Dancing for their lives in key seat

KATE Jones broke her own cardinal rule the other night -- about never dancing in public -- and it was with Campbell Newman, who covets her job.

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KATE Jones broke her own cardinal rule the other night -- the one about never, ever, dancing in public -- and it was with none other than Campbell Newman, the new messiah of the Queensland conservatives who covets her job.

It was a rare moment of levity in the do-or-die political contest that is playing out in Jones's electorate of Ashgrove, in Brisbane's leafy inner northwest. No one is under any illusion about the stakes involved: the outcome in Ashgrove is the key to the next state election in Queensland.

At 32, with a new baby on her hip and ministerial experience under the belt, popular with her constituents and unabashedly hard-working, Jones is as close to a dream candidate as the Labor Party would want. She also has the comfortable cushion of a 7.1 per cent margin in Ashgrove.

Then there is Newman, 47, the formidable former mayor of Brisbane who burnished an already sky-high profile with his sure handling of the city's flood emergency in January.

Despite professing he would run for a third term in council elections next March, the one-time army officer tossed a grenade into Queensland politics by stepping into the leadership of the Liberal National Party, from outside parliament, to take on Anna Bligh at the state election due about the same time.

It's as audacious a move as anyone could imagine, and sets the scene for an epic duel between the most marketable state leader produced by the Queensland conservatives since Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Bligh, who made the biggest political comeback recorded in opinion polls with her own strong performance during the flood and cyclone disasters.

The last statewide Newspoll in Queensland, taken in April-May, showed the LNP had pulled the right lever with Newman, who erased all of the Premier's gains through summer and propelled its vote 20 points clear of Labor after preferences.

Today's exclusive Ashgrove Newspoll for The Weekend Australian, the first to take the pulse of its 31,000 voters, shows the "Can Do Campbell" juggernaut has rolled over the popular and talented young woman with whom he was kicking up his heels at the local Quest Newspapers' business achievers awards last Friday.

Jones has been blown away by the howling wind for a change of government in Queensland. Fully 70 per cent of those surveyed by Newspoll this week credited her with doing a good job as their local MP, but only half were prepared to give her their No 1 vote.

On these figures, Newman wins the seat outright, with Newspoll giving him 50 per cent of the primary vote. When preferences are factored in, his two-party preferred vote increases to 55 per cent over Jones's 45 per cent, after she picks up useful but non-decisive support from a double-digit Greens vote.

The Newspoll findings will be a relief for the LNP and broadly reflect internal research, leaked last month, that put the two-party preferred vote at 53-47 to Newman.

Of course, this is where he needs to be. For Newman, and assuredly for the LNP, all roads lead through Ashgrove.

If Jones can claw back enough support during the coming months to block his path it will be an unmitigated disaster for the conservatives, even if they went on to take office without Newman.

The instability would cripple the new government from the outset. And as the man himself admits, there is no plan B. Should Jones pull off the mother of comebacks and retain the seat, he says he won't let the LNP lean on a sitting MP to make way for him.

That would land Queensland with an LNP premier the voters didn't elect, possibly in the person of incumbent "parliamentary leader" Jeff Seeney, a former National, or more likely Treasury spokesman and former Liberal Brisbane councillor Tim Nicholls. Labor would be immediately back in business.

Nor will he allow City Hall to be a backstop. Should Lord Mayor Graham Quirk, to whom he handed over, try to return the favour and give him back his old job, Newman says his answer will be an emphatic "no".

"I'll go off and do something else, back in the private sector," he says. "That's it. It will be over . . . I'm gone."

Jones, for her part, knows her best hope is to play up the role of underdog. That's a bit rich, even for well-heeled Ashgrove, given that she is the two-term incumbent of a seat that has been held since 1989 by Labor, with the backing of a government and party machine that has been in power for all but two of the past 21 years.

"I know what I'm facing and who I'm facing and what I have to do," she says. "And the way to contest that is to be the best local member I can and that is through meeting as many people as I can, doorknocking, calling people, getting around the electorate as much as I can."

NEWMAN has been on the go since before sun-up. He jogs most mornings in Brisbane's sharp winter chill, up and down the knee-jarring hills around his home in Windsor. Inconveniently, this is in Labor-held Brisbane Central, not the seat for which he is running.

By his account, it would have been an easier ask than Ashgrove. The margin in Brisbane Central is 6 per cent: 1.1 points lower on the pendulum than in Ashgrove, which rolls through the moneyed avenues of the namesake suburb at its heart, 4km north of the CBD, on to the brick and tile expanse of The Gap in the north and eastward through the post-war housing estates of Enoggera and Alderley.

Newman says he took on the challenge because he has long-standing links to the area. As we drive to his next appointment, he swings past the Warmington Road, Ashgrove, home that he and wife Lisa owned for 10 years until 1999, and reels off the names of friends who still live in the tree-lined street.

Their girls, Rebecca and Sarah, attend dance classes a block or two away. "I love this area . . . I wanted to serve Ashgrove because it's our community," he says.

While Brisbane Central is more attractive on paper, the numbers don't tell the whole story.

The seat, sandwiched between Ashgrove proper and the Brisbane River, is Labor through and through. Peter Beattie held it for 18 years until he gave politics away. You have to go all the way back to 1974, when the Queensland ALP was reduced by Bjelke-Petersen to a cricket team of just 11 state MPs, to chalk up a win there for the conservatives. The sitting member is former trade union leader Grace Grace.

Ashgrove, however, has a history of swinging with government. It did so in 1989 when Wayne Goss led Labor back to office, and Jones took it on when the longstanding Labor member, Jim Fouras, retired in 2006.

There is a whiff of 89 in the air as Bligh prepares to ask for an unprecedented sixth term of office. (After the interregnum of the Borbidge Coalition government of 1996-98, Beattie won four successive elections and Bligh a fifth for Labor in 2009).

Ominously for the ALP, its vote was hammered at last year's federal election in the seats of Ryan and Brisbane, which bookend the state boundaries of Ashgrove. The council ward of Enoggera, also within the electorate, went to Newman's Liberal team at the 2008 local government election, while his own lord mayoral vote in The Gap pushed past the 60 per cent he secured city-wide.

While today's Newspoll will be disappointing for the ALP, it has far from given up on Jones. Having surrendered her ministerial responsibilities for the environment and resource management, she is devoting herself to salvaging the seat, and Labor hopes that Newman can be contained.

The hardheads at state HQ in Peel Street say they want to re-run the "shoe leather" campaign that helped to stave off a strong challenge from the Greens, who helped out by imploding over the issue of Israel trade boycotts, to then NSW deputy premier Carmel Tebbutt in her inner-Sydney seat of Marrickville at Labor's disastrous state election in March.

Not everyone agrees with the tactic. One veteran Queensland Labor figure, experienced on the administrative and parliamentary sides of the party, argues that Jones should have held on to her cabinet post. The voters of Ashgrove, the figure believes, want their MP to have clout and by surrendering her ministerial job Jones diminished herself in the head-to-head against an opponent who is odds-on favourite to be the next premier of Queensland.

WHILE Bligh is not expected to call the state election before October, and more likely in January next year for a February poll date, the campaign in Ashgrove is already running at full tilt for both sides.

Freed from her cabinet role, Jones says she has so far doorknocked 600 homes and aims to get around all 15,000 in the seat, at the rate of 2500 a month, by the time the boss fires the starting gun.

Newman is constrained by his wider responsibilities to the LNP. Since stepping up to the leadership in March, after affable but uninspiring Gold Coaster John-Paul Langbroek reluctantly gave way to him, Newman has barnstormed the regions to introduce himself to that crucial constituency in Queensland.

He is out and about in Ashgrove at weekends and for perhaps two days during the working week.

"I'm just juggling," he admits. "I'm trying to cover all 89 electorates first and we have almost cracked that . . . and then if I've got spare time I will come here."

Today's Newspoll shows that Labor's attempts to portray Newman as a political carpetbagger, set on using the seat as a stepping-stone to the premiership have not, as yet, gained traction.

Despite the strong approval for the job Jones does in representing them, 45 per cent of Ashgrove voters think Newman will be the better MP, just shy of the 47 per cent who give the nod to Jones.

Still, full marks to Jones for effort, as her volunteer staff festoon the electorate with "Keep our Kate" corflute signs, buttons and stickers.

"Getting told Campbell Newman is going to stand against you is a huge curve ball," she says.

"Particularly in an area where I didn't think he would stand because I don't think there is a family connection of caring for this community."

Newman pointedly contrasts his own life experience to that of his younger opponent. Jones has followed the red-letter career path of the modern Labor apparatchik. Fresh out of university, she landed her first job in a ministerial office at 21 as an assistant media adviser and went on to clinch the prizes of a seat in parliament and a place on the front bench.

Justifiably, she bristles that this characterisation ignores the obstacles she overcame along the way, from a childhood home marred by domestic violence to putting herself through school and uni -- all in Ashgrove, naturally.

"If we weren't in government in Queensland that wouldn't have happened," she says of her progression. "And if you were a 21-year-old person, passionate about changing the world, and you are in government and get the chance to be part of that story, of course you take it. But if we hadn't been in government it would have been a different path, absolutely."

Newman insists he wants to do for the state what he did for the city during his seven years at City Hall. And having trained in the army as an engineer, before earning an MBA and branching out into business, he insists he has the skills and the ability to cut through in a way that Labor can't or won't after all these years in office at the state level.

"The trouble with the Australian Labor Party and their supposed government of this state is that they are about the Labor Party, they are about politics," Newman says.

"I am about outcomes. Let's be very clear. I served the city. Humbly, I believe I made a big contribution in terms of providing infrastracture, public transports, parks and gardens . . . planning. That's the track record of my service to the community."

In a crack at his other opponent, Bligh, he adds: "I don't run around and cosy up to rugby league, rugby union, netball players and stars and pretend I'm something I'm not . . . I'm authentic, I'm real, I want to deliver. That's the choice we will have here in Ashgrove and in Queensland. It's as simple as that."