Queensland by-elections and Brisbane City Council election live

Live coverage of the counts for the Inala and Ipswich West by-elections and the Brisbane City Council election.

Full displays of results:

Inala by-election

Ipswich West by-election

Brisbane Lord Mayor election

Brisbane City Council wards election

11.42pm. My system has the Greens ahead in Paddington now, but slightly behind in Walter Taylor.

10.50pm. The ABC computer has different ideas from mine about a couple of things, notably Paddington, which it’s (again) calling for the Greens while mine has the LNP with its nose in front. This points to the difficulty of projection off an election that was held at the height of COVID, which dramatically changed how people voted. The Greens have a solid lead on the TCP count so far, but this is well behind the count for the primary vote.

10.08pm. One bright note for Labor is that they seem to have come to life in LNP-held Calamvale, which is now rated a likely Labor gain by both me and the ABC. That could see them break even after the loss of Wynnum-Manly, giving them the weak bragging right of not having done worse than last time. The ABC has retracted its call of Paddington as a Greens gain from the LNP — it and Walter Taylor both look very close.

9.54pm. I also note the ABC isn’t calling Ipswich West for the LNP — it’s projecting 52.6% TCP for the LNP whereas I have 53.2%. Mysteries abound — the TCP results on the ECQ site lag far behind the media feed, and actually have Labor ahead (from 6501 votes compared with 14,375 on the feed).

9.52pm. Actually, that’s not the reason my system is being more conservative about Walter Taylor than the ABC’s. I note that every ward result on the ABC says “0 of x centres reporting a preference count”, but preference counts have assuredly been reported. I’m not sure if this is purely a cosmetic issue or if the ABC is working entirely off preference estimates.

9.38pm. So Labor look like they are down from five BCC wards to four, having lost Wynnum-Manly to the LNP. The Greens are in the hunt in LNP-held Paddington and Walter Taylor, which both look very close, to add to their existing The Gabba. The ABC is calling Paddington for the Greens, so I suspect there is an issue here of my preference estimate selling them short — that will be corrected when a few more TCP results are through. However, their second tier hopes of Central, Coorparoo and Enoggera don’t look like coming through for them, so they will not emerge as the second strongest party.

9.35pm. I’ve devoted the last half hour to bug-hunting, at least partly because my read of a Labor disaster in the BCC ward of Wynnum-Manly didn’t seem to gel with the ABC — but now it does. That’s not to say there weren’t bugs though, one of which was stopping the two-candidate preferred tables from populating on the council wards results pages. That has now been fixed.

9.18pm. It’s been noted by preference estimates, which get used before two-candidate preferred numbers report, have been selling the Greens short in seats where they are challenging the LNP. I now have them ahead in Paddington, and a correction should soon come through in their favour in Walter Taylor.

8.41pm. A strong showing by the Greens in Labor-held Moorooka ward, where they look like taking second place from the LNP, but Labor still on track to retain it.

8.38pm. As well as Wynnum-Manly, I’m now projecting the LNP ahead in the Labor-held BCC ward of Morningside, suggesting they could be reduced to three seats. That at least raises the possibility of them being outperformed by the Greens, although it’s far from clear at this stage if they will add anything to their existing solitary seat of The Gabba (which is yet to record any figures) — there are four possibilities, but they’re not actually ahead in any of them.

8.34pm. Paddington still looks like a very close race between the LNP and the Greens with three booths in.

8.30pm. My system is now calling Ipswich West for the LNP. The projected swing in Inala is even bigger, but so is Labor’s buffer there.

8.21pm. My system is now calling six wards for the LNP, one of which is Enoggera.

8.19pm. Early figures suggest Labor are in big danger of losing Wynnum-Manly to the LNP, one of only five BCC wards they held going into the election.

8.18pm. The LNP looks like retaining Enoggera regardless of who comes second out of Labor and the Greens — my system is now favouring the latter. This was one of five LNP-held wards the Greens had identified as possible gains. Of their two presumed strongest chances, Paddington looks lineball and there is nothing in yet from Walter Taylor. Too early to say about their other second tier prospects of Coorparoo and Central.

8.13pm. While Adrian Schrinner is headed for re-election as Lord Mayor, he’s faded on my projection as the count has progressed, with a slight booth-matched swing away from him now recorded on the primary vote.

8.10pm. The good news for Labor is that my system is calling Inala for them. The bad news is that the swing is similar to the one that’s putting it on the cusp of calling Ipswich West for the LNP.

8.08pm. Early indications also point to a close LNP-Greens race in Paddington, where the Greens fancied their chances.

8.06pm. The first booth from the BCC Enoggera ward has the Greens second, but my projection has them behind Labor in a fairly close race for second. The LNP vote looks high enough for them to hold either way, but early days yet.

8.04pm. The Brisbane City booth gives the Greens an encouraging first result in the BCC’s Coorparoo ward — only 168 votes, but it points to a chance they will take it from the LNP, consistent with the party’s own expectations.

8.02pm. A booth in at last from Inala, and there too there is a huge swing to the LNP of over 20% according to my projection, with Labor’s primary vote collapsing 32.5% to 37.8%. No doubt Annastacia Palaszczuk had a big personal vote here, but still. Independent Linh Nyugen on double figures, presumably taking a bit from Labor. Bad as all this is for Labor, it doesn’t suggest they are in serious danger of losing.

8.00pm. It’s been noted that the informal vote in Ipswich West is out from 4.0% to 8.6%, which no doubt has a lot to do with an optional preferential voting council election being held on the same day as a compulsory preferential voting state by-election. Presumably this isn’t doing Labor any favours.

7.58pm. An eleventh booth in Ipswich West was obviously not good for Labor, pushing my projection of the LNP lead out from (from memory) 1.9% to 2.5% and increasing their win probability to 95%.

7.52pm. Substantial progress now in the mayoralty count, confirming what was noted before — Adrian Schrinner holding steady on his 2020 vote, and movement from Labor to the Greens but not enough to get the latter’s candidate, Jonathan Sriranganathan, to second.

7.50pm. The swing in Ipswich West continues to be big enough to make the LNP firm favourites when quite getting them to where my system would call it. The Brisbane council ward of Tennyson has been called for independent incumbent Nicole Johnston, who looks to be doing it easily.

7.43pm. Note that my mayoralty entry page does things like say certain wards have been “retained” by the LNP, which simply means Schrinner is projected to win there again. The system is geared to seat-style contests and I didn’t have time to finesse everything.

7.42pm. The lack of any action from Inala had me checking the ABC to make sure it wasn’t a fault in my system, but no, still no numbers there yet.

7.40pm. Some big lord mayoralty numbers in now, and the situation has settled quite considerably — it now looks like a status quo result with a bit of a swing from Labor to the Greens, rather than historic disaster Labor seemed to be suffering at first. Presumably this will start flowing through to the council ward results shortly.

7.37pm. Labor has perked up a little on my Ipswich West win probability with the reporting of a third two-candidate result, which presumably improved their projected preference flow.

7.33pm. On Brisbane Council, my system is now calling Bracken Ridge and LNP retain, which a huge swing blowing out what was hitherto a fairly tight margin.

7.31pm. My system has actually crossed the threshold where it’s not using my preference estimates in Ipswich West. So the 10% Labor win probability should probably be taken seriously at this point.

7.30pm. Eight booths in now on the primary vote — fast count there, slow one in Inala. Perhaps they’re prioritising by-election and council votes differently. In any case, the new Ipswich West results do not change what was written in the previous update.

7.28pm. Booth number five from Ipswich West is also less bad for Labor, being comparable to the last two. But I may have been wrong to say these booths were coming in below what the LNP needed to win the seat — I was just looking at the Labor primary vote (a lot on my plate at present). The LNP primary vote swing across the board is approaching 20%, which makes them look very dangerous. Legalise Cannabis are soaking up votes from the absent Greens and a lot depends on their preferences. My current projection assumes they will go 60-40 to Labor, but if they’re loaded with Greens voters they may get a stronger flow than that. Once there are enough two-candidate preferred votes in, my projection will go off the swing on preferences rather than my estimates.

7.20pm. From four wards, I’m recording LNP two-party swings of 4.2% to 15.0% for the lord mayoralty. It’s a similar story for the council, albeit that these are the same booths. So Labor would seem in big danger at this early stage of going backwards.

7.17pm. Two further booths from Ipswich West are better for Labor — seemingly a tad below what would cost them the seat. The two booths that came in first were well above that, so Labor will have to be hoping both were outliers. Still nothing from Inala.

7.16pm. My system is calling McDowall ward for the LNP and sees big LNP swings everywhere that a swing can be determined.

7.10pm. I’ve turned off some features that were misfiring on the mayoralty landing page. However, the primary vote numbers are suggesting a very good night for the LNP and not just in Ipswich West.

6.53pm. Remarkable first results from Ipswich West had me checking the ABC to see if there was something amiss in my system, but it concurs the LNP swing is blowing the hinges off. Still early days, but the fact that the ALP has been trounced in two booths will be giving them palpitations.

6.47pm. I’m hoping the screwiness on the lord mayoralty landing page at present will resolve when there are some numbers in that aren’t mobile booths.

6.37pm. To elaborate on that point, the swing results I have for the mobile booths are meaningless — in most cases there were zero mobile results last time, so I think I just gave them a fraction of a vote from the central pre-polling booth so the system would have something to work off. Everywhere else, the swing figures will be based on booth-to-booth comparison.

6.35pm. Two mobile booths in for the lord mayoralty, with the same issues noted in the previous update. The chart and dial on my lord mayoralty landing page won’t show anything until two-candidate preferred results are reported. Ordinarily I run projections based on the primary vote, but didn’t have time to do that in this case. A little perversely, I have projections for the mayoral results at ward level, but not overall. As always, another day to do all this would have been handy.

6.23pm. A mobile polling booth has reported 102 council ward votes in Bracken Ridge. Caution would be required here at the best of times, but especially on this occasion where mobile polling was just about non-existent last time because of COVID, making any swing figure meaningless.

6.20pm. One of the things I didn’t have time to do was code around a recurring issue where sometimes empty XML files get uploaded to my server, so I suspect there will be the odd occasion where you find the page hasn’t been filled out with data. If so, you should find it resolves after a minute or two.

6pm. Polls have closed for Queensland local government elections and Inala and Ipswich West state by-elections. The links above will take you to the Poll Bludger’s own live results pages, which I’m reasonably confident will work well in the case of the by-elections, but merely hopeful in the case of the Brisbane Lord Mayor and council elctions, which were a pretty huge undertaking and for which I was still squashing bugs up to the last, which is usually not a good sign. In any case, the first results should presumably be in in around half an hour or so.

Queensland: Newspoll, state by-elections and Brisbane City Council

Two polls suggest Queensland Labor faces a grim night tomorrow as it defends two seats at state by-elections and attempts to break the conservatives’ two-decade grip on city hall.

Queensland politics has something of a super Saturday on offer tomorrow with local government elections together with two state by-elections. The former encompasses elections for the lord mayoralty and the 26 wards that constitute Brisbane City Council, Australia’s largest, most powerful and biggest-budget municipality, and also the one whose elections are most sharply defined by conventional partisanship. For all these reasons, it is the only local government in which this site takes much of an interest. I am currently frantically at work getting my live results system in order for both the by-elections and the Brisbane City Council election, the latter of which in particular is a major undertaking comparable to a state election.

Two new items of opinion polling offer a pointer as to what might be expected, both providing very good news for the Liberal National Party:

Newspoll finds the state LNP with a lead of 54-46, pointing to a 7% swing off the 2020 result, which is a fair bit worse for Labor than any of the polling that helped usher Annastacia Palaszczuk out the door. The primary votes are Labor 30% (39.6% at the 2020 election), LNP 42% (35.9%), Greens 13% (9.5%) and One Nation 8% (7.1%). David Crisafulli achieves an uncommon feat for an Opposition Leader in leading the incumbent as preferred premier, by 43-37. Premier Steven Miles records 38% approval and 49% disapproval, while Crisafulli is respectively on 47% and 33%. The poll was conducted last Thursday through to Wednesday from a sample of 1037.

• DemosAU has a voting intention poll for tomorrow’s Brisbane City Council election which suggests the LNP will match its 2020 landslide, with the incumbent Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner leading Labor challenger Tracey Price by 57.7-42.3 on two-candidate preferred (56.3-43.7 at the 2020 election) from primary votes of 46.7% for Schrinner (47.7% in 2020), 25.8% for Price (30.9% for Labor’s candidate in 2020) and 21.6% for Greens candidate Jonathan Sriranganathan (15.4% for the Greens candidate in 2020). Voting intention for the 26 council wards, all but four of which will have only LNP, Labor and Greens candidates (the four exceptions each have one independent) has the LNP on 43.7% (47.5% in 2020), Labor on 31.3% (33.8%) and the Greens on 25.0% (18.7%). The poll was conducted Friday to Thursday from a sample of 1034.

Sarah Elks of The Australian reported last week the “grassroots doorknocking data collection method pioneered by now-federal Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather”, which is claimed to have given the party an accurate insight into their looming three-seat haul in Queensland ahead of the federal election, is pointing to a swag of new ward seats, all from the LNP. Paddington and Walter Taylor are “tipped as gains”, and the party is thought “close to taking Coorparoo, Central and Enoggera”, in addition to its existing seat of The Gabba. Labor is reportedly hopeful of adding only Calamvale and Northgate to its existing five seats out of 26, raising the possibility of the Greens overtaking it as the party of opposition.

Also tomorrow are state by-elections for two Labor-held seats in the west of metropolitan Brisbane: Inala, which is being vacated by Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Ipswich West, which Jim Madden is vacating for a run at Ipswich City Council. While Labor’s 28.2% margin in the former seems unassailable, Labor appears at least nervous that little of the 14.3% margin in Ipswich West will remain after tomorrow, with Steven Miles telling journalists this week that his party faces a “double-digit swing”.

The road ahead: Dunkley, Inala and more

With dates set for a federal and a Queensland state by-election, a review of looming electoral events.

House of Representatives Speaker Milton Dick has announced the Dunkley by-election will be held on March 2, with nominations to close on February 8 and be decared the following day, and the Poll Bludger’s guide to the by-election is now up and running. It is the first of my guides to feature historical results charts for the primary vote as well as two-party preferred (among many other things), which I hope is of use to somebody because it involved a lot of work.

In a report on the by-election in The Age yesterday, David Crowe related that “this masthead reported last week that Labor officials privately believe the Coalition has the edge”. I am not clear if this refers to a report from Broede Carmody, saying only that the officials “expect a swing against them”, or one from Paul Sakkal saying “both parties are privately downplaying their chances”.

The other by-election on the way is in Queensland for Annastacia Palaszczuk’s safe Labor seat of Inala, which Premier Steven Miles has confirmed will be held simultaneously with the local government elections on March 16. Seemingly assured of Labor endorsement is Margie Nightingale, former teacher and policy adviser to Treasurer Cameron Dick, who has the support of the Right. Lydia Lynch of The Australian reports the Liberal National Party is “due to preselect its candidate within a fortnight” – I will hold off doing an election guide until then.

The council elections are of substantial interest in their own right, with Brisbane City Council in particular being both the most powerful and the most partisan local government jurisdiction in the country. The conservatives have been dominant since Campbell Newman became Lord Mayor in 2004. The current incumbent, Adrian Schrinner, won by 56.3-43.7 after preferences in 2020, a swing to Labor of 3.0% from 2016. His Labor opponent this time is Tracey Price, a lawyer and sewing shop owner.

The Liberal National Party’s dominance on council reached new heights with the elections of 2016 and 2020, both of which saw them win 19 out of 26 council wards, leaving five for Labor and one each for Greens and an independent. The Greens have high hopes of expanding their footprint after their federal breakthrough in 2022, to the extent of talking up the possibility of displacing Labor as the council opposition. Considerably more detail on the elections is available courtesy of Ben Raue at the Tally Room.

Also looming are Tasmania’s periodic Legislative Council elections, presumably to be held on May 4, which this year encompass two of the chamber’s fifteen seats: Prosser, covering rural territory immediately north of Hobart, and the self-explanatory seat of Hobart. These are of particular interest this year because former Greens leader Cassy O’Connor has abandoned her seat in the lower house to run for Hobart, which if successful will win the Greens its first ever seat in the chamber. The seat will be vacated with the retirement of Rob Valentine, who has held it as an independent since 2012. Prosser is held for the Liberals by Jane Howlett, one of the chamber’s four Liberal members, who won narrowly in 2018 and may struggle amid the government’s declining fortunes. Labor likewise holds four seats, the remaining seven being independents.

Resolve Strategic: LNP 38, Labor 32, Greens 11 in Queensland

Further signs of weakening in state Labor’s position in Queensland, including a statistical tie on the question of preferred premier.

The Brisbane Times has published a set of Queensland voting intention numbers compiled over long range from four sets of Resolve Strategic’s monthly national polling, achieving a sample of 947 from a period running from mid-May through to last week. It adds to an impression from other polling this year by YouGov and Freshwater Strategy that Labor is likely to struggle at an election to be held in October next year, with the Liberal National Party opposition opening a primary vote lead of 38% to 32% after trailing by 35% to 33% in the period from January to April. The Greens are down a point to 11%, One Nation is up one to 8%, and a generic independent category is down two to 8%.

As always, Resolve Strategic does not provide a two-party preferred result, but a judicious estimate of four-fifths of Greens preference to Labor plus two-fifths of everybody else’s comes out at 51.5-48.5 in favour of the LNP, a swing of about 4.5% compared with the result in 2020. David Crisafulli also records a 38-37 lead over Annastacia Palaszczuk as preferred premier, after trailing 39-31 last time, and his name recognition is up ten points to 68%, with Palaszczuk on 96%. Palaszczuk’s “net likeability” has gone from plus 8% late last year to minus 5% early this year to minus 15% in the latest result, while Crisafulli has tracked from plus 8% to plus 1% to plus 7%.

Now to other electorally relevant news from the Sunshine State, encompassing the Brisbane lord mayoral election in March and everything I’ve been able to ascertain so far about preselection for the state election:

• Labor has announced Tracey Price, Brisbane lawyer and sewing shop owner, as its candidate for the Brisbane lord mayoralty when local government elections are held on March 16 next year. The LNP incumbent, Adrian Schrinner, who has held the post since 2019 and was re-elected in 2020, is seeking another term. The LNP has held the lord mayoralty since Campbell Newman’s win in 2004, together with majorities on council since 2008.

• In April, Labor state secretary Kate Flanders said the new affirmative action rules requiring female candidates in 45% of seats held by the party could only be met if three currently serving men made way at the next election. One such will be Jim Madden, who announced he would not seek re-election in Ipswich West after weathering bullying allegations. The Australian reported others who might be “tapped” included Sandgate MP Stirling Hinchliffe and Ferny Grove MP Mark Furner, both ministers and members of the Right, and Toohey MP Peter Russo, who like Madden is a back-bencher and a member of the Left. A further report from The Australian in April said that Wendy Bourne, Annastacia Palaszczuk’s “caucus liaison”, was “positioned as a likely replacement” for Madden in Ipswich West. Madden defected from the Right to the Left before the last election, whereas Bourne has recently done the reverse.

• In pursuit of David Crisafulli’s target of seven women candidates four the fourteen seats identified as decisive at the next election, a number of preselections have been rolled out well in advance of an election to be held next October. In the most recent case, local mayor Clare Stewart was preselected unopposed last weekend for Noosa, a normally conservative seat that has been held since 2017 by independent Sandy Bolton.

• The LNP unveiled three women as candidates in March: Yolonde Entsch, founding director of charity Wheels of Wellness and wife of veteran federal Leichhardt MP Warren Entsch, in Cairns; Natalie Marr, real estate agent and former Townsville councillor, in Thuringowa; and Rebecca Young, managing director of Personalised Freight Solutions Global and former president of the local Chamber of Commerce, in Redlands. Entsch received unwelcome publicity in June over Indigenous grants awarded to her private company under the previous federal government.

• With the imminent retirement of incumbent Mark Robinson, the LNP preselection for the Redland City seat of Oodgeroo is developing into a high-profile preselection contest involving two former federal parliamentarians – Amanda Stoker, who failed to win re-election to the Senate last year and now hosts a show on Sky News, and Andrew Laming, who bowed out last year as member for Bowman, which he had held since 2004 – together with Daniel Hobbs, ordained Anglican priest and former staffer to Barnaby Joyce.

Lydia Lynch of The Australian reported in January that the LNP preselection for the Sunshine Coast seat of Caloundra, which Labor won for the first time in 2020, was expected to pit Alister Eiseman, a local car salesman, against Kendall Morton, former director of Home Care Assistance Sunshine Coast. The report said David Crisafulli was favouring Morton in pursuit of his target of women candidates, but that he was loath to push the issue out of fear of prompting the kind of local membership backlash that repeatedly thwarted Dominic Perrottet’s efforts to recruit women in New South Wales.

The Australian reported in June that Gold Coast councillor Hermann Vorster was expected to be the LNP’s candidate for Burleigh, with unidentified sources tipping the imminent retirement of Michael Hart, who has held the seat for the party since 2012.

Something for the weekend

Random notes: a WA only poll on coronavirus, some detail on the elections in Queensland last Saturday, and a look at Donald Trump’s counter-intuitive poll bounce.

The West Australian had a Painted Dog Research poll of 500 respondents on attitudes to the coronavirus, with field work dates undisclosed – or at least its website did, as I can’t see any mention of it in the hard copy. What the online report ($) tells us is that 71% believed the federal government should “enforce a full lockdown”; that 25% expected three months of social distancing, and 23% six months; that 18% were extremely worried about losing their job by September, with another 42% slightly worried; and that 68% were most concerned about the health impact, compared with 28% for the economic impact.

Other than that, I have the following to relate about Queensland’s elections on the weekend, which I’ll put here as the dedicated post on the subject doesn’t seem to be doing much business:

• As the dust settles on the troubled counting process, it’s clear the Liberal National Party has enjoyed something of a triumph in the election for Brisbane City Council, extending their 16-year grip on the lord mayoralty and quite probably repeating their feat from 2016 of winning 19 out 26 wards on the council. Incumbent Adrian Schrinner leads Labor’s Pat Condren in the lord mayoral race by a margin of 5.5%, although the latter gained a 4.0% swing off Graham Quirk’s landslide win in 2016. The ABC projection is awarding 17 ward seats to the LNP, to which they look very likely to add Enoggera, while maintaining a slender lead over the Greens in Paddington. The Greens’ combined council ward vote is up 3.4% on 2016 to 17.9%, and they retained their sole existing seat of The Gabba with swings of 12.2% on the primary vote and 8.5% on two-party preferred.

• However, it was a less good performance by the LNP in the two state by-elections, where all the detail is laid out at my results pages for Bundamba and Currumbin. The party finished a distant third behind One Nation in Bundamba, which remains a safe seat for Labor, and have only narrowly held on in Currumbin, where Labor has achieved a rare feat for a governing party in picking up a swing of nearly 2% at a by-election. Party leader Deb Frecklington would nonetheless be relieved by the result, since a defeat in Currumbin, which a pre-election poll suggested was in prospect, would surely have imperilled her leadership, despite her being able to point to the highly unusual circumstances in which the election was held.

• Speaking of which, I offer the following numbers on the ways the enrolled voters of Bundamba and Currumbin did and didn’t vote, with the qualification that there is an indeterminate number of postals still to be counted — perhaps rather a few of them, given I understood that there had been a surge in applications (although it seems a number of applicants never received their ballots).

Finally, a few thoughts on the situation in the United States, elaborating on a subject covered in yesterday’s post here by Adrian Beaumont – you are encouraged to comment on that thread if you have something specific to offer on matters American, and in particular on Donald Trump’s confounding opinion poll bounce over the past few weeks. I sought to put the latter event in context in a paywalled Crikey article on Monday, the key feature of which is the following comparison of his approval rating trend, as measured by FiveThirtyEight, with comparable trend measures of my own for Angela Merkel, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron and Scott Morrison.

The upshot is that leaders the world over are enjoying a “rally around the flag” approval bounce, and that Donald Trump’s looks meagre indeed compared with his colleagues across the Atlantic. I feel pretty sure that the lack of a clear bounce for Scott Morrison is down to the fact that there have been no new numbers since Essential Research’s poll of over a fortnight ago, with the surges for Merkel, Johnson and Macron being concentrated since that time.

It’s also interesting to observe that Trump’s improvement has not been consistently observed. The chart below records his trends so far from this year from the five most prolific pollsters. For some reason, Rasmussen, the pollster that is usually most favourable to him — and which is accordingly the most frequent subject of his vainglorious tweets on the odd occasion when it reaches 50% — has in fact found his approval rating going in the direction he deserves. There is also no sign of change from the Ipsos series. However, the improving trend from the other three is more in line with the many other pollsters included in the FiveThirtyEight series, hence its overall picture of his best ratings since his post-election honeymoon.

Bundamba, Currumbin and Brisbane City Council live

Live results for Bundamba here and Currumbin here, including booth level totals and swings.

Monday

11pm. I’ve actually turned off the booth matching now, so the 76.7% probability shown of an LNP probability win entails an expectation that the uncounted two-party vote (i.e. all pre-polls, postals and the rest) should behave similarly to the election day votes, when the primary vote numbers make clear that they will actually favour the LNP. So disregard the probability and treat this is near-certain LNP win. Other than the two-party numbers, there was next to no additional counting in the by-elections today. However, the picture for Brisbane City Council has become clearer, and it bears out expectations that postal votes would heavily favour the Liberal National Party — so much so that they now look like matching their performance in 2016, when it won 19 seats out of 26. Labor’s clearest hope of an addition to its meagre was for a surprise win in Calamvale, but that’s faded now; the LNP has also pulled clear from a hitherto precarious position in marginal Holland Park; and the general trend suggests they should also prevail in currently lineball Enoggera and Northgate. The same is probably also true of Paddington, where they presently hold a narrow lead over the Greens, who thus look unlikely to gain a second seat to add to The Gabba despite a generally strong performance.

5.30pm. There are now two-party results in Currumbin for all election day polling booths. This means my projections have come to life – and they are projecting a 1.2% swing to the LNP for a winning margin of 4.5%, with a 99.7% probability of victory. But as I noted at the very beginning of all this, this is based off estimates of where votes would be cast at the by-election that entailed a huge amount of guess work. The reason I have very different swing results in the tables at the top left and the charts at the top right is that the latter estimate two-party results where only primary votes are presently available, i.e. for pre-polls and postals. Other than that, no new numbers have been added today — indeed, the existing postal votes for Bundamba seem to have disappeared for some reason.

Sunday

As you can see on the links above, my results reporting pages are in action, but they only have primary votes to work with — it doesn’t appear notional two-party counts are being conducted, and I am not making use of preference estimates like Antony Green. Nonetheless, they are of value in being the only place you can find booth results short of poring through the XML media feed, and exclusively feature swings for polling booths and vote types.

The situation in Bundamba and Currumbin seems to be that most of the election day and pre-poll primary votes have been counted; that there should be roughly 5000 postals for each electorate and maybe 1500 to 2000 of various other kinds of vote, of which respectively 2191 and 998 formal votes have been counted in Currumbin, while only 747 postals have been counted in Bundamba. In Currumbin, the current primary vote shares are LNP 43.1%, Labor 39.6%, Greens 10.9% and One Nation 6.5%, with postals heavily favouring the LNP as expected, and “other” votes so far leaning their way as well. My back-of-envelope reckoning is that the LNP’s 3.5% primary vote lead should increase to upwards of 6%, which Labor should only be able to reduce by a couple of points on preferences — Antony Green has scrutineer info that Labor is only getting 71% of Greens preferences, while the LNP is getting 62% from One Nation. So the LNP went into the by-election with a 3.3% margin, and should probably come out of it with about the same.

In Bundamba, Labor does not appear to be losing ground on postals, so their 42.4% is likely to be more or less solid. The Greens are, however, which may rein their 13.5% by upwards of 0.5%. That would mean Labor’s routine three-quarter share of Greens preferences would put them fairly comfortably over the line even without accounting for preference leakage from the LNP, which should be pretty substantial. Labor weren’t claiming victory last I heard, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t.

The LNP are claiming victory for Adrian Schrinner in the Brisbane lord mayoralty race, where Antony Green projects a final margin of 5.0%, which I see no reason to question. The LNP also looks assured of retaining its majority on council: yesterday I said they only had five of their council wards in the bag, but that this said more about the slow grind of the count than the weakness of their position. With today’s counting providing further clarity, it is now clear they have won 13 out of the 26 seats and would not be writing off any of their complement of 19 from 2016. They have retained the more-or-less marginal wards of The Gap, Marchant, Doboy and Runcorn, are very likely to hold Holland Park as well (although the ABC computer isn’t calling that one yet), and appear to have overcome early scares in the seemingly safe wards of Bracken Ridge and Jamboree.

Labor’s clearest shot at a gain from their existing tally of five seats looks to be Calamvale, a rather spectacular result given the existing 14.3% margin. Two LNP marginals, Enoggera and Northgate, look like going down to the wire, but Labor suffered a disappointing failure in Doboy, where the LNP margin had been erased by the redistribution. The Greens are in a tight race to take Paddington off the LNP, which would give them a second seat to add to The Gabba. However, they look to have done well but not well enough in Central, Coorparoo and Walter Taylor.

Saturday night overview

Tonight’s counting and reporting of results was an incomplete and highly chaotic affair, reflecting these times. All that seems clear is that Labor will retain Bundamba, and that Adrian Schrinner seems near certain to retain the Brisbane lord mayoralty. Currumbin is impossible to call at this stage. The council ward results in Brisbane so far look rather weak for the Liberal National Party, but that seems likely to change when counting of postal votes begins. By the same token, the Greens look to have done extremely well, but that too seems likely to moderate. Nowhere do we appear to have two-party preferred counts.

Bundamba

The ECQ website has 56.0% of the primary vote counted in Bundamba, but there are only 25.4% counted (9301 votes) on the media feed, which is the only place where booth results are available. Presumably the former is all the election day and pre-poll results, leaving a big bunch of postals outstanding. Labor are on 42.9% on the latest count, but it was a good result nonetheless for One Nation (27.8%), who far outpolled the LNP (15.9%). The best that can be said for the LNP is that they haven’t come last, as one poll suggested they might, with the Greens on 13.4%. Presumably most of the LNP vote will exhaust, and Labor should get a good flow of preferences from the Greens. I have my results facility back online, but a) as noted it’s well behind the ECQ website count, being based off the feed, and b) my primary vote and swing projections are screwy — they should say Labor 40.3% (-13.0%), Liberal National 16.8% (+1.7%), Greens 16.3% (5.4%). If nothing else, they offer an opportunity to look at booth swings in an easy-to-read format, with due regard to the collapse in traffic at polling booths.

Currumbin

The Currumbin results look to have been removed altogether from the media feed, leaving us with raw totals only the ECQ website’s to go off, accounting for 12,988 votes or 37.1% of the enrolment. So clearly there are plenty of pre-poll and perhaps even election day results to come here on top of the postals.

Brisbane lord mayoralty

The count as recorded on the ECQ website is relatively well advanced, accounting for 41.6% of enrolment. It’s a very different story on the media feed though, so the projection on the ABC site, which makes use of booth-matching, is not illumating. LNP incumbent Adrian Schrinner is on 45.6%, which should presumably be enough. Labor’s Pat Condren is on 31.8%, and while he can hope for a solid boost for preferences from Greens candidate Kath Angus 15.8%, postals should favour Schrinner.

Brisbane City Council

The counts for the council wards are less advanced than for the mayoralty, with progress ranging from barely over 10% to the low forties as a percentage of enrolled voters. While the LNP has only a handful of its existing seats bolted down (Chandler, Hamilton, Macgregor, McDowall and Pullenvale), they seem to be holding up well in some fairly dicey wards (The Gap, Holland Park, Marchant, Doboy). They aren’t doing brilliantly on the early count in the double-digit margin wards of Bracken Ridge, Calamvale and Jamboree, but it’s early days in each case and my guess is that they will pull through. Labor can at least be hopeful of gaining Enoggera, Northgate and Runcorn, which may be the decisive contests in determining if they can wear away the LNP majority.

Early results have been encouraging for the Greens, who have clearly retained The Gabba, are in the hunt to take Paddington off the LNP and can’t be ruled out in Central, Coorparoo and Walter Taylor, although my feeling is that the LNP will pull clear in the latter three. Independent Nicole Johnston has easily retained Tennyson, but Kate Richards failed to pull a rabbit out of the hat in Pullenvale. My best guess is that the LNP, after winning 19 wards out of 26 in 2016, will drop a few seats but retain a majority, but there are very wide error bars on that assessment.

Election night commentary

9.31pm. The ECQ relates: “Preliminary counts are underway. Results are coming into the ECQ as expected. We’re having technical issues displaying results online. We are are working on the issue. Preliminary count continues tonight till around 10pm. The official count begins tomorrow.” Furthermore, the lack of scrutineers means party insiders can’t offer the insight they usually would. Antony Green relates on twitter that “from a hand-scribbled A4 sheet, it seems the LNP leads Currumbin 3200-3167 from 10 counting centres, but 12,000 pre-polls to be counted and then the LNP leaning postals after that”. Given postals are likely to favour the LNP, this suggests they are more likely to hold on that not, but the bulk of the uncounted pre-poll vote suggests nothing should be taken for granted – and it would seem we are unlikely to have much joy on that front tonight.

8.47pm. With 6.9% counted in Central ward, LNP incumbent Vicki Howard is on 42.8% with the Greens running second on 34.0% and Labor third on 23.2%, suggesting it’s worth keeping an eye on as a potential Greens gain. No or next to no votes counted in the Greens existing seat of The Gabba and other potential gains in Coorparoo and Paddington.

Labor are running third in Central ward with 6.9% counted, suggesting it’s worth kee

8.40pm. There are no two-party numbers in the feed, so I presume Antony Green’s numbers are based on preference estimates.

8.20pm. A big hit of results for the Brisbane lord mayoralty with 44,720 votes now counted, though still only a bit more than 5% of enrolment. Adrian Schrinner leads Pat Condren 43.4% to 30.4%, though a lot depends on where those votes are from — probably inner urban areas, judging by the 18.7% Greens vote, which should feed Condren quite a few preferences. This update hasn’t made it through to the feed and the ABC site yet, so no booth matched calculations available.

8.14pm. Slow progress all around. Nothing to report since the last updates.

7.50pm. Antony Green is detecting a 10% swing to Labor in the lord mayoralty race, which should bring it down to the wire. But the qualification remains that projecting results is uniquely challenging at these elections. No further progress in the Currumbin count.

7.40pm. There are nine booths in from Currumbin, with at most 563 formal votes. Antony Green projects no swing at all, which is good news for the LNP, but we’re still only talking 1107 votes counted, or 3.5% of the roll. A different dynamic on pre-polls and postals might yet change things.

7.36pm. Clearly my results facility isn’t about to come to life any time soon, so I’ve put it on ice and will fix it this evening so it will at least be of use in following the late count. Just eyeballing the media feed, I can report that eight booths are in from Bundamba, none of which recorded more than 563 formal votes. Antony Green is calling it for Labor; the LNP look like coming third, not fourth; but One Nation are in second place on a substantial 28.2%, but projected to fall 8.6% short after preferences.

7.21pm. For what very little it’s worth, the Greens lead in the race for the lord mayoralty with 0.12% counted. So presumably an inner city booth.

7.18pm. Some small numbers are starting to appear for Brisbane City Council on the ECQ, but I fear the media feed may have tanked — still nothing on Antony Green’s results page.

7.14pm. Now there are some primary results on the ECQ site for Currumbin, which look reasonably encouraging for the LNP in that they lead Labor 47.9% to 37.6%, but again we don’t know what part of the electorate this is from.

7.11pm. More numbers in from Bundamba on the ECQ site, but still nothing on the feed (no updates on Antony Green’s page either so the problem doesn’t seem to be on my end). The latest update does not change the situation noted previously. We don’t what booths these votes are from, but Bundamba is homogenous enough an electorate that it’s unlikely to matter much.

7.06pm. There are some numbers from Bundamba on the ECQ site but they’re not on the feed yet. They suggest that uComms poll might not have been far off the mark, with the LNP coming last out of four and Labor poised to win easily.

7.00pm. An hour in, and there’s not a single result yet anywhere across Queensland. Might be that social distancing is slowing the process.

6.18pm. I’ve mostly got it working now, I hope, though a niggling error means I’m unable to provide rows for non-ordinary (i.e. mostly postal) votes, which shouldn’t matter until later in the evening and hopefully I’ll have fixed it by then. In any case, the projections have to be regarded as experimental due to the extraordinary circumstances of the election: with voters abandoning polling day voting en masse for postal and pre-poll voting, I’ve had to shift results around for purposes of booth-matching in a rather arbitrary fashion.

6.05pm. Welcome to live coverage of the count for Queensland’s Bundamba and Currumbin state by-elections, and to a lesser extent for the Brisbane lord mayoralty and council. I am hoping to have my live results facility in operation for the first two shortly, provided I’m able to iron a few last teething problems.

Queensland elections: Currumbin, Bundamba and Brisbane City Council

Two polls find the Liberal National Party opposition struggling in Queensland’s two state by-elections. Also: a quick look at the lord mayoral and council elections in Brisbane.

In spite of everything, elections will proceed on Saturday in Queensland’s state by-elections for Currumbin and Bundama, together with its local government elections. It appears pre-poll voting has more than doubled since 2016, and postal voting has doubled almost exactly, though I’m hearing anecdotal evidence of applicants who struggled with a floundering website before the deadline last Monday failing to receive their ballots. By my rough reckoning, the proportions in 2016 were 63% ordinary, 23% pre-poll and 14% postal, but should now be at around 18%, 54% and 28%. I will have live results pages in action for the by-elections, but the radical changes in voter behaviour just noted will make it unusually difficult to get an accurate read on the swing.

The Courier-Mail had polls for Currumbin and Bundamba that paint a bleak picture for the Liberal National Party, showing Labor at level pegging in their bid to snare Currumbin, and the LNP crashing to fourth place in Bundamba, where Labor is credited with a 62-38 lead over One Nation. The polls were conducted by uComms last weekend from samples of 700 in each seat — I’m unclear if they were commissioned by the newspaper. Both Currumbin, which covers the Gold Coast at the New South Wales border and has an LNP margin of 3.3%, and Bundamba, covering eastern Ipswich and with a Labor margin of 21.6%, are straightforward four-cornered contests involving Labor, the LNP, the Greens and One Nation. One Nation are directing preferences to the LNP, the Greens to Labor, and the LNP to One Nation. However, the impact of this will be limited as parties are not allowed to distribute how-to-vote cards at polling booths.

The other big story on Saturday is the election for Brisbane City Council, Australia’s biggest, most powerful and most conventionally partisan local government. There will be a direct election for the lord mayoralty and elections for the 26 single-member wards of the council, conducted with optional preferential voting. The Liberal National Party achieved crushing victories in 2016, when Graham Quirk was re-elected as mayor over Labor’s Rod Harding with 59.3% of the two-candidate preferred vote. Quirk retired in March 2019 and was succeeded by Adrian Schrinner, as chosen by the council from among its own number. He had previously been deputy mayor, a prize of the majority party. His Labor opponent is Patrick Condren, a journalist with a high profile as former state political editor for the Seven Network. Reflecting a general impression that current circumstances will favour incumbency, Ladbrokes has Schrinner a clear favourite at $1.22 to Condren’s $3.

The LNP won 19 of the 26 council seats in 2016, with Labor winning only five and the Greens and an independent scoring one apiece. One of the LNP wards, Pullenvale, will be contested by incumbent Kate Richards as an independent after being referred to the Crime and Corruption Commission and dumped as LNP candidate. Another ward, Doboy, was won by the LNP on a 4.3% margin but now credited with a post-redistribution notional margin of 0.3% by Ben Raue at the Tally Room, although Antony Green gives it a tiny LNP margin of 0.03%.

There are nine wards with margins of under 10%, including two, Coorparoo and Paddington, for which the Greens are at least partly hopeful. These wards respectively neighbour the Greens’ existing seat of The Gabba to the north-west and east, the three collectively covering inner-city territory immediately west and south of the central business district. Jonathan Sri holds a solid 7.0% margin over the LNP in The Gabba, but Labor could threaten him if voters defect to them from the LNP.

Labor’s potential gains are further afield: Northgate (1.7%), The Gap (4.5%), Enoggera (5.6%) and Marchant (7.6%) in the north of Brisbane, and Holland Park (4.1%) and Runcorn (8.7%) in the south. A roughie might be the CBD ward of Central, which the LNP holds with a margin of 8.2% over Labor, but the Greens were within striking distance of second place last time. Former LNP independent Nicole Johnston looks secure in Tennyson, but it’s anyone’s guess how Richard might go in Pullenvale.

The state’s other councils do not have declared party alignments, but they are often present if you know where to look. Outer Brisbane and the coastal sprawl to its north and south are covered by (in descending order of population) the cities of Gold Coast, Moreton Bay (think Dickson, Longman, northern Petrie), Sunshine Coast, Logan (most of Moreton and northern Forde, plus some low-density hinterland from Wright), Ipswich and Redland (which perfectly corresponds with Bowman), with Toowoomba, Townsville and Cairns being the largest municipalities regionally. The first five of these are usefully explained by Ben Raue and guest Alexis Pink at The Tally Room.

Queensland state by-election(s) and the Brisbane lord mayoralty

Queensland state by-elections loom in at least one seat, almost certain to be held on the day of the state’s council elections.

Queensland looks like it may have a practice run for its October state election on March 28, in the shape of by-elections for two state seats together with its council elections, which are themselves of unusual interest due to the extent of the City of Brisbane and the partisanship of its council politics. Certainly a contested by-election looms in the southern Gold Coast seat of Currumbin, after Liberal National Party member Jann Stuckey resigned on Wednesday, trumping her announcement last June that she would not seek another term. The other potential by-election is in the seat of Bundamba in eastern Ipswich, a seat safe enough for Labor that it was among the seven retained at the party’s 2012 election wipeout. The situation there arises from suggestions that Jo-Ann Miller, a long-standing thorn in the side of her party’s leadership, is considering jumping ship to run for the mayoralty of Ipswich. The ABC quotes the Electoral Commissioner, Pat Vigden, as saying the cost of a by-election would be cut from $350,000 to $210,000 if it was held on the same day as the council elections.

Jann Stuckey’s announcement on Wednesday that she was retiring due to a battle with depression carried the sting that political life had exposed her to “bullying, personal attacks and insults”. This follows threats to her preselection after she and two other LNP members voted to remove abortion from the criminal code in November 2018 in what was supposedly a conscience vote (the only Labor member who voted against was the aforementioned Jo-Ann Miller), and her publicly voiced displeasure that the party’s candidate vetting committee knocked back the preselection nomination of her favoured successor, Chris Crawford. However, LNP leader Deb Frecklington insisted Stuckey’s comments in her retirement announcement referred to attacks on her by Labor, which Stuckey has endorsed to the extent of telling Seven News she had been “humiliated” by recent government attacks on her in parliament.

Stuckey has held Currumbin for the Liberals and then the LNP since 2004, most recently on a margin of 3.3% at the 2017 election. This followed a 2.4% swing to Labor, reducing the margin to its lowest point since her first two wins in 2004 and 2006. The seat was previously held for Labor from 1992 to 2004 by Merri Rose, a Beattie government minister whose career ended ignominiously. Labor’s candidate will be Kaylee Campradt, a part-time campaign officer for the Queensland Council of Unions who was preselected to run at the state election last October. No word on the LNP preselection that I’m aware of, other than a statement from the party’s administration that it will be “expedited”.

The Brisbane lord mayoralty election will pit LNP incumbent Adrian Schrinner against Labor candidate Patrick Condren, a television news journalist. Labor originally selected its unsuccessful candidate from 2016, Rod Harding, but dumped him in favour of Condren in September. The Liberals (technically the LNP since 2010) have won four successive lord mayoral elections since 2004, the last three by landslide margins. Campbell Newman was the winner in 2004 and 2008, and was succeeded on his entry to state politics in 2012 by Graham Quirk, the winner of 2012 and 2016. Quirk in turn resigned in April last year and was succeeded by Schrinner, the choice of the LNP-dominated council.

The LNP won 19 of the 26 council wards in 2016 to Labor’s five, with the others going to an ex-Liberal independent and the Greens. In the ward of Pullenvale, former federal Ryan MP Jane Prentice suffered another preselection defeat on Wednesday at the hands of Greg Adermann, as both vied to succeed incumbent Kate Richards, who has been disendorsed and referred by her own party to the Crime and Corruption Commission.

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