Curiously, the Courier Mail also editorialised on the issue, urging the Liberals to keep their options open because they might be able to win the seat. This was a strange intervention, unpredictably at odds with previous public stances on preferences of the Courier Mail’s Editor-in-Chief, Chris Mitchell. It is also at odds with the paper’s own polling that showed the Labor Party on 75% of the two-party preferred vote in Bundamba.
Later that day Watson ruled out a preference deal. This ran relatively positively on the electronic media that evening, yet next day the Courier struck again. It inferred that the decision was a reaction to an attack by Michael Johnson, the Australian Chinese who recently withdrew from challenging MP John Moore, reportedly as a result of a deal brokered by leaders of the Santoro faction.
Watson’s problems are compounded by the National Party. Despite the convention that the coalition partners stay out of each other’s by-elections, except by invitation, Leader Rob Borbidge has been trumpeting the possibilities of a Coalition win, at the same time bagging the Labor candidates. This possibly helps the ALP. The voters in these seats might be tempted to punish Labor, but they won’t if they think it might give them a Liberal member. It also helps the Alliance. Labor voters have not shown the same disdain for One Nation in the past, and a successful negative campaign by the Coalition might just top up the Alliance vote.
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The two parties who have something significant to lose in this by-election are the Liberals and One Nation/Alliance Recent state-wide polling has the Liberal Party on 28% of the vote to the National Party’s 16%, but that does not necessarily translate into seats. The Liberal Party restricts itself largely to urban areas as a result of the Coalition agreement, and it is these areas that are most intolerant to Hansonism and its offspring. A poor showing in Bundamba and Woodridge vis-à-vis the Alliance will hurt the Liberal Party in its heartland and make Watson extremely vulnerable to challenge. One Nation/Alliance by contrast has just about dropped off the electoral screen. It outpolls the Democrats and Greens, but all with less than 5% of the vote. It should be able to poll better than this in these two seats, and if it can run the Liberals even close, then it is back in business at a time when most thought it had just fallen to pieces.
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