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All 89 seats in the Legislative Assembly of Queensland 45 Assembly seats were needed for a majority | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Registered | 1,563,294 7.2% | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Turnout | 1,426,478 (91.25%) (0.48 pp) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Winning margin by electorate. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Legislative Assembly following election. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Elections were held in the Australian state of Queensland on 1 November 1986 to elect the 89 members of the state's Legislative Assembly. It followed a redistribution which increased the number of seats in the Assembly from 82 to 89.
The election resulted in a seventh consecutive term for the National Party under Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. It was the 11th consecutive term for the National Party in Queensland since it first came to office in 1957. The Nationals secured a majority in their own right, with 49 seats. It is the only time that the Nationals have ever won enough seats to govern alone in an election at any level. They had come up one seat short of an outright majority in 1983, but picked up a majority after persuading two Liberals to cross the floor.
This was the last time that a non-Labor Government was elected at a Queensland state election until 2012, although the Coalition briefly held government from 1996 to 1998 following the Mundingburra by-election.
Date | Event |
---|---|
30 September 1986 | Writs were issued by the Governor to proceed with an election. [1] |
9 October 1986 | Close of nominations. |
1 November 1986 | Polling day, between the hours of 8am and 6pm. |
1 December 1986 | The Bjelke-Petersen Ministry was reconstituted. |
8 January 1987 | The writ was returned and the results formally declared. |
All three parties had high hopes for the election. The Nationals knew that they needed to increase their number of seats to hang onto Government (they had held a majority of one in the last Parliament, which had been increased from 82 seats to 89 for the 1986 election). The Liberals desperately needed to win back some of their losses from their disastrous performance in 1983, and Labor hoped to exploit disunity between the conservative parties to make gains.
The already malapportioned boundaries (the "Bjelkemander") had been redrawn earlier in the year in a manner which further advantaged the National Party. [2]
Clive Palmer served as the media spokesman of National Party during its 1986 election campaign. [3]
The Bjelke-Petersen Government won a commanding victory, winning an extra eight seats and thus increasing its majority. The Liberals gained two seats, but were still nowhere near making up for their 1983 losses. Labor lost two seats.
Queensland state election, 1 November 1986 [4] [5] | ||||||
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Enrolled voters | 1,563,294 | |||||
Votes cast | 1,426,478 | Turnout | 91.25% | –0.44% | ||
Informal votes | 30,903 | Informal | 2.17% | +0.70% | ||
Summary of votes by party | ||||||
Party | Primary votes | % | Swing | Seats | Change | |
Labor | 577,062 | 41.35% | –2.63% | 30 | – 2 | |
Nationals | 553,197 | 39.64% | +0.71% | 49 | + 8 | |
Liberals | 230,310 | 16.50% | +1.62% | 10 | + 2 | |
Democrats | 8,747 | 0.63% | –0.20% | 0 | ± 0 | |
Independent | 26,259 | 1.88% | +0.59% | 0 | – 1 | |
Total | 1,395,575 | 89 | ||||
Two-party-preferred | ||||||
National/Liberal | 54.0% | +0.6% | ||||
Labor | 46.0% | -0.6% |
Seat | 1985 Redistribution | Swing | 1986 Election | ||||||
Party | Member | Margin | Margin | Member | Party | ||||
Ashgrove | Labor | Tom Veivers | 2.60 | -4.64 | 2.04 | Alan Sherlock | Liberal | ||
Callide | Independent | Lindsay Hartwig | 9.30 | -2.50 | 13.20 | Di McCauley | National | ||
Merthyr | Liberal | Don Lane¹ | 9.80 | -15.84 | 6.04 | Don Lane | National | ||
Mount Isa | Labor | Bill Price | 1.70 | -4.44 | 2.74 | Peter Beard | Liberal | ||
Stafford | Labor | notional² | 3.20 | -7.66 | 4.46 | Terry Gygar | Liberal | ||
Toowong | National | Earle Bailey | 2.80 | -21.17 | 18.37 | Denver Beanland | Liberal |
The 1986 election is significant for a number of reasons. It saw the National Party retain a majority of seats in the Parliament, and it was only the second election in Australian history (the other being the 1983 Queensland election) in which the National Party won enough seats to form Government in its own right.
More importantly, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen's victory gave him the confidence to launch the 'Joh for Canberra' campaign, which would play a major part in the 1987 federal election, and would later be a major factor in his undoing.
Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen was a conservative Australian politician. He was the longest-serving and longest-lived premier of Queensland, holding office from 1968 to 1987, during which time the state underwent considerable economic development. He has become one of the most well-known and controversial figures of 20th-century Australian politics because of his uncompromising conservatism, political longevity, and the institutional corruption of his government.
The Joh for Canberra campaign, initially known as the Joh for PM campaign, was an attempt by Queensland National Party premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen to become Prime Minister of Australia. The campaign was announced in January 1987 and drew substantial support from Queensland businessmen and some conservative politicians. The campaign caused a split in the federal Coalition. It did not attract widespread support and collapsed in June 1987. The Australian Labor Party, led by Bob Hawke, went on to win the 1987 federal election with an increased majority, gaining its highest-ever number of seats. Bjelke-Petersen came under increasing scrutiny as the Fitzgerald Inquiry gained traction, and was forced out of politics altogether in December 1987.
Robert Edward Borbidge is a former Australian politician who served as the 35th Premier of Queensland from 1996 to 1998. He was the leader of the Queensland branch of the National Party, and was the last member of that party to serve as premier. His term as premier was contemporaneous with the rise of the One Nation Party of Pauline Hanson, which would see him lose office within two years.
The Bjelkemander was the term given to a system of malapportionment in the Australian state of Queensland in the 1970s and 1980s. Under the system, electorates were allocated to zones such as rural or metropolitan and electoral boundaries drawn so that rural electorates had about half as many voters each as metropolitan ones. The Country Party, a rural-based party led by Joh Bjelke-Petersen, was able to govern uninhibited during this period due to the 'Bjelkemander' and the absence of an upper house of Parliament.
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The 1988 Barambah state by-election was a by-election held on 16 April 1988 for the Queensland Legislative Assembly seat of Barambah, based in the town of Kingaroy. The by-election was triggered by the resignation of National MP and former Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Until the by-election, the seat had been considered the Nationals' safest seat in Queensland.
A by-election was held in the Legislative Assembly of Queensland seat of South Coast on 28 August 1988. It was triggered by the resignation of sitting National Party member Russ Hinze.
The Ginger group, in Queensland politics was a group of Liberal Party MLAs during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, who despite nominally being a part of the government, were opposed to some of the policies of their senior coalition partner, the National Party. Initially a small informal grouping within the Liberal Party, the group came to wield greater and greater power within the Liberal partyroom, culminating in Terry White's successful leadership challenge in 1983, and the party's subsequent defeat and loss of influence at the 1983 election.
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