GOLIATH LEAP FOR DAVID
LABOR is about to win a Gold Coast seat. Will the ALP ever win any more? Take a quick trip behind the Palaszczuk bunker and visit what is a thin red line.
On Monday’s front page of the Bulletin, Gaven Labor candidate Meaghan Scanlon was pictured by the cheeky headline Swing and a M1ss, confirming the highway would be her first priority.
Senior ALP officials also admit the 24-year-old’s longer term aim will be to improve her own margin, make Gaven safe and then help others gain seats.
Her young supporters began doorknocking in May, they stood with signs on roundabouts each weekend and a huge truck parked in the main road had the young lawyer’s smiling face splashed across it.
Only a resident busy building a meth lab in Pacific Pines would not have known who she was prior to last Saturday’s poll.
Apart from Rowan Holzberger in Southport and young mum Georgi Leader in Currumbin, Labor candidates started far too late without any resources or strategies.
A respected ALP source called to question how the socalled Minister for the Gold Coast, Kate Jones, could suggest “Labor loved the city”.
“I’m personally disgusted in the Labor effort on the Gold Coast, and not because we didn’t win more seats but we ran dead in them,” the Labor source said.
“I don’t think anybody in the Surfers Paradise branch knew who the candidate was.
“I can’t recall John-Paul Langbroek having one sign up in Surfers Paradise. To ignore the second biggest city and not make an effort is disgusting.
“It’s bad for democracy and why you get these largely complacent LNP members.”
At Mudgeeraba, the ALP candidate had a corflute with a box of how-to-vote cards.
When Paul Taylor finally arrived at a booth having travelled from Brisbane, the LNP’s Ros Bates told him: “Nice to finally meet you. Glad they gave you a map of Mudgeeraba”.
Labor will always have a chance of winning Bonney, Burleigh and Currumbin, and the new seat of Theodore is not out of reach as young families on a budget rent townhouses on each side of the M1.
The real story of the 2017 campaign is you must doorknock early like Miss Scanlon and the LNP’s young Sam O’Connor, who did the same successfully in the most marginal seat of Bonney.
You must talk to voters before they see your face on a corflute, otherwise One Nation and the Greens will arrive on election eve and steal your major party vote like thieves in the night. AFTER just being re-elected to Parliament, Broadwater’s David Crisafulli is far too smart to talk up being an LNP leadership contender.
But other party members are talking him up in the media as a potential candidate, which is not endearing the new LNP MP to some colleagues.
A senior LNP source reckons the former local government minister in the Newman government at this point will have only one caucus vote if he runs.