My home state has long seemed an unpredictable force in federal politics, at least to the outside observer. Its voting patterns are discussed with mysticism uncharacteristic of otherwise precise electoral analysis. Coupled with a reputation for producing independents equal parts wacky and racist — Pauline Hanson, Bob Katter, Clive Palmer — Queenslanders are often dismissed as backwards rednecks who vote barefoot and without reason.
It’s undeniable that Queensland is socially conservative, with a majority of its voters frequently persuaded by racist policies like removing youth likely to commit crimes from their families, or scrapping the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry that would have led to a treaty with First Nations people.
However, some electorates are represented by comparatively left-wing MPs. Brisbane electorates were pivotal in the ‘greenslide’ of the 2022 federal election, and Queensland remains the only state to have ever elected a member of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) to any parliament. The cane fields north of Townsville were once a hotbed for union activism, Australia’s very own ‘Red North’.
This radical history feels at tension with the conservatism that permeates the state’s political identity. But, if you consider the 20-year authoritarian premiership of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, with a prolonged state of emergency, rampant police corruption, gerrymandering and violent crackdowns on protest, things begin to make sense.
Regional Queensland, former CPA heartland, loved comrade Joh. He led Australia’s only ever police state and was unabashedly bigoted. As Premier, Bjelke-Petersen directed his ministers to leave infectious diseases like HIV intentionally untreated in remote Indigenous communities, refused to partake in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody and spent over $400,000 on legal fees trying to defeat Eddie Mabo’s claim of native title over the island of Mer in the Torres Strait.
This history reveals a predisposition for the extremes, largely untethered to ideology beyond what best serves the ‘battler’ that anchors the collective consciousness of the state.
No figure represents this better than Bob Katter, whose social conservatism, agrarian socialist economics, and outback insanity make him a remarkable aggregation of otherwise totally incomprehensible political preferences. Let a thousand blossoms bloom, nationalise the grid, give farmers back their guns, and for the love of God, give that woke nonsense a rest and help us work out what to do with these bloody crocodiles.
This brings me to the leader of the Opposition, our native son, Peter Dutton. A Queensland cop who worked alongside the Pinkeba Six, who kidnapped Indigenous children in Fortitude Valley in 1994, in a period of significant, widespread police corruption, turned property magnate and childcare centre millionaire. He was once thought to be wholly unelectable for his sociopathic disdain for the poor and deeply off-putting public persona. While some Queensland electors might tolerate corrupt cops, there seems to be less sympathy for corporate sellouts whose success goes beyond that expected of the mythologised battler.
I’m unsure how much of an impact his home state will have on tipping the election in his favour. Only one of the key marginal seats being targeted by the coalition is in Queensland: the electorate of Blair, centred on the regional centre of Ipswich and stretching from Brisbane’s exurban west out to the Lockyer Valley in the state’s south east. Dutton is also vulnerable in his own seat of Dickson, the most marginal seat in Queensland.
And despite electing David Crisafulli’s Liberal National Party to government in October 2024, it’s unclear whether this success will translate to gains in Queensland on the national stage. This is the same state that returned a Palaszczuk Labor government to state office in 2020 with a record majority a short 17 months after flipping blue to keep Bill Shorten out of Kirribilli house.
It feels like a poor strategy, then, for the Coalition to design their election campaign around policies and rhetoric that in years prior would have only played well in the Queensland’s backwaters, still sour about the findings handed down in the Fitzgerald Inquiry. To win the 19 additional seats required to form government, and to retain the marginal ones they already hold, surely the Coalition needs to moderate to appeal to the metropolitan electorates they ceded to the Teals in 2022?
In the context of a global backslide into right-wing authoritarianism, the state so frequently laughed at as a cultural backwater run by corrupt, Southern-Cross-tramp-stamped bogans was ahead of the curve. The national electorate has been dishearteningly tolerant of Dutton’s Trumpian politics, evidenced by his acceptance into the political mainstream. It’s truly bizarre that Dutton has been able to position himself as a serious candidate for Prime Minister instead of the quack from Brisbane’s head office no one wanted near a microphone only a few short years ago. There might be a little more Queensland in all of us than we’re ready to admit.
Maybe it’s time to look north not just for problems, but also solutions. If we’re voting like Queenslanders in the 2025 federal election, hopefully we can buck the global trend of right-populist dominance and veer left, despite what polling numbers and conventional wisdom might say.
