Queensland election: Labor's Kate Jones could unseat Campbell Newman, poll shows
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Version 0 of 1. Labor’s Kate Jones could unseat the Queensland premier, Campbell Newman, from his electorate, with the latest polling showing her ahead of him on 47.6% of the primary vote. The Seven News ReachTEL poll, taken in the electorate of Ashgrove on Wednesday night, has Newman with 43.7% of the primary vote and the two-party preferred result has Labor on 53%, ahead of the Liberal National party (LNP) on 47%. However, asked who voters thought would win, 51.4% responded with Newman and 48.6% with Jones. The margin of error was 3.3% either way. Newman has increased his primary vote from 40.7% in December while Jones was steady, recording 47.9% last month. The LNP has closed the gap slightly on a two-party preferred basis with Labor dropping from 55% in December and the LNP increasing from 45%. Newman unseated Jones, a former Labor environment minister, in 2012 when he led the LNP from outside of the parliament to become premier. Polls in the lead-up to the 2012 election were close right up until the last week of the campaign, with Newman winning the seat on the night with a 5.7% margin. The two-party preferred result is based on 2012 preference flows which a union has argued skews the polls against Labor because of its historic drubbing. Together state secretary Alex Scott said those polls were likely to be underestimating the loss of preferences to the LNP as Newman faced a protest vote similar to that against Anna Bligh in 2012. Scott said the two-party preferred results used by the likes of ReachTEL, Newspoll and Galaxy asked respondents only about their primary vote and assumed preferences would fall the same as last time. He said analysis by the union’s in-house polling company showed the abandonment of Labor over its asset sales plans made 2012 “remarkably different to every other election” since the introduction of optional preferential voting two decades earlier. “There was a much higher level of progressive voters only voting ‘one’ and not giving preferences to the ALP because it was a protest vote against the state government in 2012,” Scott said. “Also for the minor parties, both Greens and others, there were much more flows of preferences back to the LNP than for Labor.” Scott said much of these would likely swing away from the LNP in an election that was “a referendum on Campbell Newman the same way that it was a referendum on Anna Bligh at the last election”. “People voting for Newman will vote LNP, people who are voting against Campbell Newman will vote for someone else, therefore their preferences are less likely to flow back to the LNP than at the 2012 election where they were voting for anybody but the ALP,” he said. Preferences from the Palmer United party, which is polling around 5% of the primary vote ahead of contesting its first ever Queensland election, were a significant but unpredictable factor, Scott said. The only guide, the last federal election, showed marked variation in preferences from seat to seat depending on whether sitting members were Labor or LNP, he said. |