A Queensland election today would probably produce a hung parliament.

Sunday, 02 March 2014 21:11 | Written by Graham Young

According to the latest Galaxy Poll the Queensland government would receive 53% of the vote on a two-party preferred basis if an election were held now. This could be enough for them to scrape a bare win, or potentially face a hung parliament. This is because the electoral system incorporates around a 2.5% bias towards Labor, or at least it did before the last election.

This is the Galaxy table:

It could be worse than that. Galaxy doesn't state on its website how it determines two-party preferred results, but it is general practice to distribute preferences as they were distributed last election. This assumes support from minor parties remains the same, which isn't necessarily the case. In Queensland this is complicated by optional preferential voting, which means that voters don't have to distribute a preference, introducing another variable.

galaxy first pref 14 02 06

The first preference votes show only 5% between LNP and Labor who share 77% of the vote between them. Galaxy has minor parties essentially splitting 50/50, meaning the LNP needs to get the vast bulk of the minor party vote to get the 53% of the vote predicted by Galaxy.

Our polling suggests this is unlikely as the Newman government is currently unpopular with all but LNP voters, and these are decreasing in number.

The tables below tell the story. I have dissected them into LNP, ALP, Green and Minor party voting intentions. I am forced to group all the minor parties together to try to get a statistically significant sample. It obviously hides some nuance, but at this sample size it is difficult to tell the difference between nuance and sampling error.

What they show is that most voters think the state is heading in the wrong direction, that they disapprove of the performance of Campbell Newman and approve of the performance of his opponent Anastacia Palaszscuk. However, they still prefer Newman to Palazszscuk, but only by a small margin.

Of course this isn't necessarily what will happen, because people adjust their positions with respect to reality, creating a new reality. The LNP can't be expected to stay still.

And neither will the ALP. What would be really interesting is if they changed their leader.

The suggestion is that they might very well do this, borrowing from the Campbell Newman tactic of taking someone from outside the parliament and making them leader. In this case that someone would be Cameron Dick, former Attorney-General and member for Greenslopes.