Hinchinbrook By-election 2025

While Hinchinbrook has a long history of electing National and Country Party MPs, the party's grip on the seat has been challenged several times over the decades.

In 1992, electoral system changes that ended malapportionment between city and country seats saw Hinchinbrook combined with the neighbouring Labor seat of Mourilyan, giving the seat a notional Labor majority. National MP Marc Rowell was returned as the local member, and was challenged again in 1998, when he needed Labor preferences to win from behind against One Nation. In 2001, a four way race saw Rowell re-elected with just 28.8 per cent of the first preference vote. He withstood another challenged in 2004, this time by an independent, and then retired in 2006.

Rowell's successor Andrew Cripps won 50.4 per cent of the primary vote in his first election for Hinchinbrook, the first time in a decade that the National Party avoided being forced to preferences, and Cripps increased his margin substantially in 2009. The National campaign was helped in 2009 when the Labor Party nominated a Brisbane-based university student who unwisely told a local paper he would not be visiting the electorate during the campaign.

But in 2012, Cripps' first preference vote fell back below 50 per cent, even despite the newly amalgamated LNP's landslide victory. Former One Nation MP Jeff Knuth was the Katter's Australian Party candidate and polled 35.3 per cent to the LNP's 44.0 per cent. Labor preferences favoured Knuth which meant Cripps was re-elected with a margin of only 3.6%. A decline in Katter support at the 2015 election saw Cripps re-elected with a margin of 7.1% versus Labor.

The LNP came through all those electoral scares unscathed, but Cripps wasn't able to defend the seat in 2017 when, helped by a redistribution that halved Cripp's margin, KAP candidate Nick Dametto was elected from third place on primaries. He leapfrogged One Nation on Labor preferences and then easily defeated Cripps.

Dametto was re-elected in 2020 (doubling his first preference vote in that election) and 2024, and this by-election may give us an indication of how much personal support he has built up over the past eight years. He won the seat last year with a slightly shaved down margin of 13.2 per cent.

While the result of this by-election won't change the balance of power in Queensland parliament, Premier David Crisafulli has been campaigning heavily in this seat in a bid to regain ground in what was once friendly territory to the LNP.

Coming just over a year after Crisafulli's election as Premier, his party's performance will be watched by the state's politicians as a temperature test on how voters are viewing the still relatively new government.

(Victories by the party that formed government are indicated by thick coloured underlining)