Steven Ciobo

Early life and education

Ciobo grew up in Mareeba in North Queensland, the youngest of three children in an Anglican family. His parents, Bruno and Joan, ran a tourism business in Cairns. Ciobo is of Italian descent.

Ciobo graduated in law and commerce from Bond University and earned a master's degree in law from the Queensland University of Technology.

According to ABC Television, he worked on the floor of a food processing factory to help support himself while studying. While at university he reportedly considered joining Australia's domestic intelligence agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). He was a consultant with Coopers & Lybrand, a senior consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers and an adviser to Senator Brett Mason.

Political career 2001-Since

Ciobo has been the federal member for Moncrieff since the federal election on 10 November 2001. He frequently voiced his criticism of the plan by Andrew Wilkie, and adopted by the Gillard Government, to require all poker machine players to set a daily betting limit, telling a Queensland newspaper the plan "will place the entire population that want to have a $10 flutter within arms' reach of big brother government."

In April 2011, Ciobo called for a radical rethink of the tourism strategy for the Gold Coast, calling on the city to focus on more casinos and glitz. He said turning Surfers Paradise into a world-class entertainment precinct to rival Las Vegas and Macau was the solution to save the Gold Coast from rising unemployment and economic doom.

He was critical of the merger of the Liberal and National parties in Queensland, telling ABC Local Radio in July 2008 "I don't believe it's going to have a positive effect on a federal level. But at a state level it certainly is going to make a very big difference."

In 2011 Ciobo and Labor MP Kelvin Thompson were seconded to the United Nations in New York City for 12 weeks.

Ciobo has repeatedly called for the introduction of daylight saving for South East Queensland, despite this position being at odds of that of the Liberal National Party in the Queensland Parliament.

In 2005, he urged the government to change the law to strip naturalised Australians of their citizenship if they incite, support or engage in terrorist activity. In 2006, Ciobo called for the first home owner grant to be doubled, a policy which was adopted by the Rudd government in October 2008 as an economic stimulus measure.

In the lead up to the 2007 federal election, responding to a dare from a local radio station, Ciobo and his wife were thrown into the air on a sling shot bungee at the Surfers Paradise Adrenalin Park. While hurled up in the air, Ciobo's wife spotted one of her husband's stolen election signs on the balcony of a Surfers Paradise apartment. The radio station has since posted a video of the dare on YouTube.

The electorate of Moncrieff covers the central Gold Coast and stretches from the suburb of Miami in the south to the suburb of Southport in the north and west to the suburb of Gilston. The electorate includes the tourism landmark Surfers Paradise as well as the Pacific Fair shopping centre, the Conrad Jupiters casino and hotel complex and the marine mammal park Sea World. Steve Ciobo in 2006 voted against legalising the abortion drug RU486. In 2002 he voted for legalising Embryo Experimentation Bill.[1]

He was the Shadow Minister for Small Business, the Service Economy and Tourism as part of the first opposition front bench, led by Brendan Nelson, following the defeat of the Howard government at the 2007 federal election. Nelson promoted Ciobo into the shadow ministry despite Ciobo publicly pledging his support for Nelson's opponent, Malcolm Turnbull, in the previous month's leadership ballot.

He then was the Shadow Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors, Tourism and the Arts on 22 September 2008 as part of Malcolm Turnbull's shadow cabinet. In December 2009, upon his election as the Leader of the Opposition, Abbott had demoted Ciobo from the shadow cabinet to the outer ministry to be the Shadow Minister for Tourism and the Arts and the Shadow Minister for Youth and Sport.

In September 2010, shortly after the 2010 federal election, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott removed Ciobo from the shadow ministry, relegating him to the backbench. Abbott refused to answer questions on the reason for Ciobo's demotion, other than to say: "There is something of the quality of snakes and ladders about the business of politics." In an article in The Australian, contributing editor Peter van Onselen speculated the reasons for Ciobo's demotion were that "Abbott has never especially gotten along with Ciobo personally" and that Ciobo was "a Malcolm Turnbull lieutenant." Van Onselen said the demotion reflected poorly on Abbott because Ciobo is "talented, a good media performer and part of the next generation in the Liberal Party."

In 2009 Ciobo raised the government's slow pace in acting on a report recommending reforms to the franchising sector as a Matter of public importance in Parliament, saying "I plead on behalf of all those people in the franchising sector for Dr Emerson and this government to start doing something."

He challenged an 11th-hour change to the Rudd government's unfair dismissal checklist, saying it will force many small companies to pay "go away" money to terminated employees with a grievance.

Ciobo said Peter Garrett's move to scrap the Uluru climb would be another setback to the tourism industry which had been hit hard by the global economic downturn.

On 23 November 2009 Ciobo introduced his first private members bill as a shadow minister. The bill proposed changes to the government's producer offset to encourage more local feature film production.

In 2008 Ciobo called the Prime Minister and Treasurer "wimpish" for failing to get Australian banks to pass on interest rate cuts to small businesses.

He attacked the Rudd government over Peter Garrett's decision to axe funding for the Australian National Academy of Music, saying the decision was "the latest chapter in bungled Labor decisions that have ended one of Australia's centres of excellence and left students' futures in limbo".

Ciobo has also called for Captain Cook's landing place at Kurnell in Sydney to be upgraded and promoted as a tourism icon.

In early 2016, Ciobo publicly opposed lock-out laws. Confronted with statistics of a 42.2% drop in assaults after Sydney instated lock-out laws, he responded "Well how does that sit with the way in which patronage is down? I heard someone quip, 'well there were 0 assaults in the Simpson desert too.'"

On 18 September 2013 Ciobo was appointed the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer, Joe Hockey. He was also appointed as Australia's alternate governor to the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Ciobo was given responsibility for the Foreign Investment Review Board, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Royal Australian Mint, the National Housing Supply Council and the Australian Valuation Office. Since his appointment, Ciobo has abolished both the National Housing Supply Council, saying the Council's activities were "no longer needed"; and the Australian Valuation Office, saying "a compelling case for the Commonwealth providing its own valuation services no longer exists, particularly given there is a highly competitive market of private sector providers"; and announced plans to privatise the Royal Australian Mint.

In December 2014, Ciobo was appointed as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs and to the Minister for Trade and Investment. In 2015 he was promoted as the Minister for International Development and the Pacific and in 2016 promoted as the Minister for Trade and Investment.

In June 2015, Ciobo was part of an ABC Q&A panel when he was asked a question from a member of the live audience. The questioner, Zaky Mallah, was the first to be charged under new anti-terrorism laws in 2003, and had been found not guilty after spending two years in a correctional facility pending trial. Mallah asked Ciobo a question that had been pre-approved by the ABC: "What would have happened if my [terrorism] case had been decided by the Minister and not the courts?" Ciobo responded that he understood Mallah's acquittal had been on a technicality, and he would be happy to see the government remove Mallah from Australia. Mallah later was given an opportunity to respond, and stated "The Liberals now have just justified to many Australian Muslims in the community tonight to leave and go to Syria and join ISIS because of ministers like him." Moderator Tony Jones called these comments "totally out of order". Mallah later wrote, in Comment is free, that he "hates ISIS" and his comments were "misinterpreted".

Following this incident, the ABC reported that it had received over 1,000 complaints about Zaky Mallah's presence in the audience, while Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott condemned the ABC - asking "which side is the ABC on?" and accusing it of having 'betrayed' Australia. Abbott subsequently banned front bench members of his government from appearing on Q&A, demanding that the show be moved to another part of the ABC's editorial programming. When the ABC met Abbott's demands, accusations were made by an ABC 'source' that this was "the biggest example of editorial interference I've ever heard of".

Personal life

In an opinion piece he wrote for ABC's The Drum in June 2011, Ciobo declared he was a libertarian who would "attempt to persuasively argue the need for less regulation." In the article he said that "like the Tassie Tiger, personal responsibility has died out" and that "increasingly, I find myself thinking it is not this new law that is required, rather, it is a good dose of 'toughen up and stop blaming others for your bad decision'."

Ciobo is married with two children and lives on the Gold Coast. In 2010, he told a newspaper his happiest moment was when his son, who was born with a heart condition, came through a five-and-a-half-hour operation well. His wife, Astra Ciobo, is a successful businesswoman who co-founded a Gold Coast public relations firm.