Although it is more than 1,000 kilometres away from Queensland’s Parliament House, Townsville will have a big say in who controls a majority on the assembly floor.

The north Queensland city has three marginal Labor seats — all of them moving to the beat of their own drums.

Forget about polls showing statewide swings or the popularity of party leaders, Townsville has its own dynamics that make the election campaign in this region highly unpredictable.

If the LNP wants to win a majority in its own right, it needs to win at least two, probably all three, of these Townsville seats.

For Labor to maintain its two-seat majority in Parliament, it has to hold the Townsville line.

The most marginal electorate in whole of Queensland is the seat of Townsville itself, held by Labor’s Scott Stewart on a wafer-thin margin of 0.4 per cent.

But confusingly, some in the LNP don’t even rate this seat as their best chance.

“It will be the toughest seat [in Townsville] to win because of its strong local member,” one Opposition MP told the ABC.

The former LNP member for the Townsville-based Federal seat of Herbert, Ewan Jones, believes the seat of Townsville will be a tough fight for LNP candidate John Hathaway.

“To win Townsville you have to carry Palm Island, Magnetic Island, Garbutt, those sorts of suburbs — it’s very hard,” he said.

At the other extreme, in the seat of Thuringowa, where Labor’s Aaron Harper sits on a seemingly comfortable margin of 4.1 per cent, the LNP is more confident its candidate Natalie Marr can get over the line.

That’s because of the strong presence of minor parties in this outer suburban and semi-rural seat.

One Nation finished second on a two party-preferred basis in 2017, but this year may not even be in the contest because of the mysterious last-minute resignation of its former candidate, Troy Thompson.

This provides an opening for Katter’s Australian Party, which believes Thuringowa is its best chance for picking up another seat in Parliament.

The third seat, Mundingburra, has often changed hands with a change of government.

Here the LNP is aiming to overcome the slender 1.1 per cent margin.

Law and order

Working in the LNP’s favour is the late resignation of Labor’s sitting member Coralee O’Rourke for health reasons, although Labor is hoping its new candidate and former deputy mayor Les Walker can hit the ground running.

The LNP’s Mundingburra candidate is former local police inspector Glenn Doyle — his high profile and background explains why the Opposition is campaigning so heavily on law and order.

“Youth crime is going through the roof under the Palaszczuk Government,” Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington said at the launch of the LNP’s crime policy in Townsville in July.

“We know here in Townsville the statistics are frightening.”

While Labor is also promising more police on the beat, the LNP has differentiated itself by controversially promising new laws to automatically jail children who have committed a third criminal offence.

Mr Jones said the LNP was successfully selling the message that Labor is soft on crime.

“The LNP is not afraid to ruffle some feather in this area, and it’s not afraid to take this on,” he said.

‘Going back to the old Bjelke days’

Many in Townsville’s Indigenous community, such as sports administrator and Indigenous prison release program organiser Jenny Pryor, have felt this campaign was being aimed at them.

“I really believe they’re taking the easy way out and it’s going back to the old Bjelke days [of former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen] where we become a police state,” she said.

“You send an 11-year-old into the incarceration circle, they’re going to be abused.”

Ms Pryor accused not only the LNP but also Labor and Katter’s Australian Party of playing the politics of race.

“They have to satisfy the non-Indigenous voters that it’s perceived they’re doing something, whether or not it’s the right solution with the right outcomes is the issue.”

Townsville Mayor Jenny Hill, who is a member of the Labor party, argued the city had an underlying youth unemployment problem and crime was one of the symptoms.

“We suspect that more than 25 per cent of Indigenous youth are unemployed and probably close to 15 per cent overall of unemployed youth,” she said.

Cr Hill said the city was hit hard by both the closure of the Queensland Nickel refinery in 2016 and this year’s COVID-19 crisis, and that the main election issue would be about the post-COVID recovery.

“The stuff I hear is that people want to know what’s going to happen after COVID — how are we going to move forward, how are we going to secure jobs how are we going to secure prosperity for the region,” she said.

There was a regional Queensland backlash against Labor in last year’s federal election as the party struggled to articulate its position on coal mining — in particular, Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine.

Labor revealed this week it had finalised a royalty deal with Adani and Cr Hill said she thought Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s recent announcements — such as giving the green light to the Olive Downs coal mine — would ensure that backlash was not repeated on the state level.

“They are the sort of announcements that people need to hear because we all know that they bring in long-term jobs,” Cr Hill said.

The racial divide in the crime debate, uncertainty over coal mining and the strong polling of minor parties are more significant factors in Townsville than they are in South-East Queensland.

It makes predictions about the outcome of the election all the more fraught.

A popular Premier who managed the keep the state largely COVID-free during a global pandemic and an Opposition Leader making the case for change still have to tailor their messages for Townsville.

– ABC / state political correspondent Peter McCutcheon