Updated ,first published
Queensland’s Labor opposition has suffered a significant swing against it in the party’s northern Brisbane heartland, delivering a knife-edge result in the Stafford byelection.
In a seat Labor has only lost once since 2001, the party was facing a 4 per cent swing to the LNP after preferences – 19 months after a bruising state election.
By 11pm on Saturday, with about three-quarters of the vote counted, the early two-party electoral commission tally had Labor’s first-time candidate, Luke Richmond, ahead by a margin of fewer than 800 votes.
Opposition Leader Steven Miles, speaking to a room of hundreds of red-clad supporters at Kedron’s Edinburgh Castle Hotel, claimed victory for Richmond amid what he described as a “modest primary vote swing towards the LNP”.
“It was an incredibly short campaign, and it was called in difficult circumstances,” Miles earlier told the crowd. The ABC said Labor would likely retain the seat, despite the 4 per cent swing to the LNP.
Premier David Crisafulli, addressing LNP faithful at the Valleys Diehards leagues club in Grange, spruiked the swing as “one of the biggest ever towards the government”. However, he said he thought his party would “fall agonisingly short”.
The swing towards the LNP will further buoy the Crisafulli government after its byelection win in Hinchinbrook last year.
The conservative party will also use the result to heap pressure on Miles, who has been staring down an informal internal deadline set for later this year to boost Labor support.
Asked by reporters if he believed Labor would have done better with someone else as leader, Miles said that would be a decision for the caucus.
“But I have the support of the caucus right now to be leader, and I’m very proud to be our party’s leader,” Miles said after addressing the Labor event.
The byelection was triggered by the death of former MP Jimmy Sullivan in early April.
Sullivan had been sitting as an independent since his expulsion from Labor last year amid highly publicised personal struggles.
Addressing the crowd in Kedron, Richmond said: “We threw everything we had at this campaign. We doorknocked the entire electorate twice.
He said any emotions felt by those in the room about the result would pale in comparison to “our friend Jimmy’s” family, some of whom were in attendance.
The LNP’s candidate, Fiona Hammond, a former local Brisbane councillor, lost to Sullivan in Stafford by a two-party margin of 5.3 per cent in 2024.
This time, she faced Richmond – a lawyer with a health-policy background who was most recently Labor’s assistant state secretary.
Also filling out the Labor venue – with a standup comedy night taking place in the nearby bistro – were cabinet ministers including deputy leader Cameron Dick and shadow treasurer Shannon Fentiman. Both are considered alternative party leaders.
Labor’s former MP for the seat, Dr Anthony Lynham, was also in attendance, as were party officials and union leaders, federal senators Murray Watt and Anthony Chisholm, and former federal treasurer and national Labor president Wayne Swan.
In a short and largely small-target campaign in which the government touted its fledgling fuel security plans while Labor attacked the LNP over hospital beds, much of the focus had been on sending either the government or opposition a message.
Stretching from Newmarket to Chermside on Brisbane’s north, the seat of Stafford comprises mainly younger, more educated voters, who tend to be renters.
Labor has held the seat at every poll since the electorate was re-established in 2001, except the 2012 Newman landslide.
The LNP then lost the seat two years later in one of the state’s biggest anti-government byelection swings.
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Matt Dennien is a reporter at Brisbane Times covering state politics, parliament and the public sector. He has previously worked for newspapers in Tasmania and Brisbane community radio station 4ZZZ. Contact him securely on Signal @mattdennien.15Connect via email.
