Queensland held its local council elections Saturday, which would normally be a big yawn outside the Sunshine State, except for two reasons: Brisbane City Council is now the largest government held by the Liberal Party in Australia, and there were two state by-elections held concurrently that yielded unexpectedly bad results for the ALP.

The elections sent mixed messages to the Liberal-National Party which, if they are interpreted badly by the party’s strategists, could lead them in completely the wrong direction in the Queensland state and federal elections.

The state by-elections were caused by the resignations of two MPs: former Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk who previously held the outer south-western Brisbane working-class electorate of Inala, and the member for Ipswich West, in the Labor-heartland satellite city to Brisbane’s immediate west.

The swing against Labor in Inala, likely to be around 20 per cent, could be explained away by the loss of a prominent political figure, and was not unexpected. Inala has been retained by the ALP, so strong was Palaszczuk’s margin to begin with.

But the story in Ipswich is disastrous for Labor and Palaszczuk’s successor Steven Miles.

In what commentators have described as a ‘brutal’ swing, it could put Miles’ new leadership under early pressure given a state election looms in just seven months. The fresh-faced premier has earned the nickname ‘giggles’ because of his tendency to laugh at serious matters like he’s stuck in a university politics debating team, rather than actually Premier of a grown-up government, IRL – as the kids like to say – ‘in real life’.

Insider party analysis reportedly provided to The Australian newspaper, predicts a ‘final two-party-preferred vote in Ipswich West of 53 per cent to the LNP’s Darren Zanow and 47 per cent to Labor’s Wendy Bourne. That’s a swing against Labor of 17.4 per cent’. It had previously held the seat with a margin of 14.3 per cent.

‘In terms of by-election swings it’s huge,’ Brisbane-based pollster and head of the Australian Institute of Progress think tank, Graham Young, told The Spectator Australia.

‘The recent Melbourne by-election in the federal seat of Dunkley was a slightly larger than average swing at around 3-4 per cent, and here we’re talking 17 per cent. This is of the same dimension as the Bass by-election in 1975 in Tasmania which heralded the landslide against Whitlam Labor later that year, so Labor has to pay attention.’

But Young says it’s most likely too late for Labor to rectify anything now.

‘The voters have sent them a message. It’s a warning shot. The first barrage in the next election,’ he said.

As well as a message for Labor, the result in Ipswich will give a boost to those within the Liberal-National coalition who support a shift to new populist conservativism and away from any further sucking-up to the inner-city centre-left Liberal power players.

The recent wins by libertarian and conservative non-left parties around the world – especially in left-leaning Europe – have been heavily reliant upon a rejection of modern leftist elitism by working-class non-university educated voters.

This cultural and political split between inner-metro and outer-metro Australians was writ large on Saturday in Queensland. Firstly, the inner-city university-educated voters continued their long march to the Greens in the Brisbane City Council election. And this happened, despite the radicalism of a Green Lord Mayoral candidate who had openly called for squatting and shoplifting by the poor to be normalised and accepted as ethical. Check out our recent video on that here:

The radical-socialists-pretending-to-be-environmental-party collected almost 20 per cent of the primary vote. Brisbane City is the largest local government in Australia covering 1.2 million people, almost half the population of Greater Metro Brisbane. The Greens came close to victory in five of the council’s 26 seats, and will likely finish with two or three of those after counting is completed.

The LNP held onto power by playing a clever Teal-like strategic game of being a very ‘green’ council.

‘Council is lime green, not ideological,’ said Young. ‘It spends a lot of ratepayers’ money on brown conservation issues like parks, footbridges and bikeways, so they are a council friendly to issues dear to the greens hearts.’

But any attempt to extend this strategy for city council victory to the state or federal sphere will spell disaster for the LNP.

The by-election results, in stark contrast, make it clear that Peter Dutton’s strategy of favouring the outer-metro conservative working class fed up with ‘Woke-ism’ is the right one.

The outer-metro Ipswich and Inala state by-election stories are very different to the inner-city trend in Brisbane. As well as the big swings to the LNP in these Labor-heartland seats, the Greens’ performance was lacklustre. In Inala, the Greens picked up only two per cent points of the huge primary swing from Labor, to finish at their usual national average of 10 per cent, while in Ipswich West they didn’t even bother fielding a candidate. Although, notably, in Ipswich West there was a strong protest vote to the Legalise Cannabis party of almost 15 per cent, following a weird campaign strategy by Labor of recruiting their own supporters to hand out how-to-vote cards for them.

Young says it’s a generational and class divide.

‘The electorate is divided between parents and children and inner-city and outer suburbs. There’s definitely a generational thing going on and an economic gap.’

The man who has been both Brisbane City Lord Mayor and Premier of Queensland, Campbell Newman, agrees.

‘The inner city areas of Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane will be difficult territory for the coalition, notwithstanding the tremendous victory of Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner and his LNP team over the weekend,’ Newman told The Other Side.

‘The LNP victory in Ipswich West demonstrates starkly the opportunity for the LNP in Qld and the coalition federally. Middle and outer-ring suburbs of our capital cities, regional and rural areas with aspirational middle-class voters are where it’s at.’

Newman says a firm focus on the issues that matter for the aspirational middle-class, rather than any ideological shift to the left to appease inner-city elites will be critical to state and federal success.

‘The elite of the ALP are fixated with matters far beyond the concerns of people who are trying to bring up their families and pay the bills. Real initiatives that deal with housing affordability, the cost of living, energy prices, youth crime, and access to well-run health care will be rewarded,’ he noted.

The message of Saturday seems clear: any temptation by the LNP to hold Brisbane City Council as a shining template of ‘how elections are won’ and try to apply that to a state and federal strategy is doomed to fail.

The party would do well to remind itself that, even though Brisbane City Council is the only government in Australia where it holds a majority (its only other government – Tasmania state – is a minority government) applying an inner-city Brisbane-style approach in places like Ipswich and Inala, isn’t going to cut it.

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