Predictions ahead of Saturday’s by-election in the north Queensland seat of Hinchinbrook generally hinted the seat would be retained by Katter’s Australian Party.
The LNP mounted a vigorous campaign, but in a time when voters seem attracted by alternatives to the major parties, the collective wisdom was that Katter’s Australian Party would retain Hinchinbrook.
The by-election had been caused by the resignation of Nick Dametto, MLA for the seat since 2017. Dametto resigned to contest election as Mayor of Townsville and won easily with 61.5% of the first preference vote.
But the election of his successor in Hinchinbrook went against expectations. LNP candidate Wayde Chiesa won with 41.4% of the first preference vote, 53.8% after preferences, and a swing of 17.0%.
It was the first time a Queensland seat had been gained by a governing party at a by-election since 1998 when the Beattie Labor government won the nearby north Queensland seat of Mulgrave from One Nation. In Mulgrave the One Nation MLA had served less than six months, which leaves Hinchinbrook as a more significant victory with the LNP winning back a seat lost in 2017.
Inside the post I’ll look at the implications of the result, for LNP Queensland re-election prospects, for Labor given the collapse in the party’s support, and examine prospects for One Nation and Katter’s Australian Party.
In my view, it is hard to draw firm conclusions. Hinchinbrook is a traditional National/LNP seat, but one where the LNP has constantly been threatened by third parties. It has long been a weak seat for Labor, and Labor contesting the seat can only have been to maintain morale in local party branches, and to avoid giving Labor supporters a chance to practice voting for the Greens.
Labor’s concern in the result is if the unusually low Hinchinbrook result is reflective of declining Labor support in Townsville and other Queensland coastal cities. The last two Federal elections have shown that Labor can win elections without winning rural and regional seats, a situation that also applies in other mainland states. But that’s not the case in Queensland.
There are not enough winnable seats in south-east Queensland to deliver a majority Labor government. The Queensland Labor Party relies on winning a number of seats in the state’s coastal regional cities for victory. Labor lost the 2024 election on the back of regional losses and needs to turn around declining regional support if it hopes to win the 2028 state election.
The Result
The key feature of the result was the collapse in support for Katter’s Australian Party. The party’s primary vote was down 16.3%, the swing 17.0% after preferences. LNP support was up 13.2% and One Nation up 8.9% to 13.5%.
Nick Dametto won Hinchinbrook with 63.8% of the two-candidate preferred vote at the 2024 state election, so an LNP victory required a big swing.
The LNP victory was built on massive swings of more than 30% in the north of the electorate around Ingham, the home town of both Premier David Crisafulli and LNP candidate Wayde Chiesa. Former member Nick Dametto, and his KAP replacement candidate Mark Molachino, were both based in Townsville, northern parts of which lie in the electorate of Hinchinbrook. Molachino had problems in the campaign explaining away his past associations with the Labor Party in Townsville, an issue that the LNP constantly returned to in the campaign.
There were swings near Townsville that were almost enough to deliver victory to the LNP, but the desertion of past KAP voters to the LNP around Ingham turned a close result into a comfortable LNP victory.
Another factor working against Molachino was a weaker flow of preferences from a larger pool of votes to be distributed. In 2024 Katter’s Australian Party received 69.1% of preferences from 25.4% of votes cast for excluded candidates. For the by-election the flow fell to 56.0% of 28.5% votes distributed.
Labor received fewer votes and delivered weaker preference flows, and One Nation’s decision to flip its preference recommendation and put the LNP higher produced a much weaker flow of preferences to KAP.
A Peculiar Electorate
I’ve covered 13 Queensland elections, and in that time Hinchinbrook has been a seat where the Nationals/LNP faced many challenges from third parties and Independents. It has long been a seat where Labor left it very late to name a candidate.
The chart below shows the winning and losing two-candidate preferred percentages since one-vote one-value boundaries were introduced in 1992. These percentages exclude exhausted preferences in the period when optional preferential voting was used. I have included an entry for exhausted preferences in this period.
Labor has finished second in Hinchinbrook at only 5 of the 13 elections since 1992. Only in 1992, when the contest was between sitting Labor and National MLAs following the introduction of one-vote one-value electoral boundaries, and on the re-election of the Beattie government in 2006, did Labor come close to winning Hinchinbrook.
Twice One Nation finished second, the high exhaustion rate in 2001 seeing the Nationals win with only 35.4% of the formal vote after preferences. A third of voters made no choice between the Nationals and One Nation at an election where 80% of Labor Party votes exhausted under Labor’s ‘just vote 1’ strategy. Independent Andrew Lancini polled strongly in 2001 before finishing second to the Nationals in 2004.
At five of the last six elections, Katter’s Australian Party was in the final count versus the LNP, winning the seat three times in 2017,2020 and 2024.
Some have pointed to Labor polling only 8.2% as a sign of the party’s weakness since losing government at the October 2024 election. I think the story is a little more complex.
The chart below shows first preference results in Hinchinbrook since 1992.
Given how many times Independents, One Nation and Katter’s Australian Party have finished second in Hinchinbrook, there should be no surprise at the size of the third party vote in Hinchinbrook.
Across the country we have become used to third parties and Independents attracting more than a third of voter support in contests, but it has been common in Hinchinbrook for far longer.
While Nick Dametto proved to be very popular as KAP member for the seat, it should be pointed out he won from third at his first election in 2017. He polled only 20.9%, preferences from Labor voters pushing him ahead of One Nation, then One Nation voter preferences allowing Dametto to defeat LNP member Andrew Cripps, whose primary vote had collapsed to only 30.1%.
At nine of the 11 elections since 1998, support for the two major parties has fallen short of two-thirds, less than half at the four elections since Dametto was elected in 2017.
Labor has polled below 20% at five of the last six elections and the Greens under 4% at every election since 2012. I think one of the reasons for the low Labor vote at the by-election is Labor voters voting strategically for KAP’s Molachino in an attempt to defeat the LNP. In the end it was the collapse of support for Katter’s Australian Party that delivered victory to the LNP’s Wayde Chiesa on the back of strong local support for him and Premier Crisafulli around Ingham.
What does this mean for the future of Katter’s Australian Party? The party competed for seats across Queensland at the 2012 state election, but polled most strongly in north Queensland. The party has stuck to north Queensland seats since, and the state seats it has held lie overwhelmingly within the Federal seat of Kennedy, held by the party’s founder Bob Katter.
Is Katter’s Australian Party fading as a north Queensland party? Can it win seats away from Bob Katter’s electoral base?
Is the significant rise in support for One Nation, despite the late announcement of the party’s candidate, an indication of where support of disaffected voters is moving?
The result is a fillip for the LNP and raises questions for Labor on the wisdom of contesting seats like Hinchinbrook at by-elections.
And the result poses questions on the future of Katter’s Australian Party, and future prospects for One Nation.
There has been a lot of chatter by observers that the fact that the KAP candidate was a former Labor councillor in Townsville a fact that the LNP relentlessly pushed. Many feel that was a decisive factor. The actual Labor candidate, while not a gadfly, was a bit eccentric and all but ran dead. Some, as do I, feel that KAP is at a bit of an inflection point. Papa Katter will be done soon and it is not a done need that the younger Katter will take over the party. With One Nation on the rise, and I do not necessarily see this election having much of an effect on their political profile, there are only going to be so many parties on the right that will attract bleed off Liberal voters. With Joyce leaving the Nats, and possibly/probably eventually joining Pauline Hanson, the biggest issue with KAP, aside from Old Bob retiring, is that they are geographically limited to Northern QLD. The Nationals play everywhere as do One Nation.
Crisafulli invested a lot of personal time and political capital in Hinchinbrook. That combined with his personal background in Ingram and Chiesa being a mate and having some local notoriety as a sport caller a lot of dominoes fell into place. Whether that will hold in 2028 is another question the seat is probably at risk at the next election although Chiesa will be the incumbent. Redistribution could be interesting for this seat and for the future of politics in NQLD. Most of these seats are under quota and it is something of an open question whether Shane Knuth will have a seat to run in.
I expected the KAP to drop perhaps significantly but the fact that LNP came out on top in the end was a bit of a shocker. ON did preference LNP over KAP this election but as has been proven countless times their HTV is loose. The outcome certainly helps Crisafulli as he now has an additional buffer seat plus positive press for sticking his neck out and it paying off.
COMMENT: I altered your references to murderous Haitian dictators for being in poor taste.
No party can take voters for granted, even KAP with its choice of a past Labor man.
Antony, you think one of the reasons for the low Labor vote at the by-election is Labor voters voting strategically for KAP’s Molachino in an attempt to defeat the LNP. But it’s just a hunch. There’s actually far more evidence for a theory that says Labor voters voted strategically to try and get the One Nation candidate over the line….