Brisbane City’s single-member wards lend themselves to two-party competition, but in recent decades we’ve seen the rise of the Greens, first by just contesting wards that had previously been two-candidate contests, and eventually by winning their first ward and increasing their vote citywide.
This post will be looking at some metrics that show how that traditional two-party system in Brisbane City has declined in the last two decades. It also shows a precipitous decline in Labor’s position in a council they once dominated.
My dataset extends as far back as the year 2000, so that is where the story will start. Back in 2000, a majority of wards were only contested by two candidates: a Labor candidate and a Liberal candidate. When I talk about candidate numbers in this post, I’m simply counting candidates running for a ward, not the Lord Mayoral election.
The Greens ran just one candidate in 2000 (in Wynnum-Manly ward), but sixteen independents ran for council that year. Eight wards had three candidates, three wards had four candidates, and five candidates ran in Dutton Park ward.
We haven’t seen as many independent candidates at any election since 2000. Counting independents and minor parties apart from the Greens, there was a peak of nine such candidates in 2020 and just four have nominated in 2024.
The Greens first emerged as a serious force in 2004, running seventeen candidates. There were just seven two-candidate contests.
There were just three two-candidate contests in 2008, before rebounding to eight in 2012. Since 2016, there has been just one two-candidate contest (Doboy in 2020). Of course, that is also the only ward not contested by the Greens in the last three elections.
This year, every ballot paper has a Labor, Liberal National and Greens candidate. Just four wards have a fourth candidate, all independents.
So from the perspective of who contests elections, Brisbane City has evolved from a place mostly contested by Labor and Liberal with some independents, to a place where Labor, LNP and Greens contest everywhere, and few others run.
But how has the voting trend changed? Unsurprisingly, the Greens aren’t yet polling at parity with the major parties.
Labor polled a majority of the vote in 2000, and fell just short of the LNP in 2004, when Campbell Newman won the mayoralty, while Labor maintained a large majority on the council.
There was a large swing to the LNP in 2008, giving them a council majority and pushing their vote over 50% on both ballots.
Labor’s vote has been stuck around 30% ever since 2008, although there was a slight recovery on the council ballot in 2016. The LNP vote peaked in 2012, and has slowly declined into the mid-to-high 40s by 2020.
The Greens vote was around 10% for three straight elections but it started to climb again in 2016, reaching 17.8% on the council ballot in 2020.
Generally the LNP has polled better on the mayoral ballot than the council ballot consistently since Newman’s victory in 2004, while Labor and the Greens do better on the council ballot. Other candidates generally do better on the mayoral ballot, which makes sense considering how rarely other candidates contest council ballots.
While over 20% of the vote has been cast for non-major party candidates, it hasn’t really been reflected in the council results. This chart shows how the 26 wards have been split by party since 2000:
The LNP has continued to hold large council majorities since 2008, reaching nineteen out of 26 seats in 2016 and 2020. Nicole Johnston quit the LNP in 2010, and has been re-elected three times as an independent. She was joined on the crossbench by the Greens’ Jonathan Sriranganathan in 2016.
The LNP’s dominance has masked quite a lot of change below the surface amongst their opponents. You can see this shift if you look at the number of non-classic races. That is an electorate where the final distribution of preferences includes a candidate from outside of Labor or the LNP.
It’s worth noting that there hasn’t been a non-classic race involving the ALP since 2000. Every other non-classic contest since 2012 has been the LNP against an independent or Greens candidate.
Every contest in 2004 and 2008 was Labor vs Liberal. In 2012, Nicole Johnston obviously made the final count, as did Greens candidates in Pullenvale and Walter Taylor. The Greens have subsequently increased the number of non-classic races from two to four to six.
With the LNP making the final count in every seat, this thus creates a geographic division. There are some parts of Brisbane with the Greens as the main LNP opponent, and other areas with Labor as the main opponent, and with Johnston playing that role in Tennyson.
Of course that breakdown is not fixed – there are seats where Labor and Greens are close to each other, and seats could flip one way or the other. There’s also a few wards where the LNP could fall into third – The Gabba, Moorooka and Tennyson come to mind, but they are all solid seats for the leading candidate regardless.
So finally, I thought I would try to map out this divide by showing which non-LNP candidate made the 2CP in every ward, and how much they outpolled the third-placed candidate on the 3CP.
The cluster of Greens contests mostly cover the city centre, leaning a bit towards the western suburbs and extending out to Pullenvale, with Johnston’s seat adjacent to this area. Labor then is the main non-LNP party in a ring of the rest of Brisbane, with particularly strong 3CP results in a few patches.
This leads me into tomorrow’s post, which is about how optional preferential voting impacts on Brisbane City elections, and how different some of those margins could look with compulsory preferential voting.