Background

A by-election for the southern Brisbane state seat of Stretton will be held on July 24 after Duncan Pegg, who had held the seat for Labor from 2017 until his resignation in April on grounds of deteriorating health. Pegg had been diagnosed with cancer in 2019, and died from the illness on June 10. The date for the by-election was announced on June 29; candidate nominations close on July 7, with the ballot paper draw to follow immediately afterwards.

Candidates

Labor's new candidate is James Martin, who had been an electorate officer to Duncan Pegg and ran for the ward of Calamvale at the Brisbane City Council election, picking up an 11% swing but falling 2.2% short of gaining the seat.

The Liberal National Party candidate is Jim Bellos, a police officer and former Queenslander of the Year. Bellos has been the subject of the campaign's obligatory social media dust-up, involving unpleasant language he used in 2017 to describe a female television presenter whose off-air quarrel with a colleague was leaked to media site Mumbrella.

The election has attracted three minor parties, not including One Nation. Greens candidate Andrea Wildin is a nurse midwife; also in the field are candidates of Animal Justice and the Informed Medical Options Party.

Profile

Stretton is a strongly multicultural seat centred around 17 kilometres south of Brisbane, with 23.0% of the population identifying Chinese ancestry at the time of the 2016 census, over ten times that of Queensland as a whole, and a further 7.2% who identified as Indian.

Labor has held Stretton for all but one term since its creation in 2001, the exception inevitably resulting from Campbell Newman's 2012 landslide. It was created as the successor to abolished Sunnybank, which re-emerged in 2009 as a separate electorate bordering Stretton to the north, before again being abolished with the creation of Toohey in 2017. Stephen Robertson held Sunnybank and then Stretton for Labor from 1992 until his retirement in 2012, his closest shave being a 1.4% winning margin in Sunnybank in 1995.

Stretton was gained for the LNP at the 2012 election by Freya Ostapovitch with a swing of 19.0%, a particularly forceful result even by the standards of that election. She was then unseated in 2015 by a 14.5% swing to Duncan Pegg, who secured a margin of 5.0%. Pegg did well to record further swings of 4.6% in 2017 and 4.9% in 2020, restoring the Labor margin to its level from the Peter Beattie era.