ALP 11.6%
Incumbent MP
Milton Dick, since 2016.
Geography
Oxley covers the southwestern suburbs of the City of Brisbane and eastern parts of the City of Ipswich. Suburbs include Redbank, Forest Lake, Richlands, Durack, Inala, Jamboree Heights and Jindalee.
The seat of Oxley was created as part of the expansion of the House of Representatives at the 1949 election. After first being held by the Liberal Party for a decade, it has almost always been won by the ALP, except for the 1996 election, when it was won by disendorsed Liberal candidate Pauline Hanson, who later formed the One Nation party.
The seat was first won in 1949 by Liberal candidate Donald Cameron. Cameron served as a minister in the Menzies government from 1956 until his defeat at the 1961 election, when he was defeated by former police officer and Labor candidate Bill Hayden.
Hayden served as Member for Oxley for 27 years. He joined Gough Whitlam’s ministry in 1972, and served as Treasurer for the final five months of the Whitlam government in 1975. Hayden was elected Leader of the Opposition after Gough Whitlam’s resignation after the 1977 election, and led the party to an improved position in 1980.
Hayden faced a leadership threat from former ACTU president Bob Hawke, who had entered Parliament in 1980. Hawke failed to win a ballot in 1982. In early 1983 Hayden resigned as leader and was replaced by Hawke, only hours before Malcolm Fraser called an early election. After Bob Hawke’s win, Hayden was appointed Foreign Minister. He served in this role until he was appointed Governor-General in 1988, at which point he resigned from Parliament.
The ensuing by-election was won by the ALP’s Les Scott. Scott held the seat for the remainder of the Hawke/Keating government, up to the 1996 election. The Liberal Party preselected former Ipswich councillor Pauline Hanson as their candidate in 1996. Shortly before the election she was quoted in local papers criticising government assistance for indigenous Australians, which resulted in her disendorsement as a Liberal candidate. With the ballot papers already printed with the Liberal Party’s name attached to Hanson, she gained a high profile and managed to win the seat with a large swing.
Hanson was a prominent independent MP and, in 1997, founded the One Nation party in support of her political views. The party had a strong result at the Queensland state election in early 1998 and she was predicted to perform strongly at the next federal election. Her hopes fell short at the 1998 election, where One Nation only managed to elect a single Senator, despite a national result of over 8%. Hanson contested the new seat of Blair, which now covered Ipswich, which had previously been included in Oxley. Despite coming first on primary votes, Hanson lost due to the ALP and Liberal Party swapping preferences.
Pauline Hanson repeatedly run for election after losing her seat in 1998, and finally returned to parliament as a senator in 2016.
Hanson’s seat of Oxley was won in 1998 by ALP candidate Bernie Ripoll, and he held the seat until his retirement in 2016.
Ripoll was succeeded by Labor’s Milton Dick, and Dick has been re-elected twice.
Milton Dick was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives after the 2022 federal election.
Assessment
Oxley is a reasonably safe Labor seat.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Milton Dick | Labor | 43,785 | 45.9 | +3.4 |
| Kyle McMillen | Liberal National | 27,385 | 28.7 | -5.9 |
| Asha Worsteling | Greens | 13,595 | 14.2 | +2.6 |
| Dylan Kozlowski | One Nation | 5,568 | 5.8 | -0.5 |
| Timothy Coombes | United Australia | 5,079 | 5.3 | +2.7 |
| Informal | 3,582 | 3.6 | -1.1 |
2022 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Milton Dick | Labor | 58,768 | 61.6 | +5.2 |
| Kyle McMillen | Liberal National | 36,644 | 38.4 | -5.2 |
Booths have been divided into three areas. Booths in the City of Ipswich have been grouped as ‘South-West’. Booths in the City of Brisbane have been split into South-East and North.
The ALP won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in all three areas, ranging from 58.1% in the north to 67.9% in the south-east.
The Greens came third, with a primary vote ranging from 14.6% in the south-east to 17.7% in the north, but polled just 12.8% on the pre-poll vote.
| Voter group | GRN prim | ALP 2PP | Total votes | % of votes |
| South-West | 15.4 | 62.4 | 16,372 | 17.2 |
| South-East | 14.6 | 67.9 | 14,942 | 15.7 |
| North | 17.7 | 58.1 | 9,184 | 9.6 |
| Pre-poll | 12.8 | 59.7 | 32,988 | 34.6 |
| Other votes | 13.9 | 61.0 | 21,926 | 23.0 |
Election results in Oxley at the 2022 federal election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for Labor, the Liberal National Party and the Greens.
@yoh if you look at south of the river Bonner Moreton and Oxley are all under quta so there wil be a westwards shift south of the river if it stays at current seat numbers is the defeciet is about 1/5 of a seat.
@nicholas the only way that happens is if qld gains a seat. at current numbers your seat moves further into ipswich
Agree John, Moreton is the most under quota seat (>10% variance) so it will likely add suburbs such as Durack from Oxley and Stretton/Calamvale from Rankin. Both Rankin and Oxley will then expand outwards to absorb territory from Blair and Wright.
Depending on how the numbers work, it may be possible to unite the Springfield area into Oxley (currently split between Oxley and Blair).
If it loses the Centenary suburbs but keeps the Inala area, then yes, the seat will become even more safe. If it loses both and moves further into Ipswich, it’ll become more marginal (compare how the Inala area votes to how Ipswich votes) but probably still too safe.
What I can hope happens (but probably won’t as it’s too radical) is that in the committee’s redrawing of Wright (their hands will be forced this time as Wright is now well above quota), they combine Springfield and Flagstone, like Jordan at the state level.
It is interesting to note that the combined shortfall of every seat from Wide Bay north – excluding Maranoa – is roughly similar to the combined over quota of Longman, Fisher and Fairfax. Everything shuffles down. My dream redistribution scenario would be for Maranoa to take in Mount Isa. This would allow the coastal seats to be tidied up.
Yoh my plan is to move both wright and rankin into forde which will absorb the excess gc voters and to have groom take in the lockyer valley then move maranoa furhter into Toowoomba.
it would be labors safest qld sat
@redistributed Kennedy is at quota and wont be altered.
@nicholas its gonna need about 20% or 1/5 of a seat to shed to moretona dn bonner so initially id say along Stapylton/Blunder road then along the ipswich motorway and centeneay highway
Looks like the Labor campaign have been busy putting up signs at every high-traffic street corner.
Still no LNP candidate. So I have an MP who hasn’t represent me on the floor of parliament this entire term, the opposition is less interested in campaigning here than in Melbourne or Grayndler, and even One Nation is yet to nominate a candidate to recontest the seat that led to their inception. Feels bad man.
@Nicholas, I bet it does. As someone who has lived with the same party in power at Territory level for over 20 years, it can be immensely frustrating at times.
@Nicholas:
Hanson had an unexpected win appealing to a similar demographgic that nixed The Voice 27 years later. Probably unintentional, she was pretty green as far as handling media gotchas at the time. Other factors were general unhappiness with the sitting member, he’d been a Hayden staffer, and Hayden himself had been a blow in back in 1961. Ipswich was/is parochial, any Labor candidate might have won Oxley in 1961.
@ Gympie
On the current boundries it is not ONP friendly. Hanson was popular in Ipswich and the adjacent rural areas. Areas like Springfield-very young, Inala- too poor and multicultural, Centenary Suburbs-educated and more cosmpolitan are not areas that will be warm to Hanson. The current Blair excluding the areas around Springfield is ONP territory along with Wright.
Yes, Oxley had already become rather unfavourable for One Nation ahead of the 1998 election when it moved east to cover the entire Inala / Forest Lake area. Kind of funny in light of the whole “wE aRe iN dAnGeR oF bEiNg sWaMpEd bY aSiAnS” thing. In a sense, the redistribution committee fulfilled her prophecy, just not in the way she thought!
I’m not happy with my slate of candidates. I’ll be putting the major parties first and second, which feels so dirty. (For the Senate, I have the major parties 8th and 9th, ATL.)
Why don’t all the right-wing minor parties merge or federate and call themselves the “Freedom Party” or something, like what centre-left parties have done with Fusion?
I mean, I know why – there’s too much ego and too much unwillingness to compromise in those circles.
As for what I’ve noticed on the ground in my area:
– There are signs for Dick everywhere.
– There’s some signs for Holt and Larissa Waters.
– I’ve seen one or two signs for Malcolm Roberts, but none explicitly for Baker.
– I have not seen a single sign for Burns, although I received a pamphlet for him in the mail.
There are signs for Mutzelburg along the boundary of Oxley and Blair, and even a sign for Neumann within Oxley. I’ve been bombarded by ads on YouTube for Neumann and Mutzelburg despite being enrolled in Oxley.
Nicholas
Do you really think that the Conservative minority parties have not thought of merging. The big problem apart from personality issues is that looking in from the outside these parties are thought to be similar looking outwards from the inside there are many significant differences., Economically they range from rural socialists (Katter) through distributists (DLP) through neo classical liberalism ( Family First) to laissez faire capitalism ( Libertarianism). They range from pro union to anti union, from Concilliation and Arbitration supporters to economic rationalism, from the first supporters of Free Health care to those still holding out for a 100% privately funded system, From Hangers of criminals to total opponents.
It is simplistic to count them as the same just so that voters do not have to think.