Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Federal Labor will target 11 Liberal-National Party seats in Queensland at the 2016 election, just over half the 21 seats it needs to win back from the Coalition and reclaim government.
Since the switch from Tony Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull, the ALP has sharpened its focus on the Sunshine State and greater Sydney, in part to compensate for the Coalition's improved standing in South Australia and Victoria.
Labor believes Mr Turnbull has a "Queensland problem" and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten fired an early salvo last week with a promise of $100 million to help build a new Townsville stadium, in the seat of Herbert.
Immediately after making the pledge, Labor launched local radio ads, robocalls to local households to hammer the message about the stadium promise and put a Reachtel poll in the field to gauge reaction to the pledge.
And Herbert is just one of the 11 seats in Labor's sights, with lessons learnt from the state campaign victories in Queensland and Victoria and a strong focus on local issues to come in the next 12 months.
In all, six Brisbane seats (Longman, Forde, Brisbane, Bonner, Petrie and Dickson) and five seats (Leichhardt, Herbert, Dawson, Capricornia and Flynn) in the regional centres of Cairns, Townsville, Mackay and Rockhampton are in the frame as the ALP seeks to win 76 seats in the lower house.
The strategy, in part, relies on a belief that while the Prime Minister and his new team enjoy their political honeymoon the ALP can steal a march in Queensland now.
The January state election that saw Annastacia Palaszczuk secure a 14 per cent swing against incumbent Campbell Newman after just one term to sweep him from office served as a reminder of Queensland's volatility and propensity to swing big.
The 11 seats on Labor's target list range in margin from 0.5 per cent for the marginal Brisbane seat of Petrie to 7.6 per cent in regional Dawson.
Queensland state Labor secretary Evan Moorhead said the Liberal switch to Mr Turnbull meant the state was "more viable for us" and that while "Bill Shorten has actually visited nickel refineries and sugar mills, I doubt Malcolm Turnbull has".
" We hold most of the state seats in these places, the [federal] margins don't tell the full story. There are big opportunities for us in provincial cities and outer urban areas, too," he said.
"Abbott appealed to working class voters with a simple message, now we have a PM who waffles on and doesn't talk about people's issues."
Liberal National MP Ewen Jones, who holds Herbert, said the $100 million promise was "very strange at this point in the electoral cycle, two days after the PM said the election will likely be September or October next year".
" A lot of people have been saying Queensland will be the battle ground, whether that holds true post-Tony [Abbott] is up for grabs. I try to not get too far ahead of myself. I'm always ready for someone to come at me as I'm in a marginal seat," he said.
Mr Jones said " we [Queensland] do swing big, but I also think he [Mr Shorten] is barking up the wrong tree. People were angry at Newman, but people will get sick and tried of inaction from this new state government, too."
Election analyst Antony Green cautioned that Labor rarely did as well federally as it did at state elections, having won a majority of the vote only three times -1961, 1990 and 2007 - since the Second World War.
"To win all those seats, they would have to do extraordinarily well," he said.
" The two hopes for the Opposition are NSW and Queensland – consistently, since the mid-1990s, it's those two states which have determined elections."
