Election 2022: Liberal rising star Amanda Stoker in Senate limbo

A fiercely competitive Senate contest in Queensland at the May 21 general election comes down to a brutal mathematical equation: what does five into two equal?

Queensland Senate hopeful Clive Palmer. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

A fiercely competitive Senate contest in Queensland at the May 21 general election comes down to a brutal mathematical equation: what does five into two equal?

In this case, likely disappointment for rising Liberal star and assistant minister Amanda Stoker, who is in the firing line to miss out on one of the final two quotas being chased by a personality-studded field of Pauline Hanson, Clive Palmer and former premier Campbell Newman, rounded out by schoolteacher Penny Allman-Payne for the Greens.

This assumes the top four spots are shared equally by Labor and the Coalition’s merged Queensland arm, the Liberal National Party – a good bet on current polling.

In 2019, the unpopularity of then leader Bill Shorten reduced the ALP’s Senate vote in Queensland to 22.5 per cent, returning only one candidate. The LNP got three. Fortunately for the No.2 on the Labor ticket this time around, former state secretary and campaign boss Anthony Chisholm, the tide appears to have turned. The Australian Financial Review’s Ipsos poll last week found Labor’s overall primary vote in Queensland had bounced back to 35 per cent.

When preferences were factored in, the two-party-preferred split favoured it by 51-43 per cent over the LNP, with 7 per cent undecided. But an analysis of Newspoll over the three months to late March was less emphatic for the ALP, registering only a one-point increase in its primary vote in Queensland to 32 per cent, well behind the LNP on 40 per cent.

What can be said with confidence is that Senate incumbents James McGrath, at No.1 on the LNP ticket, and former cabinet minister Matt Canavan at No.2 will be returned.

A darling of the Christian right who has joined street marches against abortion and voluntary euthanasia, the eloquent Senator Stoker, 39, faces an uphill fight for one of the final two, deeply contested positions. Her No.3 ranking is problematic but not irretrievable given the LNP routinely wins three and on occasion four spots at a regulation half-Senate election: it will come down to whether Fortress Queensland again delivers for the Coalition and how much of a quota is left for her once preferences flow.

Congestion on the right side of the ballot, however, leaves her vying for supporters also being wooed by Senator Hanson, a big-spending Mr Palmer for his United Australia Party and high-profile Mr Newman for the Liberal Democrats. Like fractions in a maths equation, they risk cancelling each other out.

The Greens, on the march in southeast Queensland at local and state level, could be the beneficiary.

While One Nation’s vote tanked at the 2020 state election, Senator Hanson, 67, is favoured to notch up a first in her long and chequered political career and be re-elected.

True, Ipsos had the Hanson party’s primary vote in Queensland at 6 per cent, less than half a quota. But a combination of name recognition and minor party preferences from the likes of Katter’s Australia Party will get her up, most pundits say. That would pose an intriguing test for Anthony Albanese were he to become Australia’s 31st prime minister. Never has Labor in office had to deal with One Nation.

Originally elected to the house as a disendorsed Liberal candidate in the 1996 election that brought the Coalition to power under John Howard, Senator Hanson and her fellow travellers from One Nation were long gone by the time Kevin Rudd prevailed for Labor in 2007. Having served only the one term, she did not return to parliament until the 2016 double-dissolution poll called by Malcolm Turnbull effectively halved the Senate quota.

Labor stridently rejects her divisive views on race and immigration, but in the near-certain event of another hung Senate, it would have to find a way to deal with her should it win.