Catholics crucial to Labor’s Longman win

The Catholic vote ‘walloped’ the LNP in Longman in a trend Labor leader Bill Shorten could repeat for substaintial gain.

Mother Melissa Smith and her 4-year-old twins Gracie and Fletcher and her 5-year-old daughter Evie. Picture: Sarah Marshall

Catholic voters were a key force for Labor in last weekend’s ­Longman by-election victory amid the ­nationwide funding brawl between the Turnbull government and church schools, analysis has revealed.

Labor’s gains came despite low-income families appearing to reject Bill Shorten’s controversial “class warfare” campaign in the fast-growing southeast Queensland electorate, according to ­demographer and former ALP senator John Black.

Instead, the opposition’s stocks rose among highly educated, wealthy professionals — a trend which, if repeated at the next federal election, could cause substantial Labor gains to be ­diverted away from battleground seats to heartland electorates ­already held on comfortable ­margins.

The Coalition found new supporters among single-parent families, semi-skilled blue-collar workers, voters on welfare such as carers, the unemployed and ­people with disabilities. However, only four of the nation’s 20 most disadvantaged seats — Page in NSW, Braddon and Lyons in Tasmania, and Longman — are considered marginal.

The government won votes among seniors across Longman, despite its support in the retirement haven of Bribie Island collapsing to 53.4 per cent after preferences — the worst Coalition result there since 1998. This suggests the Coalition could have an edge in defending the battleground seats of Gilmore on NSW’s south coast and Flynn in central Queensland.

Mr Black, the chief executive of Australian Development Strategies, found Catholic voters were a “significant driver” of the Liberal National Party’s losses in ­Longman.

“The Catholic vote walloped the LNP in Longman and it could have been a lot worse without ­increased support from Australians about to retire,” he writes in The Weekend Australian today.

Marginal Sydney electorates such as inner-western Reid, held by Workplace Relations Minister Craig Laundy, and outer-western Lindsay, held by Labor’s embattled Emma Husar, are among the ­nation’s 20 most Catholic seats.

There are also almost 6000 students enrolled at Catholic schools in the marginal seats bordering Longman in Brisbane’s north: Dickson, held by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, and Petrie, held by Liberal MP Luke Howarth.

Dickson mother of three Melissa Smith, whose five-year-old daughter Evie attends Our Lady of the Way Primary School in Petrie, hoped the school could continue its programs without raising fees.

“In the future, will I be able to afford to send my kids to a Catholic school or will I have to send them to a state school? We’ll need to look at other avenues,” Ms Smith, 40, said yesterday.

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Ms Smith said she would support Labor candidate Ali France because she believed the Coalition was failing veterans.

Dickson paramedic Brenda Worth, 38, who sends her two children to Our Lady of the Way, previously voted Liberal but said education funding was shaping as “a major issue” for her.

“Health and education funding are the most important for me,” Ms Worth said.

“I voted for the Liberals in 2016 but I am not necessarily a Liberal voter. I will see who is doing a better job at the election.”

Mr Dutton, who won Dickson from Labor’s Cheryl Kernot in 2001, held the seat on a 2 per cent margin in 2016.

Mr Howarth, whose margin is 1.6 per cent, was one of the few ­Coalition MPs to gain ground at the last election.

Labor strategists believe the Catholic schools’ eleventh-hour letter to parents on the topic of school funding played a significant role in the Longman victory.

“It was absolutely strong and essentially a third-party endorsement of Labor’s core message — funding for essential services like education and health, counter to a tax break to banks,” one ALP figure said, noting that voters intrinsically trusted Catholic educators more than politicians.

Brisbane Catholic Education stressed the letters outlined the parties’ positions only and “did not advocate that parents should vote for, or support, one political party — or candidate — over another”.

Other factors included Labor’s strong campaign presence, support from trade unions, a final-week advertising blitz, and attacks on LNP candidate Trevor Ruthenberg drawing attention to his time as an MP under unpopular former premier Campbell Newman.

Labor’s “better hospitals not bigger banks” catchcry — which linked the Coalition’s curbing of projected growth in health spending to promised company tax cuts — was devastating.

LNP president Gary Spence said Longman “was always going to be a difficult seat to win”.

“Not only did we have to fight against Labor’s lies, we also had to manage expectations created by the media that did not reflect our internal polling,” Mr Spence wrote to party members.

The LNP’s primary vote crashed 9.4 per cent to 29.7 per cent last Saturday, compared with 45 per cent for Liberal John ­Alexander at the Bennelong by-election in Sydney last December. However, the Longman two-party swing of 3.6 per cent was lower than the 4.8 per cent swing against the government in Bennelong.

Mr Ruthenberg is likely to win preselection should he seek it for the poll due by May 18.

In the Tasmanian seat of Braddon, where there was little change from the 2016 election result, the Coalition appeared to win back many voters who swung to Labor for the first time.

Ann Sudmalis, the Liberal MP for Gilmore since 2013, said seniors seemed “pretty happy” with the government, citing its popular reverse-mortgage policy and new taxpayer-subsidised pharmaceuticals. However, she said she had been working hard to hold the trust of voters in anticipation of another “Mediscare-style” campaign by Labor at the general election. “I try not to be negative, but if Labor stacks a whole stack of lies into the electorate like they did last time and people believe it, then they’ll vote that way,” she said.

ADDITIONAL REPORTING: TOM McKINNON