By Jeremy Cook
Queenslanders will head to the polls in just over one month’s time to vote on their state representatives for the next four years and already candidates have begun turbocharging their campaigns.
In the Southern Downs electorate, a comfortably safe LNP seat which includes the major towns of Warwick, Stanthorpe and Goondiwindi, at least three candidates have already announced their intentions to run ahead of election day on 26 October.
They include LNP incumbent James Lister, One Nation’s Liz Suduk and Greens candidate David Newport. As of midday on Tuesday, Labor had yet to publicly endorse a candidate.
Since its inception in 2001, the Southern Downs electorate has only ever been held by the LNP and its National Party predecessors. The previous Warwick electorate had remained in the hands of a non-Labor party since 1947 before the electoral boundaries were redrawn.
Come election day, incumbent Premier Steven Miles’ Labor government will attempt to secure a fourth consecutive term over the David Crisafulli-led LNP opposition.
Both major parties have already made it clear what they feel are the key issues facing Queenslanders with topics like youth crime, healthcare and cost of living often dominating political headlines for months.
But what about the Southern Downs? Warwick Stanthorpe Today asked the three candidates whose campaigns have already been launched to outline what they felt were the biggest issues facing their electorate.
Incumbent MP Mr Lister, who has held the seat since 2017, said housing, crime, roads and cost of living were four of the biggest issues constituents had raised with him. He claimed the government had “shilly-shallied about for a decade” on fiddling with rental laws and making big announcements.
“It is very sad when people come to me to say that they are about to lose their home, and that there is nothing else to rent,” he said.
Mr Lister said the LNP had pledged to “abolish stamp duty for first home buyers” and would provide $1 billion to fund regional infrastructure and “allow new housing developments to be released.
He said if elected, the LNP would, before the end of the year, “change the law to provide adult time behind bars” for juvenile criminal offenders and embark on “serious, decisive early intervention, training and support” for at-risk and detained youth offenders. He said an LNP government would look to end “wasteful cost blowouts on Labor’s city projects”.
“People complain to me that they are really feeling the pinch as the costs of everything go up, and workers and small businesses struggle to keep their heads above water,” he said.
“Better government leadership and responsible economic management under the LNP will end the huge cost blowouts and poor decision making we’ve seen for a decade under Labor.”
One Nation’s Ms Suduk, a former New South Wales cop who now operates a beef farming operation in Silverwood said her key priorities included cost of living, youth crime, housing availability, protecting farmers and supporting rural communities with water security and infrastructure.
Ms Suduk vowed to amend national electricity market rules and end taxpayer subsidies for renewable energy. “It needs to stand on its own. I support cheap, reliable base load coal power stations such as the one at Millmerran,” she said.
She threw her support behind a number of initiatives targeted at reducing youth offending such as “Operation Hard Yakka”, tougher penalties for repeat offenders, more policing resources and “less red tape for officers, so they can get back to policing”.
If elected, she pledged to advocate for reducing fees, taxes and duties to lower costs for buying a home and eliminate stamp duty on insurance payments.
She said her party had a “strong focus on infrastructure” which supports critical industries in regional Queensland and called for more dams to be built.
“I was farming in the last drought [and] it was soul destroying – and I know that if we are in drought in Southern Downs, then there is a good chance so is everyone else,” she said.
“Transporting water around the southeast is not a long-term solution.”
Ms Suduk also committed her support to cutting “red and green tape” for farmers.
Allora mechanical engineer and Greens candidate David Newport said he had been out talking to constituents in Warwick, Stanthorpe and Killarney throughout the past week.
“Out here, people are worried about the housing crisis,” Mr Newport said.
“Too many people are couchsurfing, living in their cars or can’t find a safe and affordable home to live in — and for the people with a place to call home, they’re finding it harder and harder to pay rent or their mortgage repayments.”
Mr Newport accused the major parties of “letting big corporations and wealthy property investors rip off everyday people”.
“The major parties have spent decades privatising essential services and key infrastructure like ports, railways and energy, putting corporate profits ahead of the common good,” he said.
He said the Greens would cap rent increases, give everyone a right to a lease renewal and improve minimum rental standards for insulation, ventilation and ceiling fans. He added the party would also “slash mortgages” by forming a public bank, create a public property developer and create “thousands of secure apprenticeship opportunities”.
He said climate change had made seasons “more erratic” and criticised new and planned coal mine approvals as well as gas and fracking wells.
“The Greens are the only party with a plan to get our regional communities back on track with massive public investment in critical minerals, domestic manufacturing and publicly-owned renewable energy,” he said.
Many of the issues outlined by candidates were among the topics brought up by parliamentarians when they sat for the final time last week.
Faced with a barrage of LNP criticism on issues like youth crime, health and housing, Labor MPs in turn lauded its efforts to leverage coal royalties to fund the party’s recent cost of living measures with some even questioning the opposition’s yet-to-be announced tax and debt plan.
