Queensland Labor is going to have to lift if Bill Shorten is to win this election

OPINION: There are many electoral myths and facts about Queensland — big swings, crazy candidates, baseball bats. But there’s one indisputable truth, and it’s going to make life very hard for the ALP.

QUEENSLAND Labor is going to have to lift its historic performance on Saturday week if Bill Shorten is going to have any chance of winning this election.

There are plenty of myths and facts about Queensland — it is supposed to swing big, swing more than other places, elect crazy people and voters sit on their front porches with baseball bats ready to wallop the next politician who comes along.

There’s some truth in all this but one thing that stands out is this is not a natural Labor state — say in the way people talk about New South Wales being a traditional ALP stronghold or South Australia having long term Labor administrations.

In just about every federal election since 1966 Queensland Labor has underperformed, being at the lower end of primary votes returning a smaller proportion of House of Representatives’ MPs.

Polling analysts also point out there is a pretty steady tendency in Queensland for the ALP to feel a late swing against its candidates and ending up with a lower vote share than published polls indicated just a few days or a week before polling day.

There have been a couple of train wreck years for the ALP — in 1975 Labor won just under 39 per cent of the vote and sent only one lower house member to Canberra out of 18 and in 1996 the vote share fell to 22.6 per cent of two Labor politicians took seats out of 26 from the state.

When Kevin Rudd gave Queensland Labor one of its best results — in 2007 the party had a majority of MPs for the first time in decades, grabbing 15 of the 29 from this state, but the primary vote was still the second lowest in the country, 42.9 per cent just nudged by Tasmania where the ALP had just 42.8 per cent.

The past two elections (in 2010 Labor got just 33.6 per cent and had eight MPs and in 2013 the party picked up just 29.8 per cent, electing six MPs) are actually close to the “normal” Labor result for Queensland, although the last poll was the worst on record for a unified ALP.

In the last published poll that had a breakdown for states, Labor has just 31 per cent in Queensland.

That is way short of where the ALP needs to be to give Shorten any hope on Saturday week.

Originally published as Queensland Labor is going to have to lift if Bill Shorten is to win this election