Nominations closed yesterday for the Queensland state election. The number of candidates shot up to a record high, with more than six candidates running in the average seat.
There are a total of 597 candidates running across the 93 seats. This breaks the previous record of 453 who ran in 2017. While 2017 was the record number at the time, it only slightly exceeded the numbers in 1998, 2012 and 2015, and once you factor in the creation of four new electorates the average was about the same. 2020 is in a whole different league. Antony Green has more information about historical candidate numbers in his blog post.
I’ve updated my candidate spreadsheet with the final list. I’ll update each seat profile over the next few days.
Three parties are running full slates: Labor, the LNP and the Greens. One Nation is running in all but three seats. They have sat out the race in Callide, Hill and Traeger. The latter two are held by Katter’s Australian Party incumbents, but Callide does not feature a KAP candidate, or any other minor party apart from the Greens, and One Nation came second there in 2017, so it’s an interesting decision. There are two independents who I don’t know much about.
Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party is running 55 candidates, the Informed Medical Options Party is running 31 candidates, while Legalise Cannabis QLD is running 23. Civil Liberties & Motorists has 16 candidates, Katter and Animal Justice each have 13. Jason Costigan’s North Queensland First is running five candidates and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers are running three.
I have attempted to identify the gender of each candidate and you can check my work in the spreadsheet, although there were four I could not identify due to lack of any information about them beyond their name.
Amongst the bigger parties, the proportion of women varied from 28% for the LNP to 46% for the Greens:
- LNP – 28.0%
- ON – 33.3%
- ALP – 41.9%
- GRN – 46.2%
Amongst the other parties, the UAP had the fewest women, running just 8 women and 47 men, while the Informed Medical Options Party is running five men and 26 women.
The number of candidates per seat varies from ten in Mermaid Beach and Mudgeeraba down to just four in Algester, Jordan, Stretton and Woodridge.
That’s it for now. Give me a few days before complaining about the seat guides being out of date. I’ll do one last check for candidate URLs before I do the update so if you want me to include yours comment below and I’ll add it to the spreadsheet before I do the final update.
There seems to be a number of paper candidates in several seats who appear only to exist to harvest preferences for a major party. In my own seat, I will be watching the pre-poll workers to see who they really work for. At the last State election one worker showed up on different days representing a major then two different minors. However on each day he collected his shirt and how to vote cards from a major party organiser.
In Callide, for Loris Doessel see her website at https://www.lorisforcallide.com/ Main platform – get Assisted Dying laws passed asap. And other progressive isssues.
The only Australian Adam Burlingses with any presence on the web are an Associate Director of Marketing for Optus (based in Sydney) – unlikely – and the Bob Brown Foundation’s Media Manager. Maybe the latter is flying the flag in Coal Country, but he’s a long way from home and he would be only competing for votes with the Greens. Or there’s another one without much profile yet, whom the Hansonites are comfortable with…
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