• Brian Costar

25 February 2009Next month's election is the first test for the new Liberal National Party in Queensland, writes BRIAN COSTAR, and it has quite a fight on its hands

JUST OVER a century ago Australia’s two non-Labor political parties - Alfred Deakin’s Liberals and George Reid’s Anti-Socialists - merged to form the Fusion Party. The new party was dominated by economic conservatives and suffered a heavy electoral defeat at the hands of the young Labor Party the following year. Nearly one hundred years later, last July, another pair of non-Labor parties merged, this time in Queensland, to produce the Liberal National Party, or LNP. The new party is dominated by social conservatives, and at the state election held on 21 March 2009

That’s where the LNP leadership hopes the historical parallels will end. But will they? The task facing the opposition in Queensland is daunting: to form a majority government - leader Lawrence Springborg has ruled out negotiating a minority administration - it must secure a swing of 8.3 per cent and take an additional twenty-two seats from the government. In the last Newspoll survey published before premier Anna Bligh announced the election, Labor led the LNP 57 per cent to 43 per cent on a two-party preferred basis. (A new Newspoll, published in the Australian on 24 February, was not large enough to tell us anything useful.) Almost anything is possible in electoral politics, but an added impediment to an LNP win is that it must pick up seats in Brisbane, where it now holds a single, solitary district. It is in this respect that the brutal politics of the 2008 merger may prove fatal...

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