How great is Queensland? Depends if ‘quiet Australians’ are seen and not heard
Three years ago, Scott Morrison celebrated the “greatness” of Queensland after his election win. Dennis Atkins looks at whether history will repeat.
If Scott Morrison defies the polls, betting markets and most pundits and pulls off his miracle reprise mid-May election victory (something he calls hubristically a “second coming”), one thing he’s very unlikely to say is “How great is Queensland”.
That was Morrison’s exaltation in May, 2019 – after shouting out to his mum, wife Jenny and daughters Lily and Abbey, as well as those “quiet Australians”.
He did it because the LNP managed to not just hold its already disproportionate number of seats in Queensland but add Longman and Herbert (electorates that often jump from side to side). It was worth an extra length or two in the final furlongs of this staying event.
This time, the very best Morrison can hope for is to hold his party’s ground. The idea of winning one, two or three seats is just a pipedream that’s now all smoke and no tobacco.
In the long-gone, heady, late-2020 times, LNP strategists thought they could grab Lilley in Brisbane’s north and Blair further out to the west of Peter Dutton’s seat of Dickson.
Some excitable types thought there might be a chance to snare an outer suburban seat like Milton Dick’s Oxley or even shadow treasurer Jim Chalmer’s fiefdom of Rankin. Now, not so much.
This flirtation with attacking Labor territory has now flipped to an almost exclusively defensive stance. The LNP is now gazing east, west and north to see where incoming threats might be emerging.
Top of the list of seats the LNP needs to defend is Brisbane which tightly hugs the state’s CBD and along the Brisbane River to its mouth.
Incumbent Trevor Evans might have a 5 point buffer but he has a climate concerned, flight path noise-hating, accountability and transparency engaged and human rights cheering constituency. Most of these voters also really dislike the prime minister.
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The fear felt in LNP circles was on display on Monday when they rolled out a flight path fix, mark three. Could be too little, too late.
Labor and LNP strategists now think Brisbane could be the first Queensland seat to fall.
The next could be at the other end of the state. Over the decades Leichhardt has been in Labor hands for many more years than it’s been held by the Country Party, Nationals, Liberals or LNP.
In 1993 Labor’s John Gaylor stepped away after 10 years because the party thought he’d been there for one too many elections and he’d lose if he stood again.
That move paid off and Peter Dodd’s win in Leichhardt helped Paul Keating hang on in the Labor win over John Hewson.
Now most people think incumbent Liberal Warren Entsch has been one too many times around the rodeo ring. Apart from a brief spell just over a decade ago, he’s been the MP for the seat since 1996.
Leichhardt could fall because the locals were too tolerant towards Annastacia Palaszczuk in 2020. Labor was expected to lose most if not all of its three local seats but held on to all of them.
The economic pain felt by people in Cairns and other tourist centres in the Far North didn’t go away and this built-up grumpiness might weigh heavily and cause Entsch’s downfall. Just as an historical aside, no one thought Dodd would win in 1993 – least of all Keating.
Losing just these two seats is seen as the LNP’s best hope. The Coalition would love to hold all of its 23 seats but the campaign is bracing itself for losses – at least two and maybe as many as four or five if everything turned to custard.
That is looking less and less likely.
Longman, which sprawls island from Bribie Island north east of Brisbane, is slipping off Labor’s radar as is Flynn which is centred on Gladstone in the mid regions of the state’s coastal strip.
Longman has always harboured an economically conservative and pro-national security sentiment and that might keep the seat in LNP hands.
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Flynn is similar when it comes to national security and many feel Labor hasn’t done enough to convince locals it’s got the backs of workers in the fast looming energy and mining transition.
The other seat Labor dreams about – and is keeping some LNP operators from a good night’s sleep – is Ryan in Brisbane’s west.
It has many of the demographic and political characteristics of neighbouring Brisbane but Labor has only ever held it once since federation and that was in extraordinary times in early to late 2001. Its loss 21 years ago was the big factor in making Howard do whatever it took to turn things around and fend off defeat by Christmas that year.
Queensland can be a difficult place for pollsters – not to mention politicians and pundits – to get a handle on.
There might be a growing predominance of people living in the south east, but major provincial centres remain and many are difficult to poll, especially in places where digital contact can be cursory at times.
Over the past 15 months the fortunes of the two major parties have waxed and waned in Queensland although Labor has maintained a lead that’s been, at its lowest, about 5 percent up from the miserable 42.6 per cent preferred vote in 2019.
The latest state breakdown – in today’s Morgan Poll published in The New Daily – has Labor on 50.5 per cent in Queensland, an increase on that survey’s previous finding in mid-March and almost nine points up on the last election.
If this was uniform across the state the LNP would be in danger of losing as many as 10 seats – Longman, Leichhardt, Dickson, Brisbane, Ryan, Bonner, Herbert, Petrie, Forde and Flynn.
Swings are never uniform and there are local reasons why they are pushed back on the ground – popularity of incumbents, particular demographic profiles and just the mood in one place.
While this might be how it looks on paper, strategists from both sides of politics reckon there’s no big wave being felt in the state, as has been seen in the past to the LNP or, more rarely, to Labor.
Maybe it will happen – Queensland has been known to break late and break big. The state famously went off like a frog in a sock for Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007, handing the ALP eight extra seats on a 8.1 per cent swing.
Right now it feels like not much will change but the LNP is having the worst start of a federal election campaign in recent memory.
The New South Wales branch of the Liberal Party is engaged in a destructive fiesta of self-harm.
The prime minister’s office seems unable to keep up with events – they have been flat-footed on the Commonwealth response to the flood crisis, especially around Lismore.
No one can explain why they haven’t responded to the requests of the state government to boost housing grants from $20,000 to $50,000 two weeks after they were made.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet went ahead and announced the lower amount on Monday. It is breathtaking in its neglect.
The reality is you’re not going to have any more miracles if your brain has stopped working rationally.
