One Nation losses are Labor’s gain
Townsville’s Labor candidates are increasingly confident of victory in three knife-edge seats as preference flows show voters who abandoned One Nation turned toward both major parties.
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Townsville’s Labor candidates are increasingly confident of victory in three knife-edge seats as preference flows show voters who abandoned One Nation turned toward both major parties.
Labor strategists credit its small targets campaign in the city and agile, at times aggressive, advertising blitzes that went unchallenged by the LNP for getting it over the line in seats that were all seen as winnable for the Opposition.
Analysis of election results in Thuringowa, Townsville and Mundingburra revealed both Labor and the LNP benefited, to varying degrees, from the collapse of support for One Nation.
In Townsville, where Labor MP Scott Stewart looks set to be re-elected, One Nation supporters ditched the party in favour of Katter’s Australian Party, which in 2017 did not run a candidate in the CBD-centric seat and this year saw a swing of 11.2 per cent toward it.
Queensland University of Technology political expert and former Labor parliamentary speaker Professor John Mickel said, in the bellwether seat of Mundingburra, a decline in the minor party vote resulted in a 7 per cent increase in both Labor’s and the LNP’s primary vote.
Prof Mickel said the swing to Labor in Mundingburra further underlined the adage that “as Mundingburra goes, so does the state”.
But in Thuringowa, where One Nation has until now been a major force, the LNP’s Natalie Marr picked up a sizeable 9.4 per cent increase in the party’s primary vote while Labor’s Aaron Harper benefited mainly from the lack of an independent and a decline in the Greens.
“For all this talk from the Greens that they are marching across the state, they haven’t marched as far as Townsville,” Prof Mickel said.
“The shocking result there is the Greens, who have no reason to go (backward on their vote), have.”
The Greens’ vote declined by nearly 1 per cent across all three seats.
As experts blamed the LNP’s lack of cut-through and original policy ideas for the party’s loss in Townsville, Labor strategists were crediting their small-targets campaign of funding small projects for getting the party over the line.
One insider pointed out that the same day then-LNP leader Deb Frecklington was announcing her controversial youth curfew plan, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was being photographed playing football with kids as the party promised $400,000 to upgrade the suburban club’s grounds.
Labor sources also revealed they were concerned about the strength of the LNP’s Mundingburra candidate Glenn Doyle, saying the co-ordinated sustained smear campaign using his old social media posts had less to do with trying to paint him in a bad light but about choking Ms Frecklington’s ability to sell her message while campaigning in the region.
Townsville’s Labor MPs Scott Stewart, Aaron Harper and candidate Les Walker yesterday said they were “quietly confident” of winning their respective seats but stopped short of declaring victory with postal votes yet to be counted as they all sat on 53 per cent two-party preferred.
Originally published as One Nation losses are Labor’s gain