Two political parties won out of this weekend’s Queensland elections, and one party, the (Australian Labor Party) ALP suffered devastating defeats.
Those losses were worst in the state by-election of Inala, where the two-party preferred swing was around 19 percent, but they held the seat, and Ipswich West where they lost around 18 percent two-party preferred, and the seat.
Their result in the Brisbane City Council elections was status quo bad.
The by-elections were held to replace two retiring state MPs—former Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk in Inala, and Jim Madden in Ipswich West.
These results look not so much like a warning shot across the bow of the good ship Labor, but the first barrage in the next state election.
In the last four years, there have been three state by-elections in Queensland.
In Callide, when the state Liberal-National Party (LNP) member resigned to pursue a federal seat, there was a swing to the LNP of 5.9 percent; in Stretton, when Duncan Pegg the Labor member died, there was a swing against the ALP of 0.9 percent; and in Currumbin, when the LNP member resigned for health reasons, there was a swing against the LNP of 2.1 percent.
Remember when the end of the Whitlam Labor government was heralded by the Bass by-election in Tasmania?
It was won by Kevin Newman, the father of former Queensland Premier Campbell Newman, with a swing of 17.5 percent against the Labor Party and a two-party swing to the Liberals of 14.3 percent.
The Greens Eating Labor’s Lunch
While most council elections are not contested by the major parties, the Brisbane City Council is the major exception with a Liberal Lord Mayor and administration.It was returned with a 1.6 percent increase in the two-party preferred vote but managed to probably lose three seats and gain one in the process (We won’t have final figures for some weeks, and some of the results were so close that they may not eventually be determined until all votes have been counted).
Of those seats it seems to have lost, two went to Labor and one to the Greens. Salvageable good news for Labor you might think. Not really.
Not only do they appear to have lost the previously very safe ward of Wynnum Manly to the LNP, held at the last election by a margin of 61.4 percent, but they went down 5.6 percent on primaries across the city, while their rivals on the left, the Greens, probably took most of this, and rose by 5 percent.
First preference results were LNP 46.8 percent, ALP 27.3 percent, and Greens 22.9 percent. So not only are the Greens up, but they are closing on the ALP and were actually ahead of them on first preferences in eight wards out of 25.
These include the inner-city areas where the richest and best-educated voters live.
What Does This Mean for the LNP?
First is that Brisbane demonstrates the Liberal-National Coalition can hold government with a decisive margin without holding the cosmopolitan metropolitan capital city hearts. The LNP will hold somewhere around 18 wards out of a total of 25. Labor will hold six, the Greens two, and an independent one.They’ve done this by appealing to middle and outer-suburban electors, mostly on their record of competence. There were no strong issues. Labor started off campaigning against the LNP for allegedly neglecting the suburbs but ended up with a negative campaign on LNP cost cutting.
The Greens campaigned on free public transport, rent freezes (that were beyond their power as a local government authority), 2,000 new pedestrian crossings, and several general development issues, like making “big developers pay their fair share,” whatever that is supposed to mean.
Everyone Wants a Piece of Green
If I had to describe this council’s ideology, it would be one of “lime green.”City council voters are concerned about “brown” environmental issues—municipal amenities principally rather than changing the way we live and think.
This LNP council talks about parks and bike tracks, spends extravagant amounts of money on “green” pedestrian bridges across the Brisbane River, and boasts about its low-emissions public transport strategies.
A similar approach has been adopted by the state LNP under leader David Crisafulli.
Even with this lime green face, they are losing ground to the Greens in the centre of the city, along with the Labor Party.
Why? Because the Greens aren’t really about conservation at all, they are a revolutionary party that appeals to the young, well-educated and moderately wealthy who lack practical life experience, and they leverage envy for votes.
The eccentric Greens lord mayoral candidate, Jonathan Sriranganathan, boasts about living on a houseboat and has expressed empathy, and arguably encouragement, for people who squat in vacant properties and/or shoplift.
These voters don’t like the LNP, but equally, they dislike Labor as well, and the harder Labor tries to court them, the worse it gets for Labor.
What’s happening in working-class areas like Inala, Wynnum, and Ipswich West? They feel deserted by Labor, and unlike many of the city elites who vote for the Greens, they don’t have a wealth buffer against the cost of living, nor are they revolutionary.
Running on Public Dissatisfaction
It has always puzzled me that non-Anglo migrant communities have tended to vote for Labor. The values of risk-taking that bring them here, and the thrift, enterprise and application they show when they arrive, align with Liberal, not modern Labor values.Perhaps it comes down to something as simple as Labor being friendlier to them.
Ms. Trang is an Australian success story, the kind of story that many parents in Inala actually want for their children. She had no influential parent to serve her future up to her on a silver platter, like the former state member and premier, and on her own merits has risen to become the acting CFO for Trade and Investment Queensland.
That this highly successful public servant put her hand up, against the party in government, to run for a seat she could not win tells you a lot about her character, and also the dissatisfaction with the government amongst public servants.
Should the results of the by-elections carry through to the state election the new LNP government will need competent people like her to help them govern.
He fits the seat, which reaches out into rural areas from the west of Ipswich, a former mining town, like a glove, having also started his business life working on the family farm.
Mr. Zanow succeeded when Ms. Trang didn’t simply because the margin for the ALP in the seat wasn’t as fat as it was in Inala.
Labor will try to represent the swing as being partly due to anger with the previous member for resigning. I don’t think that holds up as Jim Madden, the former MLA, appears to have won a seat in the Ipswich City Council in exactly the same area.
Focus on the Main Fight
These by-elections will change people’s perceptions of Opposition Leader Crisafulli as well. He will start to look in their minds like a leader and less like a challenger, and that changes their focus from what they don’t like about the government to what his policies might be.I think these elections also have messages for federal leaders Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese. The inner-city electorate is concerned about conservation issues, and younger Australians are in thrall to the Greens, but you cannot win courting that vote.
The party that will do the best in Australian politics is the one that relates to suburban and regional voters and enunciates the matters that concern them directly, like the cost of living.
These can’t be solved with Greens’ solutions, and Greens voters are neither the friends of Australia’s mainstream parties, nor mainstream Australia.
Nevertheless, the Greens are here to stay, but in their present form, they stay on the margins. The real fight is between Labor and Liberal, and currently, the electorate is actually more aligned to the Liberal Party values than Labor ones.
