Greenslopes

Margin: Liberal National 2.5%
Region: Southern Brisbane
Federal: Bonner/Griffith

Candidates in ballot paper order

	IAN KAYE Liberal National (top) MATTHEW DARRAGH Family First JOSEPH KELLY Labor (bottom) DARREN ELLIS Greens

The inner southern Brisbane seat of Greenslopes has long been one of Queensland’s main litmus test tests, having participated in the flight from Liberal to National in 1983, Wayne Goss’s sweep to victory in 1989, the decisive swings of 1995 and 1998, and the all-encompassing 2012 landslide, albeit that the narrow margin on the latter occasion suggests it has become more favourable for Labor over time. The electorate includes the bulk of Coorparoo in the north, Holland Park in the centre, and Mount Gravatt in the south. It is held for the Liberal National Party by Ian Kaye, a former police officer.

Greenslopes was held by the Liberals from its creation in 1960 until 1983, when Bill Hewitt became one of the party’s seven members to lose his seat to the Nationals, his tenure as a Bjelke-Petersen government minister having ended amid the rupture of the coalition a month earlier. The seat was then held for two terms by Leisha Harvey, who later served as Health Minister and was ultimately convicted on Fitzgerald-related misappropriation charges. Harvey suffered a particularly crushing defeat at the 1989 election, finishing a distant third behind the Liberals. Gary Fenlon emerged as Labor’s winning candidate in 1989 with a margin of 5.6% and held the seat until 2009, except for the term after the 1995 election when Liberal candidate Ted Radke defeated him by 41 votes.

Fenlon was succeeded upon his retirement in 2009 by Cameron Dick, a barrister and former staffer to Beattie government minister Merri Rose, who had an earlier brush with politics in the 1990s when he served for a year as acting Attorney-General in the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. Dick is associated with the Labor Forum/AWU faction, together with his brother Milton Dick, a Brisbane City councillor and former party state secretary. He was immediately elevated to cabinet upon his election as Attorney-General and Industrial Relations Minister, before exchanging the former portfolio for education in the February 2011 reshuffle. Dick was one of only five Labor members able to contain the swing to single digits in 2012, but the 9.4% swing was nonetheless sufficient to erase his existing 6.9% margin. He will now seek to re-enter parliament further out along the Pacific Motorway in the Logan City seat of Woodridge.

Labor’s new candidate for the seat is Joe Kelly, a nurse who ran unsuccessfully for Holland Park ward at the 2012 Brisbane council election.

In the second week of the campaign, a Galaxy automated phone poll of 511 respondents in the electorate had Labor with a two-party lead of 59-41, from primary votes of 50% for Labor, 36% for the LNP and 12% for the Greens.

Corrections, complaints and feedback to William Bowe at pollbludger-at-bigpond-dot-com. Read William’s blog, The Poll Bludger.

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