Stafford (ALP 5.32%)
Luke Richmond (ALP) vs Fiona Hammond (LNP) and others
Cause of by-election: death of Jimmy Sullivan (ALP/IND)
ALP retain with c. 4.4% swing to LNP
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Sunday: Excuses excuses...
Steven Miles has been quoted offering a
bizarre excuse for his party's poor result, claiming it was due to One Nation not running and saying "We will never know what the result would have been if they had run and not directed their supporters to vote for the LNP,". Stafford is one of One Nation's worst seats in the state, had they run I estimate they would have got about 8%. Most of their voters would have preferenced the LNP anyway. Care of the 2017 election we have a window on what happens when One Nation recommends preferences to the LNP in some seats and Labor in others - the flow difference was around 10-12%. So for an open ticket, half that. This argument if it works at all isn't worth half a percent, it might be worth a tenth of the swing if that. In fact not all One Nation voters would have even been aware that their party recommended (not "directed") its voters to vote for the LNP, so probably even less. And some of those who were aware would not have obeyed.
Miles has also referred to Fiona Hammond's local profile, but that was already present in the baseline since she was the candidate last time. Indeed her time as a councillor was more recent then.
Another excuse quoted by The Australian is “Right-of-centre voters, after the deal with One Nation, weren’t left with many alternatives in a field of nine candidates, and so we have seen a splintering of the vote amongst other left-of-centre parties.’’ But in fact there were four right wing candidates (up one from 2024) and the three minor righties between them got a 0.3% swing on the combined One Nation and Family First primary from 2024. It is true that Labor's primary suffered from the extra competition on the left - but that does not explain half of the primary vote swing against Labor flowing through to 2PP swing as well.
Sunday: The Swing In Historic Context
I've been looking back to find the last time a government got a 2PP swing this large in a Queensland by-election and I've hit a brick wall dated 1979 - from that year and earlier I can't find numbers for the state's by-elections. But for 1980 onwards there have been 17 by-elections where an exact 2PP swing exists. All ten government vacancies saw swings to Opposition, as did five of the seven Opposition vacancies with the exceptions being Currumbin 2020 and South Brisbane 2012. There have been a further thirteen by-elections where both majors contested in this time but no swing can be computed because of incomplete preference distributions or the presence of crossbenchers in one or both 2CPs (often including Liberals who performed well in by-elections while the Nationals governed alone). However of these only Hinchinbrook 2025 is likely to have had a larger 2PP swing to government. There is some mystery with Southport 1987 where Wikipedia figures imply a 4.2% swing to government but preferences were not distributed in 1986 and the estimate for 1986 (of unknown source) may not be accurate. So this is the best swing for a Queensland government in a classic 2PP by-election for at least 46 years and I wouldn't be surprised if for longer.
This is in fairness to Labor an asterisk case though; Sullivan was either on leave or outside the caucus for the whole term to date, and so while they are losing his personal vote they also probably gained little if anything in terms of the usual benefits of office in selling themselves.
Labor have issued a victory claim; I suspect they know how many postals are to come.
Saturday live coverage:
10:36 Finally in and Richmond (ALP) is 764 ahead. Extremely unlikely the LNP can get all of that back on remaining postals, though I'm not certain how many might be left. Subject to rechecking of the primaries I'm confident Labor has retained Stafford but to have spent so long even talking about it tonight in a by-election in a favourable seat is a shocker for them and a strong result for the LNP. A loss would have been terminal for Steven Miles but this as it is is at least cause for severe introspection about Labor's struggle to connect.
Interestingly the Sunday Mail's sample actually overestimated Labor at prepoll by five points but they got strong enough preference flows to win prepoll anyway. As for the Greens, a 3% swing away is OK given that there are 8.9 points in minor left vote that were not there before (Labor dropped 8.7 points but a fair chunk of that would have gone to the LNP).
10:23 Still waiting for that prepoll ... the two were counted sequentially so it could be a while. Updating the preference flows to Labor: Greens 86.7 Parry 81.9 LCP 60 AJP 63 Libertarian 36 Smart 36.9 FF 25.4
9:18 Nothing harmful in the 2PP flow from the first prepoll either. Labor's preference flow has been increasing as the night goes on and is now approaching 73%. Unless something very dire happens in the remaining prepoll (which the LNP would need to win by several hundred) they are fine - at least in terms of holding the seat that is.
9:16 The worst might be over for Labor (but wait for the remaining prepolls) as they get another strong preference sample and move to an actual 51-49 lead though I expect that could drop back a little. Maybe they can still win this tonight.
9:10 Couple of booths in on 2PP and Labor did better than my projection on both of them and have now almost hit the lead in the live count. I now project Labor 255 ahead, not counting Chermside South EVC.
8:50 No new numbers for ages. I often forget about the ECQ's by-candidate preference flows! So far Greens to Labor 84.1% (so the open HTV did very little then), Parry 81.9, LCP 57.7, AJP 55.7, Libertarian 35.9, Smart 33.2 and Family First 24.8.
8:35 Currently we still have five day booths and one prepoll to report 2PP and one prepoll to report anything. With all the booth primaries in, the Courier-Mail's day sample of 150 votes had the LNP 5.8 points too high, Labor 2.9 too high, Greens 1.7 too low and others 7 points too low. The preference flow also suggests that even on their numbers Labor would be very close to winning the booth votes.
8:20 Stafford EVC is in and the swing there is again somewhat muted compared to the booths. Off my variable swing method I'm now projecting Labor to get ahead based on the booths that have yet to report 2PP (including Stafford EVC) but only just - I have by about 120 50 votes. But there is also the Chermside South EVC to add and as bad as the swings in that area are Labor might just win that.
8:10 Very close now and all on the prepolls (of course it's very bad for Labor that we're even here). Labor's preference share has improved slightly and I'm starting to see the usual pattern where good booths for the LNP have good flows to them.
8:00 3730 postals have been added and interestingly (especially as they are probably early postals which tend to skew conservative) the swing on them is substantially lower than the day votes, at least as the primaries are concerned: Labor down only 4.1, LNP up only 4.8. (Greens are down a lot though). This comes out to a 6.6% 2PP swing.
7:50 All day booths in. Newmarket was fairly benign by the standard of what we have seen so far.
7:37 Two-party counts incoming! Labor on 68.3% of preferences so far (Chermside S and W, Kedron W, Stafford W) which is problematic. A flood of booths in as well and the booth swing has just not changed much at all. Indeed Newmarket is the only booth outstanding (and is pretty small).
7:34 If current primary vote swings for the majors carry through to votes not yet counted Labor will end up below 30 and needing about 75% of preferences. It's not impossible to get that though the Greens open card does not help them! Last time they got 71.4% but the non-Green preference vote was entirely One Nation and Family First.
7:23 Chermside East also bad for Labor but not as bad as the other Chermside booths. 6.6% swing on two-party primaries. Same in Stafford Heights. There is a lot of vote with Legalise Cannabis and Parry but I would not expect the Legalise Cannabis flow to be great for Labor.
7:16 Chermside West more pain for Labor, almost as bad as Chermside South. 9.6% swing on two-party primaries.
7:09 Kedron West also in - 6.9% average two-party swing on primaries. Labor not doing well here, will be very interesting to see some 2CPs. Whatever the result this already looks like a good night for the government.
7:04 Two booths in and huge swings against Labor's primary in both. Oh dear! The booths are Chermside South and Stafford West. Especially 12.6% against in Chermside South is a lot. On a two-party primaries-only basis the swings are 10.5% and 5.2% but also the Greens are down slightly in both booths, though a lot of this has gone to Parry and Legalise Cannabis.
6:52 Another scrap added, this being on the day phone voting which hasn't shown the same swing to LNP as the rest though the sample is tiny.
6:37 We have early telephone voting too and the rate of this is up greatly from the general so it's hard to project off it. Anyway 40.9% LNP, 30.2% Labor, 17.5% Green from a total of 308. The phone votes taken in 2024 did skew well to the left. This is very positive for the LNP being quite competitive if one treats the 2024 votes as a fair baseline, but the more widespread use of phone voting in the absence of other out of division options could be a reason not to. One trend that may well hold: aside from the Greens none of the other minor candidates (especially not Parry) are getting anything much. Let's see a real booth now! (Could be a little while, it's an urban seat with booth sizes generally over 500).
6:30 We have a Mobile Polling booth with the LNP leading 68-34 and four votes for the rest of the field combined (!), this is most likely hospitals, aged care facilities and the like.
6:00 On the dot the ECQ has a booth results page up, good to see. Will be a while before numbers appear though.
4:00 There is a new Courier Mail "exit poll" with a sample of only 150 voters with the LNP said to be on 43.3% and Labor on 32.7% with the Greens on 15.3%, again no detail of the remaining 8.7%. On those numbers the LNP could win narrowly (say 51-49) but the sample is very small (an 8% in theory margin of error) and even that would depend on the preference breakdown - though note that this is day voting which skews slightly to Labor on 2PP. The article refers to "exhausted votes", there won't be any.
12:30 pm A thing to watch for tonight is that in this by-election there are two prepolls, Chermside South and Stafford. Chermside is a somewhat more Labor-friendly area and this might have some impact on the prepolls. In the election there was a prepoll at Returning Officer Stafford which is again listed but I don't know if it will take votes in the same numbers.
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Thursday:
This is a combined prospects/live post for this week's third consecutive by-election weekend, this one for the seat of Stafford in Queensland. Stafford is an old-fashioned vanilla two-party contest that has been overshadowed by Farrer but I think it's interesting enough to be worth covering in detail especially given some of the claims that have been made about it. A big question here is why are the LNP running for this seat. My initial impression was they might sit it out as governments often do, but in fact there is a strong strategic case on paper for giving it a go.
Stafford is an inner north Brisbane seat that was a Labor/Liberal swing seat in its first lifetime (1972-1992) but since its revival in 2001 it has been Labor-dominated, falling only in the 2012 wipeout with 2024 its only other return to technically marginal status. In its second life it has generally run about 9% above the Labor statewide 2PP with a low of 5.7% above in 2012. The seat has had an increasing Greens vote at recent elections with the party polling 18.06% in 2024 (their ninth best seat in the state). Conversely it is a dead zone for One Nation who polled 3.17% in 2024 (their eighth worst) and have decided not to risk a loss of momentum in this one. While One Nation are surging in Queensland state polling, it is not to the same extent as elsewhere, and they'd be lucky to get double digits if they ran in Stafford.
Stafford is vacant because of the death at only 44 of second-term incumbent Jimmy Sullivan, who was first elected as a Labor MP in 2020. Sullivan was evidently a troubled soul whose recent timeline included domestic violence allegations (abusive language), the loss of a child, post-traumatic stress, addiction and other health issues. He had been on a long period of leave from parliament from late 2024 and had been removed from the Labor caucus in May 2025 for allegedly failing to comply with a "safe return to work" plan. The exact cause of his death, described in some reports as a possible accident, is as yet not publicly known.
Stafford had a significant by-election in 2014 when its fall to Labor on a 19.1% 2PP swing presaged the sensational 2015 defeat of the one-term Campbell Newman LNP government. This has been used by Premier Crisafulli to goad Labor saying that if they can't get a double digit swing here then what are they doing. But the two are completely non-comparable. Stafford in 2014 was a government vacancy where swings are generally larger, and it was also a vacancy for a government that had scored a 2PP nine points higher than Crisafulli's at the previous election.
So what should we expect? The general pattern is that by-elections see swings against the government, but this is muted when they are opposition vacancy by-elections, which almost as often as not see small swings to government. This is partly because the opposition has lost the personal vote of its incumbent, and also because governments tend to cherrypick which such by-elections they bother contesting in the first place. There actually aren't that many recent Queensland cases (and a lot of them are unusual - pandemic, retiring ex-Premiers, local independents and so on) but nationally the average is about a 1% swing to the opposition in such cases, with a high standard deviation. There isn't generally any difference between by-elections caused by resignations and those caused by incumbent deaths.
The LNP has already made one by-election gain in this term, picking up Hinchinbrook with a huge swing after popular KAP MP Nick Dametto decided he would rather be the mayor of Townsville and didn't even clearly endorse his old party on the way out the door (though apparently he did vote for them). That was a special case but for what it's worth government gains in by-elections do most often occur when the state government is in its first term and the opposition is "federally dragged" by being the same party as governs in Canberra - both the case here.
The LNP government is also polling well (on sparse evidence) on average at the moment after a few iffy Resolve readings last Spring. It led 56-44 2PP in a Redbridge poll late last year and a DemosAU in February. Two small Resolve samples in Jan-Feb and March-April I estimate at 54.6 and 52.4 to LNP respectively.
Beyond the debates about issues like petrol costs and health services, the by-election background is unusually noisy with distractions at the moment including debate about an on-off-on affair between Ministers Tim Mander and Amanda Camm, Opposition Leader Steven Miles apologising after being found in contempt of Parliament for misleading the House and former Premier Palaszczuk's partner being charged with rape and deprivation of liberty, all of which he denies. And then of course there's the federal Budget.
Other points of interest
The Greens have decided to issue an open how to vote card at this by-election. I've been unable to find any clear public explanation (as distinct from apparent retro-justifications) for this decision. If it had been a head office call as an experiment or to send Labor a warning that might make some sort of sense but it seems to have been a local decision. I do wonder if it is inspired by the recent idea that the Greens need to be becoming more populist, like a One Nation of the left, instead of being so "establishment". (Indeed The Australian has since I wrote this article linked the plan to the chief booster of that theory, Max Chandler-Mather). It has sparked criticism including some from within.
Decades ago when the Greens used to issue open cards more commonly the impact on flow was low (5-10%). These days in this sort of educated seat the preference of Green voters for Labor is so strong that this may not make any real difference at all - though even a slight flow change could hurt Labor's 2PP by several tenths of a point because of the size of the Greens primary. In the federal seats of Deakin and Menzies in 2025 the Greens issued open HTVs on the main voting day only; the flow from the Greens to Labor nonetheless increased albeit by slightly less than the national increase - on that basis the impact of the decision on flows in the booths was at most a few percent, and could well have been nothing. In Clark 2022 (a special case by being in Tasmania where interest in how to vote cards is always low) an open HTV also had no impact on 2PP flows. My suspicion is that while about 15% of Greens voters will follow how to vote cards, a high proportion of them will preference Labor anyway if there is no card (as happens in Tasmanian Legislative Council elections where how to vote cards are banned). The 2024 count in Stafford saw 83.7% of Greens preferences flow to Labor. I will be surprised if that falls to even 75%.
(PS 17/5 I originally wrote 83.7% of Greens' exclusion preferences including a few prefs from minor right sources, but that was actually a result of a mistyped number on my behalf and the correct Greens' exclusion flow was 81.5%. However it turns out that by coincidence 83.7% was in fact the flow of 1 Greens voter preferences!)
The rest of the field consists of Family First, Legalise Cannabis, Animal Justice, a Libertarian and two candidates running as independents for currently unregistered parties. One of these, Damian Smart, is running for Gerard Rennick People First while Liam Parry is the candidate for the Queensland Socialists. The Socialist run is interesting firstly because it is the unofficial debut for this party in the sort of seat where they might poll significantly, and secondly because Parry is one of two people who have been charged under Queensland's laws restricting the use of certain pro-Palestinian slogans. Although the ban is supposed to only apply when the slogans are used in a manner that could be reasonably expected to cause someone to feel menaced, harassed or offended, police have been taking action against the slogans even where it is not remotely clear that that condition is met.
The Sunday Mail's "poll"
The Murdoch tabloids in Australia and particularly in Queensland have a long history of conducting "exit polls" mostly at prepoll stations and then interpreting them cluelessly and unprofessionally without expert analysis, as a result deceiving their readers about what the "polls" are actually saying in the interests of blatant hype. (Sometimes when interpreted correctly these "polls" are actually useful.) I pointed out what a debacle this was in the 2024 state election leadup but no amount of making these points appears to stop these papers from embarrassing themselves with this dishonest and sloppy poll reporting.
This has continued with the latest effort in which off the back of a doubtless uncontrolled sample of 300 voters at prepoll on May 7-8 we are told that the LNP is "on track to pull of a historic upset" and that Labor is "relying on unpredictable Greens preference flows to cling on to the seat by its fingernails."
The actual numbers in this sample have the LNP on 41.7%, Labor on 36.7% and the Greens on 12.7%. No breakdown is given for the remaining 8.9%.
The first thing to note here is that the remaining 8.9% are likely to skew left, perhaps heavily so depending on whether Parry is taking any substantial number of votes from the Greens. But even with a 55% flow from the others and a 75% flow from the Greens, Labor would still just win on these numbers, 51.1-48.9. The second problem is that comparing these numbers with a general election is not comparing like with like - they are prepolls. In 2024 within-electorate prepolls in Stafford were LNP 40.5% Labor 39.2% Greens 15.9%, about 1.4% 2PP worse for Labor than the seat in general. And furthermore the sample is not just prepoll, it is prepoll early in the prepoll period, which is likely to be more conservative than average. So what this sample if accurate is actually pointing to is a Labor retain, perhaps with a small swing against.
From the LNP's perspective when deciding to contest Stafford, they would probably detect some chance (even if only a small one) that they actually win the seat. A win for them in a seat that was ALP+7 to the state average at the last election would be a disaster for Labor, of the sort that causes leadership change. Even a very close result would be a very bad night for the ALP. But that aside there is a decent chance on paper that the LNP would get a 2PP swing of some kind (which would lead to significant bragging rights). A small swing against the LNP is easily dealt with by misleading nonsense about the average by-election swing being several points and even more misleading nonsense the swing being nothing like 2014. So it's not really easy for the LNP to clearly embarrass themselves in this one. And while a big swing (say 6% and up) against them would raise some questions, they would also learn things in the process. A close loss could also be used by the LNP to argue for optional preferencing, notwithstanding that this would be a disaster for it in rural seats with high One Nation votes.
Given the LNP's strong state polling but also that the LNP is coming off a high base election I would consider any 2PP swing to Labor above 3% to be a good result for Labor. Any swing to the LNP at all would be a good result for the LNP and a 0-3% swing to Labor is the inconclusive zone. And Saturday is not far away so soon enough we will see how they go.
