Rockhampton result in State election still in doubt says Labor

The final result for Rockhampton may not be known until next week with Labor saying preference voting is “all over the shop”. 

Labor's Rockhampton candidate Craig Marshall at a polling booth on election day on October 26, 2024. Contributed

Labor candidate for Rockhampton Craig Marshall still believes he has a chance of winning the seat due to uncertainty about the flow of preference votes which could take until next week to resolve.

The LNP’s Donna Kirkland led Mr Marshall 51.7 per cent to 48.3 per cent on preferences on Saturday night but that count had not been updated since then with thousands of preference votes still to come in.

“They’re not doing any more preferencing until all the postal votes are in,” Mr Marshall said on Wednesday.

“They only did a two-party preferred count on the night from the (Saturday) booths.”

Ms Kirkland claimed victory on the weekend based on the predicted flow of preferences from Independent Margaret Strelow and One Nation’s David Bond.

Running for the Rockhampton seat at the 2024 state election, Labor candidate Craig Marshall, LNP candidate Donna Kirkland and Independent candidate Margaret Strelow.

But Mr Marshall said that forecast had not panned out as expected.

He said the preferences from Mr Bond were trending anywhere from 30 per cent to 60 per cent to him depending on which booth they came from.

“It’s (One Nation) all over the shop and Margaret Strelow preferences are about 50 – 50,” he said.

The deadline for counting postal votes is next Tuesday with the distribution of preferences to be published from Wednesday November 6.

“All we can go on (for now) is what they did on the night,” Mr Marshall said.

“We don’t really know what the trend is going to be on postal votes (etc) yet.”

With 84 per cent of the primary vote counted as of 2.30pm Wednesday Mr Marshall led with 30.34 per cent, ahead of Ms Kirkland 28.55 per cent, Ms Strelow 17.96 per cent and Mr Bond 13.45 per cent.

Ms Kirkland has been approached for comment.