Welcome to Steven Miles’s nightmare: Queensland ALP faces election oblivion
Polls show that Queensland Labor is facing defeat at the October 26 election, and some ALP insiders fear the Premier and his likely leadership successor Shannon Fentiman could also lose their seats.
Queensland Labor is confronting a nightmare scenario in which Premier Steven Miles and future leadership contender Shannon Fentiman lose their seats, with massive swings against the third-term government in Brisbane’s outer suburbs.
In a rerun of the 2012 “decapitation” strike by the Liberal National Party that ousted a swag of senior Bligh government cabinet ministers, Labor is facing the possibility of opposition after the October 26 election without key members of its leadership.
Senior ALP insiders told The Australian the statewide swing that is almost certain to lead to a change in government was particularly strong in regional Queensland and Brisbane’s fringe.
The government lost its Labor heartland seat of Ipswich West, just outside Brisbane, in a by-election in March this year after suffering a 17 per cent swing to the LNP.
Mr Miles holds the outer north Brisbane seat of Murrumba on a margin of 11.33 per cent – which had increased by about 2 per cent at the 2020 election on the back of a statewide swing to then Palaszczuk government after its border lockdowns in Covid.
Internal polling has indicated Ms Fentiman, the Queensland Health Minister tipped as a frontrunner to become opposition leader if the LNP wins the election, is facing a two-party-preferred swing of 13 per cent in her outer Brisbane seat of Waterford, which she holds on a Covid-boosted margin of 16.02 per cent.
A senior ALP source said both Mr Miles and Ms Fentiman could lose their seats. “The statewide swing against Labor is worse in outer suburbia,’’ the source said.
“When they swing out there, they swing big and it is often enough to tip them out, even with the bigger margins they are sitting on. Cost of living and crime are the big issues; where they are being felt the most is in the outer suburbs, the rental and mortgage belts.’’
Mr Miles declined to comment about the speculation.
Former Queensland premier Campbell Newman lost his Brisbane seat of Ashgrove in 2015 when his government was ousted after just one term by the Annastacia Palaszczuk-led Labor.
Internal ALP polling is understood to show the swing against the Miles government was weaker in the inner city of Brisbane, but there remains a risk it could lose seats to the Greens.
Demographic profiler John Black said “ground zero” for the campaign was Brisbane’s suburban fringe and the state’s regional centres, where its famously volatile voters swung hardest.
The former Queensland Labor senator said that put Mr Miles in the firing line. The problem for Labor was that both key battlegrounds were thick with blue-collar workers who traditionally leaned ALP, and had largely stuck with the state government under Ms Palaszczuk before she was succeeded by her one-time deputy last December, but they had been “walking out the door” federally on the ALP and he anticipated the trend would accelerate in Queensland in the build-up to October 26.
“I’d expect to see the Labor vote in some of inner-city areas generally hold up,’’ he said. “But the outer suburban areas are a very different story; I think Labor is going to get caned there, as well as in the regional cities.
“Places like Rockhampton, Gladstone, Townsville, Mackay and to an extent some of the inland mining communities … contain concentrations of blue-collar jobs … a lot more tradies, a lot more people in manufacturing.
“This is the group that has been walking out the door on Labor for the past 20 years or so, and that trend is accelerating.”
Former Queensland Liberal campaign chair Graham Young, who heads conservative think tank Australian Institute for Progress, said the state’s decentralised population spread underpinned its distinctive electoral politics.
