Holland Park – Brisbane 2024

I’m not expecting too many seats to change hands in this election. But if I had to pick a surprise result in any seat, it’d be here. The swings in these booths in the 2022 federal election were enormous, catapulting Max Chandler-Mather into a plurality of the primary vote in most of them. Krista Adams also seems a bit nervous about the Greens, since she’s been engaging in some rather nasty accusations against them through the media, describing them as being supportive of crime, and repeatedly labelling their Lord Mayor candidate Jonathan Sriranganathan as racist due to his support for Palestinians.

@wilson i reckon everything north of Morayfield is up for grabs for the LNP except Gladstone, MAryborough and Mulgrave

John, this is about the Brisbane City Council election, not the Queensland state election.

woops i thought it was the qld election thread my bad

@ Wilson I would suspect the LNP are petrified of the Greens threat, not least accusing a candidate who herself was a victim of a break in that they somehow support crime. The mayor announced that Brisbane was withdrawing its support for the Gabba redevelopment, something the Greens have been campaigning heavily against. Putting my betting hat on for a moment, I would wager this ward will fall, and it will be the Greens who take it.

Sam, I agree there certainly are some ominous signs. Schrinner wouldn’t have withdrawn his support if he didn’t realise it’s a popular position amongst the community, and as you say, the Greens have been banging that drum for a while.

I’m still unsure if that will translate into a Greens victory in Holland Park, because there’s a greater apathy around council politics than state or federal, and also because the OPV system in place will hurt the Greens’ chances, as Labor still have a high vote in this area but the preference flow from them will be lower than usual. However, there’s definitely a chance of an upset. This might be the Greens’ best chance at a seat after The Gabba and the more obvious targets of Coorparoo, Central, Paddington and Walter Taylor.

@wilson while holland park is no where near a certainty I would say several factors are moving in the Greens favour. Labor voters seeing the rise of the Greens would likely if not in large amounts be more clued into the idea that not putting the Greens second is giving an advantage to the Liberals. To your point abt apathy, the Greens campaign seems in part attempting to convince more people that the council is higher stakes than most people realise. This might not work, but they are certainly trying to fight it. Also agree this is their best chance on the Southside apart from coorparoo, morningside would be less likely imo.

This is a hard ask for the Greens but agree with Wilson that this ward could be a surprise upset. The Greens couldn’t really have asked for better boundaries imo, as this ward combines their best federal areas from Bonner (Mt Gravatt), strong areas from Moreton like Tarragindi/Wellers Hill, plus Holland Park from Griffith where the Greens finished first on primaries in two of the three Holland Park booths.

According to Antony Green, on federal figures in this ward, the L/NP finishes on 36%, with Labor and Greens tied for second with 32% each. I think there’s no doubt that Krista Adams will outrun the federal L/NP vote (as a four term incumbent and deputy mayor), and when you factor in the OPV benefit to the L/NP, I would predict this seat is competitive but leans L/NP. Difficult to say whether Morningside is more likely to fall to the Greens than this seat, but I think it’s a safe bet to say they’ll beat Labor here on primaries.

Would Greens be able to make any use of a beach head into Bonner? The Greens are pretty short on credible LNP held targets going into 2025 and they’d want to point to whatever they can.

Don’t imagine they’ll do much with Mansfield – they wouldn’t want any Green fingerprints on Labor losing a seat to the LNP.

I think the Greens have a good candidate in Holland Park and unlike with Coorparoo, they didn’t waste a bunch of time preselecting him. People talk about Krista Adams as an asset but she seems like a fuckwit to me. And yes the Greens had a big swing in 2022. Nonetheless the LNP aren’t completely oblivious to the threat this time and the Greens’ grassroots campaign simply isn’t on the same scale as it was at the federal election. I think it’ll be very close but I still give the edge to the LNP. To be even more frank, I really don’t know what to think about the inner Southern wards other than to say that Greens will retain Gabba and Johnston will keep Tennyson.

John I really don’t think Qld Greens care at this point. Qld Labor’s given them absolutely nothing policy-wise. The relationship between the state party MPs is even worse than it is at the federal level. So the Greens will go for what they think they can win. Mansfield and Bonner are safe for now, but not for sentimental reasons.

John, I think the 2022 federal election showed that the Greens target seats held by both major parties. I also think it wasn’t a coincidence they won more seats from the LNP than Labor, because in that election, people were unhappy with the incumbent Coalition government.

In the next federal election, going by current polling, people might be unimpressed by both major parties. Labor will likely hang on because it’s rare to see a one-term government in Australia, but it may bear some resemblance to the 2010 election where they lost a few seats while still retaining government. I would expect fewer Coalition losses overall (partly because the have fewer seats to lose) and I’m not confident Bonner will be one of them. While the 2022 swing against the Coalition made it a marginal seat, I expect a swing away from Labor this time. The Greens vote may still grow but I wouldn’t expect it to be a 2025 target, more so in subsequent elections. I would imagine Moreton and Lilley are more vulnerable to a Greens swing.

In the state election, as an unpopular incumbent, Labor will likely lose seats, and Mansfield is certainly one that’s on the table. I don’t think the Greens can do Labor much harm there though, because CPV exists at state level, so Greens voters will likely preference Labor in high numbers anyway. But I doubt the Greens would really bother with Mansfield when there are at least a half dozen more promising seats to target.

Agree Furtive, whilst Krista Adams holds a strong position as Deputy Mayor, she has also run a sort of smear campaign against the Greens in general.

@furtive have to agree with the fuckwit sentiment she accused Greens coorparoo candidate Kath Angus of “supporting crime” when Angus was a multiple time victim of break ins kinda insane ngl.

Greens seem to be off the boil here – this isn’t popping up as one of their target wards any more. The Green campaign has highlit Central, Walter Taylor, Paddington, Coorparoo and Enoggera as the winnable seats (from an article in the Australian)

I have no idea what you guys are on about this being a surprise Greens upset. You know there primary vote only at 20% right while Labor is at 30% and the LNP are at 48%. Which makes it a TPP of 54.7% LNP. The ward is marginal with a mixture of the more working middle class areas of Mount Gravatt and Mount Gravatt East as well as the more wealthier parts of Tarragindi Holland Park and Holland Park West. But even in these suburbs there are pockets of working class people hence why you see the drastically different results depending on which booth you look at. If you guys ever care to actually doorknock around Holland Park you would see old run down Queenslanders mixed in with nice renovated homes 🏡 that look like mini mansions.

The reality is The Greens know they can’t win in this ward and haven’t really bothered spending any real money resources or having 20 trained volunteers intimidating everyone at the pre poll booth. For the simple fact is The Greens are unlikely to win Holland Park. This is a suburban ward although only 7-10kms from the city and suburban wards don’t typically have violent swings towards one party or the other and they tend to resist more extreme populist parties like The Greens and One Nation. In order to have stability leadership and good governance. So to sum up this ward is definitely a Labor LNP fight and it looks like it will be really close. Considering how the LNP trajectory has been. Whoever wins this ward will depend on how high the LNP primary vote is or how many Greens will preferences going to Labor as opposed to how many preferences are exhausted. Hence why you see LNP telling people to just vote 1 and Labor is telling everyone to number all boxes in this optional preferential voting system which has saved the LNP from losing a lot of wards including this one.

So I was commenting on the Enoggera ward page that I was a bit confused as to why the Greens chose Enoggera as a target over Holland Park. For a lot of reasons Holland Park seems like the more lucrative target. It shares some area in the Griffith federal seat, it neighbours state seats that are targets for the next Queensland state election, it contains some of Moreton, a target seat at the next federal election for the Greens, but upon doing some modelling of this one it does become quite clear why.

Because of OPV, the 2 party dynamic is quite entrenched here in Holland Park. The Greens would have to run FP shares of approx. 39-40% to start having a chance at flipping this one, a swing of approx 18-19% puts them in the ballpark, it doesn’t even clinch the win. That would require the bottom falling out on both the LNP and Labor, as they’d both need to endure like -8% to -10% swings for this to happen.

On the other hand, the ALP have a much more fruitful path to victory here. As Harry above has so colorfully suggested.

“I have no idea what you guys are on about this being a surprise Greens upset. You know there primary vote only at 20% right while Labor is at 30% and the LNP are at 48%. Which makes it a TPP of 54.7% LNP… This is a suburban ward although only 7-10kms from the city and suburban wards don’t typically have violent swings towards one party or the other and they tend to resist more extreme populist parties like The Greens and One Nation.”

@Harry, I don’t think your arguments aren’t really supported by evidence from federal figures. According to Antony Green, on federal figures Holland Park results would be roughly LNP 36%, ALP 32% and GRN 32%. Clearly this area has the potential to vote Green and does not appear to be resisting the Greens like @Harry suggests.

@Harry also says that areas like Holland Park don’t typically have violent swings to one party, especially parties like the Greens, but that is not supported by evidence from federal figures. If you look at federal booths in Mt Gravatt (Bonner) from 2022, the Greens were getting very large primary swings – +8.5%, +9.9%, +8.9%, +12.4%. They didn’t outpoll Labor in Mt Gravatt but came very close – and that was without Bonner being a Greens target seat. Results in Holland Park in federal Griffith were very similar, if not bigger swings to the Greens.

The best case for the Greens in Holland Park would just be a 10% swing from LNP to them – they would get ahead of Labor and then likely win on Labor preferences. That doesn’t require a near-20% swing and is certainly smaller than the swings required in Enoggera. I doubt that will happen given it hasn’t ended up being a focus for the Greens, but they could still bring it closer or even end up winning it for Labor.

+1 to your points GPPS. If the council race was CPV, Holland Park would be a fantastic target ward.

Your points are why Moreton is a target for Greens at the next election. Also, just on this point that @Harry raised: “If you guys ever care to actually doorknock around Holland Park you would see old run down Queenslanders mixed in with nice renovated homes 🏡 that look like mini mansions.”, from what I’ve heard about doorknocking, I think one of the most fascinating things about it is that you really have nfi what the political affiliation of a person is by their house, street frontage, cars, etc. I assume the implication is that people in the run down Queenslanders would vote Greens, but the nice renovated homes wouldn’t. I think that is not accurate to how it plays out on the ground.

@Babaluma for the Greens to get any votes from the LNP they’d have to push them into 3rd on the FP count. That would require calamitous drop in FPs for the LNP, this starts happening at approx. -13% swing, and it would require ALP to have a good night. I guess it’s totally possible for the ALP to have a good night, but I think it’s less likely that the floor would drop out of the LNP that hard than it would be for the Greens to have a surge.

But they are both extremely unlikely, imo. I think it’s very safe to say the Greens won’t pick this one up, but a good night from the ALP could take it out of the LNP column.

You’re misunderstanding, a straight 10% primary swing from the LNP to the Greens here would give the following primaries:
LNP 38.4
Labor 30.7
Greens 30.9
This is enough for the Greens to just scrape out a win over the LNP on last election preference flows. Obviously the swing coming entirely from the LNP is unrealistic, I’m just trying to demonstrate the optimal scenario for the Greens in this seat and why it isn’t as bad of a prospect on paper as you’re saying. I don’t expect them to win it either.

Ah yes. Good call out, that does make sense.

@Cyrus spot on I’ve learned to assume nothing when I get to the door no matter the area or the quality of house or anything like that. People will always surprise you when u get to the door.

@Greens Polticial Party Supporter As usual you are all wrong because you don’t understand how suburban Wards work. The results now are Greens 24% Labor 28% LNP 48% and that will only decline for The Greens as postals come in that don’t favour them at all. LNP have been returned on 53%+ and it’s due to the same scenario I was talking about which was OPV where votes get exhausted and the LNP ends up winning. Obviously The Greens would get a small swing but it wasn’t 32%. What we have seen is a deliberate split of the progressive vote where Labor and Greens are competing against each other and the Liberals are benefiting from this to the point. That The Greens are now struggling to pick up Paddington even which was there best chance in Brisbane.

There this false perception that the more working class the suburb is the more likely they will vote Greens. When in reality it comes down to geography and people who live close to the city typically are the most wealthy people in all of Queensland and would have the biggest advantages from stage 3 tax cuts. Socially progressive electorates vote Greens not economically progressive hence why The Greens struggle so badly in the Moorooka ward to gain any real montenum.

It’s not about the polls sometimes they are right sometimes they are wrong it’s about the mood on the ground. It’s obvious Schrinner was going to be relected unfortunately he has basically saved all of his wards in the process even though Emily Kim won Calmavale. Also GPPS you are making the same mistake as many pundits do comparing what happened on the federal results in Griffith to what happens locally in Holland Park as anyone with a brain would know that Queenslanders who live outside of the inner city never vote consistently and we are seeing that the TPP vote has barely changed and Krista will probably end up with 54% meaning the last 3 elections there has been no big swing away from the LNP at all. All this has achieved is the LNP running city hall for quarter of a century.

Yes Cryus wasn’t it a good call these messages didn’t age well lol 😆

Babaluma Holland Park isn’t Enggoera nor is it The Gabba Central or Paddington. There is a difference between suburban and inner city wards and its clear The Greens are not going to score 30%. Instead Labor and The Greens have chewed up each other votes in the process. Even Enggoera the LNP won with an increased majority. If there was this huge mood for change then why are The Greens struggling to pick up a ward. Votes don’t matter wards do.

Cyrus when you have a united conservative front and a divided progressive front it becomes much more difficult to win the mayoralty. If you added up all the votes of the progressive parties it would of been more then 44%. Yes OPV dosen’t help but neither does the progressive vote splintering into more and more parties.

Cyrus it just frustrates me when the whole picture wasn’t talking about with Holland Park there was no surprise win here for The Greens and they didn’t get 2nd. They won votes by taking votes off Labor not the LNP.

“hence why The Greens struggle so badly in the Moorooka ward to gain any real montenum”

Um, Harry, did you see the Greens swing in Moorooka from the weekend?

7% swing to the greens in moorooka, according to the latest ABC tracker. Almost 10% in the inner city latte sipping, granola eating, decadent bourgeois enclave of Forest Lake. Neither of which were on their target list.

Something wrong with certain ‘progressives’ (I’m assuming) where they think it’s somehow always the Greens’ fault when Labor sucks.

“Sometimes wrong when certain progressives (I’m assuming) where they think it’s somehow always the Greens fault when Labor sucks”

Stop being an indisguised Greens supporter here. Yes I support Labor. I have said repeatedly vote don’t matter wards do and The Greens got no real montenum in terms of gaining wards. Yes they got a swing but Labor primary vote still remains at 46% and the LNP still might beat out The Greens for 2nd.

When you have a Labor vote of 26.5% a Greens vote of 19.5% and a LNP primary vote in the mid 40’s with them barely getting damaged on TPP at 56/44% then yes the progressive vote been split and more votes have been exhausted under OPV. The Greebs won votes but they didn’t win the right votes to actually gain wards. This splintering of progressive party votes has only helped the LNP remain in power for over quarter of a century.

Wilson yes I did they gained votes but no real momentum in terms of gaining the ward. Moorooka remains comfortably ward. I have said this repeatedly winning vote don’t matter winning wards do and it looks like we are going to struggle to win any wards even Paddington looks shaky with OPV. The only councillor that has got a LNP ward in Calmavale was Emily Kim our star candidate.

Comfortable for Labor*

Wilson and Furtive, the results of the recent elections clearly show the Greens as more of a ‘protest’ party. They will gather votes from the major party that is seen to be doing poorly, either the LNP for the recent Federal election and now Labor for Queensland.

Harry, I’d say you have a more narrow definition of momentum than I do, then. In my books, any consistent vote gain is momentum. Sometimes that doesn’t translate into seat gains, due to the vagaries of our electoral system and ward boundaries, but eventually vote gains turn into seat gains if a trend continues long enough.

Yoh An, how does conclusion that square with the Greens winning South Brisbane and Griffith in elections that Labor won overall?

Wilson, to be fair the bulk of Max Chandler Mather’s swing/vote gain came from the LNP with only a small portion (3%) coming from Labor.

South Brisbane 2020 was a different contest as Amy McMahon gained votes pretty equally from both Labor and LNP.

I think interstate contests also show mixed results as the recent NSW and Victorian elections saw only minimal swings or vote gains for the Greens, netting only one lower house seat (Richmond in Victoria).

Wilson, to be fair the bulk of Max Chandler Mather’s swing/vote gain came from the LNP with only a small portion (3%) coming from Labor.

South Brisbane 2020 was a different contest as Amy McMahon gained votes pretty equally from both Labor and LNP.

I think interstate contests also show mixed results as the recent NSW and Victorian elections saw only minimal swings or vote gains for the Greens, netting only one lower house seat (Richmond in Victoria).

@ Yoh An
I feel that like you said previously the Brisbane CC LNP are more moderate and focused on service delivery so many voters at a federal level who switched from LNP to Greens in the absence of a Teal in Ryan, Brisbane and Griffith decided to remain with the LNP at a local level. This is similar to the situation in NSW. To me it shows that that it was certainly not inevitable that Libs were going to loose the Affluent “Teal” seats.

Fair point Nimalan, as you mentioned previously there are two classes of voters who will back the Greens. On one side is the ‘teal’ like voters who are often tertiary educated and work in a professional type setting. Then you have the more traditional ‘socialist’ type voters who are typically considered ‘working class’.

It appears those ‘teal’ like voters have returned to their usual base with the moderate faction of the LNP, with Labor losing support in its more traditional working-class heartland to the Greens (as shown with larger swings to the Greens in both Moorooka and Forest Lake wards). Both of these wards contain many suburbs that consist of those from working class, ethnic minority backgrounds similar to places like Fairfield and Cabramatta in Sydney that actually swung against Labor at recent elections.

@Nimalan @Yoh A the difference is though the Greens are very left-wing. Someone who votes for the Greens for their policies won’t be even considering voting Liberal but might vote for a Labor candidate provided they are from the Labor Left faction.

These “teal Greens” though are people who would vote teal but couldn’t because no teals ran in Queensland. Also, the people you see in the Extinction Rebellion protests (these are Greens voters) and the people who back their protests (these are also Greens voters) are indeed ecosocialists just like the Greens themselves, but I wouldn’t call them working class at all. Most would be uni-educated lefties born, raised and resident in the inner-city who typically live on an above-average income. On social issues, they are also very woke. These are what actual Greens voters are like.

@ Nether Portal
I agree that Greens are more left wing than Labor. In the 3 affluent Brisbane seats at a Federal level in 2022 we saw in the absence of a Teal that Liberal voters switched to Greens rather than Labor. I think there is some logic behind this actually. For many affluent Liberal voters voting Labor is a bridge too far it maybe associated with the working class in suburbs such as Inala so there is some class based aversion. The people who switched from Lib to Greens changed due to social issues such as climate, integrity. Gender Equity rather than economic. Tanya Plibasek was asked about this on election night on the ABC coverage in 2022 and she said they voted Greens as there know there is no chance of a Greens government. Also i would say what defines the core group of Green voters is that they are asset poor so it is actually young renters. The Greens actually do well with some professions which are low income and do not require uni degrees such as hospitality workers (Bar tenders, cafe workers, hotel staff) etc which reside in the inner city and are typically renters.

Well the Greens increased their vote share in nearly every ward. If there was some sort of exodus of teal type voters for the LNP, then it makes more sense to say they left Labor, not the Greens (as long as you want to oversimplify shifts of tens of thousands of voters). I don’t agree that the city council LNP are necessarily more moderate than their state and federal counterparts or that they’re even perceived that way by voters, in fact much of their campaign material was focused around right wing, pro car, anti cyclist/pedestrian culture wars and other errant nonsense. They deliberately emphasised the general Channel 7/LNP youth crime hysteria despite it being well outside the remit of council politics. Does that appeal to ‘teal’ voters? Maybe it does. I think a more accurate assessment of the election in general is that what we’re witnessing is a general collapse in the Qld Labor constituency, despite Calamvale or any singular ward upset they’re able to orchestrate amongst the double digit swings elsewhere. That’s the more immediate and pressing concern as far as the plight of “”””””””progressive””””””””” politics in Queensland. And for my money, as I said on the other thread, it has a lot more to do with Qld Labor not knowing why they even exist anymore than Greens campaign staff deploying campaign resources in a less than optimal fashion

There was obviously some kind of bargain in 2022 between the Greens and the Teals. The Greens could not have won any of the Teal seats but they did run dead. No Teals in Higgins, Macnamara and Ryan – all of which would have been winnable by a Teal but the Greens only got up in Ryan. Will be interesting to see if this holds up in 2025 – the right Teal could still win in Higgins or Ryan.

Furtive, whilst you may see a lot of the LNP’s branding and advertising material as ‘smear’ – the issue with Brisbane as a whole is that it is completely different to other large cities (even Sydney and Melbourne).

Low density suburban type housing dominates the city, even extending up to traditional inner-city areas like Greenslopes and Wooloowin. Voters as a whole including myself are ‘pragmatic’ in nature. We only support change if it is justifiable and may not accept ‘radical’ new ideas that the Greens are proposing. As a result, the LNP and conservatives in general can still dominate and poll well here.

The only reason many of these voters may have shifted to Labor is that they were seen as competent in the face of an opposing party who was scandal plagued.

Low density housing and especially car centric infrastructure dominates our city because that’s almost ll that’s been built for sixty plus years. If doing anything different isn’t ‘pragmatic’ in your view then I submit you don’t actually support change at all. I agree that a lot of people think like that, and that’s an electoral problem for progressives, but it’s not pragmatic.

Wilson it’s not a gain if you are in the same situation time and time again. Which we are consistently seeing on a local level The Greens have only barely won 1 ward and that still might in doubt on postals with Paddington. They won votes off the expense of Labor while LNP retain wards. Ensuring the LNP runs city hall for the next 4 years. The progressive vote has been seriously split which only ensures the LNP remain in council for a lot longer now they will be approaching quarter of a century running city hall.

Yoh An The Greens are not even going to get 2nd in Moorooka on the official preference count they barely got a swing and Labor still leads by 20 percentage points. If you want to call that a surge then sure. But Labor still dominates that area and as for Forest Lake. Largely due to an inflated margin because no one knew what Labor was about with Jonno Sri in charge. In the Inala by election The Greens vote was only 10% so votes can go up and down.

Furtive nah he probably right compared the local LNP or state LNP to the federal LNP definitely a lot more moderate escapielly as they don’t have fancy ideas like pushing nuclear that won’t get built by 2040s and have terrible leaders like Dutton in charge. The only difference is state LNP have barely any representatives in Brisbane so it’s more nationals orientated while locally in Brisbane it’s basically just all moderate teal style Liberals with the OPV system they have got they have done very well to stay in power. Because they also have a united conservative front while the progressive front is split. I also don’t think The Greens understand that Labor being unpopular at the moment dosent bode well for progressive poltics in general escapielly as Labor represents quite different types of voting bases that could possibly be won by the LNP at the next state election. Seats that The Greens wouldn’t have a chance in think Ipswich Logan Caboolture Maryborough Townsville Cairns etc

There is also this idea that if a party going badly it will lead to its inevitable decline. But just because Labor and the LNP do poorly in the polls dosen’t mean it’s the end for them it’s just part of the election cycle.