Category: Queensland Election 2015

The Australian has a Newspoll result of somewhat dubious utility, in which three disparate electorates – Cairns, Keppel and far distant Ipswich West – were targeted with small samples of 200 respondents each, the composite result indicating a reversal from 57.4-42.6 to the LNP in 2012 to 56-44 to Labor now. Which is obviously very good news for Labor, but how good is extremely hard to say. On the primary vote, Labor is up from 31% to 47%, the LNP down from 43.5% to 35%, the Greens down from 6.6% to 5% and others down from 18.9% to 13%, Katter’s Australian Party having done well in all three seats in 2012 but not contesting this time.

Campbell Newman cops a particularly tough mark of 32% approval to 60% disapproval, though whether this reflects a decline in his fortunes since previous campaign polls or peculiarity of sentiment in these electorates is, once again, impossible to say. The same goes for Annastacia Palaszczuk’s strong ratings of 45% approval and 33% disapproval, her 46-36 lead as preferred premier, and the LNP’s unusually narrow lead of 44-36 as party expected to win.

The rationale behind polling these seats is clearly to get a sense of how things are looking in seats in the 6-9% range, but since similar margins is all these seats have in common, I’m not sure how illuminating it is. Basically, I’d much rather have seen Newspoll’s efforts dedicated to a particular region, or even just one seat, than a scattershot look at three electorates that have nothing to do with each other.

The Seven Network reports that the second ReachTEL poll of the Queensland election suggests the tide is going in the Liberal National Party’s direction, which is consistent with what I’ve been able to observe of the campaign. Whereas the first poll on the night of the election announcement had it dead level, this poll has the LNP leading 52-48 from primary votes of 42.0% for the LNP (up 1.7%), 36.7% for Labor (down 1.4%), 8.4% to the Greens (up 0.8%) and 5.2% to Palmer United (down 0.9%). Two-thirds expect the LNP to win, and a question on preferred LNP leader if Campbell Newman loses Ashgrove has Fiona Simpson moving ahead of Lawrence Springborg, with likely nominee Tim Nicholls well down the list.

UPDATE: Full results here. The automated phone poll was conducted last night from a sample of 1635.

UPDATE 2: For the purposes of illustrating a point I’m making in an article I’m writing for Crikey, I feature below calculations of the LNP’s two-party vote at the federal election transposed on to state election boundaries. In the other two columns are the 2012 state result (asterisk indicating an estimate because no LNP-versus-Labor count was conducted), and what I’ve called “SSD”, or “standardised state difference”. This equals the relevant electorate’s deviation from the mean at the state election, minus the equivalent result for the federal election. So for example, Nanango, Kawana and Burnett were seats where the LNP had relatively stronger results at the state than the federal election; Curtis Pitt in Mulgrave and Kerry Shine in Toowoomba North appear to have been two Labor members who performed particularly well in spite of everything; and Mansfield, ever the bellwether, was bang on the statewide average both times. There have been a few seats where I deemed the state 2PP to be unestimateable (inestimable?), and you might well think there should have been a few more.

UPDATE 3: And below are full results for the weekend’s Galaxy poll, which I don’t think have been published. Swings from 2012 election noted in italics.

The sidebar now comes with a poll tracker, which presently shows the Liberal National Party on track for a modest absolute majority. However, the recent emphasis on electorate-level polling means its most recent data points are from the first week of the campaign. Since this is a two-party model, the seat allocation for “others” simply assumes that the three relevant incumbents who won their seats as non-major party candidates in 2012, namely Mount Isa MP Rob Katter and Dalrymple MP Shane Knuth of Katter’s Australian Party and independent Nicklin MP Peter Wellington, will do so again this time, without being joined by anyone else. If any electorate-level polling emerges to disturb that apprehension, I will play it by ear if and when it occurs. The methodology is broadly similar to that for BludgerTrack (you can find an explanatory link for that somewhere on the sidebar), but with a few experimental tweaks to deal with optional preferential voting. Based on the way preferences in individual electorates behaved in 2012, I have derived the following models to determine the percentage share of the minor party and independent vote allocated to the two parties as preferences:

LNP: 0.295 – 0.089a – 0.095b
Labor: 0.047 + 0.208a + 0.341b

Where “a” equals Labor’s share of the major party vote, and “b” equals the Greens’ share of the non-major party vote. In other words, as either of these things increases, so does Labor’s share of preferences. Polling suggests the Greens vote to have been essentially static since 2012, so “b” isn’t much of a factor, but “a” of course has risen considerably. Even so, the effect of implementing the model is unspectacular: if 2012 preference flows (as best as I can determine them) were applied to the current primary vote numbers, the Liberal National Party would be up 0.4% on two-party preferred and two on the seat projection. The current split is roughly 30% Labor, 20% LNP and 50% exhausted. I should grant that modelling based on previous election preferences wouldn’t have worked that brilliantly at the last five elections due to the escalating rate of exhausted preferences, but presumably that trend has to level off eventually.

Random notes:

• Antony Green gets detailed on Campbell Newman’s “just vote one” strategy, the upshot of which is that the party that leads on the primary vote wants the exhausted preferences rate to be as high as possible. When Peter Beattie pioneered the strategy in 2001, the anti-Labor vote was splintering between Nationals, Liberal, One Nation and the One Nation breakaway City-Country Alliance. While the Palmer and Katter parties complicate the issue somewhat, the main issue today is the segment of the Left vote that goes missing as exhausted Greens preferences, which can only stand to be maximised if the Premier is out there reminding voters that they are not in fact obliged to number every box, as they would be at a federal election.

• The Australian reports that the internal polling of both sides has the six LNP-held seats in northernmost Queensland “well within the ALP’s grasp”, namely the Cape York electorate of Cook, the Cairns electorates of Cairns and Barron River, and the Townsville seats of Townsville, Thuringowa and Mundingburra. However, it would seem Labor is better placed in Cairns and Thuringowa than in Barron River and Mundingburra.

• Sean Parnell of The Australian reports that “support is building” for Treasurer Tim Nicholls to take over if Campbell Newman doesn’t win Ashgrove, “although there is some support for former leader and Health Minister Lawrence Springborg”. Mark Ludlow of the Financial Review reports Nanango MP Deb Frecklington is “shaping as a possible deputy for Nicholls if he becomes premier” (see below for more on Frecklington’s status within the government).

• The LNP held its campaign launch yesterday at the Brisbane Convention Centre, which Steven Wardill of the Courier-Mail deemed “weird” even by the standards of the genre. From the limited material available to me, what stands out about the launch is the distinctly multicultural flavour of what Wardill describes as the “nodding heads placed strategically behind Newman”, one of which I take to be that of Yeerongpilly candidate Leila Abukar. The contrast with the Liberal Party’s federal campaign could not be more acute. Labor will hold its campaign launch tomorrow in Ipswich, presumably with an eye to the seats of Ipswich and Ipswich West, which the LNP holds on margins of 4.2% and 7.2% after titanic swings in 2012. The other Ipswich electorate, Bundamba, is held by one of Labor’s seven survivors from 2012, Jo-Ann Miller.

• Steven Wardill of the Courier-Mail observes parallels between the looming election and Peter Beattie’s second landslide of 2004, starting with a February 7 election date that was barely less audacious than Campbell Newman’s, and continuing with a government on the front foot with respect to contentious areas of the policy debate. Following the lesson of history to its conclusion, he determines that Labor will find the going tough outside of a designated list of gimmes (Bulimba, Waterford, Lytton, Greenslopes, Sandgate, Nudgee, Ipswich and Logan). There may be quite a bit in this, but I would add the following qualifications. First, Peter Beattie took Labor into the 2004 campaign with its two-party poll rating in the high fifties, and the worst of its mid-term Newspoll results had been equivalent to 53-47. Both of which suggest he was doing four or five points better than Newman. Secondly, whereas the LNP has been savaged in two by-elections in the past year, Labor under Peter Beattie had performed quite creditably in its one by-election of the term, which was held in Maryborough nine months before the election. Thirdly, while the Beattie government’s federal counterparts were polling strongly under the new leadership of Mark Latham at the time of the 2004 election, Newman would be bracing for some heavy blowback against Tony Abbott.

• Certainly Wardill is on the money when he says that the LNP campaign is seeking to make a virtue of being “the agent of reform on the election’s key issue”. The party’s publicity material makes prominent use of imagery of Campbell Newman, Tim Nicholls, Jeff Seeney, Fiona Simpson and Deb Frecklington getting down to business, with Nicholls singled out for prominence in the television spot below as Newman spruiks “a plan we know we can pay for”. Interestingly, neither of the two women featured are actually part of the cabinet that looks like it’s being portrayed, the only female members of which are Tracy Davis and Jann Stuckey. Simpson is the Speaker, and presumably made the cut by virtue of her long-established public visibility. Frecklington holds a position in the outer ministry, but being the member for rural Nanango, rather than suburban Aspley or Currumbin on the Gold Coast, was presumably favoured over Davis and Stuckey in the interests of regional balance.

• The Courier-Mail reported on Saturday that both parties were to launch an advertising blitz over the weekend ahead of the start of pre-polling today, having spent the first half of the campaign relying on the internet. I can’t tell you if this is being reflected in what’s going to air, but the advertising on the parties’ YouTube channels is all positive in the LNP’s case, and all negative in Labor’s. The LNP may well be calculating that its interests are best served by keeping the opposition’s profile as low as possible. As for Labor, I was willing to cut its campaign team some slack for the poor quality of its 2012 ads, on the basis that 15 years of accumulating baggage in government gave it little left to work with, but this lot is making me wonder. The party’s channel essentially features three ads, the least underwhelming of which comes in 30-second and 15-second edits, with the longer version featured below.

GhostWhoVotes tweets that tomorrow’s Australian carries a Newspoll from Ashgrove, from a sample of 600, which gives Campbell Newman something of a morale boost in showing him trailing Labor’s Kate Jones in his seat of Ashgrove by a margin of just 51-49, from primary votes of 47% for both Newman and Jones, 5% for the Greens and 1% for “others”. Furthermore, Newman is credit with something he hasn’t seen much of lately, namely a positive net approval rating, with approval at 51% and disapproval at 42%. However, Jones leads him as “better local member” 52-44, though under the circumstances this measure is a bit hard to read.

Pooping the LNP party, apparently, is electorate-level Galaxy polling from the Courier-Mail showing “massive swings of up to 12 per cent against the Newman Government across southeast Queensland”, and the LNP to be “wiped out across north Queensland”. It would seem this includes a very close result in the Townsville seat of Mundingburra and a big Labor lead in Greenslopes in Brisbane’s inner south. Stay tuned for more on that one.

UPDATE: The Galaxy polling for the Courier-Mail encompasses eight individual electorates, and while the report offers nothing on how it was conducted, I think it’s safe to assume it followed the usual format of electorate-level polling from Galaxy in hitting samples of around 550 by automated phone polling. The results are remarkably consistent in showing swings to Labor of around 10%, and are thus actually well in line with the statewide Galaxy phone poll of last week which had the LNP leading 52-48 – which is to say they don’t quite live up to the Courier-Mail’s “Palaszczuk is on track to become premier” front page hype. Only two-party results are provided, which are as follows:

Barron River (LNP 9.5%): 50-50.
Cairns (LNP 8.9%): 53-47 to Labor.
Greenslopes (LNP 2.5%): 59-41 to Labor.
Mulgrave (Labor 1.1%): 61-39 to Labor.
Mundingburra (LNP 10.2%): 51-49 to Labor.
Pumicestone (LNP 12.1%): 52-48 to LNP.
Thuringowa (LNP 6.7%): 52-48 to Labor.
Townsville (LNP 4.8%): 58-42 to Labor.

… is here. Bells and whistles include electorate maps (sadly not including two-party booth results this time, partly because the assumptions of the two-party vote didn’t entirely play out in 2012, and partly because I didn’t have time), and charts showing previous election results and demographic indicators. I only got half way through checking that all the pages were in order before calling it a night, so try not to laugh too hard if you see candidate photos or slabs of text applied to the wrong electorates. Corrections of the polite kind will be gratefully received in comments.

The Seven Network reports that a ReachTEL automated phone poll of 843 respondents conducted last night finds Campbell Newman trailing in Ashgrove by 53-47 on two-party preferred, with Labor’s Kate Jones on 47.6% of the primary vote compared with 43.7% for Newman, and the Greens on 5.4%. This marks a narrowing of the gap compared with the last such poll a month ago, which had it at 55-45 on two-party and 47.9% to 40.7% on the primary vote. The electorate was polled four times last year, with Labor in the lead each time: by 53-47 in a Galaxy poll conducted in February, and 53-47, 58-42, 56-44 and 55-45 in ReachTEL polls respectively conducted in July, early September, late September and December. The latter two polls were conducted after Kate Jones announced her intention to run.

With today’s closure of nominations, ballot paper order has been determined and full lists of candidates published on the Electoral Commission of Queensland website. There are seven registered parties at the election, of which the Liberal National Party, Labor and the Greens are fielding candidates in all 89 electorates, as they did in 2012. Palmer United is fielding 50, Family First 28 (compared with 38 last time), Katter’s Australian Party 11 (well down on 76 last time), and One Nation also 11 (up from six last time), with 66 independents (up from 43 in 2012). The total number of candidates in 433, almost exactly the same as the 430 at the 2012 election, despite the short notice of the election. The list of registered parties differs from 2012 only in that Palmer United has joined the party. Campbell Newman got the better of the ballot paper draw in Ashgrove, landing second place with Labor’s Kate Jones last out of five candidates.

Two more polls from Queensland, from Newspoll in The Weekend Australian and Galaxy in the Courier-Mail, both suggest the commencement of hostilities has served to push the Liberal National Party into the lead. The Newspoll survey was conducted from Wednesday to Friday from a sample of 801, which is a little on the small side by its standards, and it records a five point hike for the LNP on the primary vote compared with the aggregated October-December poll, pushing it out to 42%. Labor is also up a point to 37%, with the balance accounted for by three point drops for the Greens to 7% and “others” to 13%, with Katter’s Australian Party remaining at 1%. On two-party preferred, a 50-50 result in the previous poll turns into a 53-47 lead to the LNP. Campbell Newman’s approval rating is up three to 41% with disapproval steady at 51%, while Annastacia Palszczuk is at 38% on both measures, respectively being steady and up four. However, she’s actually narrowed the gap on preferred premier, with Newman’s lead down from 44-35 to 42-38. A question on firmness of voting intention finds it to be a little weaker than usual, while 47% say they expect the LNP to win compared with 31% for Labor.

The Galaxy result is in the same ballpark in having the LNP lead at 52-48, compared with 50-50 for its last poll in mid-November. The primary votes are 41% for the LNP, up four on the previous Galaxy poll; 38% for Labor, who are steady; 8% for the Greens, down one; and 3% for Palmer United, down four. The Palmer United result compares with 12% in the Galaxy poll from August, and reduces them to parity with Katter’s Australian Party (Newspoll doesn’t provide a dedicated measure for Palmer United, but conclusions are there to be drawn from the three-point drop in the others vote). Despite the improved result for the LNP on voting intention, the poll finds Campbell Newman’s lead over Annastacia Palaszczuk narrowing from 47-37 to 45-40. However, the leaders’ respective personal ratings are little changed, with Newman at 41% approval (steady) and 52% disapproval (up one), and Palaszczuk at 39% (up two) and 38% (up one). The poll encompassed 800 respondents; not sure of the exact field work dates, but obviously it was over the last two or three evenings.