Queensland election: Light on policy, but LNP’s David Crisafulli looks to be home and hosed

Queensland Opposition Leader David Crisafulli. Picture: Liam Kidston

Queenslanders look as though they have made their minds up – it’s time for change.

After decades of Labor dominance at a state level – holding power for 30 of the past 35 years – David Crisafulli and the Liberal National Party are as near as you can be to a certainty of winning the October 26 election.

Newspoll puts the LNP on track to return to government nine years after the explosive Campbell Newman single-term interlude with a solid but not crushing nine- or 10-seat majority in the 93-member unicameral parliament. It would give Crisafulli, a former minister in the Newman government, a free hand to deliver what can only be described, so far, as his ill-defined agenda.

The comfort for Labor – and it’s a very limited one – is that Steven Miles seems to have arrested the party’s plunge in its support under Annastacia Palaszczuk.

Following a third election victory on the trot in 2020 on the back of pensioner support for her hardline Covid border lockdowns, voters became increasingly turned off by her meandering government and penchant for the red carpet.

The change in leadership last December to Miles, pushed by his union backers, seems to have put Labor on track to save at least some of the furniture in its stronghold of Brisbane.

It has also been helped along by Miles’ June budget, with $3.7bn in handouts to voters – most with an expiry date that falls in the months after the poll.

Despite the spending spree, Labor’s primary vote of 30 per cent remains unchanged from where it was in the Newspoll conducted in March.

And the results shows that a slight majority of voters believe Crisafulli is ready to govern.

Miles and Crisafulli are making their debuts in leading their parties into an election, the first time that has happened since Wayne Goss and Russell Cooper faced off in 1989.

The intense scrutiny and grind of the campaign will test them both in different ways.

Miles, who has given his premiership a red-hot go in trying to tackle some of the major issues unattended by Palaszczuk – like confronting the youth crime crisis with tougher action – will have to defend the government’s lacklustre record and its plans for the future, including its questionable $20bn-plus switch to pumped hydro to secure the state’s power supply to meet its emissions targets.

Crisafulli has seemingly done the impossible and unified and brought discipline to an opposition that for years was riven by personal animosity and poor policy. But while his small-target strategy has kept the focus on Labor’s failings, the LNP leader needs to detail his policies, particularly on the economy and the state’s rocketing debt.

The swing is often patchy in Queensland, and Labor – with the deep-pocket backing of the unions – will be fighting for every seat to try to deprive the LNP of winning the extra 12 seats it needs for a majority.

Already, we are seeing signs that Labor is going to run the mother of all scare campaigns against the LNP.

Miles should be wary.

Before the 2012 campaign, the polling results were similar, with the LNP on 56 per cent on a two-party preferred basis to Labor’s 44 per cent.

But then Labor premier Anna Bligh launched her now-infamous mid-campaign personal attack on Newman, throwing all sorts of unfounded allegations against him.

It blew up in her face and outraged voters, who then delivered the LNP its biggest victory in Australian history.