Moreton – Australia 2025

It is still a ways to go but if the Greens were to win another federal seat QLD here would be the best shot they have.

the grees wont get any more seats in qld. their best chancesare in victoria. i doubt they would have the resources to anyway.

I recognise that Moreton is literally their best prospect in QLD by current Greens primary vote @SpaceFish, but next election it would be wise if they focused on sandbagging what they’ve got. Any excess campaign energy and attention could be directed down below the border to assist in the Richmond efforts. Richmond has been a long time coming for them. There was only ~2.5% margin sitting between Nolan and Elliot before the Greens were eventually excluded from the preference count in 2022. We can assume that if this was overcome, Labor preferences would have comfortably delivered the seat to the Greens over the Nationals on 2PP.

There are a few seats at the state election where if the Greens win, they have cause to target a federal seat. In descending order of plausibility

Miller -> Moreton
Stafford -> Lilley
Chatsworth -> Bonner
Everton -> Dickson

Chatsworth and Everton are very, very, long shots with tiny overlaps onto federal Green seats, but may be targeted by Greens to put more LNP held seats in the mix at both tiers. Though QLD seems like the least concerned Green party with the optics of going after Labor seats (as well as their history of winning seats off the LNP).

An active Greens campaign may actually help Perrett retain the seat – if left alone as an ALP vs LNP contest the LNP might get the edge with a QLD based leader. SEQ observer I think you are right about Greens priorities UNLESS they win Miller – the newly elected state MP and their office will make a difference

i agree with SEQ Observer, the Greens will look to Sandbag all 3 seats in QLD first. I also agree Richmond is a logical next seat. The seats that the Greens are likely to win are when one of the major parties has a primary vote below 30%. Here the LNP and ALP primary vote is much greater than that. Also much of Moreton is middle ring suburbia very ethnic rather than tealish. The areas close to river are very affluent but this seat also includes some lower income areas. So there is a big primary vote gap that the Greens need to close. I think LNP are at a low ebb in this seat as it includes Tealish and Chinese Australian voters both who are hostile to current direction of the Libs. I dont think a QLD based leader in Dutton will help here unlike in the Moreton Bay Region and Blair. This is an area that is demographically hostile to Dutton even if they are from the same state.

With Cassy O’Connor gone (the most senior Green who regularly made a big deal about the CCP, sometimes veering a bit too far into Sinophobia) Greens may be better positioned to pick up Chinese Australian votes, which may not favour either major party. They have had Chinese speaking candidates campaigning on WeChat before but not in Moreton.

I think the issue John is that areas like Sunnybank (where there is a large Chinese community) are more middle class where there is a focus on bread/butter issue. It is the same issue they faced at the Warrandyte state by-election where the absence of Labor candidate in Middle Class ethnically diverse in Doncaster East drove voters towards the Libs rather than Greens. One of the main reasons that Labor won in Higgins rather than Green is that the Eastern Middle Class Fringe (Ashburton, Chadstone, Murrumbeena, Carnegie) offered swang from Lib to ALP rather than Lib to Green in the seat of Ryan. The Greens do well in trendy inner city areas, alternative lifestyle areas such as Byron Shire/Nimbin etc, tree change/sea change areas like Upper Blue Mountains etc, in the absence of a Teal they outpoll Labor in elite/posh suburbs but they dont do well in Low income areas or even middle Australia. I dont think the Greens are going to be competitive in seats like Chisholm, Reid, Banks Deakin, Aston etc which are the middle Australia seats

Isn’t Graham Perrett at danger of being dumped so that the ALP can fulfil their affirmative action quota?

“An active Greens campaign may actually help Perrett retain the seat – if left alone as an ALP vs LNP contest the LNP might get the edge with a QLD based leader.”

@John

People are entitled to make predictions. But it should pointed last time there were alot comments in the Moreton thread talking up the Liberals chances picking up Moreton. It wasn’t even close.

I don’t think it matters what the Greens do or don’t do. It’s a Labor retain.

I agree with some of the above comments – the Greens are far from winning this seat. I read that Brisbane/GC Greens are targeting Richmond over the NSW border, but has a very low margin. In fact, the Greens have already preselected Mandy Nolan again two years ahead of schedule.

Moreton currently has the lowest enrolment in the state. At this rate, at the next redistribution, Moreton will likely expand southward or westward geographically and take in mostly ALP vs LNP parts of Rankin or Oxley. This would kill off the Greens’ chances. There’s a slim chance of expanding northward to Dutton Park or crossing the Pacific Motorway.

Someone mentioned Perrett was retiring in the Blair thread. This makes it a 3 corner contest especially if Greens can get a beach head in Miller (state seat covering the best Green areas here).

I wonder if Moreton should take the North West Part of Rankin and South-Western Part of Bonner but then remove the Western Half of Moreton as this seat has the best community of interest

Marh, I agree with some of your suggestions on a cultural basis. The parts of Rankin that are within Brisbane City Council have more in common with Moreton than with anywhere in Logan City. And Corinda and Oxley feel more like the suburbs that are in the seat of Oxley than the rest of Moreton (and it’s a bit silly that Oxley isn’t fully in the electorate named for it, but I suppose Kooyong already set a precedent with that.

A bit more complex with the other areas. Mount Gravatt is culturally similar to suburbs like Holland Park that are in Griffith, more so than suburbs in Moreton. I predict the AEC will preserve the highway as the boundary, with Bonner retaining Mount Gravatt eventually gaining suburbs like Holland Park and Mount Gravatt East as Griffith continues to become more dense.

Chelmer and Graceville probably have more in common with Fig Tree Pocket and Chapel Hill than anywhere else, all being quite wealthy areas. But I doubt the AEC will ever put a seat across the river again. So it’s either Moreton or Oxley for them, and I think they’d be as culturally out of place in Oxley as they are in Moreton.

@Wilson another example of a seat sharing its name with a suburb that isn’t in the electorate but is nearby is Parkes in NSW; the town of Parkes is actually in Calare (the Division of Parkes and the town of Parkes are named after Sir Henry Parkes). Just some random trivia.

@np Parkes will probably be in Parkes a after the redistribution

@John yeah that was in my proposal too.

@np it is most ifnot all

Would class this as “Likely Labor” unless Perrett retires in which case “Lean Labor”, in which case I think the Greens should go hard here, as Perrett’s personal vote will fall away and give the Greens a good chance of overtaking Labor. Interestingly, Jono Sriranganathan wrote a piece on his blog recently where he said that the Greens should go hard here regardless of what Perrett does to starve Labor of resources to take back neighbouring Greens seats. I think that’s a fair point, espeically when you consider that the Greens results in BCC in overlapping wards like Moorooka were quite good (Greens even got a small swing to them in Tennyson).

Ok read Jono’s article. I agree mostly with it. Greens should target here, especially if Perrett retires. They are often a little too cautious on retaining the seats they currently have. But I do think how well the Greens vote holds in an election where there is a swing back to the right hasn’t really been tested.

Prahran 2018 had a swing to the left, in 2022 Vic swung to the right, but the Labor TPP also improved in this area. Ballina 2019 and 2023 were also in elections where there was a swing to the left. Same for Maiwar in 2020. What happens to the Greens vote when people start to get fed up with Labor? Do the Greens, who heavily say they will support Labor in a hung parliament, start to get affected by Labor’s standings? Do the people who swung to the Greens, or Labor (and then preferenced the Greens) swing back to the Libs when they improve their national polling? Greens can win these seats when Labor is polling 54% on the statewide TPP, but what about when they are polling 45%?

For the Green seats where the Libs have no chance of ever winning (South Brisbane, Griffith, Gabba Ward, Melbourne x2, Balmain, Newtown) then I agree, the Greens don’t really have a lot to fear. It’s been shown the Greens vote holds up in these areas even when Labor’s vote improves. But how well the Lib’s can recover their lost vote to the Greens, is still largely untested because there has been a lot of bad election results for the Libs in a row. This will start changing now with federal drag affecting Labor now.

I am not sure how much personal vote Perrrett has he often appears to be quite socially awkward.

Not sure how much you can contribute it to Perrett, but Moreton is, I’m pretty sure the QLD seat that has swung the 2nd most to the left since 2007 (Ryan is first). It’s one of the few seats Labor did better in 2022 than 2007 in QLD. He held on in 2010 and 2013 and 2019 where you would think he would have lost.

Drake, we do have data on the Greens during elections where there is a lurch to the right.

2010 Federal: significant primary vote increase in both houses, significant increase in representation in both houses, 0 to 1 MP and 5 to 9 senators.

2010 Victoria: primary vote increase in both houses, but no change to representation (no MLAs to lose).

2011 NSW: primary vote increase in both houses, +1 to reps in both houses (including their first ever MLA in the state).

2012 QLD: small primary vote drop, but no change to representation (no MPs to lose).

2013 Federal: significant primary vote drop, but no change to representation (after supporting a Labor minority government).

2014 Tasmania: significant primary vote drop, decline from 5 to 3 members (after being part of an unpopular coalition government with Labor).

2018 SA (debatable as the Libs lost primary vote share to SA Best, but they won government so I’ll count it): small primary vote drop, but no change to representation (no MLAs to lose).

So overall a pretty mixed bag, and unique circumstances in several of them (QLD 2012 was an extreme landslide result, Tas 2014 was the product of being part of an unpopular government, SA 2018 had SA Best heavily complicating the picture). It’s hard to draw any conclusions, beyond alignment with an unpopular Labor government producing declines. But that isn’t the case at the moment.

Perhaps the most pertinent example for Fed 2025 is Fed 2010, because both are federal elections, both feature a first term Labor government with mediocre but not terrible opinion poll ratings, and both have climate change and renewable energy on the political agenda in some form (thanks to Dutton reopening the climate wars).

However, I don’t see that swing being repeated, because while climate change and renewable energy are on the agenda, they’re not as big an issue as they were in 2010, as the past few bushfire seasons haven’t been as catastrophic as 2009 was, and we’re heading into La Nina (unless that causes some destructive cyclones, but the areas that suffer from them usually vote LNP anyway).

I think the swing will therefore be more muted, but will either be positive or keep the Greens vote stable, as many people will be disappointed by the Albanese Government but still can’t bring themselves to vote LNP, so may choose the Greens. So it may end up looking more like Victoria 2010 for the Greens, mildly positive but not achieving an increase in representation.

As to how this affects Moreton, I think it may be too big a hill for the Greens to climb in one election. They still ought to campaign hard, as there’s always a chance of a significant swing against an unfamiliar Labor candidate. As Brisbane grows, the extent of the cultural “inner city” starts to expand geographically, and it brings an increased Greens vote with it. I’d argue it’s already reached Moreton, having crossed from Woolloongabba into Annerley since 2020, and will only keep expanding over the coming decade.

@Wilson

Thanks Wilson. I guess I should have been more specific. How well do the Greens hold up against the Libs in their seats which the Libs can possibly win back? The Greens can win Ryan and Brisbane in a bad election for the Libs, but can they keep winning them in good elections for the Libs? It’ll be interesting to see how well the Greens votes hold in Maiwar, Ryan and Brisbane.

We will see what happens in Maiwar at the qld election this is a marginal seat

I reckon either Brisbane or Ryan will flip back

@Wilson my interpretation of the 2010 Greens result is that they picked up a lot of the anti-politics protest vote that would go to various anti-politics or far right parties at every election since. Case in point, they got a 7% swing towards them in Blair that immediately vanished the election after (with Palmer United picking it up and then some).

Those votes probably aren’t coming back – just by the virtue of political correctness the Greens are seen as cut from the same cloth as Liberal and Labor by anti-politics voters. I think a lot of voters who may be receptive to Greens messages about money in politics or taking on a corrupt political establishment get turned off when they say they’re from “Naarm” or “Meanjin”, or when the doorknocker says their pronouns after their name. It can come across as forced or inauthentic even when it isn’t (I get that sense from a lot of campus socialists). It’s core Green policy to stand up on these issues, but when not messaged carefully it leaves voters with the sense that the Greens look down on them and are judging them, ending up on the wrong side of the “up yours” sentiment that drives anti politics votes.

Plus compared to 2010 there’s a large online ecosystem and pipeline driving anti-politics people towards broader far right views. I would say in 2010 conspiracy theorists spanned the political spectrum – now it’s a firmly right wing thing with sitting LNP members aligning with conspiracism.

However 2025 might have some similar characteristics to 2022, with opportunities for Greens to pick up 2022 Labor voters who thought that electing a Labor government would mean more change than it has. If Greens can win Miller they can mount a winnable seat campaign here.

@Drake, good points, I agree with @Michael Quinlivan that Maiwar 2024 will offer good clues about how the Greens hold up when the Liberals are on the ascendancy.

However, I think Prahran in the 2022 state election offers some clues. Nearly all its neighbouring seats swung to the Liberals on a 2PP metric except for a tiny (notional) swing to Labor in Melbourne. Albert Park (+1.9%), Richmond (+7.1%), Malvern (+2.0%), Caulfield (+2.0%), Brighton (+4.6%). Prahran is actually the outlier in swinging +2.4% to Labor on notional 2PP. This may indicate swings to the Liberals are muted/reduced with Greens incumbency.