Saturday’s Queensland election came out very much as expected. The narrowing in the polls over the last couple of weeks turned out to be overstating the reality a bit; the opposition Liberal National Party (LNP) scored a comfortable victory, winning about 54% of the two-party-preferred vote (a swing of something over 7%) and most probably 52 of the 93 seats, a majority of 11.
That’s no landslide, but it’s a much better result than how it looked early on Saturday evening, when a number of pundits confidently expected a hung parliament. Later counting, however, and especially from pre-poll centres – which, counter-intuitively, report late, because they concentrate more votes in one place and therefore take longer to count – changed the picture, swinging more seats to the LNP late in the night.
The difference in the prepolls may partly reflect the late swing back towards Labor; some voters were voting without the benefit of the last week of news, when abortion made it into the headlines and appears to have hurt the LNP. But it could also be that the presence of Covid in 2020 changed the composition of the pre-poll electorate, and that Saturday represents a return to a more normal situation, where the prepolls lean markedly to the right (this post from 2020 discusses the question at some length).
A lot of media still haven’t fully got the message; the figure of 48 seats for the LNP was being widely quoted this morning, probably read straight off the ABC’s summary table. Since 47 is the target for a majority, that makes it sound like a very narrow win. But the ABC is very conservative about calling seats: that table still includes ten doubtful, of which four (Aspley, Capalaba, Pine Rivers and Pumicestone), if you look at the figures, have clear LNP leads.
It’s possible the LNP might fall over in one of those, but not particularly likely. On the other hand, it might happen to reel in one of the three where it’s narrowly trailing Labor (Gaven, Macalister and Springwood). It also has a fighting chance in the two seats, Mirani and Mulgrave, where it’s locked in a tussle with Katter’s Australian Party: Kevin Bonham, who generally has the best coverage of late counting, suggests the Katters are ahead in both, although Mirani at least looks line-ball to me.
If the Katters win Mirani and Mulgrave that will take them to five seats (up two). Labor is looking at 34 seats, although South Brisbane, which it appears to have won back from the Greens, is still in some doubt. If Labor prevails there the Greens will be reduced to just one seat (Maiwar), and there remains a single independent (Sandy Bolton in Noosa).
Being Queensland, the relationship between these results and how people voted is a bit tenuous. The ratio of LNP to ALP votes, 41.9% to 32.8%, matches their performance on seats pretty well, but the rest of the table goes haywire. The Greens scored 9.5% of the vote (unchanged from 2020) for their single seat, whereas the Katters have won at least three and maybe five for just 2.6%. Between them is One Nation, which increased its vote by 0.7% to 7.8% but won no seats at all. Nor did the other two vaguely serious parties, Family First with 1.7% and Legalise Cannabis with 1.5%.
Contrast with the Australian Capital Territory, which held its election the previous weekend (previewed here). There, with a democratic electoral system, the voters got pretty much what they voted for. The Greens, with 12.2%, were lucky to hang onto a fourth seat and Independents For Canberra, with 8.5%, probably should have got two seats rather than one, but otherwise the proportions came out right. The Labor-Greens coalition government was returned with 14 of the 25 seats, a majority of three.
Queensland, though, has a new government, and LNP premier David Crisafulli may take his relatively modest majority as a cue to avoid the hubris that overtook the last LNP government and ended up confining it to a single term. Meanwhile Labor may reasonably hope that the state’s voters, having vented their displeasure once, will be less likely to take it out on the federal government at next year’s election.
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UPDATE, Wednesday 6pm (Brisbane time): After another two days of counting there have been two changes to what I reported above. Labor has hit the front in Pine Rivers, and the LNP now looks like beating the Katters in Mirani (the one I said I thought was line-ball). So if everything goes as expected from here, the new government will have an 11-seat majority, as predicted above, but Labor will hold 35 seats and the crossbench six.
FURTHER UPDATE, Friday 8 November: Counting now appears to be complete, although there is a possibility of a recount in Apsley, which Labor held on to by just 31 votes. Otherwise the new LNP government finishes with 52 seats, as foreshadowed, but Labor has come up to 36, with just five for the crossbench: one Green, one independent and three for the Katters, who fell short in both Mirani and Mulgrave.
In terms of votes, both major parties dropped slightly in late counting from the totals given above (to the benefit of the minor parties), but the differences are small. Assuming the ABC’s figures are correct, the LNP had 41.5% of the vote (up 5.6% on 2020), Labor 32.6% (down 7.0%), Greens 9.9% (up 0.4%), One Nation 8.0% (up 0.9%) and Katter 2.4% (down 0.1%).
The World is Not Enough 