Mal Brough, the federal LNP member for Fisher in Queensland, has announced that he will not be contesting this year’s election.

Brough, 54, first entered parliament as the member for Longman, also in Queensland, at the 1996 federal election. He was re-elected in 1998, 2001 and 2004 but was defeated at the 2007 election.

He re-entered the House of Representatives as the member for Fisher at the 2013 election, after winning preselection in 2012. The then sitting member for Fisher was Peter Slipper, who had left the Liberal National Party after he accepted the Speakership from the Gillard government in 2011. Slipper and Brough came into conflict over James Ashby and a police investigation is proceeding into whether Brough and Ashby broke the law in relation to access to the former Speaker’s official diary. [Read more…]