Thirty Years of Labor Hegemony

For three decades, Labor has dominated Queensland politics, with only a few short interruptions. In 2015, after a particularly savage single-term LNP government, QLD Labor miraculously regained power, bouncing back from a mere seven seats to forty-four, just shy of a majority. Their position has remained precarious since.

In the 2017 state election, although Labor’s vote went backward, the party managed to pick up a few seats thanks to a large transfer of votes from the LNP to One Nation. The 2020 state election seemingly offered Labor a lifeline, thanks to former premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s popular response to the pandemic. But that reprieve was always going to be temporary.

Within a few years of the COVID-19 bounce in support, QLD Labor was again trending down in the polls. The Palaszczuk government seemed asleep at the wheel, offering few new policies, despite a major cost-of-living and housing crisis. In the 2022 federal election, Labor’s vote went backward in Queensland, and the party lost its only inner-city seat of Griffith to the Greens as part of a “Greenslide” that saw the minor party win three lower house Brisbane seats and a second senator.

By late 2023, QLD Labor was at risk of losing Brisbane City to the Greens. At the same time, the LNP successfully weaponized the question of crime, and, despite Labor’s lurches to the right on that issue, was poised to take outer suburban and regional electorates. Faced with this prospect, less than a year out from the election, QLD Labor dumped Palaszczuk in favor of Deputy Premier Miles. Despite the change, six months out from the October 2024 election, the polls predicted a wipeout for Labor and a surging Greens vote.

In this context, the Queensland Greens decided on an aggressive strategy aimed at gaining the four Labor-held inner-city seats of Cooper, McConnel, Greenslopes, and Miller as well as retaining Maiwar and South Brisbane. But as the election drew closer, the political atmosphere shifted significantly, undermining the QLD Greens’ sizable and ambitious ground campaign.

Miles’s Strategy to Kill the Greens

Faced with the prospect of losing inner-city, suburban, and regional electorates, Labor premier Miles made an aggressive pivot, deciding to sacrifice the regions and outer suburbs in favor of crushing the long-term threat posed by the Greens. This hard-nosed anti-Greens strategy caused some friction in the party’s left faction. As Craig Crawford, MP for Barron River, stated publicly after losing his seat in the election, “Too much emphasis was put on saving Brisbane from the Greens and not enough emphasis on the regions in relation to the crime campaign.”

Miles sought to undermine the QLD Greens by adopting a large amount of their rhetoric and a number of their signature policies, reducing the perceived spaces between the two parties’ platforms. Central to this was Labor’s decision to introduce statewide fifty-cent public transport fares. The policy was perfectly suited to winning inner-city voters — who would be its major beneficiaries — while antagonizing regional and outer suburban voters who lack access to decent public transport. Initially, voters responded skeptically to what seemed like a vote-buying exercise. But when the reform commenced in August, the experience of cheap public transport soon changed their minds.

At the same time, the reform wrong-footed the Greens badly. Over the last eight years, the QLD Greens campaigned first for $1 fares and later, for free public transport. Now Labor had implemented a largely similar policy. It was the first time in decades that a government had implemented a bold, universal policy that genuinely improved people’s lives. It is hard to overemphasize its impact.

To this Miles added more cost-of-living relief in the form of $1,000 energy rebates, alongside a string of broadly social democratic policies that both aped and watered down the Greens’ 2020 platform. They included setting up a public energy retailer and a network of state-supported free general practitioner clinics as well as introducing free lunches for children at public schools.

Labor also leaned heavily into the Queensland Greens’ focus since 2017 of redistributing the wealth from mining corporations, claiming that they would pay for these reforms by “making mining corporations pay their fair share.” This was made possible by a progressive reform to coal royalties introduced in 2022, which also resembled a diluted version of the Greens’ 2020 energy policy. Despite taxing coal corporations very little during normal times, during the recent spike in coal prices, this raised the state a vast sum of money. Labor also claimed it was supporting “publicly owned renewables” and a rapid green energy transition.

This set of policy shifts formed the basis of a major PR campaign for Miles that saw QLD Labor substantially upgrade its TikTok game and rebrand Miles as a “daggy dad” in order to appeal to Greens voters, and young people in particular.

Australia’s Abortion Election

Then, in the final weeks of the campaign, Labor found the LNP’s weak spot: abortion. By bolstering fears that an LNP government would repeal laws decriminalizing abortion, Miles’s maneuver exploited a contradiction in the LNP between a publicly moderate leadership and its ultraconservative, Christian pro-life wing.

Up until this point, the LNP had presented a small target, successfully minimizing its differences with Labor, while matching many of Miles’s announcements, including fifty-cent public transport fares. By raising alarms about abortion, however, Labor successfully presented the LNP as untrustworthy. Even among voters for whom abortion wasn’t a major issue, the move sowed doubts about LNP leader David Crisafulli’s attempt to rebrand himself as a sensible economic manager.

The move rapidly polarized the election, particularly in left-leaning inner-city electorates. It presented the choice as between a progressive, reforming government and a disingenuous opposition with a hidden, socially conservative agenda.

Having found the right framing, Labor and the unions went all in, dumping massive sums on digital advertising, while bussing in staffers and volunteers from around QLD and other states to sandbag Brisbane seats like Cooper.

Throughout all this, the Queensland Greens continued to campaign for an augmented version of the policy platform that had been so successful since 2017. It proposed to set up a state-owned developer to build 100,000 universally available public homes, and to reestablish a publicly owned bank offering cheaper mortgages. The Greens also campaigned for caps on rent increases and essential grocery prices and a moratorium on new coal and gas mines. Substantially higher mining royalties, the Greens argued, would fund these commitments and a major expansion of essential services.

Greens volunteers knocked on doors and reported very supportive feedback from significant sections of the target electorates. Just a few months out from the election, polling indicated surging support for rent caps, grocery caps, a public bank, and for the Greens overall.

However, by the time voting opened, many people who had been considering voting for the Greens switched to Labor.

Low Expectations

The result poses significant long-term strategic questions for the Greens. The Greens’ platform undoubtedly offered voters more than Labor’s and would deliver more material improvement for voters, including in relatively affluent areas. Yet, a large layer of people in the Greens’ target areas voted for Labor. Not without reason, they asked: “Why hold out for a vision that can’t be delivered immediately, when a party of government is offering a few good things now?”

In part, the problem is one of low expectations. After decades of neoliberalism, reforms like fifty-cent fares feel significant. But expectations are also a class question. According to a recent poll, people with a university degree who live in the inner city and have a family income over $120,000 are, unsurprisingly, far less likely to say that Australia is on the wrong track. If you think things are basically on the right track, it seems more sensible to stake a safe bet on a few steps in the right direction than an unlikely one on deeper, more transformative reforms.

By a similar token, class is also a question of geography. As Brisbane gentrifies, poorer renters are being pushed to the outer suburbs, leaving inner-city electorates to the comfortable classes. And because the outer suburbs are larger and more numerous, this also means that the less comfortable classes are becoming more dispersed geographically. This phenomenon goes some way toward explaining how the QLD Greens’ overall vote increased slightly while their inner-city vote declined.

Volunteers’ experiences while door-knocking confirmed these trends. When speaking to people really in tough situations — a single mom struggling to keep a roof over her family’s head, for example — their disaffection and rage can be palpable. Fifty-cent fares and a handful of progressive policy announcements aren’t enough to win voters like that back to Labor. By contrast, a fairly comfortable dual-income household with a mortgage may also be feeling the cost-of-living crisis. And they may even agree with the Greens’ program — but likely with far less enthusiasm.

This analysis shouldn’t be taken as suggesting that middle-class voters won’t vote for a transformative, universalist vision. Rather, it points to the challenges that arise in building a cross-class voting base and in finding the right platform and pitch to bring together disparate social strata.

The Void Stares Back

The Queensland Greens also came under unprecedented attack on a variety of fronts. Ultraconservative campaign group ADVANCE, formerly Advance Australia, ran extensive ad campaigns attacking the Greens for “not being what they used to be,” while Zionist astroturf group Queensland Jewish Collective raised tens of thousands of dollars to fund a campaign painting the Greens as “pro-hate.” At the same time, the LNP and Labor respectively ran ad campaigns targeting the Greens for being soft on crime and for being obstructionist in the Senate.

It is debatable how impactful these campaigns were individually. However, the net effect may well have contributed to the way voters perceived the Greens in 2020 and 2022. Today the Greens in Queensland appear less as outsiders offering a new vision and more as tainted by the muck of politics, like the major parties.

At the core of all these challenges is the problem articulated by Peter Mair in his 2013 book, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy. As he explains, there has been a “hollowing out” of politics in the West that began in the mid-twentieth century and accelerated under neoliberalism. Once, large-scale civil society organizations connected people with mass-membership political parties. Now, those organizations and parties are shells and the people once connected to them are largely atomized individuals with no organic relationship to politics.

In short, a now void exists between representatives and those they purport to represent. This helps explain both collapsing loyalty to major parties and growing voting volatility. As Shahar Hameiri points out in his recent essay in Griffith Review, this was largely designed to insulate the state from growing democratic demands from the people.

The Queensland Greens have for a long time looked into this void with optimism. If loyalty to the major parties is collapsing, they speculated, then with a small amount of engagement, it might be possible to win people to an alternative party standing outside of the establishment. But as the recent election result indicates, it might not be so easy to fill this void with a transformative, universalist project.

For challenger parties, as theorist Anton Jäger notes, the void is both too empty and not empty enough. It’s empty in the sense that voter loyalty can’t be easily built behind new political projects since they also suffer from a lack of connecting social structures. And it’s not empty enough because establishment parties still have powerful mechanisms that can stabilize and preserve voting blocs.

The QLD Greens have identified this problem in the past. Their strategy aims to capture new electoral beachheads and to then backfill them with the deeper, organic community relationships that build and sustain a durable social base. This, in turn, helps build resistance against establishment maneuvers and attacks. The Queensland election result does not disprove that strategy — but at the very least, it does show it’s going to take more work to fill the void in politics than one may have hoped before.

Challenges and Openings

These challenges in no way invalidate the Queensland Greens’ long-term project. Despite its leftward shift, Labor continues to allow new coal and gas projects. They let massive corporations pay almost no tax and defend the excessive profits of property investors and banks. Meanwhile, the climate crisis accelerates while renters and regular mortgage holders slip backward, and teachers and nurses at public schools and hospitals are on the verge of burnout. An alternative electoral and social force is more necessary than ever.

It is clear, however, that as mainstream parties offer modest but real reforms, the Queensland Greens will have to learn how to raise expectations for deeper change. At the same time, they will have to grapple with the challenge of maintaining middle-class support for a platform of structural reforms, while building deeper roots in less well-off communities. Alongside immediate tactical questions, they will also need to construct more durable social bases.

The growth of political forces is not linear; electoral contexts aren’t always favorable. This makes setbacks inevitable. Ultimately, however, a deteriorating climate, significant geopolitical shifts, and damaging global economic headwinds will create openings over the coming decade and beyond. The challenge for the Queensland Greens is to maintain its organizational growth while positioning itself to offer solutions to these increasingly urgent crises.

At the same time, one election does not signal the end of long-term, structural trends that favor minor parties. In 1989, after decades of conservative rule, Queensland Labor finally removed Bjelke-Petersen. Then, the major parties’ combined vote share was 95.4 percent. In 2024, it was 74.2 percent. The trend is downward. Although the political class has some fight left in it, underneath the apparent stability of two-party rule, their hold is weakening.