Apparent wins (several not yet confirmed) LNP 52 ALP 33 KAP 3 GRN 1 IND 1
Seats in doubt not in above total, and to be covered on this page:
Mulgrave (LNP vs KAP)
South Brisbane (Green vs ALP)
Mirani (LNP vs KAP)
Estimated final result if current leads/expected favourites hold LNP 52 ALP 34 KAP 5 GRN 1 IND 1
This is my postcount thread for the 2024 Queensland election which has been very decisively won by the LNP, the scale of their victory becoming more apparent late in the night as the prepoll swing was higher than the day booths. I will be unrolling seats of interest through the day. With only 66% of enrolment counted on the night it may well be that more seats become more competitive than they looked as counting continues. I note for instance that Labor's apparent miracle retain in Bundaberg has tightened late at night and is still awaiting a major prepoll. (Edit: Labor has survived that)
Many of the ABC projections last night were very hard for me to fathom, including the late-night projection of Maiwar as an LNP win. The ABC has since called the seat a Greens retain.
The LNP has opened up a large lead in Pumicestone which I was going to cover on this page so I've saved myself the bother for now. I am also not duplicating
William Bowe's coverage of Pine Rivers and Maryborough yet though I may add Pine Rivers at least if it becomes closer.
Updates will be added for each seat, scrolling to the top, until a seat is considered no longer in serious doubt. Seats no longer being followed will be moved to the bottom of the page.
Mirani (ONP vs LNP 9.0%, ONP incumbent ran with KAP)
Complex to project but KAP appears better placed
Monday 4:30 pm: The ABC is using the mix and match method from the incomplete official primary count to correct for errors in the unofficial count and on this basis is showing a slight weakening in Andrew's primary (down 31) and improvement for the LNP (up 11). Andrew's lead in the unofficial 2PP count is 328, with those changes it would be more like 286.
Intro Sunday: Mirani is a coastal seat loosely between Rockhampton and Mackay. In Mirani, Stephen Andrew was elected for One Nation in 2017 and became a very rare case of a One Nation incumbent to run a full term with the party and be re-elected in 2020. But in the lead-up to the current election a spat broke out between him and his party, who accused him of being "lazy" and complained that he had not been moving bills in the parliament. After a short spell as an indie, Stephen Andrew was picked up by KAP.
This proved rather handy for him in preference-gathering terms because it meant that instead of being a One Nation candidate who Labor had to put last, he was now able to be preferenced by Labor ahead of the LNP - Labor's general fondness for giving away preferences to the Katter Party and also Shooters Fishers and Farmers having long known no rational limits.
The split in vote between KAP and One Nation in the seat, plus the general swing to the LNP, have endangered Andrew's hold on the seat but haven't destroyed it as obviously as could have been the case. At present Glen Kelly (LNP) has 35.8%, Andrew (KAP) 27.6%, Susan Teder (ALP) 20.2% and Brett (Beaver) Neal (ON) 10.8% plus 3% for the Greens and 2.7% for Family First. There is a slightly incomplete 2CP count in which Andrew leads Kelly by 253 votes (50.5-49.5). This is missing a small booth Mount Morgan from which Andrew may slightly increase his lead (say by 40 votes or so), but I am not so sure about that as while the LNP has done badly in that booth and Labor well, it is a very good one for One Nation.
The count is at 68.8% of enrolment and in 2020 it reached 89.6%. Absent early voting is huge in Mirani accounting for 23% of enrolment in 2020 (nearly 8000 votes!); it will be less than that this time. There are probably about 2000 postals to come as well as a few thousand absents and the usual scatter of provisionals and so on.
It's not possible to project off the 2020 2CP breakdowns in this seat because the how-to-vote recommendations of Labor at least are different as concerns the two competing candidates. It's the postals that are the issue for Andrew so far as the first 2319 cost him 367 of his lead, and while that flow should weaken in the later postals it could still be enough to put him behind or very nearly so. The LNP hasn't done at all well in the prepolls in this seat counted so far on 2CP (oddly) and so I suspect that absent early votes should be good for Andrew and absent votes also should be.
It's a straight 2CP fight and it's better to have the lead than not to have it so for now I think Andrew could just hang on but this is subject to, for instance, any corrections in the existing count. I did a preference flow check and did not find any issues.
Mulgrave (ALP 12.2%, LNP vs KAP)
Apparently strong prospect of KAP winning from third, otherwise LNP wins seat
Mulgrave includes southern Cairns and areas further south and has been held by Labor since they won it in a by-election in 1998, which gave Peter Beattie majority government. It was won by the Nationals from Labor in 1995, then initially by One Nation in 1998, and has been held by Labor ever since the by-election, firstly by Warren Pitt (also MP 1989-1995) and then by his son Curtis Pitt, who retired at this election.
Labor has lost more than half of its vote with the retirement, a catastrophic 27.4% primary swing (the worst in the state) and is currently behind 52.7-47.3 on 2PP with 54.8% counted. The bulk of the rest will be absent early voting which in 2020 accounted for 20.2% of enrolment and favoured the LNP over Labor. Turnout in this seat also tends to be low, reaching only 83.75% in 2020. Presumably swings on absent early voting will be at least similar to the count so far if not worse for Labor so Labor will lose the 2PP even more heavily than this.
However instead of the departing votes going to the LNP they have sprayed among a large field and we currently have this mess:
James (LNP) 26.0
Bates (ALP) 23.8
Lesina (KAP) 18.2
Raymond (IND) 7.9
McInnes (ON) 7.4
Daniels (LC) 5.8
Batzke (IND) 4.1
Everett (Grn) 3.6
Searle (FFP) 1.8
Floyd (IND) 1.3
On current numbers, the threat to the LNP's Terry James is Steven Lesina (KAP) who could repeat Nick Dametto's win from third in Hinchinbrook 2017. Lesina's first challenge is to get into second. On present numbers he needs to beat Labor's share of preferences from the other candidates by 17.5 points in a three-way split vs Labor and the LNP. This does not sound difficult and the target may well decrease. I note that of the independents, Batzke is a
controversial anti-abortion ex-UAP candidate and Raymond is a veteran policeman who campaigned on crime issues and was reportedly courted by the LNP and KAP. All this said reports that the how to vote card preferences favoured KAP were
overstated, with many flowing to Labor and LNP ... but few voters for this mess will copy the cards anyway.
Assuming Lesina does make the final two, he currently needs to beat the LNP 57-43 on the combined preferences of all other parties. This strikes me as very easy, though the target is likely to increase as further counting favours the LNP.
Most likely we will be waiting for all votes to come in and a distribution of preferences to confirm the winner in this seat but at the moment Lesina seems to be well placed.
South Brisbane (Greens vs ALP 5.4%)
ALP need to stay ahead of LNP at crucial point to win seat - critically close
Live count gap estimate after preferences on Monday evening: ALP 216 ahead of exclusion
Estimate is based at this stage on historic ON flows between LNP/ALP/GRN, will be adjusted if better data permits
--
Monday 9:20: 1619 out of electorate prepolls favoured the LNP 616-433 over Labor and 1249 day absents favoured Labor over the LNP 387-262; there were also some postals added. An important thing here is that you can't project off a sample of absents to all absents unless you know where they are from; the prepolls may have been from somewhere naturally conservative. (Edit: my understanding is they're from multiple seats to the south side of South Brisbane where the LNP vote is mostly not that high.)
Monday 3:30 pm: The current Labor to Liberal primary gap in the unofficial count is 2.9% (760 votes) having come down very slightly on what I believe is rechecking. Furthermore, in the rechecked booths the LNP are up 13 votes compared to the official count, Labor down 28, One Nation up 12 and Greens up 48 meaning the lead prior to ON preferences is currently 719. The main culprit here is the West End booth where it appears 30 Greens votes may have been in the Labor pile. Overall this improves the Greens' position by about 67 votes compared to Sunday's outlook and significantly improves their chances given the projected closeness of the finish (but they're still behind).
INTRO SUNDAY: The Greens' Amy MacMahon won South Brisbane from Labor's Jackie Trad in 2020 with the assistance of LNP how to vote card preferences, though she also had a lead on primary votes. The LNP reversed that decision for 2024 meaning that all else being equal, the Greens would probably need a slight improvement in their primary vote position vs Labor to hold the seat. That has not occurred, with a 2% swing against Labor's primary and a larger 4.6% swing against the Greens', with 63.8% of enrolment counted, and the small matter of a 43 point decline in the Greens' preference share means they are definitely toast if it finishes as a two-party contest against Labor. In 2020 out-of-electorate early votes were 6.5% of enrolment (likely to increase) and day absents were 5.0%, and turnout finished at 88. Remaining postals could be about 4.5% of enrolment.
Late in the night, a possible lifeline emerged. If the LNP vote comes up to the point that the LNP make the final two with the assistance of One Nation preferences, then the Greens still win the seat on Labor preferences. At present MacMahon is on 35%, Barbara O'Shea (Labor) on 32.4 and Marita Parkinson (LNP) 29.4. Richard Henderson (One Nation) has 3.2%.
In South Brisbane in 2020 preferences from the One Nation candidate (not all One Nation votes) split 61.6% LNP, 20.1% Green, 18.2% Labor. There were similar One Nation exclusions with three candidates left in, for instance, Maiwar 2020 and the federal seats of Griffith and Brisbane in 2022. In all these cases the LNP gained on Labor at between .43 votes/preference and .50 votes/preference on the exclusion of the One Nation candidate. If this pattern repeats, the LNP will close on Labor by something like 1.5 points off the One Nation preferences, suggesting they are currently in reality about 1.5% (390 votes) behind.
If I assume that out of division prepolls will have the same swing as home prepolls, that will give the LNP only a trivial edge on those, probably worth less than 100 votes. If I assume that absent day votes have the same swing as day votes generally, that would more or less cancel out the out of division prepolls. This suggests that if the LNP are to close the gap (much as they don't want to) they will probably have to do it on remaining postals.
The postals so far have had a colossal swing to the LNP, such that another 1900 formal postals at the present rate would reduce Labor's lead in the race for second by about 310 votes. However late postals won't break as strongly as early postals, and declaration votes could boost Labor's lead by several dozen. So all up I am projecting Labor staying ahead of the LNP but the margin in my estimate is a few hundred votes (a bit under 1%) which could easily be overturned by a change in swing patterns or even a counting correction. Too close to call yet (and the Greens for some reason have a high win rate in close postcounts in my experience) but for now this seems to be a advantage Labor.
The Greens have never before lost a single-member state and federal seat that they won at a general election, having successfully defended eight (some of them repeatedly). That streak is here in serious danger.
(More seats may be added)