Think sand, hourglass and 14 make-or-break days for Deb Frecklington to stop another election getting away from the Liberal National Party in Queensland.
Outright victory was always a tall order for the LNP, requiring a net gain of nine on the 38 seats it holds. But there was a chance if Frecklington fired on the hustings, took some bark off a popular Premier, and at least got close enough to put her side in contention if the voters delivered a hung parliament on October 31.
Newspoll shows the LNP is in deep trouble.
Annastacia Palaszczuk is cruising and the sand in the hourglass is running Labor’s way. Approaching the midway point of an unforgivingly short 26-day campaign, Frecklington needs to change things up and put pressure her opponent before it’s too late.
Pre-polling opens on Monday so Newspoll’s snapshot of where the vote sits — 52-48 per cent two-party preferred to the ALP — has an outsized importance when as much as half the electorate is expected to cast an early ballot.
Scott Morrison did his bit to help the LNP and its struggling leader this week, campaigning strongly with Frecklington in regional Queensland.
But she had a fraught time of it, bogged down by questions about her interaction with property developers who have been declared “prohibited donors” under Labor electoral laws.
The LNP is right to rail against the unfairness of the system — Labor’s targeting of developers, an important resource for the conservatives, was unquestionably self-serving — but it’s hardly a vote-changer and this was a lost week for both Frecklington and her party.
She needs to turn the conversation to the government’s patchy five-year record on debt, integrity issues and unemployment that was pegged above the national average before COVID-19 brutally levelled the field. But the questions about Frecklington’s leadership persist and there is no escaping that her campaign is stuck in first gear. Palaszczuk remains personally popular while the government she leads is unloved and will face the verdict of voters with a quarter of its 48 seats in the danger zone, vulnerable on margins below 4 per cent.
If Labor coasts to a third successive election victory in a fortnight’s time Palaszczuk will no longer be the accidental Premier who came to power in 2015 after Campbell Newman squandered one of the biggest electoral wins on record at the election before.
Palaszczuk will be the lucky Premier — lucky to have had Frecklington against her.
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