LNP 8.4%
Incumbent MP
Luke Howarth, since 2013.
Geography
Northern Brisbane. Petrie covers suburbs on the northern edge of the City of Brisbane, including Bracken Ridge and parts of Aspley. It also includes parts of Moreton Bay Regional Council, including Redcliffe, Scarborough and Deception Bay.
Petrie was created as part of the 1949 expansion of Parliament, and has always been a marginal seat, changing sides on many occasions. The seat has been a bellwether seat since 1987.
The seat was first won by Alan Hulme (Liberal) in 1949. Hulme served as a minister in the Menzies government from 1958 until 1961, when he was defeated by Reginald O’Brien (ALP), and Hulme won the seat back off O’Brien in 1963, before resuming a ministerial role.
O’Brien retired in 1972, and the seat was won by Marhsall Cooke. Cooke was not preselected by the Liberals in 1974, and he retired, with John Hodges winning the seat. Hodges held the seat for the Liberals until the 1983 election, when Dean Wells (ALP) won the seat. Hodges won it back off Wells in 1984, and Wells went on to serve as a minister in Labor state government from 1989 until 2004.
Hodges was finally defeated by the ALP’s Gary Johns in 1987. Johns went on to serve as a minister in the last term of the Keating government, losing his seat to Liberal Teresa Gambaro in 1996.
Gambaro held the seat for eleven years before losing to Yvette D’Ath in 2007.
D’Ath was re-elected in 2010 amidst a large anti-Labor swing in Queensland was a minimal 1.7% swing to the Liberal National Party.
D’Ath narrowly lost Petrie in 2013 to the LNP’s Luke Howarth. The 3% swing to the LNP was just enough for the LNP to win with a 0.5% margin, making Petrie the most marginal Coalition seat in the country.
D’Ath returned to politics within six months, winning the state by-election in the overlapping seat of Redcliffe in February 2014. She now serves as Health Minister in the Labor state government.
Luke Howarth was re-elected in 2016 and 2019.
Assessment
Petrie swung hard to the LNP in 2019 but was quite marginal in 2016 and shouldn’t be considered too safe for the LNP.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Luke Howarth | Liberal National | 48,879 | 48.1 | +3.4 |
| Corinne Mulholland | Labor | 31,348 | 30.9 | -7.5 |
| Jason Kennedy | Greens | 8,877 | 8.7 | +1.4 |
| Nikhil Aai Reddy | One Nation | 7,638 | 7.5 | +7.5 |
| Troy Hopkins | United Australia Party | 3,361 | 3.3 | +3.3 |
| Neville Fowler | Conservative National Party | 1,494 | 1.5 | +1.5 |
| Informal | 3,813 | 3.6 | -0.4 |
2019 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Luke Howarth | Liberal National | 59,331 | 58.4 | +6.8 |
| Corinne Mulholland | Labor | 42,266 | 41.6 | -6.8 |
Booths have been divided into three areas. Booths in the City of Brisbane have been grouped as South. Those around Redcliffe have been grouped as East, and the remainder around North Lakes and at the northern end of the electorate have been grouped as West.
The LNP won similar two-party-preferred majorities in all three areas, ranging from 55.4% in the west to 56% in the east.
| Voter group | GRN prim % | LNP 2PP % | Total votes | % of votes |
| East | 10.1 | 56.0 | 17,014 | 16.7 |
| West | 9.5 | 55.4 | 16,729 | 16.5 |
| South | 10.5 | 55.6 | 15,047 | 14.8 |
| Pre-poll | 7.1 | 60.6 | 35,676 | 35.1 |
| Other votes | 8.6 | 61.6 | 17,131 | 16.9 |
Election results in Petrie at the 2019 federal election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for the Liberal National Party and Labor.
Petrie in no trouble at all according to.my sources.
Maverick, maybe a compromise might be you must be an Australian citizen, and if you have dual citizenship you cannot also maintain links to a foreign government in any way. If you have family members who serve in any capacity with a foreign government (could be a local councillor or even in a government department) then you would be ineligible.
maverick, I totally disagree. The content of people’s character is what matters, not what additional citizenships they have. And it’s for voters to determine if the candidate’s character suits the interests of the nation and vote accordingly. If they’re deemed a security threat in the event of war, let the government and ASIO deal with them accordingly.
And I don’t see why the mere act of renouncing foreign citizenship would give any assurance that a parliamentarian has not been corrupted by a foreign power. Did Sam Dastyari have a Chinese citizenship to renounce before being caught accepting money from CCP-linked donors? Did Steve Dickson have an American citizenship to renounce before being caught soliciting donations from the NRA in return for weakening our gun laws? What difference would citizenship make in these examples?
By the way, China doesn’t allow dual citizenship. You lose Chinese citizenship the second you become an Australian citizen.
You also have to remember that if s44 was designed in some senses to avoid foreign interference in the Australian Parliament, on its current interpretation and enforcement it does the opposite. Why? Because all these embassies and consulates representing foreign governments get letters from people saying “oh I think I might be XYZ citizen by descent, please help me renounce so I can run for Parliament in Australia” when in most cases there’s no real record of these people having a claim to the foreign citizenship unless they supply the embassy with all the birth/marriage/death certificates in the family tree. So what you have is people self-identifying to foreign governments as potential agents to cultivate. This is why the current system does not work, it’s also inconsistent with multiculturalism, and it gives foreign governments a say over whether someone can or cannot nominate.
Ultimately there are three ways this ought to be dealt with:
1) If you are a nominated candidate or serving MP, it would be inappropriate to seek out and apply for a foreign citizenship
2) If you inherit the foreign citizenship by ancestry, that’s passive and should be allowed. If the individual has converted that into a physical passport, then the solution would be to declare that and surrender the document to, say, the Governor-General (in much the same way someone on bail gives up their passport so they can’t flee the jurisdiction – this way they can’t use the foreign citizenship either)
3) Naturalised Australians – we could treat them in the same way as (2) since we don’t require renunciation to become a citizen, and there shouldn’t be multiple classes of citizenship. Although I think some countries would still require renunciation to run for Parliament.
Also bear in mind that the UK and US legislatures have no problem with dual citizens serving in their parliaments. The UK doesn’t even require you to be a British Citizen to run since they allow any Commonwealth Citizen to exercise that right.
Looks like my gut feeling was right about the 3-4% swing here. However for the firstime since 1984 we will have a federal MP that does not belong to the government, yet seats like Tangney,Higgins and possibly more will be won by Labor that haven’t been won in 2007 or decades.
Most of the seats that the LNP picked up in 2013 including this one they seem to be holding onto, the seats the government have lost, most were held on in 2007 or won back in 2010. Most of the “traditional” seats that go with government have stuck with the coalition which is a strange anomaly but possible a new long term trend.