Labor likely to lose Ipswich West, hold Inala in Qld by-elections
Steven Miles kept smiling, but Queensland Labor is on track to lose heartland Ipswich West amid a huge swing in Inala in by-elections, as the LNP holds Brisbane council.
Labor is on the brink of losing the heartland state seat of Ipswich West after a brutal swing against Steven Miles’s ALP, but will hold Annastacia Palaszczuk’s old seat of Inala despite a voter backlash, after a Super Saturday of elections.
Insider ALP analysis provided to The Australian predicts a final two-party-preferred vote in Ipswich West, on Brisbane’s outskirts, of 53 per cent to the LNP’s Darren Zanow and 47 per cent to Labor’s Wendy Bourne, a swing against Labor of 17.4 per cent.
The Legalise Cannabis Party secured a large protest vote of about 15 per cent primary, but despite Labor’s strategy of recruiting ALP supporters to hand out how-to-vote cards for the pro-weed party, an estimated 40 per cent of preferences flowed to the LNP.
See our election-night blog here.
Ipswich West was vacated by Labor’s “Call Me Sir’’ MP Jim Madden, who quit parliament to run for local council and had held the electorate on a margin of 14.3 per cent.
Despite suffering a forecast swing of about 20 per cent against it, Labor will hold Inala, with government staffer Margie Nightingale to replace former Premier Ms Palaszczuk as the safe seat’s MP.
The significant swings against Labor in the two heartland seats, as well as a crushing statewide Newspoll result published in The Australian on Friday, will be a wakeup call to the Queensland Labor government, which was hoping for a popularity bounce after Mr Miles replaced Ms Palaszczuk in December.
Queensland ratepayers also went to the polls in council elections across the state. In Australia’s largest local government area, the Brisbane City Council, the Liberal National Party’s Adrian Schrinner has been re-elected as Lord Mayor of Brisbane and the LNP has retained its majority in council.
Many Brisbane City wards are still too close to call, with slow vote-counting hampering predictions, but it looks as if the Greens will at least double the number of wards held, from one to two, picking up Paddington from the LNP. The progressive minor party has also had swings towards it in the LNP-held wards of Enoggera and Walter Taylor.
But despite early optimism from the Greens, it has not yet leapfrogged Labor to become the official opposition.
Labor has suffered swings away from it in Wynnum-Manly, and the LNP is hopeful of picking up that ward, but Labor is still optimistic about picking up Calamvale from the LNP.
If the ALP loses Wynnum-Manly and fails to win Calamvale, the party will slump to just four wards of the Brisbane City Council’s 25 divisions.
Across the rest of the state, Labor member and veteran Townsville mayor Jenny Hill – who has been mayor of the north Queensland city since 2012 – is at risk of losing her job to ex-One Nation candidate Troy Thompson.
Ms Hill is on 43 per cent primary vote, and Mr Thompson has taken 47 per cent of the first- preference votes, in a city that has been seriously affected by youth crime.
On the Gold Coast, LNP member and incumbent mayor Tom Tate has been re-elected. In division 7 on the Gold Coast, accused murderer and sitting councillor Ryan Bayldon-Lumsden won 20 per cent of the primary vote, behind Joe Wilkinson (24.5 per cent) and Jenna Schroeder (24 per cent), with the result too close to call.
In the southern Queensland coastal city of Bundaberg, in the Wide Bay region, incumbent mayor Jack Dempsey – a former LNP state MP and police officer – looks to be in strife with about 15 per cent of the vote counted.
Small business owner Helen Blackburn has picked up 57 per cent of the primary vote, compared with Mr Dempsey’s 31 per cent.
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