Former MP Trevor Evans to recontest Brisbane at federal election

Former Morrison government MP Trevor Evans believes the next election will be a test of whether voters regret supporting the Greens and teal independents at the 2022 federal election.

Trevor Evans at Wilston State School on election day in May 2022. Picture: Josh Woning

Former Morrison government MP Trevor Evans has been preselected to recontest his old seat in inner-city Brisbane and try to reclaim it from the Greens in what is expected to be a close race.

The two-term MP believes next year’s federal election will be a test of whether inner-city voters regret backing Greens and Climate 200-backed teal independents in 2022.

“There were a lot of inner-city and urban Liberals who lost their seats at the last election,” Mr Evans said.

“I wonder, around those seats, how much buyer remorse there is. That (voters) views might not be well represented in governments into the future.

“Everywhere I go in Brisbane, people are expressing to me not just that they’re hurting in terms of cost of living and the challenges of economic mismanagement, but also that they’re feeling disappointed that they don’t have a representative who is able to deliver the outcomes that Brisbane desperately needs.”

The moderate-leaning Mr Evans, assistant minister for waste reduction and environmental management in the Morrison government, lost Brisbane after a 10.7 per cent swing against the LNP. The Greens pulled ahead of Labor on preferences to claim the seat, one of three captured as part of the 2022 Queensland “Greenslide” that also installed the party’s housing spokesman, Max Chandler-Mather, in Griffith.

The contest for the inner-city seat – which encompasses affluent Hamilton and Ascot, trendy Newstead and Paddington, and the suburbs of Ashgrove and Everton Park – will look similar to the 2022 election. Diagnostic radiographer Madonna Jarrett is again running in the seat for Labor and has campaigned in the community for months.

Mr Evans said the Greens straying from environmental campaigning increasingly into social activism will be a handicap in the electorate, citing the party’s Brisbane City Council mayoral candidate Jonathan Sriranganathan’s proposals to turn Eagle Farm racecourse into green space and social housing, and changes to major roads to install trams.

“All of those things combine to really demonstrate the proof that none of those thought bubbles from the Greens are about environmental policy,” Mr Evans said.

“What Brisbane really needs to manage our challenges, to manage all of the growth ahead, is a cohesive policy platform that makes sense … and they need better representatives who actually know how to deliver things, not just thought bubbles.”

Mr Evans is not concerned with the state LNP government’s failure to capture any Labor-held inner-city seats at the October election, noting Brisbane voters have a long history of voting differently at each level of government.

The LNP is expected to announce candidates in the seats of Lilley, Blair and Moreton in the coming weeks. The preselection process is under way in the seats of Kennedy, Griffith, Rankin and Oxley.