Queensland’s only “voices of” candidate has leapfrogged One Nation and Labor to poll second in the seat of Groom after preferences – despite winning just 8.26% of the primary vote – in a result election analyst Antony Green describes as “startling”.
On the primary vote, independent Suzie Holt finished fourth in the Liberal National party-held seat. But Holt has surged into second spot with 42.89% of the two-candidate preferred vote due to preference flows.
“It’s pretty remarkable,” Green said. “Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a case where someone’s come from fourth to finish in the final two.”
While she won’t win the seat in 2022, Holt said the “overwhelming” result, amounting to a 13.3% swing, has given her a “beautiful platform” to work with “moving forward”.
“Our volunteers have expanded already,” Holt said.
“We were facing one of the hardest battles in the nation … and this positive response has shown that people want us to keep going.”
Groom (and its predecessor, Darling Downs), which is centred on Toowoomba, has been held safely by conservative parties since federation in 1901.
In 2019, John McVeigh won 70.48% of the vote after preferences to Labor’s 29.52% – placing it among the safest seats in the country.
But when the moderate McVeigh stood down, the preselection of mining engineer Garth Hamilton – on the right of the LNP – and concerns about the influence of pentecostalism on the party encouraged a number of challengers to run.
Holt, along with another independent, nurse and small businesswoman Kirstie Smolenski, and Labor’s Gen Allpass, each ran lengthy campaigns with the conviction they could pull off an unlikely triumph in this heartland of Christian conservatism.
There were also three other candidates vying for votes on the right, including former police officer, Grant Abraham, who stood down from the service over Covid vaccine mandates and ran for One Nation.
Abraham finished third on first preferences with 9.56%; Allpass won 18.74%, placing Labor second; while 43.71% of the electorate put Hamilton first.
Smolenski won a handy 7.14% and both the Greens and United Australia party gathered more than 5%.
What all these figures and the subsequent preference flow to Holt amount to, Green said, was that there were a lot of voters in Groom who went to some effort “to make sure they voted for somebody else before LNP”.
“The issue here is entirely the negative sentiment towards the LNP,” Green said.
“This tells you that the LNP was well on the nose in this electorate.”
Green said Holt’s remarkable surge after preferences were distributed was only made possible by the decline in the major party vote – but it would still take “a big effort” to knock off the LNP in Groom.
“In the end, [Holt] only got about 8% of the vote,” he said.
Holt said the campaign had given Groom voters a taste for a “shift away from being represented by [a] major party” and that she planned to continue, either at a local, state or federal level.
“The campaign will keep going, one way or another,” she says. “People are genuinely excited about the possibility for the future.”
Allpass won’t yet say if she will run for Groom again. She says her community deserves “someone constant” but she wonders whether 2025 will offer another chance to shake the electorate.
“This was very, very different period,” she says.
“You had the first push of the teals, the indies and the ‘voices of’ groups and also a sitting member who was unknown, who got there in [a] preselection process that was on the nose,” she says.
“This election was the window for anyone other than the LNP locally.”
