety minister, Amanda Camm, had been the “worst kept secret” in Queensland politics, since before the LNP’s election win in 2024.
Whispers that Mander – a former NRL referee and CEO of the Scripture Union – had separated from his wife began in early 2025, when he began “spending most of his time” at the annexe.
In July last year, Mander and Camm went public about their relationship. The news made a few gossip columns but otherwise seemed to be treated by almost everyone as a private matter. Until it wasn’t.
Last month, after reports in the Australian, Labor’s state secretary, Ben Driscoll, wrote to the Australian Electoral Commission, asking that Mander be investigated for allegedly breaking voter enrolment rules when he moved out of the family home in north Brisbane.
Mander had switched the address on his voter enrolment to the nearby home of a staffer. Driscoll’s letter alleged there was “a substantial reason to believe that Mr Mander’s enrolment is not legitimate”. Mander denies any wrongdoing.
Then last week, media reporting began to focus on the timeline of the relationship between Mander and Camm, whether it had been appropriately disclosed, and whether they had made decisions that benefited one another’s electorates.
Mander and Camm each say they had a personal relationship while the LNP was in opposition, but that it ended before the 2024 election, after which they both became ministers. They claim they reconnected last year, made appropriate declarations at the time, and put in place integrity measures.
“Tim Mander and Amanda Camm say they were in a relationship for about a year. Then they weren’t. Then they were,” the deputy opposition leader, Cameron Dick, said earlier this month.
Dick said the premier, David Crisafulli, was trying to convince people “that Tim Mander and Amanda Camm are the Ross and Rachel of his government”.
At the heart of the issue – and where all this gets messy – is that if there are integrity questions to be resolved, doing so relies upon raking over the timeline of two marriage breakdowns and an extramarital affair.
As one Labor MP says: “It is the nature of an affair that you don’t tell the world about it. It’s also the responsibility of a minister to disclose relationships that might give rise to a conflict. It does feel a bit shabby, but there’s a real public interest here.”
Not everyone agrees.
‘We have all heard rumours’
At a press conference last week, Crisafulli calmly responded to questions about Mander and Camm’s relationship.
“I have this view that privacy matters and so too does ministerial accountability,” he said.
“I will not go into people’s private lives. I just won’t do that. I didn’t do it against the Labor Party, and I won’t do it now.”
As questioning from journalists continued, the deputy premier, Jarrod Bleijie, threatened to go where the premier wouldn’t.
“If they want to go down this rabbit warren of who was sleeping with who … then we will go there,” he said.
“We’ve all heard gossip and rumours about Labor ministers for years”.
When parliament resumed on Tuesday, Labor asked a question about whether Mander and Camm’s relationship had been declared.
Bleijie rose to his feet and – under parliamentary privilege – made good on his promise from the week before.
He named five Labor MPs and threatened to reveal further information about them. He said another two had been in a relationship (which they deny). He questioned the public timeline of the former relationship of Mark Bailey and Meaghan Scanlon, both ministers in the former government.
“[Leader of the opposition Steven Miles] has set a new standard about the private lives of all MPs that those in the Labor shadow ministry now have to live up to as well,” Bleijie said.
”The leader of the opposition has said that this is a test of leadership, and this is one of a few things that I agree with him about. It is a test of his leadership and whether he will apply the same standard and threshold to his own team that he now conveniently expects others on this side of the chamber to do.
“We have all heard rumours, innuendoes and stories.”
Bailey told parliament: “I take personal offence at the insinuations, which are false.”
Grubby politics
Labor insiders say the party had planned to keep asking questions about the matter,
but changed tack as the accusations themselves gave way to counter-claims from both sides about grubby politics.
Labor referred Mander, Camm and Crisafulli to the Crime and Corruption Commission on Wednesday – a decision that also signalled an effective end to debate on the matter in question time while it is being assessed by the watchdog.
John Mickel, a former Labor speaker, now political commentator and academic at the Queensland University of Technology, said he could not recall any similar debate in the state parliament. In the past, old heads would have stepped in.
“An allegation based on rumours of people having sexual relationships was always a no go zone,” he said.
Mickel said some of Labor’s questions about integrity were legitimate, and that Bleijie had gone too far. But he said the whole episode played into the sorts of narratives pushed by populist rightwing parties like One Nation.
“The problem with all of that is that institutions throughout the world – whether it be the parliament, the judiciary, the media, government departments – the whole process of government itself is under severe pressure by the general public”.
The state government appears increasingly confident about its chances in the Stafford byelection, a heartland Labor seat, which goes to the polls on Saturday.
There has been little credible public polling, but any negative result for Labor will increase pressure on the opposition leader, Steven Miles.
Labor insiders who spoke with Guardian Australia this week said they were concerned the party’s strategy had focused too much on “getting hits” in an environment where the party needed to define itself.
“The threat is not the LNP. The threat is an existential crisis, and how do the two major parties survive? It’s not by doing the same old mud-slinging politics,” one said.
Another senior party figure said there was a sense the party, which governed for most of the past three decades, “have yet to learn” how to do opposition properly.
“I’m not talking about the leadership. There needs to be a refocus on what they’re on about,” they said.
“[Political gamesmanship] is not the thing they need to be doing. It’s a side distraction. They need to be in the main game.
“They’ve got to learn to fight, and they’ve got to learn to fight hard, but to do that, they actually have to value why they’re in there”.
Among many LNP MPs, there is a sense that Labor provoked the fight and Bleijie had finished it. None would outright say the government’s strategy went too far, but a few said they were uneasy about the tone of debate in the chamber.
“The best thing about this week is that it’s nearly over,” one said on Thursday.
