With a week left until the Stafford byelection, Queensland’s major parties are trading barbs over health policy and hospital funding in a bid to win over voters.
Early voting opened on Monday in the second out-of-cycle vote since the LNP took government in October 2024.
Health Minister Tim Nicholls released figures on Saturday claiming surgery waitlists across the state were at a two-year low, and ambulance ramping figures were trending down.
At the Prince Charles Hospital – within the Stafford electorate in Brisbane’s north – ramping rates were down 4.4 percentage points compared to the March quarter last year, the government said.
Among the nine candidates contesting the seat are the LNP’s Fiona Hammond, Labor’s Luke Richmond, and the Greens’ Jess Lane.
Opposition Leader Steven Miles said on Saturday a Labor victory in the May 16 poll would not change the government, but could send the LNP a message about bed capacity at Prince Charles Hospital.
Miles and his deputy, Cameron Dick, stood with Richmond to take a swipe at Premier David Crisafulli over claims the government was spending $45,000 a week on a billboard to promote a $20,000 grant to a local school.
Dick said the advertising was an obscene waste of money, and the premier was “plundering the public purse to promote his government in a byelection”.
Richmond said he had doorknocked thousands of people in the electorate and “not one of them has told me they want to see more of their money being spent on government billboards”.
“What they tell me is they want the LNP to reverse its cut to the 93 beds at the Prince Charles Hospital. People are waiting longer and longer to receive the vital and urgent healthcare they so desperately need.”
Although Labor has claimed a plan for 93 beds at the hospital will be scrapped, the Crisafulli government has pledged to deliver that number under its Hospital Rescue Plan, however the timeline is yet to be released.
Labor also disputed the ramping figures touted by Nicholls on Saturday morning.
“The LNP are crowing about getting ramping back to the levels they were when they first got elected, but if you look into the data, ‘ambulance lost time’ is up more than 20 per cent,” Miles said.
“So our ambos are spending more time ramped and less time back out in a community, and that means people are waiting longer for ambulances.”
Miles said the data also showed a massive spike in the number of people waiting for specialist outpatient appointments.
“It was a 22 per cent increase in the people waiting for a specialist appointment,” he said. “They’re people who can’t even get an appointment to see a doctor.”
The byelection comes after the sudden passing of MP Jimmy Sullivan in April.
Sullivan was sitting as an independent after he was expelled from Labor last year following highly publicised allegations of domestic violence, which he had denied.
Liam Parry, the first person charged under the state government’s ban on two protest slogans, is also running, as an independent.
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