Public angst fuels political fortune

Public angst is a governing resource. The question is whether you’re spending it – or borrowing against it.

April in Queensland was defined by fuel. Not necessarily the price of it,  but the fear around the lack of it. Specifically, our lack of sovereignty around it. The Strait of Hormuz is in chaos. Bowser prices climbing. The ghost of COVID-era scarcity doing laps around the national conversation. And into that anxiety stepped a state government with a very clear message: we have a plan, we are moving, and the plan has a name. The Taroom Trough. ‘Liquid gold.’

Both the Premier and the Deputy Premier made the trip to Ampol’s Lytton refinery – cameras in tow – to announce $25 million for renewable diesel production. An Australian first. The politics were transparent. And it worked, because when people are frightened, visible action – even action that will yield results years away – feels like leadership.

But if pulling oil from the ground were straightforward, Queensland would have done it long ago. The Taroom Trough’s potential has been known for decades. The oil sits kilometres underground, requires fracking in agricultural country where water rights are fiercely protected, and yields light crude better suited to petrol than the diesel Australia most desperately needs. What the crisis has done is compress public tolerance for complexity. Voters aren’t asking hard questions right now. They’re asking for reassurance. That’s a different thing entirely.

And it is exactly this reassurance around public angst that fuels election outcomes.

Stafford fell vacant when independent MP Jimmy Sullivan – a local man who carried enormous personal burden through his final year in public life – passed away at his home on 9 April. Within days, the Premier was standing at a service station in the electorate, framing the coming by-election as an endorsement of his fuel agenda.

Three candidates define the contest. Labor’s Luke Richmond is a northside local, a lawyer with a health policy background and the party’s assistant state secretary – organisationally strong, but untested on the hustings. The LNP’s Fiona Hammond is a former councillor who ran here in 2024 and knows the ground. The Greens’ Jess Lane, a school teacher, ran in 2024 and will again be a factor in preferences. On the numbers, Labor is the favourite – it has held this seat through the 2024 LNP wave, and the two-party-preferred margin across the electorate ranged from 56% to 62% in its favour. But Sullivan held it on personal vote as much as party brand, and Richmond will need to earn what Sullivan was given.

A close result – let alone a loss – invites a conversation the Leader of the Opposition might not be ready to have about whether his leadership is a rebuild or a placeholder.

The fuel crisis is most definitely a political problem for the federal government – but it has created political opportunity for the Crisafulli Government. People don’t audit the details when they’re scared. They reward movement. The risk – always – is that movement and outcome eventually have to reconcile.