Queensland isn't just a COVID-19 election

Brisbane is to Queensland what Victoria is to Australia. Climate change and soft social issues hold sway, with mining and agriculture barely-necessary evils.

Outside Brisbane is a doughnut of commuter suburbs, where the federal Liberal Party does very well.

This is where the realm of “Howard’s Battlers” “Silent Australians”, starts but at a state level not only does the ALP hold 12 seats to the LNP’s 2, but One Nation is frequently more competitive than the Libs.

The LNP needs to win 9 seats to form a majority government. If they could replicate the federal result in these areas they’d be virtually there, yet with the exception of Redlands, which requires a 3.06% swing, nothing appears to be in prospect for them.

This illustrates better than anything else the failure of the LNP to get the conservative “vibe”. These are the areas which tend to determine government in Queensland. Working class enough to not fear Labor, but aspirational enough to see the sense of economic prudence.

Populists like Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Pauline Hanson have reaped huge dividends here, but the LNP leader, Deb Frecklington, while representing Joh’s old seat, doesn’t cut through.

If the ALP is to pick up seats, it is most likely on the Gold or Sunshine Coasts. Yet on the Goldie border closures may work against them. And they also have one seat at risk there themselves.

So wins for Labor and LNP seem hard, until you get to North Queensland seats such as Townsville, Mundingburra, Barron River, Keppel and Cairns. These voters are motivated by mining, tourism and agriculture, and have a strong sense of northern identity. Katter does well here.

Annastacia Palaszczuk spent her first day of the campaign in Mt Isa, announcing a new coal mine. Labor has a lot of ground to make up in mining courtesy of its handling of the Adani (as well as Acland) mine.

The LNP needs to make up ground too and is promising a “New Bradfield Scheme” and a complete $33 B upgrade of the Pacific Highway.

The latter is obviously biting as Labor has just tried to nullify it by promising to duplicate the Highway west of the Great Divide as a way of taking trucks off it. This recycles a promise Campbell Newman made in 2015 and is a really a series of road upgrades that the government says will cost $1bn while the industry says it is $2 bn.

While the parties talk about “plans”, their economic promises seem more like a Jackson Pollock with rich blobs of promise thrown at marginal seats, but no actionable structure.