A Queensland state adds two seats to outer Brisbane and abolishes a seat in North Queensland.
Proposed new state electoral boundaries for Queensland have just been published. As the report summary puts it, “new electorates are proposed to be created – namely, Caboolture (formerly Glass House) and Springfield (formerly Jordan)”, which are balanced by the effective abolition of Hill (held by Shane Knuth of Katter’s Australian Party) and the Labor-held metropolitan seat of Stretton. Fully 19 seats are being renamed, including a reversion to geographical names of seats like McConnel (which goes back to being Brisbane Central) and Oodgeroo (Cleveland). UPDATE: Ben Raue at The Tally Room has interactive maps of the old and new boundaries.
Below the fold are my estimates of two-candidate preferred and primary vote shares for the new boundaries, and how they have changed from the 2024 election results. Note in the former case that where more than two numbers appear in a row, it is because the proposal combines seats that had different parties in the final count in the election. When the aberrant number is large — Mulgrave, for instance, is an LNP-versus-Labor seat that stands to absorb a large chunk if Hill, where the two-candidate count was Katters-versus-LNP — it means the numbers are of limited use. The remainder of the post will consist of commentary that will be added bit-by-bit as I wrap my head around what’s been done.
There was an unusual degree of consensus in the party submissions that a new seat of Caboolture should be created, and so it has proved. An earlier incarnation was one of the 11 seats One Nation won at the 1998 election, but I only get their primary vote at 11.0% based on the 2024 results. Its voters are drawn from Morayfield (39.5%), Glass House (32.8%) and Pumicestone (27.8%).
Covering the eastern end of the City of Ipswich, Springfield is being treated as a new seat, but this can be better understood as an arrangement that accommodates local population growth by creating Springfield, Redbank and Greenbank (together with the commonality of “bank” in the latter two cases, there are now three seats that begin with “red” and two with “spring”) where formerly there was Bundamba and Jordan. All are notional Labor, in varying degrees of safety.
Fresh from losing Hinchinbrook at a by-election in November, Katter’s Australian Party now loses one of its two remaining seats in Hill, held by Shane Knuth, of which 24.5% goes to Flinders, the successor to his party colleague Rob Katter’s seat of Treager. Around half goes to Hinchinbrook and the rest to the Mulgrave, which becomes less urban after losing about a fifth of its enrolment to Cairns.
Around two-thirds of the abolished southern Brisbane seat of Stretton, which Labor won in 2024 by 9.5%, goes to Eight Mile Plains, the new name for Toohey, with the rest going to Algester. This is not the only bad turn for Labor: their remaining toehold on the Gold Coast, held by mooted future leader Meaghan Scanlon, gains unhelpful territory north of Nerang State Forest from Theodore, turning a 0.6% Labor margin into a notional LNP margin of 5.4%. Not far to the north, Beenleigh has an LNP margin of 0.4%, where the seat of Macalister that is supersedes has a Labor margin of 1.9%. The regional seats of Thuringowa and Mackay, which Labor lost badly in 2024, have both gained conservative semi-rural territory. Conversely, the loss of its southern end to Caboolture makes Labor more competitive in Glass House, which moves into the Sunshine Coast hinterland, cutting the LNP margin from 10.2% to 5.7%.
The inner-city seats where the Greens are competitive are little changed: the changes to their primary vote share in Maiwar, Cooper and South Brisbane, the first two of which resume their former names of Indooroopilly and Ashgrove, are all inside half a percentage point.
Estimated two-candidate preferred
Estimated primary vote
Author: William Bowe