Anna Bligh’s personal ratings are equally worrying for the government: her approval rating is 33 per cent, compared with 50 per cent at the election and 44 per cent for Peter Beattie shortly before his retirement, while her disapproval is at 64 per cent. Further questions elicited predictable responses on corruption issues, with 68 per cent expressing support for Tony Fitzgerald’s recently expressed opinions on the government. Fifty-six per cent backed a ban on political donations, and 86 per cent said they opposed the government’s plan to sell state-owned assets. For all that, the poll provides a disappointment for LNP leader John-Paul Langbroek, whose approval rating has fallen to 34 per cent from 42 per cent in the previous poll. His disapproval rating is 36 per cent.

Monday, February 23

• Missed a spot from Steven Wardill’s Courier-Mail report on Chris Bombolas’s departure from Chatsworth: “Frontrunners to replace Mr Bombolas include his electorate officer Margaret Young and Police Minister Judy Spence’s policy adviser Simon Tutt.”

• Chris Pianta, who as of 2005 was Bundaberg secretary of the Australian Federated Union of Locomotive Employees, has been nominated as Labor’s candidate to run against Rob Messenger in Burnett.

• Déjà vu all over again: Pauline Hanson in shock comeback bid, and Greens threats to withhold preferences from Labor.

• Liberal National Party television ads viewable here.

• Tony Raggatt of the Townsville Bulletin on Mandy Johnstone’s preselection win in Townsville:

Even in Labor circles, there are questions. Not the least of which is why Mike Reynolds suddenly changed his mind after only days before going to the expense of preparing his advertising material, including video shoots with the other Townsville Labor candidates. Mr Reynolds told the Townsville Bulletin he made the decision during the past week due to health problems and rejected any suggestion he had been pushed …

Another question surrounding the preselection is why Labor’s factional bosses in Brisbane preselected a Left candidate from the Nelson-Carr group which is so openly hostile with Reynolds’ own Left group … There is a split between the Socialist Left factions of Mike Reynolds and Lindy Nelson-Carr (there is also a separate Labor Left faction). The Nelson-Carr faction would appear to have won the day by gaining the Townsville seat with its candidate Mandy Johnstone, apparently a cousin of Ms Nelson-Carr, while the Reynolds’ hopeful, Cathy O’Toole, his sister-in-law, will have to wait her turn.

Sunday, February 22

• The latest from the Courier-Mail:

ON YOUR marks, get set . . . The 2009 election race is almost under way. All that’s required to start the contest proper is for Anna Bligh, above, to take a quick drive up Paddington’s Fernberg Rd to visit Government House. That road trip will almost certainly happen some time in the next 10 days, with some predicting she’ll visit the Governor on Monday for a March 21 poll. Or will she wait a week and pull the trigger on a March 28 election?

They’ll have to be right eventually.

• Madonna King in the Courier-Mail sees things from Anna Bligh’s perspective:

Of course we’re going to lose seats. We’ve been in power for 11 years for goodness sake. But the boys (advisers chief-of-staff Mike Kaiser, Treasurer Andrew Fraser and state secretary Anthony Chisholm) all reckon we can win Gladstone, Mirani and Burdekin … The redistribution should deliver Mirani and Burdekin, and Gladstone should never have gone to an Independent in the first place. And don’t forget Bundaberg. The LNP might have sneaked across the line there, but this was Labor’s heartland for a century … Chris Bombolas just handed Chatsworth to the LNP … And there are other seats looking bad, too. Hervey Bay, where that former mayor Ted Sorensen is in with a good chance; Pumicestone; Aspley; not to mention Indooroopilly … Cleveland, Mansfield, Redlands – they’ll all be hard to hold and that’s not even considering those Gold Coast seats.

• Queensland’s very own Pitt the Younger, Curtis Pitt, is inevitably having to field questions about nepotism after succeeding his father as Labor candidate for Mulgrave. Curtis’s story seems to be that he worked locally as a cinema manager before moving to Brisbane in 2003 to take up a public service position, where he still remains.

• Elsewhere: Larvatus Prodeo, Woolly Days and Leon Bertrand.

Thursday, February 19

Fairfax confirms that Mandy Johnstone and Cameron Dick have won Labor preselection for Townsville and Greenslopes. ABC Radio reports the Mulgrave preselection has gone to Curtis Pitt, the son of outgoing member Warren. What’s more, a new front has opened with the surprise retirement of Chris Bombolas in Chatsworth, saying doctors have advised him to reduce stress due to diabetes. The ABC reports a successor will be chosen on Monday. A former Channel Nine sports reader, Bombolas won the seat in 2006 from Liberal powerbroker Michael Caltabiano in 2006, who in turn won it from Labor at a by-election a year before. Caltabiano’s personal vote as state member and earlier as a Brisbane City councillor would have meant the 0.8 per cent margin (reduced to 0.1 per cent after the redistribution) exaggerated Labor’s vulnerability, so long as Bombolas remained candidate – and assuming Caltabiano’s personal vote doesn’t transfer to his wife Andrea, who is the new Liberal National Party candidate. Now he’s gone, the seat can be ranked among those that will fall to the LNP barring a total disaster. Anna Bligh has intimated there might be more departures to come. Elsewhere: Cate Molloy to run again as an independent in Noosa (UPDATE: Make that “likely to run”).

Wednesday, February 18

• Queensland election speculation has stepped up yet another notch in recent days with three Labor members announcing their retirements (see below). The most excitable stories had it that the election would be called two days ago for March 28. The minimum election period is 26 days, so I gather an election for that date could be called as late as March 2. Darryl Rosin lays out the obstacles for various election dates beyond that in comments at Larvatus Prodeo, which are considerable if the government is of a mind to get in before the budget. The Courier-Mail reports outgoing Labor MP Mike Reynolds has told a radio interviewer the election “could be in late March”, while Tourism Minister Desley Boyle says she “suspects the election is not far away”. While you wait, enjoy Antony Green’s guide to the election, which went live this evening. My own effort remains a work in progress.

• Labor’s retiring Queensland MPs have made three seats available for new passengers on the Anna Bligh express ride to death or glory. Open for preselection are Townsville, where Mike Reynolds is calling it a day after 11 years; the outer Cairns seat of Mulgrave, home to Warren Pitt on-and-off-and-on since 1989; and the inner southern Brisbane seat of Greenslopes, vacated by another class of 1989 graduate in Gary Fenlon. Acting with remarkable haste, Labor set up preselection processes to replace Reynolds and Fenlon within three days of their retirement announcement on Sunday, with Pitt’s successor to be chosen two days after his announcement on Tuesday. In each case the decision will be made by the party’s administrative committee. Yesterday’s Townsville Bulletin reported that “insiders are tipping failed Townsville City Council contender Mandy Johnstone will get the party nod ahead of former mayor Tony Mooney” (who was defeated at the 1996 Mundingburra by-election which spelled the end for the Goss government). The ABC reports that Cameron Dick, brother of Brisbane City councillor Milton Dick, is likely to get the nod in Greenslopes. I gather we will find out in each case very shortly. The Cairns Post rang around trying to find someone who would admit to being interested in the Mulgrave preselection, apparently without success.

• Brendan Nelson’s announcement he will vacate his blue-ribbon northern Sydney seat of Bradfield at the next election could initiate another of the classic preselection clashes for the NSW branch of the Liberal Party has become justly famous in recent years. Party sources quoted by Imre Salusinszky of The Australian say the preselection will be “the most open and hotly contested since Bronwyn Bishop succeeded Jim Carlton in the neighbouring seat of Mackellar in 1994”, with no clear front-runner and neither Right or Left controlling the seat. However, it is also “understood party bigwigs are intent on avoiding a repeat of the preselection debacle in 2007 in the southern Sydney seat of Cook”. Salusinszky’s report floated the possibility of his paper’s conservative pundit Janet Albrechtsen taking the field, but she promptly ruled herself out. Live possibilities apparently include another connection with The Australian in Tom Switzer, former opinion page editor and staffer to Nelson; Arthur Sinodinos, John Howard’s legendary chief-of-staff; Nick Farr-Jones, former rugby union international; Julian Leeser, executive director of the Menzies Research Centre; Geoff Selig, former state party president; Alister Henskens, barrister and local party office-holder; David Elliott, former Australian Hotels Association deputy chief executive; Paul Blanch, a sheep farmer who ran in Calare in 2004; and, as always, Adrienne Ryan, former Ku-ring-gail mayor and ex-wife of former police commissioner Peter Ryan. The Sydney Morning Herald reports we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for a result:

A state executive meeting tomorrow is likely to discuss the timetable for the preselection race but because of a redistribution of seats in NSW, the final ballot will not be held until the end of the year. Because of that, most Liberal insiders believe the final candidate has yet to emerge.

• The Electoral Commissioner’s federal electoral determination has been published, confirming redistributions will need to occur to remove a seat from New South Wales and add one to Queensland. There seems to be some confusion abroard as to whether this scotches any chance of an election this year. As Antony Green explains, it is indeed the case that Queensland cannot be deprived of the seat which it is constitutionally entitled to at the next election now that the determination has been made, and it is indeed true that a redistribution process takes the better part of a year. However, the Electoral Act lays out a set of procedures for “mini-redistributions” in these circumstances, in which the two most or least heavily enrolled adjoining electorates in the state are either divided into three or merged into two. This has never happened before, and there would be obvious political difficulties in justifying an election held under such slapdash arrangements if it could possibly be avoided.

• Could Western Australia’s May 16 daylight saving referendum be the catalyst for a super Saturday of state by-elections? It certainly seems war clouds are gathering over the electorates of the two most powerful figures in the defeated Carpenter government: Jim McGinty, the member for Fremantle, and Alan Carpenter himself, who holds the neighbouring seat of Willagee (surely I have not so pleased the Lord that He would grant me neighbouring same-day by-elections in my own backyard?). According to Jenny D’Anger of the Fremantle Herald:

In the face of persistent rumours that veteran state Labor MP Jim McGinty is about to trigger a by-election for Fremantle by announcing his retirement, the Greens have called a war cabinet to talk tactics and anoint a candidate. It is all but certain they will choose South Fremantle’s Adele Carles, who came within a whisker of taking the seat at last year’s state election … Ms Carles says if the powerbroker is considering calling it quits he should do it so the by-election can coincide with the daylight saving referendum in May, saving thousands of dollars … The tom-toms have been beating for weeks that Fremantle mayor Peter Tagliaferri was the shoe-in as Labor’s choice to replace Mr McGinty. But more recently a senior union figure has emerged as a front-runner, which a Labor insider says had Mr Tagliaferri threatening to run as an independent (Word around the campfire is that this refers to Dave Kelly, one of McGinty’s successors at the LHMWU – PB). The Herald’s Labor source said Alan Carpenter also had to be taken into account: If the former premier decides to quit politics the union figure may prefer Mr Carpenter’s safe Willagee seat, which is not threatened by the Greens. This would leave Fremantle open for Mr Tagliaferri. But both Mr McGinty and Mr Tagliaferri are denying a by-election is imminent. “It’s no more than rumour-mongering,” Mr McGinty barked down the phone, adding he stood by the Herald’s report last November that he had no plans to go early but was unlikely to run again in 2013.

• Killjoy Harry Quick has gone back on his threat to run against Treasurer Michael Aird as Greens candidate in the looming upper house election for Derwent. According to the ABC, Quick says “his family has played second fiddle to his political aspirations for too long”. An earlier report said he was “understood to be ready withdraw his nomination due to family pressure to stay true to the Labor Party”.

The polling indicates that Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg, an ex-Nationals farmer who led the coalition to two election defeats, is failing to connect with Brisbane voters … The western suburbs electorate of Indooroopilly, which was once a blue ribbon Liberal stronghold, is regarded as a must-win seat for the LNP. But the polling puts support for the LNP candidate – Scott Emerson, The Australian’s former Queensland political reporter – at 5 per cent behind the combined Greens-ALP vote. The Indooroopilly contest is complicated by the defection last year of Labor MP Ronan Lee to the Greens. Mr Lee is likely to swap preferences with Labor, even though Labor has yet to nominate a candidate after Mr Lee’s defection. The LNP is 5 per cent behind Labor in the bayside seat of Cleveland, which needs a swing of 1.5 per cent to the LNP for the Government to lose. In the inner-city seat of Clayfield, which returned to the LNP fold at the 2006 election, the polling suggests a lineball result, with shadow treasurer Tim Nicholls struggling to hold on. The only bright polling spot was in the northern suburbs seat of Aspley, where the LNP was one point ahead of Labor.

This squares with the perception of Paul Williams of Griffith University:

Brisbane’s progressive Liberals will not vote for a party headed by a National. Lawrence Springborg’s LNP might suffer a devastating loss … I’m told by a senior Labor figure that internal ALP polling shows a remarkable pattern: the so-called “Beattie Liberals”, those middle-class Brisbane voters who loyally voted for John Howard federally (and the state Liberals until the mid-1990s), are sticking with Labor and Premier Anna Bligh … Labor’s polling allegedly shows Brisbane’s progressive Liberals – despite anger at major public infrastructure failings in health, water and roads – still cannot bring themselves to vote for a conservative party headed by a National.

UPDATE: As has been noted in comments, Greg Roberts is wrong to indicate the LNP might have something to fear in Indooroopilly if they were “5 per cent behind the combined Greens-ALP vote“. The take-up of the exhausted vote option in Queensland is high enough that preferences will not flow tightly between Labor and the Greens like they do in compulsory preferential systems, as is presupposed by talk of a “combined Greens-ALP vote”.

• The silly season endeth – Kerry O’Brien and Lateline are back, and parliaments federal, Victorian and South Australian resume today.

• The Australian Workers Union has released a comprehensive survey of workers’ attitudes to the global financial crisis, derived from 1016 interviews conducted by Auspoll. The headline finding is that 40 per cent fear losing their jobs in the next year.

• Parties’ disclosures of receipts, expenditure and debts are available for perusal at the Australian Electoral Commission, at least so far as donations of over $10,500 are concerned. Siobhain Ryan and Imre Salusinszky of The Australian and Bernard Keane of Crikey sift through the evidence; the latter also opens fire on the Coalition over its obstruction of legislation reversing the 2005 disclosure threshold hike. Keane notes that one travesty can’t be pinned on the previous government: that we have had to wait until February 2009 to find out what went on at an election held in November 2007. Anyone who imagines this has something to do with logistics should consider the practice in New York City, where donations have to be declared before election day and “made public immediately on a searchable, online database”.

• Antony Green returns from a fortnight in the wilderness (literally) with a belated post-mortem on the Liberals’ defeat in South Australia’s Frome by-election. As I suspected, independent Geoff Brock owes his win to a peculiarity of the state’s electoral system that saves ballot papers with incomplete preferences by assigning them the preferences officially lodged by their favoured candidate. Without this provision, 258 ballots that were thus admitted the day after polling day would have been informal, leaving Brock 38 votes behind Labor at the second last count rather than 30 votes ahead. Another issue has been brought to my attention by Kevin Bonham, who points to the fact that a certain number of Liberal voters harmed their candidate’s chances by voting Liberal rather than Labor. If 31 such voters had tactically switched to Labor, Brock would have been excluded and the distribution of his preferences would have given victory to Liberal candidate Terry Boylan. Public choice theorists call this flaw in preferential voting “non-monotonicity”, which is elaborated upon here (although Bonham reckons “some of their worked examples are wrong”).

• Antony also gets in early with a preview of Western Australia’s May 18 daylight saving referendum, which combines customary psephological insight with a keen eye for the state’s lifestyle peculiarities.

• Former Labor MLA Kathryn Hay will run as an independent for the Tasmanian upper house division of Windermere (extending from the outskirts of Launceston north to the proposed site of Gunns’ Bell Bay pulp mill), challenging independent incumbent Ivan Dean at the poll likely to be held on May 2. Peter Tucker at Tasmanian Politics reports that one of the the other two seats up for election, the Devonport-based division of Mersey, looms as a clash between Latrobe mayor Mike Gaffney and Devonport mayor Lyn Laycock. Mersey is being vacated by retiring independent Norma Jamieson.

• Staying in Tasmania, a recount has confirmed that the last remaining Labor candidate in Franklin from the 2006 election, Daniel Hulme, will assume the lower house seat vacated by former Tourism Minister Paula Wriedt.

• Mining magnate and former National Party director Clive Palmer is making himself visible as the Queensland state election approaches, having been profiled last week on The 7.30 Report and in a cover story for The Weekend Australian Magazine. The latest salvo in Palmer’s charm offensive is a demand of $1 million in damages for defamation from Anna Bligh, who said there was “something just not right about one billionaire owning their own political party” (the annual financial disclosures discussed previously list $600,000 in donations from Palmer to the Liberal and National parties). Sean Parnell’s Weekend Australian piece describes Palmer as a “notorious litigant”, who “once listed it as a hobby in his Who’s Who entry”. Palmer’s 18-year-old son Michael has been preselected as the Liberal National Party candidate for the safe Labor seat of Nudgee.

• Rick Wallace of The Australian reports that Nationals-turned-Liberal Senator Julian McGauran will face a number of challengers in his bid for one of the two safe seats on the Victorian Senate ticket, with other incumbent Michael Ronaldson “widely expected to claim top spot”. The field includes prominent Peter Costello supporter Ross Fox, barrister Caroline Kenny and solicitor Cate Dealehr. Other names mentioned by Andrew Landeryou’s VexNews are Terry Barnes, a “former Tony Abbott adviser”, and Owen Lysaght, who ran as an independent in Chisholm in 2004.

• The South Australian Liberals have suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of independent Geoff Brock in the Frome by-election following Saturday’s distribution of preferences. Crikey subscribers can read my post-mortem here, and a still lively discussion is raging on my live coverage post. The Advertiser reports that Brock’s success might give other potential independent candidates ideas, including “ALP stalwarts such as Rod Sawford and Murray Delaine”, who were respectively Labor members for the federal seat of Port Adelaide and the state seat of Cheltenham. Liberal leader Martin Hamilton-Smith says he is “ready to make deals with any independent candidate who ran next year in safe Labor seats such as Port Adelaide, Croydon, Lee and Colton”.

• Speculation about an early Queensland election continues to stop and start. Mark Bahnisch of Larvatus Prodeo says the Courier-Mail has damaged its credibility with its repeated wolf-crying on the subject, while The Australian’s D. D. McNicoll contends that “the whisper in Queensland political circles is Premier Anna Bligh will call the state election on February 28, a date that ensures bumper superannuation payouts for all the surviving members of the ALP’s ‘Class of 2001′ who were never expected to serve more than one term in parliament.” “Former Howard government senior adviser” David Moore surveys the landscape in The Australian.

• The NSW Nationals’ plans to select a candidate in a winnable seat for the 2011 state election by holding an open primary has caught the attention of blogger Tim Andrews, who is “unsure why this proposal hasn’t received more attention, as it has the potential to revolutionise Australian politics”. Ben Raue at The Tally Room reckons the idea is “at least a good gimmick”. The Nationals’ briefing paper on the subject can be read here.

• Western Australia’s daylight saving referendum will be held on May 16. Daylight saving was previously voted down in 1975 (53.66 per cent against), 1984 (54.35 per cent) and 1992 (53.14 per cent).

• South Australia’s first state by-election since 1994 will be held tomorrow in Frome. Read and comment about it here, and tune in to this site for live coverage of the count from about 6.30pm local time.

• It appears a contest is on to fill Petro Georgiou’s Liberal preselection vacancy in Kooyong, with reports emerging that merchant banker Josh Frydenburg is not the shoo-in many had assumed. Frydenburg pursued a membership recruitment drive before the last election in an unsuccessful bid to topple Georgiou, but sources quoted by Andrew Landeryou at VexNews say two-thirds of these memberships have lapsed. This leaves Frydenberg vulnerable to opposition from Institute of Public Affairs director John Roskam, previously an unsuccessful candidate for Senate preselection (and more recently mentioned as a successor to Peter Costello in Higgins), who stands poised to garner support from Georgiou and the locally powerful Ted Baillieu/David Davis faction. Also mentioned is John Pesutto, described by Melissa Fyfe of The Age as “an industrial relations lawyer who led a rewrite of the Victorian Liberal Party’s constitution last year”.

• Liberal Senator Judith Troeth has announced she will retire when her current term ends in mid-2011, adding a new dimension to the Victorian Senate preselection contest for the next election. The Nationals are likely to secure an extension of the agreement that will give them second place on a joint Coalition ticket, leaving the Liberals with the safe first position and the dangerous third. Michael Ronaldson is presumably likely to retain pole position from the 2004 election; Troeth’s departure enhances Nationals renegade Julian McGauran’s chances of taking number three.

• Marc Moncrief of The Age on the race to fill Evan Thornley’s vacancy in the Victorian upper house region of South Metropolitan:

Labor’s factions are also in a battle over how to fill the vacancy in the upper house created by Mr Thornley’s departure, with confusion over whether the Southern Metropolitan seat will be delivered to Labor’s right-wing Unity faction or to the Socialist Left. Unity faction powerbroker Michael Danby, the federal member for Melbourne Ports, is believed to have collected a number of names including Julia Mason, former candidate for the federal seat of Goldstein. However, one member of the Right faction said the Left was more likely to have a claim to the post, as Unity now holds all three of the top positions in Parliament – Premier, Deputy Premier and Treasurer. If the Left is given the nod, it will have to ensure the choice is a member who can keep the relatively conservative seat at the next election.

• Other ructions in the Victorian ALP: forces of the Right associated with Bill Shorten and Stephen Conroy have formed an alliance with the Socialist Left, freezing out what The Australian’s Rick Wallace describes as “the portion of the Right aligned with state frontbenchers Tim Holding and Martin Pakula and the shop assistants’ union”. More commentary plus an intermittently interesting comments thread at VexNews.

• Large parts of the media remain convinced that Anna Bligh will shortly be calling a Queensland state election. Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo/Crikey isn’t so sure, while fellow local Possum deems Lawrence Springborg to be no better equipped to pitch to Brisbane as leader of the Liberal National Party than he was as head of a fractious coalition.

• The silly season news cycle has been awash with talk of Barnaby Joyce seeking a berth in the lower house to assume leadership of the Nationals, at the urging of John Howard. Joyce himself has mentioned Labor’s 2007 gains of Leichhardt, Dawson and Flynn. More intriguing has been talk of a move south of the border to take on independent Tony Windsor in New England, which locals quoted by Matthew Clayfield of The Australian had no trouble recognising as a most courageous proposition. Possum notes that any such move might cost the Nationals Joyce’s Queensland Senate seat in the event that the Liberal National Party disintegrates following a state election defeat.

• Peter Tucker at Tasmanian Politics gets in early on this year’s Tasmanian Legislative Council periodic election action. This year is the turn of Derwent, a Hobart seat held for Labor by Treasurer Michael Aird; Windermere, which extends from outer Launceston up the eastern bank of the Tamar River to the sea, and is held by independent Ivan Dean; and Devonport-based Mersey, held by independent Norma Jamieson. Jamieson’s retirement after one six-year term sets the scene for an unpredictable contest likely to attract a Melbourne Cup field. Aird and Dean are almost certain to be re-elected, potentially without opposition in Dean’s case.

• The indefatigable Ben Raue at The Tally Room has moved to his own domain.