I’m going to wrap up shortly – it seems like the vote count has dried up. I’m sure we’ll have more data tomorrow that can resolve more of the seats.
At the moment it looks likely that the Greens will gain some wards, but whether they end up with 2 wards or as many as 4 wards is hard to say. Labor is set for 4-6 wards, which looks like a pretty terrible result. Labor may have won Calamvale, which would be their first ward gain since 2000, but it came alongside another potential lost.
But while we don’t have a precise final ward count, the results so far tell a very clear picture about a big divide in voting trends between the inner half of Brisbane and the outer half.
The ALP is just slightly outpolling the Greens on the primary vote, 27.4% to 24.3%, but it varies so much by region.
| Region | LNP | ALP | GRN |
| Inner & Western Suburbs | 44.0% | 20.1% | 30.8% |
| Outer Suburbs | 46.5% | 34.7% | 17.7% |
I split the 26 wards into a group of 12 wards in the inner city and the western suburbs, and the other 14 in the outer ring.
The Greens did much better in the inner city, polling over 30%, while the ALP still polled twice as much in the outer suburbs.
This first map shows which party matched up against the LNP in the 2CP in each ward. In Moorooka, which looks set to be Labor vs Greens, I’ve marked it as Labor since they seem to be winning there.
There is now a solid bloc of nine wards stretching across the council from Pullenvale to Hamilton which are now LNP vs Greens contests.
If you toggle the map, you can see how much of the total Labor + Greens vote each of the parties polled in each ward. You can really see the gradient from the areas where the ALP is the main centre-left party, to the areas where the Greens take that role.
There’s also a decent number of wards in the middle where both parties have a sizeable share of the vote. Under an OPV system, the centre-left will do better where one party dominates the centre-left vote, but instead there’s now a lot of wards where both parties polled well. In eighteen out of 26 wards, the stronger of the two parties polled less than twice of the other party.
And finally, as my last thing before I finish for the night, this map shows the two-candidate-preferred swing in every ward.
The Greens generally gained 2CP swings in the inner city, although the LNP slightly reduced the Greens margin in The Gabba on the most recent figures.
There’s a few small patches of swings to Labor, but there’s a lot of booths where the LNP has gained a 2CP swing, despite losing primary votes – that’s the effect of facing two opponents in an OPV system.
11:11 – So there are nine races that remain in some doubt. In most of them, either Labor or Greens is narrowly in front but generally the projections suggest the LNP position will improve as the count goes on.
The Greens are competing in Central, Coorparoo, Paddington and Walter Taylor. The ALP is competing in Calamvale, Holland Park, Northgate, Runcorn and Wynnum Manly.
It’s probably possible to call a few of these wards, but considering how messy and inconsistent the swings have been, I’d rather wait for more results to call some of these races.
10:54 – There are three wards where the ECQ has counted the 2CP count between the wrong candidates. In Enoggera and The Gap, they have counted between LNP and Labor, but it should actually be LNP and Greens. In Moorooka, it should actually be ALP and Greens. It seems like the Greens will fall a long way short in all three wards, but we won’t have all the data until they recount those seats.
10:48 – I’m now calling Morningside for Labor.
10:41 – I think it’s safe now to call that the LNP has won the Ipswich West by-election. There was also a huge swing to the LNP in Inala, but Labor will hold on there.
10:25 – I’d like to wait until we have a more complete picture, but it looks like the preference flows between Labor and Greens have increased compared to 2020. When Labor is knocked out, their preferences are more likely to flow to the Greens and less likely to exhaust, and vice versa.
10:14 – There’s still a bunch of seats still in play. The Greens are definitely in with a shot in Coorparoo, Paddington and Walter Taylor, but the story is not clear in any of them.
Likewise the ALP looks like potentially gaining Calamvale and losing Wynnum-Manly. Then there’s a bunch of other races where it looks like the LNP and ALP is likely to retain but the results are still early, and there is a lot of races where the lead is quite narrow.
But zooming out, the LNP looks set to retain a large majority despite not winning a majority of the vote. But the anti-LNP vote is split almost evenly between the Greens and Labor. Labor is currently sitting on 25.8%, and the Greens are on 24.9%. Optional preferential voting will really hurt the left in that situation, but the exact distribution of those votes will tell us how badly the left will do in the ward count.
10:03 – After doing a quick run through the wards, the LNP has clearly and definitively won Bracken Ridge, Chandler, Doboy, Hamilton, Jamboree, MacGregor, Marchant, McDowall and Pullenvale. Labor has won Deagon and Forest Lake, the Greens have won The Gabba, and Nicole Johnston has retained Tennyson.
9:46 – We’re now getting preference counts from Coorparoo and the Greens are looking strong there. With them also looking strong in Walter Taylor and Paddington, it’s looking increasingly likely that the party could win four wards.
The other two wards that seemed feasible were Pullenvale and Central. In Pullenvale, the Greens appear to have gone backwards on 2CP as Richards independent voters have returned to the LNP. We don’t have any preference counts in Central, but the LNP primary vote has actually gone up a bit. The only thing that suggests the door is not completely shut on the Greens there is that the shift of votes from Labor to the Greens might reduce the role of exhaustion there.
9:24 – Labor look like they’re in trouble in Wynnum-Manly. The ABC still thinks the ALP is ahead, while Poll Bludger’s computer has the LNP narrowly in front. Whatever happens, Labor’s result is very poor and it looks quite possible they will go backwards.
9:21 – We’ve started getting preference counts in Walter Taylor and Paddington. Paddington looks good for the Greens – Walter Taylor the swings are in the Greens direction but not quite enough to flip the seat. Still, the ABC computer has called both wards for the Greens.
8:49 – There’s a lot of projections on the ABC website that seem to be based on a handful of primary vote booths and no actual 2CP figures, but instead makes assumptions about preference flows. It suggests that the Greens are in a close race with the LNP in Walter Taylor and Coorparoo.
8:32 – I think the Greens are in a strong position to win Paddington – it looks like they’re on track to top the primary vote, and thus would be winning. For some reason Poll Bludger has the seat at 50/50 but I don’t think that’s right.
8:25 – The informal rate in the two state by-elections has basically doubled, despite not having that many candidates running. It is absurd that they hold these by-elections (using compulsory preferential voting) alongside OPV council elections. Queensland could just not do that. It’s not hard to predict that this would happen!
8:23 – There’s not a lot of evidence of the LNP losing marginal wards at the moment. Bracken Ridge, Doboy, Calamvale and Northgate are looking pretty solid for the LNP right now. While the Greens look like overtaking Labor in Enoggera, but haven’t made much progress in chipping away at the LNP vote. But the number of booths is still low.
8:15 – Labor looks like they’re suffering another huge swing in Inala, but with a bigger margin they should still retain the seat.
8:08 – A ward worth watching is Moorooka. The Greens gained a large swing and Labor suffered a large swing in the first booth to report, which was enough for Poll Bludger’s computer to give the Greens a chance of winning.
7:52 – Labor has regained its lead in Ipswich West’s 2PP count, but it’s not a big lead. Labor is on 51.1% after four booths, which is a swing of 17.5%.
7:51 – It’s too early to call any competitive wards, but the matched swings across Brisbane City are consistent with a decent swing away from the ALP and towards the Greens, but only a tiny swing against the LNP.
7:30 – We now have primary vote figures from eight Ipswich West booths, and the primary vote swing is 17% to the LNP and 14% from Labor. It’s hard to be precise but right now it’s looking like it will be close.
7:26 – The Poll Bludger matched-swing computer is currently showing two-party-preferred swings to the LNP on the mayoral ballot in numerous BCC wards: Bracken Ridge, Doboy, MacGregor, Marchant, Northgate and Runcorn. This could be consistent with the Greens making ground in the inner city but Labor making no progress. Indeed if the Greens gain votes off Labor you’d expect many of those votes to exhaust, and thus be lost to Labor on a 2PP basis.
7:23 – Pullenvale is an interesting ward worth watching in Brisbane City. Kate Richards was a former LNP councillor who quit the party and was defeated in her independent candidacy in 2020. She came third, with the Greens coming in the top two. This time around she’s running again and is preferencing the Greens. The first booth there is Upper Brookfield, and there’s a primary vote swing of about 10% away from Richards and to the LNP, which isn’t a great sign for the Greens there.
7:20 – There’s also big primary vote swings in the Ipswich West booths of Raymonds Hill and Rosewood, but nothing like what we saw in Marburg.
7:17 – Both the Poll Bludger and the ABC systems have called McDowall for the LNP – a very safe LNP ward and not a surprise at all.
7:02 – We have the first two-party-preferred figure from a booth in Ipswich West, Marburg, and the LNP is on 60.9%. That’s a swing of about 23%, which would be enough to flip the seat, but it’s just one booth.
6:54 – I had heard from a journalist that the ECQ had been expecting more pre-poll votes than had actually been recorded. That makes me wonder what level of pre-poll they were expecting, and whether that flowed through to a reduction in resourcing for election-day booths.
6:43 – The only results we have are from mobile booths – they are small, unrepresentative, and not possible to calculate a swing that would inform us about how the results might be going. So I’ll wait for something more.
6:18 – There was a big uptick in pre-poll voting yesterday (which is pretty standard). More than 5% of all voters cast their vote on Friday, which means that 25% of all enrolled voters cast a pre-poll vote. Remarkably this means that the total pre-poll share has jumped from 23.7% in 2020. It does look like postal votes has dropped, but we don’t yet have a final figure.
The big unknown factor is how many people vote on election day, but there have been reports of long queues. So it’s possible we could be looking at an elevated turnout.
6:00 – Polls have just closed across Queensland in the state’s council elections, along with two state by-elections in the Labor seats of Ipswich West and Inala.
I am most interesting in the City of Brisbane but I will briefly touch on other contests of interest tonight. The City of Brisbane is Australia’s biggest local council by a long shot, and in some ways it more resembles a small state than a larger council. The LNP has held the mayoralty for twenty years, the council for sixteen years, and have not lost a ward since 2000, but if the polls are to be believed they may go backwards tonight.
The southern suburbs bordering Logan Council (stretching from Sunnybank to Calamvale) seems to be the only area that stuck with Labor, other parts of BCC all swung against the ALP either to the Greens for inner suburban wards or the LNP for the outer northern suburbs.
This part of BCC is probably like Ryde and Parramatta councils of Sydney, an area with an above average number of ethnic minorities (mostly of Asian background) who also did not embrace the Coalition at recent elections.
As a Labor supporter, I am very down about the BCC result. I can’t believe after 20 years in office there has been a swing to the LNP for both Mayor and across many of the wards. Many previously marginal LNP wards have been consolidated, making it much tougher for Labor next time. For all the media talk of a Green wave, they’ve picked up one ward, with the LNP holding Walter Taylor relatively easily by over 1000 votes and easily retaining Greenslopes. Both were “certain Green gains” according to the Greens leaked polling last week. Labor looks like picking up only one ward, Calamvale, and even that was a squeaker despite having an excellent candidate. The LNP looks like holding Marchant relatively comfortably after postals and Gordan Park get counted. Worse, Labor looks like losing Wynnum Manly after a huge swing to the LNP. Forest Lake also swung blue in a big way. So the final numbers on Council will be little changed from the previous term.
Well to win Stafford the Greens basically need to double their primary vote, or hope Labor utterly craters on a scale that’s, again, analogous to Ipswich west and hope that the LNP somehow don’t do too well out of it. Bulimba is even harder than that. Miller and Greenslopes won’t be ‘easy’, but a ~10 point swing is clearly achievable and might be enough. That would give them six seats in total, assuming they hold Maiwar and don’t fumble Cooper and McConnel somehow. An ambitious but realistic goal that could set them up for the balance of power (again, assuming Labor don’t have a catastrophically bad election). Hoping for more than that sounds really fanciful to me, but I’m basically just eyeballing PVs so if someone wants to crunch the numbers proving otherwise then they’re welcome to.
John, imo odds are Greens retain Maiwar, but the LNP actually got a positive PV in Walter Taylor and may end up retaining it. It’s clearly still a marginal electorate. I’m thinking more in the sense of ‘anything is possible’ and ‘a day is a long time’ etc
The results are generally pretty close to what the Greens were saying about their internal primary vote estimates, but they’re disappointed because this is the absolute worst case scenario for those sort of primary swings to them where the big increases to their primary came entirely from Labor.
If there was one Labor candidate I really wanted to pick up a ward, I agree, it would be Emily Kim. She’s definitely a rising star in QLD ALP. From a broad left-wing perspective, I think there should be some optimism about the next election. Realistically, it looks like Northgate, Marchant and Calamvale are Labor pick-ups while at this stage I think Wynnum-Manly is gone. So for Labor a net gain of 2 wards. That still leaves it in single digits. And the Greens got close (again), but only gained one ward, which might remind them that they can’t take their three federal seats as being certain retains (which I don’t think they were going to anyway). So the broad left (ALP-GRN) is left with 9 wards. Add the independent in Tennyson and you get 10 against the LNP. Thats a pretty good position to be in for the next election. But if Labor really wants to win, they need to realise that they need to direct funds into the council election, which just didn’t happen in large amounts, obviously money was waiting to be used for the state election. But honestly there’s no hope for Labor. And I even rank the chances of a broad left wing coalition (not saying the Greens and Labor would make a coalition, but just their combined numbers) seems very unlikely to get to a majority. I genuinely have no idea what Labor needs to do to get voters back from the Liberals and the Greens. They’re in a really tricky spot.
Labor aren’t likely to win Marchant, postals aren’t in yet and will be bad for them there. Northgate is a knife’s edge.
Calamvale looks good for them though, Labor has already survived the postals there.
I would be careful making a strong connection between the BCC LNP and the State and Federal LNP. The BCC LNP lacks the conservative baggage (on cultural issues and climate change) which drags down the LNP in the cities, and is BCC LNP is generally seen a competent and progressive when it needs to be.
It also didn’t help the Greens that Sri was their lord mayor candidate, the state and federal Greens members have all been more palatable to general voters (especially young professionals) and don’t appear to be ‘radicals’, unlike Sri.
Bajoc, Labor ran a nobody mayoral candidate and didn’t even pretend to care about the election until six weeks ago. They had a boring platform they threw together at the last minute and let the Greens have all the ‘big ideas’, despite centre-left municipal governments not just worldwide, but in Sydney and Melbourne finding enormous success in infrastructure reform. As for state politics, I suppose you’re far less likely to agree with me, but, Labor don’t give the impression that they have much of an agenda left in government and are letting their opponents dictate the narrative. If you let the conversation be dominated by racism, then racists are going to gravitate to the party that enthusiastically endorses it over the one that does it reluctantly, while progressive and minority voters that are genuinely disgusted by that peace out on the left. Basically Labor, Qld Labor especially needs to do some soul searching and figure out what it is they want to do with politics at all.
Labor has ran dead at least the last 3 BCC elections.
This is just a guess:
The entire BCC Staff is unionised and vacancies have to be covertly vetted by the ALP.
ALP cutouts also get plenty of BCC contracts.
Just a guess, but nothing else makes sense after considering their series of non candidates for Lord Mayor.
PS:The previous Councillor for Gabba Ward lost preselection to a nobody, never heard of before or since, that’s how Jonno got in in 2016.
Gympie, I thought Helen Abrahams (then Labor councillor for the Gabba ward) retired on her own terms by declining to seek re-election for the 2016 contest. See link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/bcc/2016/guide/retiring-mps
Yoh An, that’s what I was told by Labor people [spend more time with her grandchildren], but the problem with that scenario is that it emerged very close to the 2016 BCC election, Helen had 4 years to announce she wasn’t standing.
I live in The Gabba, it seemed to me she was forced out, it made no sense, since her replacement was unknown, Helen could’ve resigned 8 months early and given the new girl a profile, like Jonno did.
Also, don’t believe anything on the ABC, it’s no better than The Courier-Mail.
I agree with you Parkes, the LNP leaders and councillors for BCC are very different compared to those serving in state or federal parliament. They are seen as ‘moderate’ and try to avoid links to culture war rhetoric, instead focusing on infrastructure development and service delivery similar to the NSW Coalition which was able to hold onto power for a long time.
Faded Red Shirt We have simply given a gift to the LNP by splintering the vote of progressive parties. People didn’t know Tracey and they didn’t like Sri extreme views and Schrinner was seen as the safe incumbent therefore the mayoralty vote remains about the same as the last election.
It does seem like Sriranganathan depressed the Greens vote. Will need to see booth results to see whether it’s primarily in Green target wards or across the board (i.e. Sri did worse than paper candidates).
In my opinion he became a lot more likeable during the course of the campaign, and has always been someone who actually takes local government very seriously. But his history of being quite confrontational did bite him a bit, and he hasn’t quite moved on from off-putting campus socialist talking points (excessive focus on words ending with “ism”, allusions to full scale revolution and describing things as “violence”). Left wing movements globally have an awful habit of using confrontational framing for very sensible policies. But with Sriranganathan it’s easy to think he actually does want the extreme ultraleft policy suite and is only held back by his focus on local government.
Babaluma The Greens weren’t going to win Morningside or Moorooka Wards because Moorooka had a safe Labor incumbent councillor for over 20 years and Morningside has also been a reliability safe Labor ward. So the Greens simply didn’t want to waste there time and resources they could not win. They had to pick and choose the wards they could win as we seen through the votes and the wards The Greens have spread themselves to thin and split the progressive vote. Meaning Schrinner could hold onto many more wards for the next 4 years escapielly with OPV.
Bajoc I know we got so close to winning many wards but with OPV and LNP incumbents the system is rigged against us. I am really glad Emily Kim won 🏆 winning an LNP wars is so important but unfortunately we lost Wynum Manly so we look like we are in the same position as last election.
John I don’t disagree with all the Greens policies but he is a radical he will even admit so himself. When you have someone who gave a step by step guide on how to break and enter into someone house and showed how to do it on camera. He actively encouraged shop lifting saying there was an ethically viable way to do it. He wants the prisons and the police to go and he wants all drugs to be legalised as well as some of his crazy protests tying himself onto bicycles infront of people homes and telling people to stick there tongue to look like you are dead on a busy road in Brisbane. All this shows is that yes he is definitely a radical and not in the good sense either. These ideas are beyond ridcolous.