Queensland election: ‘Get Jackie Trad’ strategy widens to marginals

Queensland’s LNP is set to preference Labor last in key marginal seats at this month’s state election, widening its ‘get Jackie Trad’ strategy.

Queensland Labor MP Jackie Trad. Picture: Claudia Baxter

The Liberal National Party is set to preference Labor last in key marginal seats at this month’s Queensland election, widening its “get Jackie Trad” strategy from inner-city South Brisbane.

LNP campaign director Lincoln Folo said the party executive would weigh a range of preference plans, though the priority was to lift the base vote on October 31.

Asked if putting Labor below the Greens and potentially One Nation was on the cards outside South Brisbane, he said: “At the moment, yes. There is a whole suite of options available and that is one the state executive will consider.

“I know that Labor has got pretty agitated about this, to claim some sort of deal between us and the Greens. But they have been doing this since the early 90s and I am not sure who Labor is accepting preferences from.”

The LNP’s move to preference Labor last in South Brisbane is ­designed to deny former deputy premier Ms Trad the secondary votes that saved her in 2017 from defeat by the Greens.

If Labor loses the election and Ms Trad retains her seat, she would be in the running to succeed Annastacia Palaszczuk as Labor leader in the likely event the Premier stepped aside. Should both the government and she be returned, Ms Trad could demand to be reinstated to the position of power she commanded as treasurer and deputy to Ms Palaszczuk.

Those roles have gone respectively to Cameron Dick, of the Labor Right, and Ms Trad’s former lieutenant in the factional Left, Health Minister Steven Miles.

She was forced to quit her ­portfolios and as deputy premier in May in the face of allegations that she had interfered in the ­appointment of a state school principal in South Brisbane, the second integrity scandal in a year to engulf her.

But after the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission cleared her, Ms Trad, 48, said she wasn’t in politics to “just ­occupy a seat”, telling this newspaper she would “love” to serve in any capacity in a re-elected Labor government. “I have enormous capacity, I think that is well recognised,” she said.

Mr Folo’s comments are the strongest indication yet that the LNP will pursue a broad-based strategy of preferencing Labor last, as all sides gear up for Ms Palaszczuk to fire the starter’s gun on the formal campaign early next week, likely on Tuesday.

The state election is historic, the first to be conducted on a fixed date in Queensland and the first to deliver the winner a guaranteed four-year term, up from the current span of three.

Labor and the LNP enter the campaign neck-and-neck in the opinion polls, with the latest Newspoll putting the conservative side a nose ahead on the two-party preferred vote, 51-49 per cent.

But Ms Palaszczuk is far more popular than LNP leader Deb Frecklington, whose approval rating in Newspoll is net negative. Satisfaction with the Premier’s handling of COVID-19 slipped from 81 per cent in July to 68 per cent as of September 21, while her overall approval rating was steady on 63 per cent.

Labor insiders say the party is reaching out to LNP voters in South Brisbane to “educate” them about the consequences of the LNP’s preferencing strategy — that it would potentially give the Greens a second seat in state ­parliament, a setback for responsible governance, the ALP maintains.

If the LNP preferences the ALP last in other seats it could also face criticism of aiding One Nation in regional contests where the Hanson party comes second behind Labor.

“The state executive is yet to determine what we do,” Mr Folo said.

“My focus is on lifting the primary vote. The way we form government is by increasing our primary vote and that is the task we set ourselves at the (2019) federal election … and that is the task we set ourselves now.”