Trouble for Kevin Rudd in regional Queensland

WHEN Tony Abbott's people crunch the numbers that count most, they should run the ruler carefully over regional Queensland.

WHEN Tony Abbott's people crunch the numbers that count most - those that could pull off the next long shot of his career and bring down Kevin Rudd - they should run the ruler carefully over regional Queensland.

While aggregated national opinion polls show a sizeable majority of Australians want action on climate change, the view becomes more nuanced on the ground, where elections turn, removed from the beltway thinking of inner Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne.

In tropical Cairns -- where the near-miss recession dried up tourism, demolished the construction sector and delivered the nation's highest unemployment rate -- voters are searching for security.

Swimming pool manufacturer Anne-Marie Whelan voted Labor at the last election but feels tempted to stray. The Prime Minister can hardly be blamed for the global financial crisis, she reasons, yet the Opposition Leader seems to have a recipe for recovery.

Disillusioned by rising interest rates and high unemployment, the swinging voter fears Labor's emissions trading scheme will harm the small business, M & A Designer Pools, she started 35 years ago with husband Mike.

"Any more pressure and business in Australia is going to be a disaster," Ms Whelan said yesterday.

"I have never seen the Cairns economy so bleak and so terribly depressed. Throw in a new tax, with increasing interest rates and you are looking for trouble -- it's a done deal if an election is called."

In Townsville, former soldier Steve Wilson, 47, reckons Mr Abbott is a better fit with conservative voters.

A committed Liberal voter who backed John Howard through his four terms of office, Mr Wilson was having second thoughts about Malcolm Turnbull -- partly because he seemed incapable of laying a glove on the Prime Minister.

"Turnbull was probably not right-wing enough for the Liberals, to be honest," he said yesterday.

To claw back power, the Coalition must retain regional seats such as Townsville-based Herbert, where Mr Wilson supports a partner and their four children on a public servant's salary.

A Newspoll last month of voter sentiment in six key Queensland marginal seats -- all Liberal-held or notionally conservative prior to the 2007 election that brought Mr Rudd to office, half of them Labor gains at that climactic poll -- showed the government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme could yet be its Achilles heel.

The Member for Herbert -- veteran Liberal Peter Lindsay, 65, who entered parliament at John Howard's breakthrough election win in 1996 and survived the 2007 "Ruddslide" -- is lining up to go around again.

He backed Mr Turnbull in the leadership spill, but now hopes Mr Abbott's strong-mindedness and conservative streak will mend fences between the Coalition in Queensland, where firebrand Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce has made a hobby of white-anting any left-leaning Liberal agenda.

"Abbott will be able to bring them back into the tent," Mr Lindsay said of the Nationals yesterday. "That will stop the political bleeding that's happened in Queensland, and we will better work together."

Although still supportive of an emissions trading scheme, he recognises it would be dangerous ground in the looming election. "My reading is that Tony's position will be widely acclaimed in the electorate," Mr Lindsay said. "It would be a brave government that goes to a double dissolution on a matter like this, because Tony Abbott will fight it tooth and nail."

In the Cairns-based seat of Leichhardt, another "Howard hero", Warren Entsch, has come out of retirement to contest the election due next year.

In his absence, in 2007, Jim Turnour comfortably won the seat for the ALP by a margin of 4 per cent, pared back slightly by a subsequent electoral redistribution.

If Mr Abbott is to cut through as Liberal leader, it needs to happen with voters such as those in Leichhardt. Mr Entsch's high profile gives the Liberals a leg-up there, but they are coming off a base much diminished by Mr Rudd's enduring popularity. Tellingly, Mr Entsch, 59, is not talking up the conservatives' prospects of returning to government under Abbott.

"I don't think people will go to the next election believing there will be a change in government," he told The Australian.

"But I do believe that they will go to the next election and say, `Is this person going to stand up for our community?', and I think I can put up a good-enough argument and have the runs on the board to suggest I can be just as effective in and out of government."

The one-time crocodile farmer and catcher is a study in the divided loyalties of the Liberal Party Mr Abbott now leads.

Mr Entsch is personally close to leadership aspirant Joe Hockey -- they share a property line on the Atherton Tablelands, west of Cairns -- but insists Mr Abbott would have won his vote in the partyroom had he been there for Tuesday's showdown.

As for the deposed Mr Turnbull, he says: "The challenge for Tony is how he brings people together. Malcolm couldn't do it."

The hip-pocket cost of the emissions trading scheme is just starting to register on voters' radars.

In the industrial town of Gladstone, the locals talk about emissions trading in the same breath as job losses.

Newspoll research shows that in the local electorate of Flynn, 58 per cent of voters strongly oppose an ETS. Now, after Mr Abbott's ascension, they have someone to vote for.

When Flynn was established prior to the last election, it was pencilled in for the Nationals with a notional majority of 7.7 per cent.

But Labor romped home on a swing of 9.2 per cent, and supposedly conservative Flynn became one of the eight seats it picked up in Queensland, putting Mr Rudd on the road to The Lodge.

Last month's Newspoll showed the voters of Flynn continued to prefer Labor to the Coalition, by a margin of 54 per cent to 46 per cent -- a narrower result than the national trend of 57-43.

But when the pollsters drilled down into the issues affecting voters' thinking, a more encouraging picture for the Coalition emerged: only 29 per cent supported the proposed emissions trading scheme, while 58 per cent were down on it to varying degrees. Across the six Queensland marginals, the split was 34 to 48 per cent against the ETS.

This will hearten Mr Abbott as he embarks on mission improbable to shake the Prime Minister off his pedestal by playing to the Coalition's traditional strengths in the regions.