Labor gains from One Nation decline

For the second state election running, One Nation voters have come to the rescue of Labor in Queensland to deliver Annastacia Palaszczuk a historic third term.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson meets voters at Glenmore State High School in Rockhampton on Saturday.

For the second state election running, One Nation voters have come to the rescue of Labor in Queensland to deliver Annastacia Palaszczuk a historic third term.

This was despite a collapse in its vote to half of what it polled in 2017 — an outcome that would threaten Pauline Hanson’s re-election were she to seek another term in the Senate.

The slump in the One Nation primary vote, from 13.7 per cent at the previous Queensland election to 6.9 per cent on counting so far, was critical to the surprise 5.2 per cent swing to Labor that returned the government with an increased majority.

Most of the voters shed by the Hanson party marched across to the ALP, returns show. One ­Nation’s aged supporter base ­appears to have been seduced by Ms Palaszczuk’s campaign pitch on borders and “keeping Queenslanders safe” from COVID-19.

This was the biggest single shift at the election and could account for the swing to Labor and the 1.9 per cent picked up by the LNP.

“I think we both effectively squeezed One Nation, but it ­appears the ultimate beneficiary of that was Labor,” one LNP source said.

Sky News commentator Alan Jones agreed that much of the vote One Nation captured in 2017 had transferred to Labor. “Those votes had to find their place somewhere tonight and it’s clear that a lot of them have gone to Labor,” he said on Saturday.

Senator Hanson was an uncharacteristically subdued presence in the campaign and did not travel with accompanying media, as was the case in 2017.

Her chief of staff, James Ashby, blamed the closure of ­regional commercial media outlets including some News Corp print titles for sidelining One ­Nation in its provincial heartland.

In 2017, One Nation preferences tipped the balance to Labor in four critical seats in Brisbane then held by the LNP – northside ­Aspley, southside Mansfield, bayside Redlands and westside Mount Ommaney. With the exception of Mount Ommaney, all were priority LNP targets at Saturday’s election. None came back to the conservatives.

This time it was the plunge in One Nation’s base vote that benefited Labor.

In Pumicestone on the lip of the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane, the One Nation primary vote sank from 23.3 per cent in 2017 to 7 per cent, while Labor’s surged nearly 11 points to 46.3 per cent. The LNP vote went from 29.9 per cent to 38 per cent — not enough to save the seat, which went to the ALP.

In nearby Caloundra, another LNP loss, the One Nation primary dropped from 22.6 per cent to 5.4 per cent. Again, Labor’s gain exceeded that of the LNP, going from 28.7 to 41.6 per cent. In both seats, the LNP faced the compounding disadvantage of its sitting MPs retiring.

The LNP’s failure to pick up any of Labor’s three marginal seats in Townsville was a critical setback. Take the electorate of Mundingburra, where Labor was under the pump with the tight 1.13 per cent margin and the withdrawal of the sitting MP Coralee O’Rourke due to ill health only five weeks out from polling day.

One Nation’s 16.7 per cent share of the vote in 2017 fell to 4.4 per cent and Labor’s climbed from 31.4 per cent to 38.5 per cent, propelling former Townsville deputy mayor Les Walker across the line. The LNP’s man, police ­inspector Glenn Doyle, lifted the party’s primary vote from 26.1 per cent to 33.2 per cent but could not close the gap.

In its heyday in 1998, the 22.8 per cent vote One Nation grabbed at the state election netted 11 seats and doomed Rob Borbidge’s Nationals-led coalition government in a tight race with Labor under Peter Beattie, who went on to win three more terms.

Senator Hanson, 66, brought the party back from the political dead in 2016 when it secured four Senate quotas in Queensland, NSW and WA and then won upper house seats in the state parliaments in those jurisdictions.