Why regional Queensland is an election wildcard

Take a 3,000km trip through regional Queensland — it might not be what you expect.

It's no secret that Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are courting the votes of regional Australia at the federal election.

From fixing the Bruce Highway, to "universal mobile coverage", and a "nuclear vision for regional Australia", the major parties have been pledging billions in early campaign promises outside the capital cities.

Labor and the Coalition both lost ground to minor parties and independents in 2022, and are looking to shore up support wherever they can to win marginal seats.

In Queensland, things may seem pretty black and white. It's where the divide between city and country voters was starkest last election.

Labor doesn't hold a seat north of Noosa, and while the Greens have three inner-city seats, beyond Brisbane it's all Coalition and Katter country.

It's cemented a longstanding perception of regional Queensland as a conservative bloc — Australia's 'Deep North'.

But behind the coal, cattle, and climate battles is a much more nuanced picture.

This is the only mainland state where more people live outside the capital city than in it. And in a handful of communities that make up regional Queensland, there's a clear picture of the everyday issues that could sway their votes this time.

About 100 kilometres up the road from Labor's northern-most Queensland seat is the tiny rural town of Imbil, nestled into the Mary River Valley.

For local hardware store owner Jo Robey, it's an idyllic place to live and work.

About 15 years ago, she was questioning the cost of her corporate career in Brisbane.

"I had had two miscarriages and I just went, right, let's change lifestyle, family is the most important thing," Jo says.

Since moving to town, Jo's become a pillar of the local community. She's now at the helm of a hugely successful school fundraiser.

Not content with making small change from sausage sizzles, the Mary Valley State College now runs a tri-annual rodeo event called the Imbil Bull Bronc Barrels.

The money goes towards the school, a hefty insurance bill to keep the local pool open, and other needs in the wider community.

"It was really important to ingrain ourselves in the community, so that we weren't city slickers coming to take money out of town," Jo says.

Imbil is in the federal electorate of Wide Bay — a comfortably conservative seat, held by Llew O'Brien on one of the Coalition's strongest margins in the state.

The LNP has been trying to harness opposition to renewable energy projects in the lead-up to the election.

Just 10 minutes out of town is the Borumba Dam, where there are plans to extend the dam wall and build a 2,000 MW pumped hydro project.

It's still in its early stages, but Jo says tension, both local and imported, is becoming a factor.

"I think 90 per cent of our community [are] really pro the development of the dam, and the hydro," she says.

"But I think there's also a lot of misinformation being shared."

On the road out to the dam is a shipping container draped with a banner that reads: "Wildlife habitats are unrenewable, once they're gone, they're gone."

A quick search reveals the website at the bottom is linked to a One Nation candidate from a nearby town. It's not clear who's funding it.

Jo says the claims about a lack of community consultation and the potential for environmental harm are misleading, but it's already influencing political discussion around town.

Forty minutes away in Gympie, 19-year-old Emily Groves will be among half a million people voting in a federal election for the first time in May.

Gen Zs and Millennials are set to outnumber Baby Boomers at the ballot box this year.

From what has filtered down through social media, Emily says she's "not a massive fan" of Albo, and seems similarly sceptical of the Coalition.

"Peter Dutton, I'm not even sure on what he does, to be honest," she says.

Like the rest of Australia, one of the biggest problems for Emily and her friends is the high cost of pretty much everything. She's working at the local fruit and veg shop to save money so she can move away for further study.

"A lot of my friends moved out as soon as school finished," she says.

"[They] moved to Brisbane, didn't have enough money, and had to move back to town to move back in with their parents."

Built on the banks of the Mary River, Gympie is one of Queensland's most flood-prone places. It last burst its banks in 2022 — the city's worst flood in more than 100 years.

"When it floods, this entire area is gone," Emily says, driving through the CBD.

Looking to the future, Climate Council modelling predicts about a third of properties here will be virtually uninsurable, or underinsured, within five years.

While the river sometimes rages, often it's a refuge. And it's part of why Emily wants to build her future here.

"I think it's a great place to grow up," she says.

"But I just don't think there's many opportunities for young people who want to get an education."

Four hours up the coast, the natural beauty of the port city of Gladstone has an industrial quality.

Smokestacks and pipelines surround the islands and blue water of the coal and gas port.

"My dad's been in the mining business since I was born," says Kailu Craigie, from the Gidarjil Development Corporation.

As an Aboriginal ranger, he plays a role in balancing the needs of the land and sea with that of heavy industry.

The Coalition has named the nearby Callide Power Station as one of the seven sites it wants to develop into a nuclear reactor facility — though locals aren't entirely convinced.

The politics of climate and energy are not something Kailu spends much time thinking about, but on recent trips with ocean scientists he says he's seen the effects of bleaching on the nearby coral reef.

"You can definitely see a big impact of climate change in the environment," he says.

The rangers help track water quality, monitor turtle breeding, and conduct cultural burning around Gladstone and Bundaberg.

Kailu's colleague, James Saylor, would like to see more opportunities for young Indigenous people to build skills and qualifications that set them up for life.

He's been working on boats since he was about 16, but feels that many young people are struggling to find jobs.

Asked what might help, he says: "Just giving this opportunity for further education and trade tickets, [making] things like that a bit easier to acquire at a young age."

The two young rangers say the housing shortage is another big problem here.

It's the number one campaign issue for their local member Colin Boyce, who holds Flynn on a slim 3.8 per cent margin.

Kailu's grandmother has been without a house for months, living in a motel.

"[We] definitely need a lot of support for the Indigenous community," he says.

"Especially with the prices of food, how that's gone up. It doesn't make it easy for people that don't really get that much money."

Alongside places called Dingo and Bluff, Comet is one of the small towns that dot the Capricorn Highway on the way to Clermont.

In the afternoon sun, a bloke in a sleeveless high-vis shirt sits on the side of the road with two tethered goats eating the grass on his front lawn.

"I got sick of pushing the lawn mower," Chris Elliot says.

He lives in Comet and works at a nearby coal mine. It's a good wage for now, but money is still tight. The goats were "meant to be going in the freezer" to help with that.

"The kids took one look and that was the end of that plan," Chris says.

For him, politics is quite removed from his day to day.

"That's all I know."

While it might be known as the sleepy little mining town that told Bob Brown and his anti-Adani convoy to bugger off, Clermont is more cropping and cattle than coal these days.

"Mining is definitely a huge part of the community, but there's a lot more … you have to come into town to see what's on offer," says Jade Davies.

Jade used to manage cattle properties, and recently moved back to town to help run a local mental health service, alongside Kelly McGrath.

"In the mining community, people are working longer shifts, there's some isolation from family, and in rural communities, there's sometimes limited resources," Jade says.

While Clermont now has two GP clinics, you still can't have a baby at the local hospital. Visiting psychologists are kept busy with acute needs, so a big part of Jade's job is connecting people with telehealth services.

"Otherwise the option is to travel to Emerald, which is an hour and 20 minutes, or the other direction … to Moranbah," she says.

"But even there, they're very isolated for psychologists and counsellors on the ground."

The geographic reality is Clermont is a long way from major centres — some people travel hours away just to buy the basics without paying a premium.

Jade sees Clermont as a "town of opportunity", where young families like hers can spread their roots.

For newcomers, house prices are relatively cheap in comparison to metro areas. But that can come with its own problems.

Robyn Cross, from Clermont Community Housing, says people on lower incomes have been forced out of the market, "and there's no alternative".

"For people that are homeless or at risk of homelessness, we've only got one set of duplexes in town, and it's always full," Robyn says.

She says about 10 clients are sleeping rough at a public reserve behind the local service station, alongside travellers.

Robyn's small team do their best to help, but money is tight.

"Our funding has been the same since 1992, we've had no increase except for CPI," she says.

Clermont used to be part of Flynn, but electoral boundaries were redrawn in 2018 and now it's in Capricornia, a slightly safer LNP seat.

"Now that we're not [a marginal seat] it makes it a little bit more difficult to have a voice heard, because we're only small," Robyn says.

With current funding, the homelessness service can only open its doors for 10 hours a week — not enough to meet demand.

Ryan Lovell was houseless in Clermont for a while.

A few years ago, he was a young carpenter building a life in Brisbane. But one day something shifted, and he was drawn back to his country.

"I lived in town in basically a big green tent for three months — you're not allowed to camp, but we have a ceremonial grounds," he says.

He's Wangan and Jagalingou (W&J) man, the traditional owner group of the country around Clermont.

During the colonisation of the 1800s, a brutal frontier war was fought between the white Europeans and local Aboriginal people. Many W&J were massacred and hunted down by Queensland Mounted Police, or forced into missions and reserves hundreds of kilometres away.

Generations later, Ryan says coming back to his country has been deeply moving.

"Sometimes I realise I'm probably not looking through my eyes, I'm looking through my old people's eyes," he says.

Ryan doesn't see himself as super political. He says he can see why "a lot of people get frustrated with it". But whatever happens at the election, he's got one wish.

"I really do hope that they hear the people — the Indigenous people — and look after the environment and just start working together," he says.

Even if you've never been to Charters Towers, you might be familiar with its most famous resident and his trademark hat.

For the past 32 years, Bob Katter has been the member for Kennedy, a vast electorate that covers more than 560,000 square kilometres of outback Queensland.

Before him, his father Bob Snr was the local member. His son Robbie is the local state representative.

"We consider them one of our own, purely for the fact that they grew up in Charters Towers," Melissa Salmond says of the Katters.

She too has grown up here, and after training as a physiotherapist and living away, she moved back 20 years ago and started an allied health business.

"I think it's a town with a great lot of magnetism associated with it," Melissa says.

"People come here, and they only plan on [staying] for a year or two, and then 40 years later, they're still here."

The same gold-bearing seams that put Charters Towers on the map in the 1800s are still being mined today. Since then, the economy has further developed around agriculture, education and tourism.

For Melissa, it's a town where "community comes first", and that means people are passionate about securing better access to essential services.

Health care is top of her list, especially considering the ageing population.

And she'd love better mobile coverage — when her husband's out in the back paddock, "if he gets bitten by a snake, it'd be really nice to know that he can pick up the phone".

Kennedy is one of the safest seats in the state, and advocating for a fair go has long underpinned the Katter family reign.

Sure, Bob's well known for his soliloquies — "let a thousand blossoms bloom". But to Melissa, who believes in climate change and doesn't want to shoot all the crocs, these viral moments miss the genuine community representation.

"Sometimes [the Katters], they're speaking on behalf of what we feel we're losing in the north," she says.

"They can be quite passionate … and for those down south, unless you've lived it up here and you're losing those services yourself, or not getting access to certain things, then yeah, it can be quite leftfield."

Whenever there's a big wet up here, it wreaks havoc on the major roads heading north. In February, the coastal route was cut off for more than a week after a bridge was washed away north of Townsville.

Lou Fletcher, who runs the local hotel in Greenvale, says it brought an influx of visitors to her little pub off the inland highway.

"They usually just keep on going — they're in a hurry because they've had to go out of their way. But this year our roads happened to close as well. And then they were trapped here," she says.

There's not a lot else in Greenvale — a servo, a fire station, and a school that currently has about 10 kids enrolled. But Lou says it's a beautiful place to raise a family.

"I love living rurally. I grew up in a rural community in western Queensland … and I wanted the opportunity for my kids to have the same," she says.

Lou concedes "we don't get a lot of services" in Greenvale — the mail only comes twice a week. Her biggest bugbear right now is the water.

"Last week we turned our taps on in the morning … and our water was chocolate brown," she says.

"We're on a boil water alert. But I can't put that in my motel for my customers even when I boil it. So I supply them with bottled water.

"Our white sheets are now sort of cream."

Lou says she's raised the issue with the local council in Charters Towers, but she suspects they've got bigger fish to fry.

"We pay our rates, you know. We probably are a bit of a thorn in the side to them, us little communities," she says.

"But we're part of the fabric that makes up rural Australia. These little communities — we're losing more and more of them all the time."

As the Kennedy Highway winds up toward the Atherton Tablelands, cattle country makes way for rolling green hills dotted with wind turbines.

Far North Queensland is seen as crucial to Australia's energy transition. The aptly named Windy Hill in Ravenshoe was among the state's first wind farms, built in 2000.

Not far away is the Kaban Green Energy Hub. A proposal for another wind farm nearby was withdrawn last year after significant community opposition.

For Jen Cox, a born and bred Tablelands local, the debate over renewables is frustrating. She's heard concerns about a lack of consultation, adverse impacts on biodiversity, and "visual pollution" in an idyllic pocket that relies on tourism as one of its key industries.

Jen's in favour of renewables — tackling climate change is her top priority. But she believes the energy transition needs to be better managed.

"To me, there is no national plan for renewable energy. There's no plan to make sure that all of the projects work together and work efficiently, for what people want," she says.

"I still don't feel like they've got the mix right … They just want to tick a box."

She's concerned that Australia's energy future has been privatised, giving the industry too much power and influence over decisions.

Jen feels there's "a lack of jobs for young people" around town and "not enough to do … they tend to leave". She runs a roller derby league that hosts monthly discos at the local high school, recently recognised as the community event of the year.

She's gone head to head with her MP on some of these issues — Jen joined the Greens and ran against Bob Katter in 2022. He's been her local member since she was in high school.

"I'm not exactly happy to have a member that's been around that long," Jen says. "He has less bargaining power … there's probably not a lot of motivation for [the major parties] to put time or effort into the north."

But Michael Nasser, who runs a heritage-listed hotel on the main drag, reckons Katter gets things done. For him, renewables are a waste of money and climate change is far from top priority.

"Atherton, it's a beautiful place. It's probably one of the best regional areas in Australia, and it's been kept secret," he says.

That changed after the pandemic — now, Michael says, the town's booming.

"But with the way the roads are, we're hamstrung in many ways."

You'd be hard pressed to find a regional town in Queensland where roads aren't top of the list. Here, it's the Kuranda Range down to Cairns.

As Michael explains, it "copped a belting" during Cyclone Jasper at the end of 2023, and roadworks are still going on to repair sections of the road.

"They just need to build a bypass and get it happening. They'll spend $8-9 billion in Brisbane to get people to work five minutes earlier, but they won't do anything here.

On a good day, it's about a 90-minute drive from Atherton and down the range to Cairns, on the doorstep of the reef and rainforest.

This tropical tourism hub falls into the federal electorate of Leichhardt — now up for grabs, with LNP stalwart Warren Entsch retiring on a tight 3.4 per cent margin.

Jimmy Lewis-Wilson reckons the Far North is overlooked by most politicians. He feels pretty distant from the major parties.

"I'm a big follower of Pauline Hanson and Katter, and everyone's gonna hate me, but Trump as well. They get stuff done. It feels like they're not putting out empty promises," he says.

He works as a driller in the mining industry, and is getting sick of paying high rates of tax "and not seeing a lot from it".

"Show us where this money's going," Jimmy says.

His biggest problem at the moment is youth crime, which he says is "getting out of hand".

Jimmy wants Australia to produce more of its own materials, and rely less on imports. He's keen for the coal industry to continue, and while he cares about the environment, climate change isn't really on his radar.

In Machans Beach, it's a different story.

This suburb was among those inundated by flooding after torrential rains brought on by Cyclone Jasper.

Mary Brodie, who runs the local community association, says it gave people a wake-up call about the reality of living with climate change.

"It happened in 30 minutes — literally. The whole area was all underwater … it was not just flooded, it was gushing," she says.

In this "little fishing village", it was Machans residents who came to the rescue in their tinnies, going door to door to evacuate their neighbours to higher ground.

Like many of the Cairns northern beaches, there's only one road in and out. "People from outside couldn't get in, or they just didn't respond in time," Mary says.

Driving through these quiet streets more than a year later, the devastation is still visible.

Dozens of houses are undergoing repairs.

Skip bins, shipping containers and tradies' utes line the curb.

Some are selling up and moving out — Mary says, in fear of the next potential disaster.

Machans is a tight-knit community. But many people are nervous about their future, or can no longer afford to stay as housing and insurance prices climb.

Residents are also wary of how development along the Barron River Delta is changing the way water flows in flood events. They're calling for a moratorium on new approvals until further research is completed and new access roads are constructed.

Mary says most people here want governments to pay attention to what's happening on the ground, and act now on climate change.

Libby Cook-Black, a Zenadth Kes woman from the Torres Strait Islands, couldn't be more proud to call Cairns home.

"I moved home from the city after university to raise my children because it's affordable. My family can all live here … and I can easily get home and have connection to country," she says.

While on maternity leave, Libby's raising her children and building the charity that she founded, which aims to bridge the gap in opportunities for young women and girls in regional communities.

"We use sport as our vehicle to empower women," Libby says. "Those skills around resilience, receiving feedback, organisation, time management, commitment — all of that can be transferred across into the classroom, into employment."

Sport gave Libby an "escape" and safe space while she was growing up, and led to a professional career. But it meant moving away from family.

She wants to create more opportunities for young up-and-coming athletes so they don't have to leave home to pursue their passions.

While Cairns is a large regional city with a major public hospital, university and international airport, Libby says access to allied health services and higher education can also be limited.

"We shouldn't miss out because our industry or our business or our kinship connection or our country is far away from the city, or where the services are," Libby says.

But she feels strongly that there are solutions to these challenges.

These Queenslanders don't agree on everything — their voices are just a snapshot of those across the state who feel, at times, forgotten.

Their political views are as diverse as their life experiences.

Just because someone votes for Katter, doesn't mean they don't care about climate change.

Just because someone prefers a freezing XXXX over a fancy craft beer, doesn't mean they don't care about social inequality.

Life in the north can be hard. People up here fuel Australia's GDP and generate the coal royalties to fund 50-cent public transport in the city. Most trains up this way carry cane or coal, not people.

Regional folks deal with the challenges of distance: roads that get cut off in natural disasters, patchy connectivity, expensive fuel and groceries, and longer travel times to reach essential services.

Most are too busy working to bother carrying a grudge; they suspect "there's a lot more common ground than we think".

They just want southerners to cast their eyes north every now and then — and maybe even come for a visit.

"We don't need anything fancy. We just want the basics first."