Nowhere is growing like this corner of Queensland. It’s changing the political game

The speed limit on Bells Creek Arterial Road appears ambiguous. After turning off the Bruce Highway towards the coast about 90 kilometres north of Brisbane, motorists make their way through the pine plantations, and forgotten paddocks, into the massive Aura housing development, advised only to slow down – to 70km/h – for a few roundabouts connecting side streets yet to open.

Baringa, one of four greenfield suburbs being built in Aura, is a microcosm of the interstate and international migration transforming the state’s south-east. That growth is also evident in voter enrolments for the federal seat of Fisher in which it sits, 11.5 per cent above the average electorate (almost 15,000 additional voters) and ripe for redistribution. There are currently five seats in Australia with double-digit enrolment deviation, and all are in south-east Queensland.

An empty road in a yet-to-be-built section of the Aura subdivision on the Sunshine Coast. When finished, it will see a town the size of Shepparton or Port Macquarie tucked between the beach and the Bruce Highway.Credit: Dan Peled

But before anyone looks at changing the electoral boundaries, and potentially adding extra seats, the people of Baringa need to vote. The developer calls Aura the “City of Colours”, and, while the Sunshine Coast was traditionally older, and conservative, this campaign may see the political colours in Fisher change – like everything else.

John Labate was running a business in Sydney when he and his wife made plans to move to Queensland. They bought an investment property in Baringa in 2020, and went caravanning during the pandemic, before moving in themselves to retire. Walking the few blocks to the shops this week – past another construction site, and a billboard announcing the opening date for the tennis courts – Labate suggests the suburb is a victim of its own success.

“You can sit out on this road here, trying to get into Caloundra, during weekday mornings, for half an hour – to get from here to Caloundra Road,” he says of the less than three-kilometre route along Aura Boulevard into more established eastern suburbs.

Pointing over his shoulder towards Bells Creek Arterial Road – one lane in, one lane out, everyone with somewhere else to be – Labate says it is “bumper to bumper every morning going that way as well”. He marvels at the insatiable demand for housing.

In a nearby playground, two young mums – both from New Zealand, originally – watch over their kids and talk about their future on the coast. They came for the sunny weather and opportunities, but, like anyone anywhere, also get frustrated by the day-to-day. They know there is an election soon, but have yet to consider the options, only the issues that matter to them.

Labate has seen his mailbox filling up with campaign material. He is generally unimpressed, saying “politicians only care about themselves”.

Nearby, as rain clouds pass over Baringa, Diana Thofner’s most pressing concern is the lack of school holiday options for those days when the Sunshine Coast is short on sunshine. She and her family moved from Melbourne – “a rat race” – for the promise of a better life, and has watched as countless others cross the border for the same reason.

Baringa local Diana Thofner with children Ava, 7, and Finn, 5.Credit: Dan Peled

Thofner relies on Bells Creek Arterial Road to get the kids to school, but knows the more people who move into Aura the harder it will be to get around. Once the next suburb, Nirimba, fills out with houses, congestion will increase and the speed limit will be reduced.

“Traffic is shocking and it’s only going to get worse,” she says, while emphasising the need for locals to still have somewhere to go for health, education and community services.

“And at night you can hear the cars screeching so we have that (anti-social behaviour) now like other places as well.”

None of this surprises the incumbent member for Fisher, Liberal National Party MP Andrew Wallace. He blames the former state Labor government for funnelling so many people into the area – another 500,000 on the coast by 2041 – without proper planning.

“A couple of weeks ago the Sunshine Coast was declared the No.1 destination for internal migration,” he says, talking into a Bluetooth speaker while driving to another campaign event.

“Anybody who has actually driven on our roads would be able to confirm that. We are being loved to death.”

The member for Fisher, Andrew Wallace, was Speaker of Parliament under the former Coalition government. He says he has secured $7.2 billion in road, rail and community infrastructure funding for his constituents over the past nine years.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Wallace is quick to point out the heavy lifting he says the federal Coalition has done to get infrastructure on the agenda. Referring to plans to upgrade an interchange on the Sunshine Motorway, Wallace says the Commonwealth only committed $150 million in matching funds to “drag the state government into doing it”.

It was a similar case with the duplication of the rail line between Beerwah and Landsborough further inland, Wallace describing it as a “project that we wouldn’t have had to put a cent towards” if the state government did its job.

For decades, the Bruce Highway – Queensland’s backbone, a state-controlled stretch of the national highway – has featured in every election campaign, federal and state. As construction costs rise, and urban sprawl gnaws away at the main road out of Brisbane, governments now argue over who funds the work to keep it moving. The residents and motorists in this growth corridor don’t care who does it, so long as it gets done.

Planned upgrades of the Bruce Highway between Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast, and local connector roads in the growth corridor, are dependent on funding and political negotiations.Credit: Glenn Hunt

Wallace knows more roads are not the long-term solution. He believes his role as MP is to lobby for whatever his constituents need, including mass transit, particularly the on-again off-again Sunshine Coast rail line now being progressed by the state LNP government, elected in October.

“If you look at the [proposed] rail line from Beerwah into the coast, we didn’t have to put a cent towards that but if we hadn’t done that the project would have gone nowhere under the former state Labor government,” he says.

“Sometimes you have to put a shot across the bow.”

Going off the last election result, Wallace has a comfortable margin of 8.7 per cent. He has seen off Labor challengers in the past, just as his conservative predecessors Mal Brough and Peter Slipper did before him, but endured a swing against him in 2022. And at this election, voters will find a new name at the top of the ballot paper – Keryn Jones, a Sunshine Coast local, and former councillor, running a well-resourced campaign to be elected as an independent.

Jones’ office said she was too busy to speak to this masthead. But her corflutes, billboards and campaign vehicles are hard to miss, all coloured in greenish-blue. And, of all the so-called community independents running in Queensland, with the support of Climate 200, Jones enters the race with perhaps the highest profile.

“She wears teal, she looks teal – when you walk like a duck, quack like a duck, chances are you’re a duck,” Wallace remarks, suggesting that apart from her political colours his constituents wouldn’t know what she stands for.

Former Sunshine Coast councillor Keryn Jones is running in Fisher as a independent, and enjoys the support of Climate 200 and others in the teal political movement.Credit: Dan Peled

---

Traditionally, Queensland candidates, whether federal or state, promise to take the fight to Canberra. They project themselves as defiantly parochial, unashamedly maroon, with a vested interest in the north. More recently, however, power has shifted from the regions to the urban south-east, which is more likely to welcome new arrivals from other states than Queensland country towns. Amid all this growth, the lines of responsibility have blurred between federal, state and even local government. Rather than fighting Canberra, the parties – including the Greens, who thrive on street-level combat – have taken to fighting each other.

At the last election, the Greens picked up three seats in Greater Brisbane, riding the winds of change. The teal movement was unsuccessful in its first federal foray into Queensland, in the seat of Groom, although Suzie Holt enjoyed a healthy flow of preferences and is running again. For now, the closest thing Queensland has to independents are Bob Katter and Gerard Rennick, but the south-east is becoming used to newcomers.

The Greens – from left, Max Chandler-Mather, Elizabeth Watson-Brown, Stephen Bates, Senator Penny Allman-Payne and Senator Larissa Waters – celebrated their 2022 election success in Brisbane. But in this campaign, the major parties are fighting back.Credit: Getty

Climate 200 and its community independents are targeting six seats in Queensland – Fisher and Fairfax on the Sunshine Coast, Groom on the Darling Downs, McPherson and Moncrieff on the Gold Coast and the most marginal seat in the state, Dickson, held by Coalition leader Peter Dutton. The well-funded, anti-establishment movement eschews the conventional campaign, making it difficult to predict how they will be received come May 3.

Former state Labor minister and speaker John Mickel says that while the cost of living, and housing, are among the major issues, they translate differently at a local level. In places such as Baringa, for example, the cost of needing a second car, to drive to work and everywhere else, also makes new roads and public transport important. In more established areas, the problem is more the loss of quality of life and opportunities. For anyone passing through, all this can be portrayed as an immigration problem, rather than Australia’s great internal migration writ large.

Looking at Fisher, Mickel sees the average voter getting younger, with no political history to draw on, and more likely to vote for someone other than one of the major party candidates. That puts preferences in play.

“They are not rusted on to the major parties. In fact, in those younger age groups, they are going for that combination of Greens and independents in a way that rivals the individual major parties,” says Mickel, now an adjunct associate professor at QUT.

Happy Valley Beach at Caloundra has grown as the inlet continues to fill with sand from the Bribie Island breakthrough.Credit: Dan Peled

Given the trend towards early voting, Mickel wonders whether perceptions of a faltering start to the Coalition campaign may already have had an impact.

“If there was a chance in Fisher, of a well-coordinated independent campaign – which there appears to be – and Keryn Jones finishes in front of the Labor campaign [on primaries], that’s where the danger lies for the LNP,” he says.

Young families, willing to move for better opportunities, and then invested in the future of their chosen home. These undercurrents are not only changing south-east Queensland, they are sending ripples into federal parliament, as Wallace, a former Speaker, knows all too well.

“By the time Aura is finished, and when Beerwah East comes online, there’s essentially another federal electorate just in those two housing estates. Then you look at Caboolture West and that’s another huge development.

“Not only do we need to have another electorate in south-east Queensland, there’s potential for another two.”

---

In the hotly contested seat of Brisbane, former LNP member Trevor Evans is eyeing a return to the Coalition benches. Evans served two terms in parliament, including a stint as assistant minister in the Morrison government, only to be defeated last time, on preferences, by the third-most popular Brisbane candidate, the Greens’ Stephen Bates.

Evans appears to have learned from the crossover campaigns of the Greens at federal, state and council elections, letting Dutton go macro while he goes micro. He is hyper-local on the hustings, talking up his record securing federal funding for public transport and road projects as well as his relationship with the LNP city council.

If elected, under a Coalition government, Evans will see to it that a minor, council-controlled intersection in the electorate gets a much-needed upgrade. He has made a lot of his plans for James and Doggett streets in Fortitude Valley – once semi-industrial, now crowded out with luxury retailers, some of the city’s best restaurants, and the renowned Calile Hotel – and his determination to “keep Brisbane moving”.

In south-east Queensland, that is more than a political slogan, it is a sign of the times. And no-one wants to be left behind.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.