If the national result for the Coalition was a bloodbath, the electorate of Ryan was the crime scene. Stuart McCarthy on the veterans vote and how the Liberals imploded in the Federal Election. Part 1.
The numbers, as they say, never lie. Last Saturday’s numbers were swift, and they were brutal. Just over two hours after the east coast polling booths closed, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government became the first federal government in history to be returned with an increased majority after its first term in office.
Within three hours, the numbers showed an equally historical bloodbath for the Opposition, the worst federal election result in the Coalition’s history.
Among the big casualties was Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in the south-east Queensland seat of Dickson. With a handful of seats still undecided, Labor has at least 91 seats in the lower house, while the Coalition has hung onto as few as 40. Greens leader Adam Bandt was one of his party’s three casualties in the lower house.
Only one Greens MP – Elizabeth Watson-Brown – might return to Canberra, after an agonising preference count set to continue well into next week.
The results for the independents and other minor parties in the lower house were mixed, just as they were in the Senate.
Independent ‘Teals’ MP Zoe Daniel conceded the Victorian seat of Goldstein back to Liberal’s Tim Wilson, while former Nationals MP Andrew Gee, now an independent, brought the regional NSW seat of Calare into the cross bench. The number of independent lower house seats now stands at ten, with independents narrowly ahead in the tally for two of the nine remaining undecided seats.
The Senate will likely see a Labor majority of two seats over the Coalition, with 11 seats in the hands of the Greens. Six independent and other minor party Senators look set to round out the cross bench.
In the LNP stronghold of Queensland, the party lost five seats to Labor, with Labor also winning at least two of the three south-east Queensland seats won by The Greens in the 2022 ‘greenslide’. The past two elections have seen a three-way in south-east Queensland’s south-east corner between Labor, the LNP and The Greens, but Labor now seems to have the upper hand.
Ryan a knife-edge seat
Watson-Brown, hanging on as the sole survivor of the 2022 greenslide, is the Member for Ryan in Brisbane’s western suburbs. For a forensic look at the LNP’s woeful performance in its final years in office under Scott Morrison, then in the Dutton Opposition in the lead up to last weekend’s election, this knife-edge seat along the northern banks of the Brisbane River is a good place to start.
If the national result for the Coalition was a bloodbath, this electorate was the crime scene. The punchline – without giving too much away on this story yet – is that the prime suspect just landed a Queensland taxpayer-funded gig with his hands now on the checkbook for much of the key infrastructure soon to be built for the 2032 Olympic Games.
Ryan stretches from Brisbane’s inner western suburbs around the University of Queensland, through the ‘aspirational’ mortgage belt, to an affluent semi-rural area on the city’s outer western fringe. Of relevance to the fortunes of a party that postures on its “national security” credentials, the seat also encompasses Gallipoli Barracks – one of the largest defence force bases in the country – in the inner-northern suburb of Enoggera.
Data from the most recent census and the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) suggests current and former defence force members, their families, defence civilians and others with a direct interest in relevant policies comprise as many as one fifth of Ryan’s voters.
The veterans’ vote
The “veterans’ vote” is diffuse across most of Australia, hence is poorly understood by mainstream political commentators, but Ryan and the neighbouring seat of Blair are two electorates where uniformed personnel and veterans vote in big numbers.
Prior to the 2022 election, Ryan was a “blue ribbon” LNP seat, taken only briefly by Labor after a 2001 by-election on the retirement of Howard-era cabinet minister John Moore, who held the seat for 25 years. Courier-Mail columnist Des Houghton wrote in the lead up to this year’s election that Ryan was a must-win seat if the LNP was to have any chance of returning to government.
The challenge here was substantial. The LNP didn’t respond to our repeated requests for comment this week, but a Queensland Labor campaign official told MWM that prior to the election, he assessed Ryan would need to see a primary LNP vote “in the 40s” for the party to have any chance of success across south-east Queensland.
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The tally in Ryan this week has boiled down to a three-way contest between Watson-Brown, LNP candidate Maggie Forrest and Labor’s Rebecca Hack, and the result remains in doubt. With 85.8% of the votes counted by Friday afternoon, Forrest has conceded defeat with 36.2% of the primary vote in a -3.3% swing adding to her party’s -10.1% walloping in 2022.
This year’s winner will be decided on preferences, in a close contest between Watson-Brown and Labor’s Rebecca Hack for second place in the primary count. As postal votes trickle in and a gap of around 500 votes slowly narrowing in Hack’s favour, party officials say the final result may not be known until late next week. Hack told MWM on Wednesday:
“Our grassroots campaign was up against millions of dollars pouring into Ryan from the LNP and Greens. The count is very close, and it may take some time to know the final outcome, but voters in Ryan have shown that they vote with their values.”
The values question
The “values” question was a key one in this electorate. Hack, Watson-Brown and Forrest are all high-quality candidates. Educated, family-oriented career-women, all three have credentials and backgrounds with solid appeal to voters from their respective parties’ core constituencies. What this election revealed in stark numbers was just how well – or poorly – each party performed on substance during the last parliamentary term and during the election campaign.
A perceived broadening of The Greens’ policy platform from an environmental conservation party historically appealing to older voters, to a left-wing party appealing to younger voters on social justice issues is certainly a factor in this election.
The perception arose in part from the involvement of Greens’ MP Max Chandler-Mather – who represents the Griffith electorate across the river – in a controversial trade union rally last year.
Watson-Brown has been described elsewhere as a “Green Teal,” comparing her to independents in the southern capitals who won office in 2022 on a platform of climate change mitigation and improved government transparency, coupled with classical liberal rather than left wing economic policies.
Queensland Greens officials who spoke to MWM dispute that characterisation, pointing to Watson-Brown’s involvement in social justice causes such as opposing privatisation of public infrastructure decades before she entered politics, and her recent parliamentary speeches on corporate tax snd related social justice issues.
Liberal Party identity crisis
Much ink has been spilled this week on the LNP’s identity crisis as a centre-right or hard-right party, but their posturing as the party of responsible economic management and national security has always been core to that identity. In what was billed as the “cost of living” election however, the LNP offered little of practical importance to swing the votes of ordinary people, against a Labor government standing on its record and offering modest income tax breaks against the backdrop of a deteriorating global economy.
The LNP’s tax-breaks-for-business-lunches blunder, announced in Ryan, highlights an absence of clear strategic thought in the party’s leadership. On Defence, Labor and the LNP are in lockstep on the big-ticket items including AUKUS.
The LNP’s effort to distinguish itself from Labor during the election amounted to a promise to outspend them on capability platforms to “keep Australians safe,” without identifying what those platforms might be. Not a word was uttered on how the LNP planned to fix the ongoing crisis in recruiting and retaining the defence force personnel needed to operate those hypothetical capability platforms.
What transpired instead from the LNP was another misdirected ideological crusade. Assisted by Houghton and his NewsCorp colleagues’ obsession with The Greens, in Ryan and elsewhere it’s clear the LNP has taken its core constituency for granted, alienating conservative voters to such an extent many now regard the LNP as “the party that stands for nothing.”
Nicole De Lapp – the Ryan candidate for Gerrard Rennick’s recently formed People First party – is another Greens critic who spoke to MWM this week about the election results.
She says her main motivation for entering politics was a desire to encourage free speech, in an environment where she the dominance of left-wing ideology for a reluctance by classical liberals to speak freely on important public policy issues. De Lapp, who told MWM Defence recruiting delays are a serious problem affecting Ryan’s constituents, says of the two major parties and their performance in the election:
“LNP conservatism needs to be re-branded, to move more in line with classical liberalism. Labor stayed true to their brand.”
Having joined People First as a first-time candidate as late as January, De Lapp achieved a credible fourth place in the Ryan results with 2.3% of the primary vote. Her People First colleague Kathryn Chadwick, who also lives in Ryan but was born and raised in the neighbouring seat of Blair, told MWM “I gave up on the LNP ages ago.”
Chadwick is a former registered nurse who served briefly in the defence force before studying to become a lawyer. During the recent Defence and Veteran Suicide Royal Commission (DVSRC), she supported hundreds of veterans and family members who provided crucial testimony to the inquiry, through her work with the Defence and Veterans’ Legal Service (DVLS).
In a long interview for a forthcoming MWM piece, Chadwick showed a better grasp of substantial policy issues affecting this constituency than any other south-east Queensland federal MP or candidate this author has ever interviewed.
She picked up 3.8% of the primary vote against longstanding Labor MP and former shadow Veterans’ Affairs Minister Shayne Neumann, in an electorate that includes Amberley air force base and an even higher proportion of ex-military constituents than Ryan.
Youtube, story of John Armfield’s RC testimony (client of Kathryn Chadwick)
But it would be a mistake to think – as many conservative commentators still do – that the sole cause of the LNP’s demise is the conservative vote bleeding to right-wing minor parties, as credible as People First’s efforts may have been in this election.
The numbers demonstrate otherwise. Labor achieved a +5.9% swing in the primary vote, while The Greens saw a swing of only -1.5%. Although preference flows are difficult to ascertain, what’s clear is that much of the primary LNP vote in fact swung to Labor.
In the minds of many local conservative voters disillusioned with the LNP, their disillusionment has at least as much to do with the party’s incompetence as it has to do with a shift to the left.
This swing to Labor, the LNP’s obsessive ideological attacks on The Greens, and a policy platform devoid of substance, show the LNP’s real blunder in this campaign was to fixate on the wrong target and obliterate the electoral prospects of their dream candidate, in an inevitable backlash against US-style ‘astroturfed’ third-party political attack ads funded by industry.
In Part 2, we will turn to the “veterans vote” and the backstory of previous LNP Member for Ryan Julian SimJulis, plus his toxic influence on the poor results for the LNP atvthe polls last weekend.
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_