Anna Bligh will today lead Labor to a crushing defeat at the
Queensland election, reducing it to a rump of barely 20 seats and
handing Campbell Newman a massive parliamentary majority to launch his
premiership.
An exclusive Newspoll for
The Weekend Australian shows
that the ALP's base vote has slumped to 28 per cent and that the Liberal
National Party under Mr Newman will win at least 55 of the 89 state
seats up for grabs.
The LNP is set to ride a swing of 11.7 per
cent into government, according to Newspoll, and Labor's woes will be
compounded by the likelihood it will lose its leadership alternatives to
Ms Bligh in an electoral bloodbath that rivals the disastrous 1974
state result when it was reduced to a "cricket team" of just 11 MPs and
condemned to a further 15 years in opposition.
When preferences are factored in, the LNP has 60.8 per cent of the vote, more than 20 points clear of Labor on 39.2 per cent.
Using last year's state election rout of Labor in NSW as a guide,
Newspoll estimates that the Bligh government will lose up to 28 of its
existing 51 seats, twice the number the LNP needs to win.
However,
former Labor premier Peter Beattie said the ALP could end up with as
few as 12 state seats and be deprived of its "best and brightest"
including Ms Bligh's heir apparent, Deputy Premier and Treasurer Andrew
Fraser, and Education Minister Cameron Dick.
Labor's attacks on
Mr Newman over his family business interests and donations from
developers to his former mayoral election fund in Brisbane - in what he
described as a smear campaign - appear to have backfired
comprehensively.
The Newspoll of 1538 voters, conducted from
Tuesday to Thursday, found that the LNP leader's popularity increased
decisively over the five-week election campaign.
Mr Newman's
standing as preferred premier lifted from 44 per cent to 51 per cent,
while Ms Bligh's rating fell from 40 per cent to 36 per cent.
Dissatisfaction with Ms Bligh jumped from 50 per cent in early February
to 58 per cent.
Katter's Australian Party, making its debut
today, attracted a late surge in support to boost its vote from 5 per
cent to 9 per cent over the course of the campaign. Crucially, Newspoll
found support for the KAP spiked to 12 per cent outside Brisbane,
putting it in a position to win between two and five seats in the
regions.
The Greens' vote slumped to 6 per cent, one of its
poorest results on record, as its support leached to the Labor Party due
to the polarising impact of Mr Newman's success.
His audacious
bid to make history by becoming the first person to jump straight into
the premiership from outside parliament has paid off richly for the LNP,
which has shredded Labor's support base in Brisbane, where it holds 34
of the 40 metropolitan seats.
Newspoll shows that under Mr Newman
the LNP now has 50 per cent of the vote in Brisbane, up from the 37.4
per cent it got at the 2009 state election.
Labor's vote in the capital has slumped from 48 per cent to a lowly 31 per cent.
Other
opinion polls this week showed Mr Newman would comfortably win his
individual battle for the state seat of Ashgrove at the expense of Labor
incumbent Kate Jones, who stepped down from the Bligh ministry last
year to campaign fulltime against him.
In her final pre-election
news conference yesterday Ms Bligh conceded she was facing defeat in a
"significant landslide" that would end 13 years of Labor government in
Queensland and leave the ALP in power at the state level in only South
Australia and Tasmania.
But she was unrepentant at targeting Mr
Newman personally. "It's been a very robust campaign and I don't step
away from that," she said.
Rounding out his campaign in Ashgrove, a
clearly confident Mr Newman renewed his appeal to Queensland voters to
ignore Labor's warning that a landslide win for the LNP today would give
it too much power in government.
"I can guarantee people that we
will be very humble if we win," he said. "We understand if we win it's
an immense responsibility that will be thrust upon us ... We will
conduct ourselves with humility, grace and dignity, and every single
day, if we're the government, we will be working for Queenslanders."
While
the swing in Newspoll to the LNP would cost Labor 39 seats if repeated
uniformly at today's state election, reducing it to just 12 seats, chief
executive Martin O'Shannessy said it was more realistic to use last
year's result in NSW as a point of comparison. On that basis, Queensland
Labor would lose 28 seats, and enter opposition with 23 MPs, he said.
There would be four independents in the new parliament, in addition to the likely newcomers from KAP. Mr
Newman will take office in a commanding position, having increased his
lead over Ms Bligh as preferred premier from four points at the start of
the campaign to 15 points.
Tellingly, seven out of 10 Queenslanders go
to the polls today believing that the LNP will win the election, against
just 16 per cent who say Labor will prevail.
Even among Labor supporters, only 30 per cent believe Ms Bligh will get another term.
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