Warrego is an electoral district of the Legislative Assembly in the Australian state of Queensland.
The electorate lies in the extreme southwest of Queensland, running along the western part of the border with New South Wales. It includes the large town of Dalby, as well as the rural centres of Surat, Roma, Tara, Charleville, Augathella, St George and Cunnamulla.
History The electoral district of Warrego was created by the Additional Members Act of 1864 which introduced six new single-member electorates. A by-election was held to fill the seat. The nomination date was 18 March 1865 and the election was held on 25 March 1865.
Warrego was, as with the rest of the state, held by independents and loose groupings of members around the government of the day until the first years of the twentieth century, when the partisan system took hold. It then became a stronghold of the centre-left Labor Party, which held it without interruption from 1908 to 1974. The decline of the rural working class gradually changed the demographics of the electorate, however, and in 1974 it was swept up in a massive landslide for the National Party.
It remained a marginal National seat for the next two decades, even at the height of the popularity of the Bjelke-Petersen government. However, it stayed in National hands even after Labor ended the long National run in government. The "one vote one value" reforms ahead of the 1992 election gave the Nationals a 13 percent notional majority, making the seat safe National on paper. The Nationals significantly increased their hold on the electorate thereafter, and it was now one of the most conservative seats in Queensland. Since then, the National hold on the seat has been only remotely threatened once, in 2001. It remained a conservative stronghold after the LNP was formed from a merger with the Liberals in 2009. The current member, Ann Leahy, has held the seat since 2015.
Members for Warrego MemberPartyTerm Frederick Forbes Unaligned 1865–1867 Graham Mylne Unaligned 1867–1868 Sir Arthur Hodgson Unaligned 1868–1869 Sir Thomas McIlwraith Ministerialist 1870–1871 Archibald Buchanan Ministerialist 1871–1873 William Henry Walsh Ministerialist 1873–1878 Ernest James Stevens Independent 1878–1883 John Donaldson Independent/Ministerialist 1883–1888 Richard Casey Unaligned 1888–1893 James Crombie Ministerialist 1893–1898 William Hood Ministerialist 1898–1899 David Bowman Labour 1899–1902 Patrick Leahy Ministerialist/Opposition 1902–1907 George Barber Labour 1907 Patrick Leahy Ministerialist/Opposition 1907–1908 Harry Coyne Labor 1908–1923 Randolph Bedford Labor 1923–1941 Harry O'Shea Labor 1941–1950 John Dufficy Labor 1951–1969 Jack Aiken Labor 1969–1974 Neil Turner National 1974–1986 Howard Hobbs National 1986–2008 Liberal National 2008–2015 Ann Leahy Liberal National 2015–present
Election results
References
External links