LNP takes leaf from Greens’ playbook to win back Queensland

Queensland’s Liberal National Party will mimic Greens old-style campaign tactics in an ambitious plan to win 14 seats and topple Annastacia Palaszczuk.

Queensland LNP State Leader David Crisafulli knows the value of shoe-leather campaigning and wants to use it to unseat the Labor government. Picture: David Clark

Queensland’s Liberal National Party will mimic Greens campaign tactics in an ambitious plan to win 14 seats and topple Annastacia Palaszczuk’s third-term government at the state election.

LNP leader David Crisafulli watched closely as the Greens ambushed a trio of Brisbane seats at the May federal election, winning all three after knocking on tens of thousands of doors to sell policy plans face-to-face.

Mr Crisafulli will go back to old-style politicking, showing up on voters’ doorstep and hosting public forums, in a bid to break the dominance of Labor, which has governed for 28 of the past 33 years.

“It is a monumental task, 14 seats. The scale of that is never lost on me,” he told The Australian. “The government is obviously wobbling a bit at the moment and that makes people emboldened, but I keep hosing down ­expectations.

“We are not yet where we need to be to win an election.”

Ms Palaszczuk became the first Queensland premier to increase a government’s seat count across three successive elections in 2020, cementing herself as one of the most successful female politicians in Australian history.

But her shine has been dulling as a series of integrity failures dog her government. A YouGov poll, published by The Courier Mail last week, revealed primary support for Labor had plunged six points since the last election.

The poll suggests support for Labor and the LNP is split 50-50 on a two-party-preferred basis but Ms Palaszczuk retained a strong lead on Mr Crisafulli as preferred premier – 41 per cent to 28 per cent.

Facing the daunting task of wresting more than a dozen seats off Labor on the back of the LNP’s 35.89 per cent primary vote at the last election, Mr Crisafulli said his party would need to rapidly grow its membership base, which sits at about 11,000 people.

“It is not just having more ­people but members who are heavily engaged – that was the success of the Greens and the teals,” he said.

“They (won seats) by being hungry and working, and there is a message in that for all of us – there aren’t safe seats.

“What those movements (teal and Greens) show is that if you are prepared to work on the ground, people will come on that journey.”

Mr Crisafulli, a former Townsville deputy mayor, learnt the value of shoe-leather campaigning in his 2004 debut campaign for a seat on the 100 per cent Labor-controlled council.

“The ward I won was a very blue-collar, working-class suburb; I doorknocked every house that election and then I went back again,” he said.

LNP leader David Crisafulli. Picture: Tara Croser

After launching a co-ordinated on-the-ground campaign at June’s Callide by-election – which saw LNP candidate Bryson Head win with a 6 per cent swing – Mr Crisafulli plans to roll it out in marginal seats across the state.

“We put up a really young, fresh face; he was hungry to win. We went there en masse, we road-sided, we doorknocked and we hand-wrote letters and it worked.

“Newsflash for our political opponents – we are hungry and we are going to be doing it across the state.”

Success at the October 2024 state election will be hard but not impossible, with nine of the target seats below a 4 per cent margin.

The state opposition is yet to outline substantial policy in the first half of the four-year term, focused instead on attacking the state’s growing health crisis and wedging Labor on youth crime.

“People will well and truly know where we stand on every issue; they won’t be going to an election with questions,” Mr Crisafulli said.