Stretton – Queensland 2024

Safe ALP retain. James Martin has been very active since replacing former MP Duncan Pegg after the last election. I can see this margin halving but still being comfortably retained.

Where’s the lnp candidate?

@nolnp The LNP haven’t yet announced who they’re running in the following seven safe Labor seats: Stretton, Jordan, Bulimba, Bundamba, Gladstone, Ipswich and Woodridge. They’re probably going to run dead here.

Seems an odd choice for the LNP to run dead in, if that really is what’s going on. They won it in 2012 and were at least somewhat competitive in a few other elections.

A seat like Woodridge or Bundamba I can understand, but would be a bit weird if they did it here.

*The LNP also don’t have a candidate in Cooper, forgot that last night.

@Mark Mulcair Stretton along with Bulimba and Cooper should theoretically be winnable or close to it for the LNP if the 57-43 TPP polls are to believed, so it is strange they still don’t have candidates. My guess in another thread was that they’ve written Cooper off for the Greens but I’m not sure about the other two.

My thoughts exactly mark. The lnp won this seat in 2012 after the failings of Anna bligh and the rud Gilliard rud disaster train. Christifulli is way ahead in the polls he’s done a solid campaign so far in my opinion and the lnp are fools not to be running candidates in Stretton and those other 7 seats someone else mentioned. Also RE: Bundamba what makes you think the lnp won’t perform there or even win the seat? We saw a 25ish % swing against Labor in Ipswich west at the bi election in March Bundamba is just next door similar demographic.

This is the first year in a decade the lnp stands a chance of forming govt and they aren’t running in all electorates? They’re abandoning cooper? Seriously?!?!?!?

Reminds me of the NSW council elections fancy not running candidates in many of them because someone forgot to file the paperwork!

What numpty is making these decisions in the lnp backroom?

Time to sack some ppl in marketing lnp!

What my concern is now where is the conservative vote for Stretton going to go? They had a 2% swing at the 2021 bi election which suggests conservatism is on the rise here. Alot of ppl in this area are angry at Labor over cost of living, covid, crime and electricity. I don’t think right wingers will go green which is the only other option. Will we see a record high in donkey / invalid votes?

Thanks for reading sorry it’s long.

@nolnp they still have time to announce candidates for those 8 seats, and they will very soon. The two major parties both run in every federal and state/territory electorate no matter how unwinnable. Only exception is Mulka in the NT.

@laine yes they do but why is the lnp leaving it to the last minute? Especially if they need to win 12 seats to win govt. If I was christifulli and serious about becoming premier id have all seats filled and made public months in advance.

@nolnp There are a good thirty seats the LNP is likely to win from Labor before they win Stretton. They’ve most likely left those eight til the last minute because they’re unlikely to win them and no one serious in the community has put their hand up.

horray! The lnp have FINALLY announced their candidate for Stretton Freya Ostravich who was the member during the Newman years. Hopefully we get a repeat performance in a months time.

LNP have now got a candidate in every seat, Labor are still struggling to find candidates

Labor retain following a single digit swing to the LNP. I am sensing much bigger swings in Logan and Ipswich-based seats (partly due to the retreat in One Nation’s vote) as well as Inala (compared to four years ago) and Mount Ommaney.

Freya Ostravich’s page on Wikipedia is interesting to read.

@Votante Holy crap Freya Ostravich is actually insane 😂😂

@Trump 24 Not sure Labor is struggling to find candidates, but rather do not care if they leave it to the last minute in places they would never win even in a landslide. It’s not like they’re missing people in seats like Coomera, it’s electorates like Warrego and Callide.

And yeah I agree @Votante, Labor retain. It’s become apparent that this isn’t going to morph into a 2012-style victory at the last minute.

Labor Retain, this is probably the worst Candidate the LNP has to offer.

@Caleb something we finally agree on.

Labor retain but with a swing to the LNP, likely smaller than average because of the shit candidate.

Curious why is liberal candidate so bad?

@Mick Quinlivan – Freya Ostapovitch is known very well as a hardline conservative, especially when she ran for federal Rankin in 2016. She once claimed that abortions can lead to breast cancer. Furthermore, while she was state MP for Stretton (2012-2015), in 2014, she was filmed throwing objects at media recording her.

Even as a Coalition supporter, she should not have been chosen whatsoever, so I don’t know why Crisafulli would endorse her as candidate. She’ll lose easily here.

And as @Votante said, her Wikipedia page is incredibly short and of the three paragraphs in it, two of them relate to her previous controversies. It’s sad to think that her actions is basically what she is known for. What a dud.

@James I would say he chose her out of haste, knowing that a 14.8% margin in a heavily Labor-voting part of Brisbane was too much. If such a candidate was chosen for a key seat then it would be worse.

Oh and just to be clear, voted Coalition all my life. Abortions don’t cause breast cancer. Chances are we’ve all met a woman with breast cancer at some time in our lives or may even personally know one, and I’ve never personally heard anyone publicly declare that abortions cause cancer (I’ve seen people say it online but I’ve never spoken to anyone who’s said that).

Does the leader choose all candidates in the LNP? Gee whiz, here was I thinking local branches chose their candidates.

@wilson it’s mostly done by local branch however the leader does make some captains calls

@Daniel T only a few candidates were there when Campbell Newman was Premier. One example I can think of is the candidate for Cook, who was preselected in favour of other candidates.

This is one of those unsinkable seats and they won’t be putting too much effort here

Labor margin seems to be inflated in Stretton as well as neighboring Toohey given a middle class to upper middle class Chinese heavy areas are normally competitive in Sydney and Melbourne but probably QLD Labor made decent inroads to the Chinese Community (similar to Libs for the Arab Community in Werriwa) as well as LNP not traditionally having the same inroads for CALD Communities compared to Liberals in other states.

@Marh well they do well with CALD communities on the Gold Coast and in Cairns as well as in at least some parts of Brisbane, just not this part.

Freya is certainly someone with the capability to be in the headlines, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons like fellow LNP member Ros Bates. For a more progressive electorate (compared to the, well you know, the regions) she’s a completely unfitting candidate.

I’d like to think this seat will be a Labor hold but given that we said the same about the likes of Nightcliff, Wanguri and Sanderson in NT and they all fell it wouldn’t surprise me if they lost this on election night.

Announcing Newman-era Ostapovitch as the candidate, who is know for her hardline conservative and anti-abortion views, shows the LNP doesn’t want to win Stretton, didn’t bother to find a good candidate and would probably run dead here. A 14.8% Labor margin in a Labor heartland area in Brisbane (half of Stretton is within the federal seat of Rankin, the only Queensland federal seat that Labor has never lost, and another half overlaps Moreton, which Labor has held since 2007) is probably too large for the LNP to conquer even with a decent candidate when the statewide 2PP swing against Labor is only going to be around 10%. I agree with @Daniel T that Labor should retain this seat comfortably.

I don’t think the LNP should be running anti-abortion or otherwise hard right conservative candidates anywhere, even in completely unwinnable seats. It reflects very badly on them and could deter small-l Liberal voters in inner Brisbane seats from voting for the LNP, even if such controversial candidates are not running in their electorates.

I have deleted all of the comments by that vile user and the whole conversation, and they’ve been permanently blocked.

I am having trouble keeping up with the vast volume of comments so if you see something like that, don’t argue about it, contact me directly. This is why I have been considering shutting down many of the comments threads.

What vile user?

Thanks Ben, hate speech has no place in this country

@John the person who was making personal attacks on other users and MPs.

Family first is now running a candidate in Stretton.

ALP should retain but there will be a strong first preference for greens.

LNP candidate here is pretty much throwing a wrench at her own party in this seat and elsewhere
https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/18/qld-election-2024-freya-ostapovitch-lnp-stretton-candidate-abortion-ntwnfb

Is Labor at the level of ThoughtCrime yet?
This woman was giving her honest opinion to someone she thought was acting in good faith, they recorded the conversation without telling her.

Gympie, ridiculous comment. Nobody is prosecuting Ostapovitch for her beliefs so it is not a thought crime. But the public deserve to know what the LNP agenda is given how many of their MPs want to revisit the legality of abortion and Crisafulli’s failure to provide a convincing answer on whether his government will look at it.

Interesting to see the results at the Kuraby booth here, the suburb with the highest Islamic population in Queensland. A massive swing against Labor, a modest swing against the LNP, massive swing towards the Greens, and an *increase* to the Labor TPP. Clearly the Israel-Gaza issue is a major concern in highly Muslim areas.

@ Louis
You are 100% Correct. You can also see the this in Woodridge. I also posted in the Yerrabi thread that there was an increase in Green vote in Yerrabi which has a significant Muslim community as well. It will be interesting if areas around Meadow Heights will see an increase in the Greens or Victorian Socialist vote.

* Yerrabi in the ACT election last week

@gympie it’s also illegal to record someone without their knowledge

The UK election saw the Green Party and several Muslim community independents take away votes from Labour, the traditional party of choice for British Muslims, presumably over anger over Labour’s perceived lack of support for Palestine under Sir Keir Starmer. The Green Party over there

In Australia, it’s our Labor Party that Muslims traditionally choose, and we’re seeing the same thing happen here for presumably the same reason.

In the NSW local elections there was also swings to the Greens and independents and against Labor in Western Sydney, which could be related to Gaza but then of course local elections are often where community independents shine as local government is less partisan. There was a small swing to the Greens in the seat of Yerrabi in the ACT election a few weeks ago, but I’m skeptical that this was from the war in Gaza as Canberra’s Muslim community is small (even in Yerrabi only 5.7% of the population is Muslim).

However, we may have just witnessed the first true example of this in Queensland.

Kuraby is a multicultural working-class suburb in the southern part of the City of Brisbane. It has large Chinese, Indian and Pakistani communities. 31.2% of the suburb is Muslim, making Islam the most practised religion in the suburb. This also makes it the most Muslim suburb in Queensland. Kuraby is usually a Labor stronghold, but this time it decided to vote for the Greens, the same woke progressive leftist party that wins seats like Brunswick and Melbourne in Victoria and Newtown in NSW, except in Queensland. It surely would’ve helped that the Greens candidate is indeed a Muslim (Ahmed Abdulahmed is his name), but either way this was unpredicted.

Results in Kuraby:

Primaries:
* Ahmed Abdulhamed (Greens): 41.0% (+31.3%)
* James Martin (Labor): 35.8% (–26.2%)
* Freya Ostapovitch (LNP): 25.3% (–5.6%)
* Stephen Strong (One Nation): 2.8% (–0.2%)
* Merle Totenhofer (Family First): 0.7% (+0.7%)

TPP:
* Labor: TBC (–70.2%)
* LNP: TBC (–29.8%)

This could also be a factor of Duncan Pegg’s retirement and thus the loss of a personal vote but the swing is too big for that to be the main reason.

@ NP
Thanks for pointing out the Kuraby results. As Louis stated above there was actually a TPP swing to Labor in that booth suggesting good preference discipline.In Yerrabi i am not sure to be honest but there is a trend in the ACT where the Greens went backwards in more Anglo seats (Kurrajong, Murrumbidgee, Brindabella). Brindabella is especially very Anglo. Ginnanderra is more CALD but not as much as Yerrabi. While Yerrabi is only 5.7% Muslim that is actually high compared to the Australian Average so maybe part of the swing was due to Muslims.

@NP Duncan Pegg didn’t retire, he died of cancer before he could actually resign

@Caleb oh wait yeah I forgot about that. The swings are from the last state election by the way, not the by-election.

The +31.3% swing to the Greens would definitely be the biggest swing to the Greens in any booth statewide and one of the biggest swings to the Greens in history.

The Greens vote went up in seats that are either safe Labor (e.g. Stretton, Woodridge) or ALP vs LNP (e.g. Capalaba) but down in their strongholds or where you normally expect over 25% e.g. McConnel, South Brisbane.

I read that at the Vic local elections, the Greens took Dandenong by storm but did badly in Yarra (the LGA just east of Melbourne).