GRN 5.3% vs ALP
Incumbent MP
Amy MacMahon, since 2020.
Geography
Central Brisbane. South Brisbane covers suburbs in on the south side of the Brisbane River in central Brisbane, specifically West End, Highgate Hill, Kangaroo Point, East Brisbane, South Brisbane, Woolloongabba and Dutton Park.
History
The seat of South Brisbane has existed continuously since 1860. The seat had been won by the ALP at almost all elections from 1915 until 2020, when it was won by the Greens.
The seat was once held by Premier Vince Gair from 1932 to 1960. He was expelled in 1957 and formed the Queensland Labor Party, and later served as a Democratic Labor Party Senator from 1964 to 1973.
The ALP held the seat from 1960 to 1974. The seat was held by the Liberal Party for one term from 1974 to 1977 and has been held by the ALP since 1977.
Jim Fouras won the seat in 1977, and held it until 1986, when he lost ALP preselection to Anne Warner. He later held the seat of Ashgrove from 1989 to 2006, serving as Speaker from 1990 to 1996.
Warner had previously won the seat of Kurilpa in 1983, but her original seat was abolished in 1986. She served as a minister in the Goss government until her retirement in 1995.
Anna Bligh won South Brisbane in 1995. Bligh became a minister in the new Beattie government in 1998. In 2005, she became Deputy Premier, and succeeded Peter Beattie as Premier in 2007. She won another term as Premier in 2009.
In 2012, Anna Bligh led the ALP to a massive defeat, with the party losing all but seven seats. Bligh held on in South Brisbane by a 4.7% margin, after a swing to the LNP of over 10%.
Bligh resigned from her seat immediately after the election. Labor’s Jackie Trad won the following by-election by a slim 1.7% margin. Trad was re-elected in 2015 and 2017.
Trad was elected deputy leader of the ALP immediately after the 2015 state election, and thus became Deputy Premier. She served in a number of portfolios, but primarily as Minister for Transport until 2017, and as Treasurer from 2017 to 2020. She was forced to resign from her ministerial roles in May 2020 due to an investigation by the Crime and Corruption Commission into her role in the construction of a new school in her electorate. She was cleared by the investigation in July 2020.
Trad lost her seat in 2020 to Greens candidate Amy MacMahon.
- Marita Parkinson (Liberal National)
- Barbara O’Shea (Labor)
- Richard Henderson (One Nation)
- Amy MacMahon (Greens)
Assessment
The Greens’ margin in this seat is not insurmountable, particularly if the LNP changed their preference policy to favour Labor.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Amy MacMahon | Greens | 12,631 | 37.9 | +3.5 |
| Jackie Trad | Labor | 11,471 | 34.4 | -1.6 |
| Clem Grehan | Liberal National | 7,616 | 22.8 | -1.5 |
| Rosalie Taxis | One Nation | 573 | 1.7 | +1.7 |
| John Meyer | Independent | 441 | 1.3 | +1.3 |
| John Jiggens | Independent | 398 | 1.2 | +1.2 |
| Marcus Thorne | United Australia | 206 | 0.6 | +0.6 |
| Informal | 882 | 2.6 |
2020 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Amy MacMahon | Greens | 18,450 | 55.3 | +8.9 |
| Jackie Trad | Labor | 14,886 | 44.7 | -8.9 |
Booths in South Brisbane have been divided into three areas: central, east and west.
The Greens won a majority of the two-candidate-preferred vote in all three areas, ranging from 56% in the east to 59.2% in the centre.
| Voter group | LNP prim % | GRN 2CP % | Total votes | % of votes |
| West | 16.8 | 58.4 | 4,147 | 12.4 |
| East | 22.7 | 56.0 | 3,944 | 11.8 |
| Central | 19.6 | 59.2 | 866 | 2.6 |
| Pre-poll | 23.2 | 55.4 | 13,841 | 41.5 |
| Other votes | 25.1 | 53.4 | 10,538 | 31.6 |
Election results in South Brisbane at the 2020 Queensland state election
Toggle between two-candidate-preferred votes (Greens vs Labor) and primary votes for the Greens, Labor and the Liberal National Party.
Agree Nimalan, I’m not sure if this can also be applied to the recent federal election and also the BCC council election 2024 where the Greens may have been too ambitious and as a result did not have enough resources to defend their marginal seats.
I think the Greens would do better under OPV, similar to NSW as the party and its MP Amy McMahon led on primary votes and would have won narrowly over Labor since most of the LNP and One Nation votes would exhaust and not flow strongly to Labor.
The tide was against the Greens. Labor’s candidate didn’t have the bad rap that Jackie Trad had. The LNP switched preference recommendations to Labor ahead of Greens. The LNP was on the upswing.
I concur that the Greens had too many target seats and were bad at sandbagging their own. Their target seats were mainly Labor seats and Labor was quite good at sandbagging their BCC seats.
@ Yoh An
Certainly with the recent Federal election i think they were too ambitious. They should have never targeted Perth, Sturt or Moreton. I remember tells some Greens supporters on tallyroom they often need to focus on holding what they had. I think Greens were confident about QLD seats because they assumed Dutton’s home state advantage will mean that Labor can be knocked out of the 2CP. Someone also sugested trying for Hotham as it the seat of the housing minister To be fair i dont think anyone had Melbourne on their rader including Labor so i dont blame them for not sandbagging but they should have done that in Griffith and Brisbane.
Yeah I agree, I think like Wills, Richmond and Macnamara were reasonable to target (and weren’t in QLD where the main in danger seats were), but they definitely spread too thin, and I agree even though I thought at the time Brisbane and Griffith would be comfortable retains, with hindsight (particularly of Labor’s general upsurge) they should’ve sandbagged more. As to South Brisbane, I 100% agree, it was fairly obvious that with switching preference flows they’d need a decent bump to retain, and they didn’t put enough in to get that, instead spreading out over what I think the party said at one point was like 10+ targets.