In the face of grim polling, can Annastacia Palaszczuk and Queensland Labor retain the state?
“What you see is what you get” has been Annastacia Palaszczuk’s unofficial political motto. She’s used the line dozens of times, as the fledgling “unexpected” premier in 2015; ahead of a leaders’ debate in 2017; and again and again during the bruising Covid campaign of 2020.
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that a year before the next state election and with polls showing Palasczuk and her government on shaky ground, the Queensland premier has retreated to familiar territory.
“[Opposition leader David Crisafulli] talks the talk but there’s no plan, there’s no action,” she told Australian Associated Press this week.
“What you see with me is what you get.”
Labor’s 2020 victory followed an almost presidential campaign built around Palaszczuk and her personal popularity. Queensland is a deeply complex state, where voters differ from region to region, and where policies pitched in one electorate might backfire in another.
The premier has repeatedly bridged ideological and regional divides by cobbling together unlikely coalitions of voters. The lynchpin of this success has been women.
Few published state polls drilled this deep, but Labor sources estimate the party might have had a 60-40 advantage over the Liberal National party among women at the last election. That fact makes more recent polling very grim reading for Labor supporters. RedBridge group’s polling from August and September shows Labor trailing 53-47 among women across the state. The numbers are bad everywhere. The LNP leads among men (58-42), in north Queensland (55-45), central Queensland (63-37) and even in the south-east (53-47).
Palaszczuk doesn’t just have a polling deficit to overcome. She has a structural problem in that Labor does not have a base from which to build a successful election campaign.
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Palaszczuk’s legacy at stake
Last week, Labor released what appeared to be a first campaign ad, a year and a few days before Queenslanders go to the polls. Some commentary bemoaned the beginning of a year-long campaign.
Mercifully for the Queensland public, the promotional video is actually clear evidence that Labor is not ready to campaign. Its vulnerabilities are writ large in the way Palaszczuk speaks mostly to the sorts of concerns of traditional Labor voters: health and hospitals, education, housing and social reforms. There seems to be a particular focus on measures targeted at women.
The video also contained another clear message: Palaszczuk would be leading Labor to the next election.
Labor MPs would have moved on Palaszczuk a few months ago, but party rules requiring a drawn-out leadership contest have fortified her position.
In August, a scenario was being discussed that suggested Palaszczuk might be convinced to resign before the end of the year. It involved party elders approaching her and suggesting it was in the party’s interests for her to stand down. She could leave a Labor hero.
But a bad election loss – or a hospital pass to a new leader in an election year – would threaten her legacy.
Labor MPs suggested Palaszczuk could be offered a few months to let leadership speculation die down and resign on her own terms. Daniel Andrews has, in the meantime, gone out on top. Palaszczuk fights on.
Political attack lines
While the past week might not have signalled the start of a year-long election campaign, it has given us an insight into what the next year will look like.
The LNP holds only four seats in Brisbane and has previously run conflicted, ineffective campaigns against Palaszczuk. In the process it has lost regional voters to rightwing fringe parties and lost any semblance of a foothold in the city.
Conventional wisdom has said the LNP would need to win relatively progressive inner-city seats and socially conservative regional ones to win a majority. But withdrawing support from Queensland’s treaty process seems to show the LNP all-in on the outer suburbs and the regions, even if it might mean potentially losing blueribbon city seats such as Clayfield to Labor or the Greens.
Expect the LNP to look more like a party led by Tony Abbott – ruthlessly exploiting every possible political advantage, determined to win by any means possible after losing 11 of the past 12 state elections – than one too worried about collateral damage from its attacks.
Labor is yearning for the comfort of its winning strategies from elections gone by. And it has begun by laying traps for Crisafulli.
One is pressure over whether the LNP would keep Labor’s increased royalties when coal companies are making super profits. By refusing to rule out royalty changes next term, Crisafulli walks into an ambush. The attacks lines are already written: what is he going to cut from the budget to compensate? Will he do a Campbell Newman and sell off assets?
Another political landmine was prepared this week when Labor moved to enshrine its energy plans in law. Legislating renewable energy targets is the bait. The kicker is the laws would also mandate public ownership of the energy sector. Any wavering by the LNP and the ghost of Campbell Newman returns to haunt another campaign.
All of this might help Labor. Or it might do the opposite. If voters think Annastacia Palaszczuk’s eight-year-old government is tired, wheeling out the same old attack lines might just help that notion take root.