Voters in the Queensland state seat of Toowoomba South voted today in a by-election to succeed Liberal National MP John McVeigh, who had resigned from the seat to run (successfully) for the federal seat of Groom.
I’d taken the night off after the last two weeks of counting so wasn’t able to cover it live, but there’s a few interesting things to look at in the result.
It’s the first election in Queensland state politics since the move back to compulsory preferences. This has caused an increase in the informal rate from 2.5% in 2015 to 3.3% today.
There was a drop in the LNP vote, but LNP candidate David Janetzki should win comfortably. In second place is former Toowoomba mayor Di Thorley, running as an independent. Thorley polled 35.6% of the primary vote, which is impressive for an independent, but it’s only slightly more than Labor polled in 2015, and Thorley isn’t facing Labor opposition this year.
Preferences haven’t been distributed tonight, but Janetzki should comfortably win the seat.
I agree the LNP should win this comfortably enough – very strange of the ECQ not to do an indicative 2 candidate preferred count on the night though?
It would be interesting under the restored compulsory preferential voting how Di Thorley would do in a general election – whilst a by-election can normally help strong independents like her, in this case given it was two weeks after the federal election and people were totally over the idea of voting again, there was little chance for her campaign or message to gain any traction in the wider community, whilst the Lib/Nats still got the chance to feed concern about her through robocalls and doorknocking and the like with no chance for her to meaningfully respond or call this out.
Di’s scrutineers – mostly quite inexperienced – report a very high rate of informals which have only a “1” against her name.
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