Talk:1995 Queensland state election

Mount Coot-tha - Greens got a quarter of the vote?

Does anyone know how with a Labor and Liberal candidate, the Greens managed to get 24.2% of the primary vote in Mount Coot-tha in 1995? Timeshift (talk) 02:55, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Given that the candidate was Drew Hutton and that he was both the Greens' primary spokesman (effectively their leader) and very prominent at the time, I'd say that explains it. Frickeg (talk) 04:57, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

IMHO still an unusually high vote for even a Greens leader considering it was 1995, but fair enough. Timeshift (talk) 05:00, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

It's absolutely an impressive result, but this was actually one of the watershed elections for the Greens; for the first time outside Tasmania and WA, AFAIK, they completely demolished the Democrats whenever they ran against each other and reached double figures in quite a few seats. I suspect the protest vote was pretty high; one of those "I don't like the government, but the opposition's a useless rabble" elections, from what I can gather. Plus, they were pretty much the only option in Queensland in 1995, even for right-wingers since the Confederate Action Party had become a joke. Frickeg (talk) 05:35, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

This is way before my time, but I know they had a couple of major issues they were campaigning around, and considering that a) they were overtly dealing with the Liberals, and b) this was well before the conservatives started railing on the Greens outside of Tasmania, I suspect Hutton probably picked up votes from all over the place in a way they couldn't do now. The Drover's Wife (talk) 14:58, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

That is a good point. As the only non-Labor/Coalition option the Greens got 12% in Capricornia in 1990, a seat where they can't even break 5% now. Frickeg (talk) 20:42, 25 June 2014 (UTC)