Bluewater flows to the minnows

The voters of Bluewater have walked away from the major parties and it seems to be the start of something big.

Ex-soldier Shaun Webb on his property at Bluewater, north of Townsville, will be sticking with Bob Katter’s Australian Party on May 18. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen.

They’re older, poorer, crankier than most. The voters of Bluewater, north Queensland, have walked away from the major parties and it seems to be the start of something big.

At the 2016 federal election, nearly half of them swore off Labor and the Liberal National Party and ticked the box of a minnow party. Pauline Hanson cleaned up, her candidate for the Townsville-based seat of Herbert grabbing 24.84 per cent of the vote at the Bluewater polling station, surpassing the ALP’s share. But it didn’t stop there. Bob Katter’s Australian Party pulled 9.7 per cent, the ticket of Palmer United Party defector Glenn Lazarus got 3.3 per cent and Family First 2.92 per cent. When the Greens’ 3.08 per cent was added, the minor-party vote swelled to 45.43 per cent.

Newspoll this week showed it was no aberration. While the eye-catcher was the performance of big-spending Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, the survey of four key marginals for this newspaper showed the minnows’ combined vote in Herbert was 40 per cent and nudging 24 per cent in the WA seat of Pearce.

The lesson from Bluewater, a town and hinterland of horse country north of Townsville, is voters no longer see their choice as being a binary one between Labor red and conservative blue. The old certainties of Australian politics have broken down, along with people’s trust in the system.

Ex-soldier Shaun Webb, 44, voted LNP at the last federal election but switched to KAP in the 2017 Queensland poll. He will be staying with Katter this time ­because he liked the job KAP state MP Nick Dametto did after Bluewater was hit by floods in February.

Mr Webb’s home by the creek went under three times, wrecking it. “I’m not a One Nation fan but the KAP bloke was here all the time when we needed it,” he said. “He turns up to the community centre, he got the emergency services in, and I think that’s the difference. The major parties don’t have a relationship with the community … they are just interested in getting into government.”

Taking the pulse of voters in Bluewater this week — the booth at the local state school collected 1389 ballot papers in 2016 — we found strong support for UAP, a surprise given the proximity of Mr Palmer’s failed QNI nickel ­refinery at Yabulu and the late ­announcement of his candidate in Herbert, former rugby league international Greg Dowling.

The seat is the most marginal in the country, held by first-term Labor MP Cathy O’Toole by only 37 votes. One Nation’s Amy Lohse, who ran unsuccessfully for state parliament in 2017 in distant Gladstone, has ground to make up after entering the race this week without the benefit of UAP’s massive ad spending. KAP’s ­Nanette Radeck and the LNP candidate, Phillip Thompson, a ­returned soldier who was injured in Afghanistan, have been in place for months and are campaigning strongly. Sam Blackadder for the Greens and Tamara Durant of Fraser Anning’s Conservative ­National Party round out the field.

The resentment has smouldered on a long fuse in Bluewater. At the 2010 election following the knifing of Kevin Rudd by Julia Gillard, the major parties cornered a combined 86.51 per cent of the local vote (49.15 per cent LNP, 37.36 per cent ALP). The Greens and Family First split the rest.

When Tony Abbott returned the Coalition to power in 2013, the LNP was down to 42.61 per cent in Bluewater, and Labor, in Ms O’Toole’s first outing as candidate, barely 23.46 per cent. One in three votes cast then was for a minor party, with Mr Palmer’s PUP breaking out on 13 per cent.

At the 2016 double-dissolution poll called by Malcolm Turnbull, after his take-down of Mr Abbott, the combined ALP-LNP vote fell to 54.58 per cent. One Nation looks to have peaked then: this week’s Newspoll gave it 9 per cent in Herbert, against 14 per cent for UAP and 10 per cent for KAP. The Hanson party was on 6 per cent in Pearce, but barely registered in the Melbourne seat of Deakin or in Lindsay in Sydney’s outer west, while UAP was 5 per cent and 7 per cent respectively in those electorates.

Retired teacher Marie Craig, 72, is leaning towards UAP in Bluewater. She hasn’t forgotten what Mr Palmer did at Yabulu when his company laid off nearly 800 workers and stuck taxpayers with most of the bill. But she’s willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when he advertises that the plant’s administrators were to blame, not him. “He used to be wonderful to his workers, he gave them cars and holidays,” she said. “He might be a bit dodgy but he’s a businessman.”

Former Labor voter Donna Hudson said she would probably vote KAP, though she doesn’t know a lot about Ms Radeck. The president of the local equestrian club, Ms Hudson, 54, thinks the Katter party is more in tune with people who live outside the city. “I like it because it’s a little party that represents little people,” she said.

Aged-care executive Deborah Carson, 49, is frustrated by poor services. Before the summer floods, power in Bluewater failed repeatedly due to problems with the local network. Like many voters, she doesn’t distinguish between local, state and federal responsibilities. “We are like the community on the fringes … an inconvenience to the conduct of the government,” Ms Carson said. She voted informal in 2016 and will probably do so again on May 18.

Truck driver Graham Sherlock, 56, said he was likely to switch his vote from LNP to the Palmer party, while Ray Lawrence, a retired firefighter, thought he would go for Katter. “A lot of the people here have a very conservative view,” said Mr Lawrence, 70. Mr Katter’s opposition to the recruitment of foreign workers on 457 visas and foreign land acquisition, an issue also played up in UAP ads, resonates with him. “This nation is being carved up by greedy politicians,” he complained. Tina Swift, 46, who works with husband Shane in their plastering business, said she was tossing up between One ­Nation and KAP. Crime is her chief concern. “The bigger parties don’t seem to give a rat’s,” she said.

These voters are a microcosm of how the Australian electorate is fracturing on geographic and demographic lines, overlaying the traditional differences between Labor and Liberal. The median age is Bluewater is 40, against 37.5 nationally, while weekly household income is $101 below the ­national median of $1438.

Newspoll’s David Briggs said the leadership chaos over the past decade under Labor and the ­Coalition had been a big factor in eroding support on both sides, ­especially in Queensland, the epicentre of the right-wing, populist parties. “A substantial swath of the electorate is now looking for an ­alternative,” he said. “What you are seeing there in Bluewater is just … the pinnacle.”