Last night’s election result was nothing like the wipe-out expected when the LNP was on 55-56% of the two-party-preferred vote back in September, but it’s still reasonably clear. Overall the scale of the defeat looks similar to Labor’s victory in 52 seats in 2020. Under Queensland’s unicameral system, that’s enough to govern comfortably.
I think there’s two interesting angles here – the regional nature of Labor’s losses, and how the minor parties (in particular the Greens) polled quite well but not where it was needed. There are also some interesting races where a 3CP count could come in handy.
In this post I’m going to run through a few statewide maps and explain the trends.
Labor suffered modest losses in urban South-East Queensland but were almost wiped out in the regions.
Of fourteen Labor seats outside the south-east, they’ve either lost, or are currently behind, in eleven of them. And they could still fall behind in Bundaberg. They have retained Gladstone and Cairns, but have otherwise lost everything – all three Townsville seats, two in Cairns, plus seats like Rockhampton and Mackay that they held on to in 2012.
About two thirds of Labor’s seats were in south-east Queensland, and the losses have been much more modest. They are currently trailing in seven seats in that area, but they are also in front in South Brisbane and have won back Ipswich West.
This map shows three different views of the partisan outcome – the two-party-preferred swing, which party is currently leading (with those confirmed in darker colours and those not confirmed in lighter), and a third map highlighting the seats that have changed hands, or at least have a different party in the lead.
Labor’s position across Brisbane still looks pretty solid, with a few losses around the outer edges of the urban area in the Redland and Moreton Bay council areas.
Generally the swings to the LNP are smaller in the Brisbane area, and there are pockets of big swings up the coast – Gladstone and Whitsunday stand out. Inala also stands out, but this is compared to 2020 when Annastacia Palaszczuk was the sitting MP.
Labor currently has a positive swing in two seats: Everton will likely reverse, and it’s fascinating to see that Labor has a 1.3% swing in Bundaberg, which was their most marginal seat in 2020. A good case demonstrating the value of sophomore surge.
The Greens had a rough night but amazingly didn’t actually go backwards overall. Their statewide vote at the moment is up 0.1% from 2020.
But if you look at this next map, which shows swings for the Greens and can be toggled to show the same for One Nation, you see that they were hit hard in the inner city.
The three biggest swings against the Greens were in three of their key seats, with South Brisbane ranked sixth. They have suffered their biggest swing in Maiwar, where Michael Berkman is in a tight race to hold on.
But their best seats were also in Brisbane. They got solid swings in the next ring of seats, in seats like Miller, Greenslopes and Bulimba. This isn’t necessarily bad news for the federal seat of Griffith, since these include the weaker parts of Max Chandler-Mather’s seat. They also gained a 4% swing in Ferny Grove while losing 4% in neighbouring Cooper.
I won’t try to answer the question of why this has happened, but it’s been clear that Miles comeback strategy has been quite effective at appealing to Greens inner-city voters.
This result has some parallels with Greens results in the NSW local government elections, where they lost seats in the inner city but gained seats in the outer suburbs, and the ACT election where some of their best swings were in the outer suburbs. Those results can be quite effective in PR systems but is a disaster if you’re the Greens trying to win in Queensland’s single-member system.
One Nation also had quite a big share of the vote but didn’t come that close to winning any seats. They cracked 20% in two seats, but generally spread their vote around in a very inefficient manner.
The story is different for Katter’s Australian Party. While there were rumours of KAP overtaking Labor and winning in urban Townsville seats that didn’t pan out, right now they are slightly ahead in a fourth seat and could come from behind to win in Mulgrave. Winning five seats off 2.4% of the vote would cement their position as a regionalist party who are able to win disproportionate numbers of seats with a concentrated vote. Indeed five seats would be about double their share of the vote.
Still despite KAP’s wins the number of crossbench seats looks about the same – the current seven could drop to four, or could be as high as nine. And the number of non-classic seats is not that high. There are currently seven races with a non-major candidate in the top two, and Mulgrave and Rockhampton could put that up to nine.
But if you look at the raw vote, the minor party vote is quite high, well over 20%. It’s not as high as the peak One Nation years of 1998 and 2017, but it’s otherwise the highest. Yet the crossbench is quite small, because of all of that inefficient Greens and One Nation vote.
Finally, I am not in this post going to go through all the seats still in play, but I wanted to mention three seats where a three-candidate-preferred count would be super useful.
In the federal election, the AEC conducted 3CP counts in Brisbane and Macnamara which helped call those seats sooner. In both seats, the 3CP was decisive in determining the winner, not the 2CP. I don’t know if the ECQ would consider doing something similar, but it would be very useful in three seats.
In South Brisbane, the reversal of LNP preferences to favour Labor, along with a swing from the Greens to Labor, means that Labor easily wins a Labor vs Greens 2CP count. But if the LNP can overtake Labor on the 3CP, it’s very likely the Greens would win on Labor preferences.
Right now, the gap between Labor and LNP on primary votes is 3%. There is also 3.2% of One Nation votes to distribute. That would not be enough to close a 3% gap, but if the LNP creep closer it could be done. Right now it looks very likely that Labor will win but that 3CP would clarify things.
In the Cairns-area seat of Mulgrave, the LNP is leading Labor on the 2PP with 52.7%, but the two parties have less than half the primary vote between them.
Katter’s Australian Party candidate Steven Lesina is 5.8% behind Labor on primary votes, with 32% of the vote sitting with other candidates. If KAP can overtake Labor they would have a good shot at winning.
In Rockhampton, the LNP’s Donna Kirkland has 51.7% of the 2PP. She is 10.3% ahead of independent Margaret Strelow but there’s almost 23% of the vote with others. Probably a too big gap to close but worth watching.
That’s it for now. I’ll be recording a podcast this morning, so depending on editing time it might be out around midday or late tonight.
@Mostly Labor Voter the Greens sophomore surge in Maiwar occurred in 2020 as it was first won in 2017. But no, they didn’t get one in South Brisbane and their primary vote has actually gone backwards there from 2020.
@Mostly Labor Voter they got a massive sophomore surge in Maiwar last time. I think a lot of that support base voted Labor this time because of abortion.
@Mostly
Maiwar was won in 2017 for the greens, but indeed no sophomore surge in South Brisbane.
Totally agree on your assessment, although I think you could expand their core support base to young professionals in general.
I think the greens are ending up with the same problems the liberals have, in which the politically active party members have more extreme views which don’t actually align with their natural supporter bases (The religious faction in the Liberals and the uni student activist views in the Greens.
The greens need to focus on Local Issues (Parks, Public Transport, etc), Climate Change, and Housing Reform, in that order
The Greens are anti-israel and pro Palestine but usually stop short of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. They’re by and large mirroring anti apartheid campaigning from decades gone by. I think they came out in support of Palestine too soon after October 7 (before Israel even began a counteroffensive), and there’s been a few gaffes but over all I think the Greens position on Palestine is broadly in line with the centre left. Except maybe a bit edgier than what e.g. teals would be comfortable with.
The message of supporting workers rights and opposing unilateral shutdowns of unions got lost in “supporting the CFMEU when even Labor thinks they’ve gone too far” and I agree it could have hurt them with the doctor’s wives and young female professionals demographics.
My 2 cents though – I would put Palestine in the “student politics” bucket where it is unlikely to sway many voters (except Muslim areas apparently, and against Greens in Jewish areas), and also reinforce the idea that Greens care more about issues mostly beyond Auspol than things that affect you. That’s out of step with what Max Chandler Mather has been trying to accomplish with his door knocking, listening and pivot to material issues, and the Greens have wasted a lot of their media time on Palestine over the last year to the point where wins like HAFF have been forgotten.
That focus is still largely fine as issues like Palestine, treaty, and refugees can build the member and volunteer base even if they’re not great at winning swinging voters, and if those issues won’t win over voters they won’t lose them either. But if Labor can muscle in on things like public transport then those issues are more of what’s left and the Greens don’t seem like a serious option in a close and high stakes election. Plus the Greens member base is moving left and I’m seeing more candidates in their 20s with recent histories as campus socialists popping up in semi-winnable seats.
The Greens did successfully win Maiwar, Brisbane, Ryan and are still trying to win seats like Sturt and Casey off the Liberals. Can they still appeal to all of the old Democrats “keep the bastards honest” base AND “left of Labor” voters? I think they can but it can’t be taken for granted. And I remember when the Greens used to dream of pulling off what the teals did in 2022, and it’s slipped from their grasp.
@BNJ the Greens will never win Casey, assuming you’re talking about the Victorian seat, and I doubt they’d ever win Sturt either.
@AA why would they switch from Greens to Labor over abortion when both parties support abortion?
I don’t think a minor party like the Greens can sustainably appeal to two widely different groups of people (teals/Democrats and the far-left). You can split Greens voters into four groups: would-be teals/Democrats voters, ecosocialists, protest voters and hippies. But in seats the Greens can actually win (in the inner-city) we can just split them into the first two.
The Greens are obviously gonna keep denying that being too left-wing doesn’t work in most places, so they won’t be able to pick up Richmond in NSW or Sturt in SA, and I doubt they could even pick up Macnamara in Victoria. They could expand their base in Cooper and Wills, both Melbourne seats and make inroads in Fraser but I can’t see them getting up in Macnamara anymore especially with the large Jewish community (though they don’t vote Greens they will tactically preference against them, so many will vote 1. Labor 2. Liberal or vice versa, even though Albo would never allow Josh Burns to do a preference deal with the Liberals).
The radicalism works in Melbourne and the Inner West of Sydney but not in Brisbane or Perth or Adelaide or Newcastle or anywhere else really. Expect the Greens to drop in the NT too where they only got votes because Labor tried to be the CLP which clearly failed.
@Nether Portal from what I’ve seen, many young female professional voters seem to have gone with Labor because the Labor government (especially Steven Miles) have been so vocal on social media about abortion rights and protection. People voted Labor because they believe that a Labor government is the only way to stop the LNP getting in power and winding back abortion rights.
You have to remember that the preferential voting system is poorly understood and voters might be happy to vote Green but not in a close election. Because of poor understanding (plus the very occasional genuine situation like Fannie Bay or when independents that explicitly go with “who has more seats” in BOP) people think there’s a “risk” in voting Green. I’ve seen it while volunteering – people saying they prefer the Greens but need to be reassured that it’s safe. Labor play into that with campaigns bordering on misinformation sometimes. It’s also what’s behind a lot of “only Labor” campaigns on issues where the Greens also support the issue.
@Nether Portal I was referring to the federal seat of Casey. Greens are doing reasonably well there on a 3 candidate preferred basis and with Dutton expected to be unpopular in Victoria (or at least in Melbourne and surrounds) it could be won by whatever left wing force (Labor, Greens, teals) comes out on top. Same with Sturt (SA).
Of course as outlined above if the election looks close that will motivate Labor to do better in conventional Liberal vs Labor marginal seats (which includes Moreton in an election where LNP are expecting a swing in QLD). On the flip side the incumbent Greens should be able to make a pitch that their incumbency makes them more electable, and most other Green targets are ultra safe ALP seats.
@BNJ
While parts of Casey are socially progressive i.e the Dandenong Ranges. The rest of it is quite Conservative and has a lot of self-employed Anglo tradies so quite similar to Hughes or the Hawkesbury region.
The Palestine issue did help the Greens in some parts look at Kuraby booth please and then let me know your thoughts