Queensland Politics — Conservative, Volatile, or Both?
Is Queensland politics different? More specifically, is the Queensland electorate more conservative than the rest of the country? It is a question that countless academics, journalists, pundits and politicians have pondered for many years. Now, with COVID-19 presenting new challenges for Australia’s federal system, this question has renewed significance.
In the wake of the Labor party’s disastrous performance in QLD in the 2019 federal election, the question received considerable attention from the commentariat. Some predicted the result was an ominous harbinger for the Palaszczuk government’s demise in the 2020 QLD state election. This of course did not eventuate — what’s more, the Palaszczuk government achieved a 2 percent swing to it, a remarkable feat for a party that’s been in power at the state level for 25 of the past 31 years.
The wildly different results at the two above mentioned elections are very much in line with electoral trends in QLD over the last 30 years; Labor dominates at the state level and the LNP performs strongly at the federal level. Such a record would suggest it is too simplistic to just label QLD, at least in terms of its voting patterns, the conservative state of Australia. In this article, I’ll chart the key trends that can be found in the results of QLD state and federal elections over the last 25 years in order to give a more accurate flavour of the banana state’s politics.
“To fully understand Queensland’s political culture and answer the question of whether it is different to the rest of the country … requires an examination of the demographics and political economy of the state, and the style and substance of our state governments.”
Turning first to the federal level where Labor has consistently underperformed in QLD relative to its electoral performance in the rest of the country. At each of the nine federal elections from 1996 to 2019, the QLD ALP’s primary vote and two party-preferred (2PP) vote was worse than their national average. In this period, the ALP won the national 2PP vote three times, but only once in 2007 did they win the 2PP vote in QLD, and even then, only very narrowly (50.44–49.56).
Since the 1996 federal election, Labor has only won a national majority of seats once, in 2007, and it is only at this election that federal Labor won a majority of seats in QLD as well. This would suggest that QLD is something of a bellwether state: whichever party wins the majority of seats in QLD typically wins the majority of seats nationally. This I think is untrue; it is more often the case that federal Labor has done worse in QLD than the rest of the country.
The average proportion of seats the federal ALP has won over this period in QLD has been a miserable 25.24 percent. This is considerably worse than the average proportion of seats the party has won nationally (43.6 percent). Federal Labor’s poor performance in QLD is particularly stark in the 2019 and 2010 federal elections, when the party won a majority outside of QLD.
Of course, the flip side is the abysmal performance of the conservative LNP at the state level. Of the ten elections held since 1995, they have only won a majority once, albeit by a landslide. The average proportion of seats won by the LNP over this period was a paltry 35.05 percent¹ (compared to 53.65 percent at the federal level).
The primary vote of the state LNP has also been consistently less than the LNP’s QLD performance at federal elections. This is most vividly illustrated by comparing the LNP’s 2004 QLD election result to its performance in QLD at the 2004 federal election. While its state primary vote was a mere 35.46 percent, its primary vote in QLD at the federal poll was a massive 49 percent.
The gap between the LNP’s state and federal primary vote in QLD was less in the most recent elections; 43.7 percent in QLD in the 2019 federal election, and 35.89 percent. But the difference in the 2PP remained vast; the LNP won 58.44 percent at the federal level and 46.8 percent at the state level. Overall, these trends show how over a 25-year period, no matter which way you look at it, federal Labor has performed poorly in QLD and the LNP have done similarly badly in state elections.
Going beyond this particular trend, we come to another key feature of QLD electoral politics: its volatility. Over the last 10 QLD state elections, there were large swings recorded in six elections — 1995, 1998, 2001, 2009, 2012, and 2015. The latter two elections saw particularly remarkable swings: 13.7 percent to the LNP in 2012 and then 14 percent back to Labor in 2015. The situation is similar at a federal level. Of the nine elections since 1996, large swings were recorded in five elections. Indeed, the volatility of QLD politics certainly makes its elections interesting and more distinct from the rest of the country.
“What this means is that we can forget making confident predictions about how QLD will play out in the next federal election”
What it also points to is yet another fascinating dynamic: the outsized role that minor parties play in shaping election outcomes examples. The 1998 and 2017 QLD state elections are particularly notable for the prominent role One Nation preferences played in the final outcome. The 2001 and 2020 state elections were similarly notable for being (partly) decided by which major party most benefited from the subsequent collapse in the One Nation vote.
The difficulty in knowing how well minor parties will perform and where their preferences will go often make QLD elections not just more volatile but also more unpredictable. What this means is that we can forget making confident predictions about how QLD will play out in the next federal election. The key questions to ask are: will the One Nation vote hold up, and if not, which major party will benefit most from its collapse?
At the 2020 State election both major parties benefited from the fall in the One Nation vote, but Labor more so, hence the 2PP swing to the Palaszczuk Government. Answering the above questions definitively is impossible. Although, I would argue that whether or not One Nation’s vote holds will partly depend on how much One Nation voters dislike the party’s laissez-faire attitude to the Covid-19 pandemic and their anti-vaxxer stance.
Certainly, some of the more conspiratorial One Nation voters will approve of these stances, but other older One Nation voters who support the tough border policy of the state premiers may not. For example, in the 2020 QLD election, the One Nation vote in retiree hub of Hervey Bay crashed from 25 to 11 percent, with Labor receiving a swing to it of 10 percent.
A final issue that I’ll comment on is the question of whether or not there is a relationship between the QLD federal and state election results. Do QLD voters tend to vote for Labor in state elections because there is a federal Coalition government in power? We can only speculate as to whether this is the case, and what would be the reasons for it. Perhaps a core group of QLD voters think there is merit in having a left-wing state government as a counterweight to a right-wing federal government. I do not think this is a convincing scenario; the type of swinging voters who vote Coalition at the federal level and Labor at state level are likely too uninformed and disengaged in the political process to make such a rational decision.
The overarching point here is that election numbers cannot tell us the full story. To fully understand Queensland’s political culture and answer the question of whether it is different to the rest of the country, and whether this means it is more conservative, requires an examination of the demographics and political economy of the state, and the style and substance of our state governments. What I will say, to conclude, is that QLD politics is far more complex than the simplistic label of ‘conservative’ suggests. What’s more, this complexity is worth understanding.
¹ I have not included in this calculation the 2012 QLD state election, which the LNP won an astonishing 78 out of 89 seats, as it is a clear outlier.
