The City of Brisbane has not yet finished punishing Labor
delivering a handsome victory to the LNP in the Council elections. Suffering a swing of 5% since 2008, Labor is likely to lose three seats barely a month after being trounced in the State election. The city is Australia’s largest municipality and incumbent
Mayor Graham Quirk is heading towards an easy victory with 60% of the vote with almost 65% counted. Labor’s Ray Smith is polling a disappointing
24.69% while the Greens candidate the high profile and former Democrat senator
candidate Andrew Bartlett is also not doing as well as some expected with
10.36% of the vote.
The Greens are doing much better in the councillor vote, in
some inner western seats overturning Labor as the main opposition. The LNP will comfortably retain their big
majority in council and are likely to take three seats from Labor with another
two Labor seats in the balance. In Central, Heather Beattie (wife of former premier Peter Beattie) is heading for defeat as she trails
Vicki Howard by 51-31 percent with over half the vote counted. This was the
seat vacated by Labor powerbroker and former deputy mayor David Hinchliffe
ending a 24 year run by Labor in the seat.
There are 26 one-member constituency wards in Brisbane and
at the time of writing, the result looks like being LNP 19, Labor 7 (20-7 including the Mayor). Two of
those seven Labor seats are still in the balance: Wynnum-Manly (43-41) and Northgate
(51-49). Two more are definitely lost. In Karawatha
(Woodridge) sitting ALP councillor Gail MacPherson stood down but her
replacement Adrienne Cremin is losing easily to a candidate with a very un-LNP
like name: Kim Marx.
Labor's John Campbell is the only sitting councillor likely to be unseated as he trails Ryan Murphy in Doboy (Tingalpa)
by 54-46. In the
Indooroopilly-based Walter Taylor ward, the Green’s candidate Tim Dangerfield
(19.77 per cent) outpolled Labor’s Adam Atkins (14.33 per cent) to finish
second to LNP’s Julian Simmonds (65.91 per cent), with nearly two-thirds of the
vote counted.
Meanwhile Labor looks set to retain The Gabba which is in Anna
Bligh’s old seat of South Brisbane. Bligh’s former election agent Jackie Trad
has narrowly won the South Brisbane by-election which also took place yesterday
though the LNP is not yet conceding just 800 votes behind with over half the
votes counted.
correction: Tennyson was won by an independent not by the LNP making the result LNP 18, Lab 7 Ind 1 - thanks to Bird of Paradox for the pick-up.
3 comments:
Small quibble: Tennyson was actually won by an independent, Nicole Johnston. She was elected for the LNP in 2008, but quit the party midway through her term and won by a fair bit over the new LNP candidate; Labor got reduced to about 10%.
Thanks for the pick-up BoP - I have added a correction to the post.
See Poll Bludger for up to date figures on the South Brisbanr result. Greens up to 20.3%.
Post a Comment