Analysis: Newman experiment a costly failure for LNP

ANALYSIS: Will Campbell Newman be remembered for his record 2012 victory and 78 seats, or his dramatic 2015 fall from grace?

IS CAMPBELL Newman’s demise the end of an error?

Will the defeated Premier earn an exalted place in the LNP for ending the party’s 14 years of wandering through the political wilderness?

Will he be remembered for that record 2012 victory and those 78 seats?

Or will Newman’s legacy be all about leading the LNP to a dramatic fall from grace?

And, ultimately, will recruiting an outsider – unfamiliar and untested in the state arena – be seen as a failed experiment?

LATEST RESULTS: The seat-by-seat data

SUMMER SHOWDOWN: All the election washup

The Newman question will be playing out painfully in the minds of LNP MPs – both past and present – this morning as they awake to the new world order without him.

Bags will be packed and tickets to Brisbane booked for what shapes as a chaotic leadership contest in coming days.

There’s a great irony in last night’s election result for the LNP: while Newman led them to a historic victory, he exits with the party’s support in worse shape than what it was amid the sudden rush to recruit him in early 2011.

When John-Paul Langbroek and Lawrence Springborg were bundled out of the LNP leadership, the party’s primary support was 46 per cent and they led on a comfortable two-party-preferred basis 55 per cent to 45 per cent.

Heading into yesterday’s election, the LNP’s primary vote was 41 per cent and its two-party lead 52 per cent to 48 per cent.

Over three years, Newman deflated the LNP’s support base more than he inflated it.

The most sobering fact for them all is that one of Queensland’s smallest-ever oppositions, with its largely unknown leader and no real policy platform, just knocked off a powerful Premier with an unprecedented majority.

The wash-up cannot ignore that Newman’s approach to the foreign environment he found himself from 2012 was the catalyst for this predicament. Newman lacked the emotional investment in what it took the LNP to gain government compared to those who did the hard years in opposition.

He measured this investment only by the risk he undertook to get there and, at times, approached the job more concerned with his own legacy in mind rather than longevity.

Much will be written about how it was reform that cost Newman and how this result will herald the end of agenda-driven administrations.

But it was Newman’s pugnacious approach which was the real problem.

He plunged into areas of administration he was largely ignorant of, like law and order, with gay abandon, unaware of the rules of engagement.

His actions would then echo across Queensland, infinitely more than what they ever did in the flea circus of City Hall.

The old adage after elections is that voters always get it right. After the highs and lows of the last four years, the drama and division, there won’t be an LNP MP left willing to argue with them.