It is an interesting development to see Ronan Lee, the Member for Indooroopilly in the Qld Parliament, announce today that he has left the Labor Party and joined the Green Party.  This gives the Greens their first MP at state or federal level in Queensland. 

Ronan was scheduled to speak at the same event I spoke at yesterday – the Love Earth Gathering to promote the greenhouse and other environmental benefits of a low or no meat diet, but pulled out at short notice, which might have had something to do with his needing to focus on his announcement today.

There is something of a precedent for this in South Australia, where sitting Labor MP Kris Hanna quit to join the Greens a few years ago.  For whatever reasons, they turned out not to be that well suited for each other. He failed to get support for pre-selection for the Upper House and ended up quitting the Greens and recontesting his seat as an Independent.  In somewhat of a surprise, he managed to retain his seat of Mitchell, getting in on Liberal preferences despite polling less than 25% primary vote.

The seat of Indooroopilly, in Brisbane’s leafy western suburbs, used to be Liberal Party heartland, until Ronan Lee managed to win it in the Beattie landslide of 2001.  He’s done well to hold it in two subsequent elections.  I’ve run into Ronan, a migrant from Ireland, at a range of events around Brisbane over the years and he has seemed to me to be a bit more prepared to show some individual opinions than many major party MPs, even after he was promoted to a Parliamentary Secretary position.  Speaking at the Love Earth Gathering is an example of this, but he has also spoken at events like the Human Rights Torch relay, strongly criticising  the human rights record of the Chinese government. 

My understanding is that he is opposed to reforming abortion laws, which would probably put him at odds with many Greens members, even though abortion is normally seen as a conscience issue in the parlament. However, I should emphasise that, to their credit, the Constitution of the Greens – in Queensland at least – takes the same approach as the Democrats always did, explicitly stating that “where the views of an elected Member are in conflict with the Queensland Greens policy, then the elected member may vote in accordance with their conscience.” 

To retain his seat as a Green, Ronan will need to poll better than either Labor or the Liberal-Nationals, and hope to get in on their preferences.  However, Queensland’s system of optional preferential voting makes this harder, with many voters just putting a 1 beside their favoured candidate and not passing on preferences.  He will need to come close to or top the primary vote, which will be a difficult task.  Personal votes for the incumbent can be higher at state level than they are at federal level, but just how big it will be in this case is hard to tell – especially as he is running for a different and minor party, not as an independent.  Labor usually pursues a ‘just vote 1’ strategy with their how to vote cards in Queensland, which would hurt his chances, although the Greens may be able to use some leverage regarding their own preference decisions to prevent that this time. 

Most of the lower house seats around the country where the Greens have polled well in recent years have been Labor held seats with a low Liberal vote.  While it is still a big mountain to climb for their party candidates to win lower house seats, it is easier if they only have to poll in the low to mid twenties. This one is different – while Indooroopilly has a reasonably good primary vote for the Greens, both major parties poll relatively high, making it harder for a third candidate to get above one of them.

Indooroopilly is a seat the Liberals would be hoping to win back at next year’s election – indeed have to win back if they are wanting to get near winning government.  They polled 42.4% in a three horse race last election, with Ronan Lee getting 40.4% as a Labor candidate and the Greens polling just over 17 %. 

Labor’s vote was already likely to drop, and will do so even more following today’s move.  It is reasonable to assume the Liberal’s vote will rise this time, although Indooroopilly is precisely the sort of seat that might have been made harder for the Liberals as a result of their merger with the Nationals. It is the so-called ‘western suburbs faction’ of the Qld Liberals who are most commonly describing the merger as a National Party takeover. 

The absence of any major political pressure on Labor from the progressive side of the spectrum has been a significant problem in Queensland.  With the vast bulk of the political pressure coming from the conservative side with the Nationals and Liberals (and to a lesser extent One Nation), there has been a continuing incentive for Labor to focus its energies and actions in that direction.  This has meant policy approaches which give consistent priority to areas like Indigenous issues, the environment and human rights can tend to get short shrift.  Whether Ronan Lee’s move will help remedy this is far from certain, but at the very least it does create the possibility. 

More on this at Larvatus Prodeo and at Dennis Atkins’ blog at The Courier-Mail.