Who is David Crisafulli? Meet the new Queensland premier who ended Labor’s nine year reign

For Queensland premier-elect and LNP leader David Crisafulli there was one bit of election night analysis that he would have found particularly sweet because it focused on two words he most wanted to emulate 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 in 1960 from Sicily and worked his way up from cane cutter to Ingham farm owner.

On 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, he travelled to North Queensland, and he started cutting cane by hand,’ the post read.

‘He eventually purchased the farm 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.’

Getting rewarded for effort was what Nine election panelist Tim Arvier on Saturday night credited for Mr Crisafulli’s success in overturning nine years of Labor rule and winning only the second election for the conservative side of politics since 1986. 

‘I think David Crisafulli has shown how to win from opposition, he may have lost the campaign in the last four weeks but that didn’t detract over 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 a 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 replicate.

‘I get out of bed every morning well before the sun,’ Mr Crisafulli said. 

‘I think that even my harshest critics would acknowledge that I work hard, and I am very disciplined. Those characteristics are important to me.’ 

Despite his application, Mr Crisafulli’s path to Queensland’s top political job has not been entirely smooth as he has already experienced a rollercoaster of electoral success and defeat.

His first job away from farming, with his dad Tony expanding Francesco’s holdings to a string of sugar cane plantations outside Ingham, was at the local Coles deli before he went to Townsville’s James Cook University to study journalism in 1997. 

While at uni he got his first job as a reporter at a local paper and by the time he was in his 20s he had worked in both TV and print while also finding time to marry wife Tegan.

His first dabble in politics was taking a job as an advisor to Howard government Minister and Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald in 2003.

Mr Crisafulli cast his vote on Saturday accompanied by wife Tegan as the LNP successfully wrestled government away from Labor

Mr Crisafulli decided to run for office himself in 2004 successfully claiming a spot of Townsville’s the Labor-dominated council where he eventually became deputy mayor.

It was while he held this position in 2010 that Tegan courted controversy by stating in a Facebook post that while she’d had a great day at an Amateur Cup race meeting in Mackay she was surround by ‘ugly’ people and ‘freaks’.

‘I still can’t believe how many freaks were there,’ she wrote.

‘I’ve never seen so many ugly people in the same place at the same time.’

Ms Crisafulli even suggested a photo competition was needed to decide on the ugliest person at the event.

In 2012 Mr Crisafulli won LNP pre-selection for the Townsville seat of Mundingburra and was swept into office as part of the Campbell Newman electoral tidal wave that year. 

Despite his youth and relative lack of experience at a higher state level of politics Mr Crisafulli was appointed Minister for Local Government and later broadened his portfolio to include Community Recovery and Resilience.

However, he lost his seat in 2015 as part of the stunning electoral wipe-out that reduced the LNP to only a few seats in parliament as Mr Newman’s radical cutting of government saw Queenslanders flip their votes.

Mr Crisabulli says his nonno Francesco was ‘the hardest working man’  he ever met and he paid tribute to the Sicilian sugar cane cutter who became a farm owner on Instagram 

Despite Labor’s efforts to tag him as still radical downsizer of government in the Newman mould Mr Crisafulli, who won the south east Queensland seat of Broadwater in 2017 to get back into state parliament, insists he is ‘centrist’. 

His election campaign has hammered three areas of perceived Labor weakness, which are youth crime, overcrowded hospitals and ambulance delays along with acute housing shortage.

Labor leader Steven Miles fastened onto the lack of policy detail in the LNP’s campaign, a theme he returned to in his speech on Saturday night acknowledging that his party could not form government again. 

‘David Crisafulli ducked and weaved and tied himself into the tiniest small target Queensland has ever seen,’ he said.

‘Never before has a party taken to an election with so little detail of their agenda.’

Labor also accused Mr Crisafulli of wanting to make abortion illegal in Queensland, something he has denied.

Despite voting against decriminalising abortion in 2018 Mr Crisafulli during the campaign said he supported a woman’s right to choose.

It isn’t the only change of heart he has had in opposition with the LNP backing away from having a process for Indigenous treaty and truth-telling.

Mr Crisafulli said he opposed the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the run-up to the 2023 referendum but did not campaign on the issue.

He also appears at odds with the federal Liberal pro-nuclear policy spearheaded by fellow Queenslander Peter Dutton.

Mr Crisafulli is very conscious of keeping his family out of the spotlight and is only rarely publicly photographed with his two teenage daughters, who did not take the stage when he claimed victory on Saturday night.

The family live in the Gold Coast suburb of Hope Island. 

One perhaps surprising aspect of Mr Crisafulli that emerged during the election campaign was his taste for raunchy music. 

Daily Mail Australia revealed that the married father-of-two his public Spotify playlist entitled ‘D U Down’, in reference to the x-rated Kevin Gates’ 2017 song of the same name.

The list contained other sexually explicit songs by The Weeknd, Chris Brown and One Direction star Niall Horan.