With Elizabeth Watson-Brown retaining her seat in Ryan (QLD), the Greens are down to a single rep in the lower house, losing three, including party leader Adam Bandt. Part Two of the election analysis by Stuart McCarthy.
In part one, we set the scene for the LNP’s unravelling as “the party that stands for nothing” in the eyes of conservative voters in south-east Queensland. As the tally drags into its second week to decide a handful of remaining seats, we now drill into some of the peculiarities in Ryan.
These include the mishandling of the “veterans’ vote” with vacuous flag-waving, and the return of the LNP’s prodigal son from three years in the wilderness with industry-funded astroturfing. Julian Simmonds, who in 2022 took Ryan from LNP “blue ribbon” seat to greenslide ground-zero in a single term, came back for a second crack at destroying his party’s prospects for re-election in 2025.
Having abandoned classical liberalism with its interventionist nuclear energy proposals on the national stage, in Ryan the LNP and their NewsCorp cronies chose to wage an ideological war for the hearts and minds of voters over The Greens’ support for Palestine, disrespect for the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and the national flag, in a cynical ploy to invoke the veterans’ vote.
After the AWM was vandalised by a pro-Palestine protester in June last year, the Greens opposed parliamentary motions to condemn the vandals. The controversy escalated when Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John described the vandalism as legitimate acts of free speech. The alleged vandal has since been arrested and charged with five counts of damaging property. Many veterans, this author included, wrote to Greens Senators or MPs to raise their concerns.
Veterans attack
In February, Courier-Mail columnist Des Houghton published a story about a letter sent to Watson-Brown by a group of veterans, including Victoria Cross recipient Dan Kieghran, and Watson-Brown’s unsatisfactory response. Houghton then appeared on Sky News with some “analysis”, taking issue with an “unrepentant” Watson-Brown’s “decision to besmirch the flag.” Another obviously self-generated NewsCorp stitch-up story, from a columnist clueless to the real stories affecting this constituency.
Houghton’s role in unhinging the LNP in Ryan, a seat he identified as a “must-win”, is a salient lesson on the risks of entrapment in the Sky News echo chamber. Had LNP candidate Maggie Forrest picked up the ball dropped by Labor in government after the Defence and Veteran Suicide Royal Commission, for example, she would likely have kicked some big goals in this electorate. But she dropped the ball and took Houghton’s ideological bait instead.
“Band-Aid Bill”: expert advice ignored in tepid response to Suicide Royal Commission
Ten days after Houghton’s story went to print, Forrest appeared on Sky After Dark with Paul Murray, claiming:
“Ryan is home to thousands of people who feel the same , it’s home to thousands of Defence families, with Enoggera Barracks at its heart, yet ee’ve got a Greens MP who refuses to fly the Australian flag. She hates the flag so much, she won’t fly it in her office. She disrespects all those people in Ryan who are proud of our country and our flag, and in particular our Defence service men and women.”
The Forrest factor
Forrest is a barrister who, amongst other things, worked for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
She has said nothing on Labor’s persecution of military whistleblower David McBride for attempting to expose senior defence force officers for scapegoating junior soldiers to avoid command responsibility for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, nor has she said a word on the referral of a former Labor Defence Minister to the International Criminal Court Prosecutor over the same matter.
Unlike her legal colleague and People First candidate Kathryn Chadwick, she has been silent on the “catastrophic failure of leadership at a government level and within the military” uncovered by the DVSRC that precipitated a suicide epidemic among some of her core constituents, and silent on the Turnbull Government pouring $1 billion down the drain on a window-dressing exercise aimed at forestalling that same Royal Commission.
Paid to Not Reform: Veterans’ Affairs chucks $73m at PwC to dodge Royal Commission
She stood on the sidelines earlier this year as Labor rushed band-aid measures through parliament, likely to perpetuate those catastrophic failures for another generation of her constituents, legislation which her LNP parliamentary colleagues waved through in unanimity.
On these burning issues affecting the lives and well-being of Ryan’s defence and veteran families, Forrest proved as lazy and ill-informed as Shadow Defence Personnel and Veterans’ Affairs Minister Barnaby Joyce. Joyce has been so invisible in his portfolio for the past three years, few voters even know he has held that portfolio.
Pork-barelling
Silent on the core issues and bereft of relevant policies from her party’s national leadership, Forrest’s local campaign announcements in Ryan instead bore all the hallmarks of a ‘Sports Rorts II’ pork-barelling scheme, right down to a cameo appearance by the architect of Sports Rorts I, Bridget McKenzie.
The verdict on all this was once again made clear on polling day. The defence and veteran voters who held themselves back in reserve from round 1 of the LNP’s 2022 belting in Ryan took out their baseball bats for round 2. The polling booths around Enoggera Barracks saw swings against Forrest ranging from 4.7% to 9.3%, another repudiation of the LNP’s distasteful recipe of flag-waving and hollow national security posturing.
Part of the #Ausvotes2025 bloodbath for the LNP in south-east Queensland last Saturday: results for LNP candidate Maggie Forrest at the booths around Enoggera Barracks, one of the largest defence force bases in Australiahttps://t.co/qbwu3EMJMB pic.twitter.com/cCKTzSEF9F
— Stuart McCarthy (@StuartMcCarthy_) May 7, 2025
Among these informed voters, the LNP’s national security credentials are as thin as the sailcloth of the flag they pulled out for their desperate crusade against the wrong election target.
But to understand the full extent of the LNP’s incompetence, we need to go back a few years to examine the toxic influence of Julian Simmonds, the Scott Morrison acolyte who lost Ryan to Watson-Brown in 2022 in a spectacular 8.7% two-party-preferred swing from his party.
The Simmonds factor
Julian Simmonds was an accident waiting to happen for the LNP, a party with a poor reputation over its treatment of women.
In 2018, he ousted Jane Prentice in a pre-selection battle for the seat amid allegations of branch stacking. The well-regarded Prentice was Assistant Minister for Disability Services in the Turnbull government. LNP colleagues, including Michelle Landry, threatened to quit the party in protest. Courier-Mail columnist Margaret Wenham later wrote of Simmonds:
“If ever there was an elephant in the room amid the Liberal Party’s struggles with female MPs and candidates, it’s this candidate for a federal seat in Brisbane. But unless voters express their displeasure, nothing will change.”
Several months after Prentice’s ousting, senior party officials also told the Courier-Mail they feared “a state-wide stack of Christian soldiers sparked by long-held grievances over the axing of Tony Abbott and last month’s abortion bill.” The events coincided with the federal Coalition leadership spill that saw Scott Morrison replace Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister.
Simmonds’ single term as Member for Ryan under Morrison coincided with the ignominious end to the war in Afghanistan, a conflict in which literally thousands of troops from Enoggera participated on a continual basis for two decades, many remaining in the electorate as civilians after their military service concluded.
These men and women looked on in dismay at the Morrison government’s incompetent abandonment of locally employed Afghans unfolding on their TV screens less than a year before the 2022 election. They read NewsCorp attack pieces clearly orchestrated by senior LNP politicians defaming well-known veteran advocates as Taliban sympathisers or medal cheats.
Then, in the 2022 election, they read Simmonds’ campaign advertising repeatedly misrepresenting personal correspondence from vulnerable veterans and other constituents as political endorsements for his re-election.
Simmonds might have flown under the radar in 2019, but voters took to him with the proverbial baseball bat at the polling booth in 2022. Local women and veterans helped deliver a 10.1% primary vote swing against the LNP that saw Simmonds resoundingly booted out of Ryan as a one-term wonder.
Not content with prematurely ending the career of the popular female minister who preceded him and throwing away the seat for the first time in history through a lack of personal integrity, this year he set about further poisoning the LNP’s moribund brand by rolling out similarly deceitful methods but on a grander scale.
Australians for Prosperity
Simmonds is, or was, the chief executive of the astroturfed third-party Australians for Prosperity (A4P). With $725,000 in donations from the coal industry, earlier this year, the group posted advertisements critical of Greens, Labor, and Teal independents’ policies on Instagram and Facebook. Most of them included vox-pop-style interviews with locals from key seats held by MPs from those parties.
Several A4P’s vox-pop interviewees told the ABC last month that although they consented to having the videos posted on social media, they weren’t told they would feature in political advertisements for A4P. A number of the videos were pulled when the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) approached the group over unauthorised content, involving potential breaches of electoral laws.
Not only did voters respond to the advertising blitz by A4P and other right-wing astroturf groups with indifference or disdain, there was a backlash, particularly among female voters fed up with political deceit and negativity. Greens and Labor campaign officials told MWM anecdotes of otherwise moderate constituents who responded to the advertisements by offering to support either party by donating or volunteering.
Needing a primary vote in the 40s, Forrest bowed out on Wednesday last week on 36%. Around the same time of her concession to “whoever wins” reduced the field to the Greens and Labor candidates, Labor’s Rebecca Hack told MWM:
This result is a message that Australia is a country that believes in kindness; in lifting up, not tearing down; in building, not blocking.
LNP soul-searching
As the Coalition’s recriminations over these disastrous results began last Monday, the LNP’s recently elected Queensland Premier David Crisafulli offered a little more self-reflection, saying his party has “some soul searching to do.”
That soul-searching process must surely examine Simmonds’ role in the bloodbath.
Crisafulli might also want to have a chat with his Treasurer Jarrod Bleiji, who appointed Simmonds to acting chief executive of Economic Development Queensland (EDQ) just before the Easter long weekend, without advertising the position.
EDQ is directly involved in delivering infrastructure for the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games, including the $3.5 billion athletes village. The international media pack already sniffing for the next big Olympic Games infrastructure corruption scandal might give Crisafulli some food for thought here. Citius, Altius, Fortius.
Greenslide to fratricide: how the LNP shot themselves in the foot in Queensland
Stuart McCarthy is a medically retired Australian Army officer whose 28-year military career included deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Stuart is an advocate for veterans with brain injury, disabilities, drug trial subjects and abuse survivors. Twitter: @StuartMcCarthy_