The battle for Ashgrove shifts to the dance stage for one night. Credit to the Courier Mail.
Next summer Queenslanders get to go to the polls and if all the polls are right (and they rarely are wrong this far out), the Labor state government led by Premier Anna Bligh (ALP-South Brisbane) is going to meet the same fates as their counterparts in New South Wales did last March.
If predicted, Labor would be reduced to less than handful of seats, most if not all of them in inner Brisbane with the self proclaimed, "party of the bush" losing seats in rural Queensland, the Gold Coast, the Brisbane suburbs and seats in Brisbane itself.
At this point in the game, its not worth wondering if Labor will somehow hold government in Queensland, its worth wondering how many Labor MP's will survive the oncoming slaughter.
Premier Anna Bligh is expected to be reelected, she sits in a seat with a margin of 15%. Though it will be worth keeping an eye on her seat on election night since the latest statewide polls would drop Bligh's margin of victory below 5%. In comparison, Kristina Keneally's margin of victory dropped from 23.7% to less than 7.1% after preferences as NSW Labor was being blown to hell in the state election last March.
Pollster ReachTEL has recently released polls done in the Labor held seats of Ashgrove (ALP-7.1%), Mount Coo-tha (ALP-5.2%) and Stretton (ALP-9.5%) and found the LNP (Liberal National Party) on track to win all three of them come the next election. The poll results are located below.
FYI:
1) ALP = Australian Labor Party
2) LNP = Liberal National Party
3) Two Party Preferred/IRV = Top two parties in the vote count after preferences from the other candidates on the ballot have either been distributed or exhausted.
Ashgrove
ReachTEL. 11/8. 620 voters. MoE ±3.9% (10/5 results):
Primary vote:
Campbell Newman (LNP): 50.2 (53.5)
Kate Jones (ALP-Inc): 39.8 (36.8)
Sandra Bayley (The Greens): 6.2 (6.8)
Unknown candidate (Katter's Australian Party): 3.2 (2.6)
Any other candidate (Undecided?): 0.5 (0.3)
Two party preferred:
Campbell Newman (LNP): 54 (56.5)
Kate Jones (ALP-Inc): 46 (43.5)
Ashgrove is ground zero in the state election as LNP Leader Campbell Newman tries to win a seat in parliament here. In Australia party leaders usually already hold a seat in parliament before being selected as leader, so Newman leading his party in the next election while trying to win a seat of his own is quite odd. Though that arrangement's quite common in Canada especially on the provincial level...
In theory if Newman was facing any other Labor candidate he should win in a cakewalk, but he's facing off against the seat's current occupant, Kate Jones who was Environmental minister until late this summer when she stepped down to focus her energies on fighting off Newman in Ashgrove. Jones is a formidable opponent, being well thought off in her electorate and with constituent services on par with Gabby Giffords'.
If Jones was facing off against anyone else, she probably would be reelected, even though her seat sits below the statewide swing, pollsters are giving to LNP on average right now. Unfortunately for her, she's facing off against someone who voters are seeing as their next premier and 57.4% of those polled indicated they wanted to change the government. Its hard to fight against a headwind like that, just ask Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin, Jack Conway and Robin Carnahan.
There is a couple of silver linings though, Kate Jones has steadily closed the gap in every poll done by ReachTEL so far and she has the advantage of campaigning solely in her electorate while Campbell Newman has to crisscross the state campaigning for fellow LNP candidates.
And a visit or two by Kevin Rudd on Jones' behalf wouldn't hurt, Rudd is still well thought off in Queensland after all. (Kevin Rudd's daughter has already compared Kate Jones to her father and KRudd himself has written a couple of warm words for her on Twitter.) Though Campbell Newman is still the favorite here and the LNP will make sure Kate Jones doesn't pull an upset here.
If Jones does lose, her political career is far from finish. She's only 32 and can afford to take a hiatus from politics to care for her two year old boy. And she can attempt a comeback by running for the Brisbane city council in 2012 or for the Federal seat of Brisbane in 2013, assuming Federal Labor's poll numbers in Queensland improve that is.
Mount Coot-tha
ReachTEL. 11/9. 410 voters. MoE ±3.9% No trendline available.
Primary vote:
Saxon Rice (LNP): 47.9
Andrew Fraser (ALP-Inc): 29.8
Adam Stone (The Greens): 17.2
Margaret Waterman (Katter's Australian Party): 3.6
Any other candidate (Undecided?): 1.6
Two party preferred:
Saxon Rice (LNP): 53.8
Andrew Fraser (ALP-Inc): 46.2
Bad news for Deputy Premier & Treasurer Andrew Fraser who's looking like the Tom Daschle of Queensland at this point. He trails his opponent Saxton Rice and will have a very hard time winning reelection seeing how he was already on shaky ground. The LNP nearly beat Fraser on the primary vote back in 2009, preferences from then candidate and future Greens senator Larissa Waters pushed Fraser across the finish line.
And Fraser is only in the game in this poll because of the Greens vote which is the strongest in all of Queensland. Unfortunately, Queensland does not require voters to indicate a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th...etc choice on their ballot. And its very hard to see Greens voters holding their nose and preference the man who hatched the idea to sell off a boat load of state owned assets right after the 2009 election.
Worst off, 65.9% of voters and 14.5% of ALP supporters surveyed want to change the government. And while Kate Jones can avoid being portrayed as a party hack, Andrew Fraser cannot.
Stretton
ReachTEL. 11/18. 341 voters. No MoE indicated. No trendline available.
Primary vote:
Freya Ostapovitch (LNP): 50.7
Duncan Pegg (ALP): 19.3
Brian Sadler (The Greens): 10.9
David Forde (Independent): 14.9
Any other candidate (Undecided?): 4.2
Two party preferred:
Freya Ostapovitch (LNP): 67.4
Duncan Pegg (ALP): 32.6
Ouch. What can I say? Open seats in bad years for the party holding the seat always tend to have the biggest swings on election time. (Like the record setting 36.7% swing against Labor in Bathurst in the NSW state election last march....)
LNP candidate Freya Ostapovitch easily clears 50% on the primary vote alone which translates to 67.4% after preferences are distributed. To add insult to injury, the Labor primary vote is fractured between the Labor candidate Duncan Pegg and former Labor member and now independent David Forde.
The retiring member here is Stephen Robertson who's calling it quits after 11 years in parliament. He choose one hell of a time to retire, but seeing Labor's poll numbers in the toilet probably made up his mind pretty quickly.