Some good news at last for the Nationals: Elisa Roberts’ off-again, on-again, off-again, on-again campaign for re-election as independent member for Gympie is now off again. Roberts’ withdrawal comes too late for her name to be removed from the ballot paper, so she will face no obstacle if she feels like changing her mind again. [...]

Whatever else might be said about Australia’s opinion polling agencies, they cannot be faulted for having sent mixed messages during the current Queensland election campaign. If today’s Newspoll figures are to be believed, the trend towards Labor has turned exponential: their primary vote has gone from 45 per cent to 52 per cent in one [...]

With polling day less than a fortnight away, a journalists’ thoughts turn to preference recommendations. Today we have Greg Roberts and Michael McKinnon reporting in The Australian that the Greens will not recommend a preference to Labor in "key marginal Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and southern Brisbane seats". This is apparently significant because "a similar [...]

Polling agencies move in mysterious ways, as demonstrated by their insistence on letting respondents choose out of the Nationals and Liberals in Queensland state election surveys. Given that there will be no three-cornered contests at the election, voters will in fact have to make do with one or the other depending on where the live. [...]

After an incident-packed first week of the Queensland election campaign, week two has been agreeably uneventful. I shall have to fall back on two things that caught my attention in the papers recently.
• Renee Viellaris from the Courier-Mail reports: "The Coalition will adopt the previously successful Labor strategy of ‘just vote one’ on its how-to-vote [...]