John Stanley and John Black – 29th January, 2024

Had a chat with John Stanley of 2GB/4BC this week, at the tail end of yet another hot and humid Queensland summer of cyclones, heatwaves and  floods. I recall making the suggestion to John that if the Labor PM was planning on fighting another election over the impact of global warming, then it would be a good idea to call it at the tail end of next summer, especially in Queensland, where he needs to win seats. We’ll see early next year if the PM was listening.

The odds still point to another close Labor win in 2025.

My editor has okayed me posting the original story on spatial electoral strategy from the Australian Financial Review’s special New Year’s Edition and here it is.

It looks as though 2024 will be a rerun of 2023 in many respects, albeit with signs of cresting and then stabilising for population growth, prices and interest rates.

We are also likely to see some stabilisation in Labor’s political fortunes in Western Australia, following the mid-2023 retirement of the state’s popular premier Mark McGowan. Our modelling of the 2022 election voting showed that Mark McGowan government was worth a flat 6 per cent to that year’s federal Labor Party vote in WA.

When McGowan quit in June, this vote was up for grabs and recent polling by RedBridge indicates that McGowan’s replacement Roger Cook, is likely to comfortably retain power on March 8, 2025, and also hold up Labor’s federal vote to the same 55% percent level attained in 2022.

In Queensland, the long-running soap opera that was the once-popular premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has finally ended during an ad break, with the election of her deputy Steven Miles, as the new Labor premier.

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