With an election looming ever nearer, Newspoll records Labor with a 52-48 lead on state voting intention in Queensland, from primary votes of Labor 37%, LNP 34%, One Nation 16% and Greens 8%. This is an all new result, conducted from a sample of 917 respondents from Tuesday to Thursday last week, and not an accumulation of polling conducted over a longer period, as is often the case with state Newspoll results. Compared with the previous poll, conducted from July through September, it has Labor, the LNP and the Greens steady, One Nation up a point, and Labor down a point on two-party preferred. Annastacia Palaszczuk is up a point on approval to 42% and down one on disapproval to 45%; Tim Nicholls is up three to 32% and down two to 43%; and Palaszczuk lead as preferred premier is unchanged at 43-33. Full report here from The Australian.
This adds to a wide spread of poll results from Queensland recently, ranging from ReachTEL’s 52-48 to the LNP to Essential Research’s 54-46 to Labor. The table below shows the results of the last five published polls, together with the 2015 election result. The final column shows the share of minor party preferences Labor are credited with – imprecisely in the case of the 2015 election result, as no effort has been made to account for exhausted votes that were a factor under the since-abolished optional preferential voting system.
I predict the outcome of this election will be more psephologically interesting than normal.
One Nation will get too many votes (because they will be on the ballot paper and presumably will vote for themselves, other people voting for them will not help either).
Based on current levels of polled support for the majors, there’s a zone around 19% primary where One Nation fairly quickly go from probably winning only a few seats to probably winning double figures.
Kevin Bonham
Based on current levels of polled support for the majors, there’s a zone around 19% primary where One Nation fairly quickly go from probably winning only a few seats to probably winning double figures.
Be it the Australia party ( probable before you time); the Democrats; one Nation etc; the support for the protest party has been a feature of Australian politics for over 40 years. Why the expectation support will suddenly increase?
Frednk
Its of academic interest, because different voting systems have different properties when it comes to multiparty contests, strict FPTP would in that situation largely benefit Labor, CPV results in a cut-off point because of the distortionary nature of single member electorates relative to overall vote share and proporional systems and the Tasmania and ACT systems have their own idiosyncrasies.
Its also practically important in Queensland because PHON is polling between 12 and 18% , so slipping over to 19% is a real possibility, and would almost guarantee the balance of power.
Looking likely it will be called today (the 29th).
Looking like a hard, but not impossible, campaign for the ALP.