For Queensland Premier-elect and LNP leader David Crisafulli, there was one analysis of election night that he would have found particularly interesting because it focused on two words he most wanted to emulate from his non-migrant.
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 in 1960 from Sicily and rose from cane cutter to farm owner in Ingham.
In an Instagram post in September, Crisafulli paid tribute to Francesco, saying that for his nonno “Australia was the land of opportunity.”
“He hopped on a boat from Italy, traveled to northern Queensland and began cutting cane by hand,” the post said.
‘He eventually bought the farm that my family still considers home today. I had a dream and I knew Australia was the right place for it.
‘Every year on Australian Citizenship Day I think about stories like yours.
‘Hard work and reward for effort.’
Being rewarded for effort was what Nine election panelist Tim Arvier on Saturday night attributed to Crisafulli’s success in reversing nine years of Labor rule 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 his wife Tegan) takes to the stage to claim victory in the Queensland election.
“I think David Crisafulli has shown how to beat 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 wore Labor down on those key issues with very good strategy and hard work.”
Last month, Crisafulli told the Courier Mail that Francesco was “the hardest working man I had ever met” and it was an ethos he was trying to replicate.
“I get up every morning long before the sun rises,” Crisafulli said.
‘I think even my harshest critics would acknowledge that I work hard and am very disciplined. Those characteristics are important to me.”
Despite his application, Crisafulli’s path to Queensland’s highest political office has not been entirely smooth, as he has experienced a rollercoaster of electoral successes and defeats.
His first job outside of farming, with his father Tony expanding Francesco’s holdings to a series of sugarcane plantations on the outskirts of Ingham, was at the local Coles delicatessen before going to Townsville’s James Cook University. to study journalism in 1997.
While at university he landed his first job as a reporter at a local newspaper and by the time he was 20 he had worked in both television and print media while also finding time to marry his wife Tegan.
His first foray into politics was accepting a job as an adviser to Howard government minister and Liberal senator Ian Macdonald in 2003.
Crisafulli cast his vote on Saturday accompanied by his wife Tegan as the LNP managed to wrest the government from the Labor Party.
Crisafulli decided to run for office himself in 2004, successfully claiming a seat on Townsville’s Labour-dominated council, where he eventually became deputy mayor.
It was while in this position in 2010 that Tegan sparked controversy by claiming in a Facebook post that, while she had had a great day at an Amateur Cup race in Mackay, she was surrounded by “ugly” people and “freaks”.
“I still can’t believe how many monsters were there,” he wrote.
“I’ve never seen so many ugly people in the same place at the same time.”
Crisafulli even suggested that a photography contest was needed to decide who was the ugliest person at the event.
In 2012, Crisafulli won LNP preselection for the Townsville seat of Mundingburra and took office as part of Campbell Newman’s tidal wave election that year.
Despite his youth and relative lack of experience at a senior state political level, Crisafulli was appointed Minister for 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 annihilation that reduced the LNP to just a handful of seats in parliament when Newman’s sweeping cut of the government caused Queenslanders to switch their votes.
Crisabulli says his grandfather 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 efforts to label him a still-radical Newman-style shrink of government, Crisafulli, who won the south-east Queensland seat of Broadwater in 2017 to return to state parliament, insists he is a “centrist” .
His election campaign has hit three areas of perceived Labor weakness: youth crime, overcrowded hospitals and ambulance delays along with a severe housing shortage.
Labor leader Steven Miles insisted on the lack of political detail in the LNP campaign, a theme he returned to in his speech on Saturday night, acknowledging that his party could not form government again.
“David Crisafulli ducked, weaved and tied himself to the smallest target Queensland has ever seen,” he said.
“Never before has a party gone to an election with so few details of its agenda.”
Labor also accused Crisafulli of wanting to make abortion illegal in Queensland, something he has denied.
Despite voting against the decriminalization of abortion in 2018, Crisafulli during the campaign said she supported a woman’s right to choose.
It is not the only change of heart he has had in opposition to the LNP moving away from having an indigenous treaty process and telling the truth.
Crisafulli said he opposed 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 pro-nuclear Liberal federal policy led by his Queensland colleague Peter Dutton.
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 when he declared victory Saturday night.
The family lives in the Gold Coast suburb of Hope Island.
A perhaps surprising aspect of Crisafulli that emerged during the election campaign was his taste for obscene music.
Daily Mail Australia revealed that the married father of two has his public Spotify playlist titled ‘DU Down’, in reference to Kevin Gates’ x-rated 2017 song of the same name.
The list contained other sexually explicit songs by The Weeknd, Chris Brown and One Direction star Niall Horan.