Campbell Newman’s face is hard to miss. The most conspicuous figure in Queensland politics in a generation – the Liberal National party’s only state premier in more than 25 years – is, as the billboards say, back.
The message to commuters who recognise his mug is simple: “New party, same man.”
I genuinely don’t know if this is a positive or negative billboard. pic.twitter.com/fKvjPRxib6
— Dee Madigan (@deemadigan) March 23, 2022
The problem for Newman, who is running for the Senate for the Liberal Democrats, is the crowded field of fellow Liberal National party defectors and their various minor parties, mostly vying for the same block of disaffected rightwing voters.
“It’s fascinating, this fragmentation or splintering of the LNP,” says Anne Tiernan, a professor of public policy at Griffith University.
“It introduces a dynamic we haven’t really considered before, and a range of complexities and unknowns to the [Queensland Senate] election.”
The newest entrant to the increasingly crowded field of restless former Liberal Nationals to the Senate race is George Christensen, the darling of the conspiratorial fringe. Christensen will take an unwinnable, but still influential, place on the One Nation ticket behind the party’s founder, Pauline Hanson. Hanson herself shot to prominence after being disendorsed by the Liberals in 1996.
Then there’s mining billionaire Clive Palmer, an LNP life member, whose falling out with Newman in 2012 prompted the formation of his big-spending United Australia party.
And up north, there’s Katter’s Australia party, yet to announce a Senate candidate, but still very much centred on the personality of Kennedy MP Bob Katter, a former National party state minister turned minor party leader.
The contest is further complicated by the structure of the LNP’s ticket and the ever-slimming re-election chances of Amanda Stoker, the assistant minister for women, and a figurehead of the Christian right in Queensland.
At best, Stoker is competing with these defectors for two Senate seats.
But more realistically, as these parties chase the support of rightwing voters and those still seething about past Covid restrictions, there will likely only be room for one of them in the 47th parliament.
Crowded contest and strategic voting could help the Greens
The common wisdom is that the Liberal National party and Labor will each win two of six seats at the half-Senate election. That means the likely return of senators James McGrath, Matt Canavan, Murray Watt and Anthony Chisholm.
At the 2019 election, Labor’s primary vote in Queensland dropped to 22.5% for the upper house – meaning the party only won a single seat, while gifting the LNP a third seat.
Opinion polling suggests that scenario is unlikely to be repeated this time around.
The Greens are running Penny Allman-Payne, a teacher from Gladstone. Tiernan says the crowded contest on the right could play into the hands of the Greens, whose support in Queensland has increased steadily in recent years.
“The unintended consequence of [the crowd of rightwing candidates] running could be to seriously galvanise and mobilise the more progressive vote, including strategic voting in the Senate.
“It wouldn’t take the Greens much to whip up some of that sentiment. People may be prepared to park their vote with the Greens to stop one of those last places inadvertently going to someone on that extreme end.”
Pantomime villains
One of the more interesting elements of this race is how broadly unpopular some of the most competitive candidates are.
Labor strategists say Hanson’s “unfavourables” – the number of people who disapprove of her and her policies – are extremely high. Her political longevity has been built by cultivating enough vehement support across Queensland to put her in the Senate mix.
The same can be said about Palmer – whose $60m advertising spend at the last federal election garnered zero seats and 3.43% of the national vote – and Newman, the Icarus premier who won Australia’s largest-ever majority in 2012 and lost office three years later.
Another eight years on, Newman is still a constant of Labor’s state campaigning. Successive LNP opposition leaders have found themselves tarred by association, then forced to distance themselves, turning Newman into a pantomime villain.
“But being a pantomime villain hasn’t harmed Hanson’s political career,” pollster Graham Young, from the libertarian thinktank the Australian Institute of Progress, told the Guardian last year.
“When you’re running for premier, you’re running for 50% plus one; when you’re running for the Senate, you’re running for a quota. I know people who are going to vote for [Newman] who would be stalwarts of the Liberal party.”
Christensen changes the race
The fragmentation of the LNP on its fringes was put into fresh focus this week by the defection of Christensen, who had increasingly embraced anti-vaccine and anti-government conspiracy theories while he remained a member of the government.
At a conservative lobby group’s Christmas party last year, Christensen said he believed the LNP grassroots had become disconnected from elected representatives, adding: “I don’t know exactly how to fix that problem, but I know the only way that it can be fixed is to stay involved.”
The subtext was that, for those who wanted the LNP to move further right, it needed warriors for the cause to fight internal battles. One of the great ironies of his move to One Nation is that it poses the greatest risk to Stoker, who herself has shared ultraconservative Christian views.
One of Stoker’s supporters said he thought Christensen’s defection “doesn’t change anything other than his bank account or our national debt”. Other party figures are more cautious about the potential impact the defection might have – and whether it could act as a signal to wavering voters on the right fringe.
“What’s clear is there’s a lot of pressure on conservative voters to support minor parties,” said one LNP figure. “We don’t really know what impact that will have, but in that environment Stoker’s chances are fading by the day.”
Hanson had been considered vulnerable in 2022; the increased competition comes piled on top of a poor Queensland election result in 2020 and suggestions her party may not have the campaigning budget to match Newman’s fundraising network or Palmer’s personal bank account.
In that environment, the final Senate seat – and the extent to which minor party candidates would bastardise the voting power of the far right – had been anyone’s guess.
“Bolstering Hanson’s prospects in that tight race could be quite an important motivation [for the recruitment of Christensen],” Tiernan says.
Tiernan says it will be interesting to see how the situation shapes the LNP campaign in Queensland and how it manoeuvres to keep voters, who might be inclined to support one of these minor parties, inside the tent.
She says criticisms of Christensen as a traitor and an opportunist – including by Canavan and another former Nationals colleague, David Littleproud – show the extent to which they feel his defection is a threat to a state party undergoing an identity crisis since the merger of the Liberals and Nationals in 2008.
Christensen himself said this week that he had once believed he should fight for conservative values from the inside.
“I have been a believer of that line for a long, long while.
“But a lot has changed over the last few years. I must say that I think now it’s beyond repair.”
