Election battlelines drawn in Queensland

It's all about Queensland. It's no coincidence that it was the first stop for Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott on the election trail and hosted both party launches.

What happens in Queensland - where the Labour and Coalition leaders spent one-third of their election campaigning time - on polling day will largely determine who governs Australia for the next three years.

In the final week of the campaign, it appears 10 out of 30 Queensland seats are on a knife-edge.

It is a far cry from 2007 when the home-grown Kevin '07 campaign and disenchantment with John Howard's ailing government generated a 7.5 per cent swing to Labour and secured the party 15 seats.

A Galaxy poll released this week showed Labour's primary vote on 38 per cent, down eight points since the so-called 2007 "Ruddslide", with the Liberal National Party steady on 44 per cent.

Labour trails the LNP 49 to 51 per cent on a two-party preferred basis.

This would translate into four Labour seats falling to the LNP - Longman, Flynn, Dawson and Forde - and the shoring up for the LNP of the now notionally marginal Labour seats of Herbert and Dickson.

Going into the campaign the Liberal National Party - contesting the federal election for the first time as a merged party - holds 12 seats.

There are two independent MPs recontesting - the colourful former National Bob Katter in Kennedy and former LNP member Michael Johnson - and one seat, Wright, has been newly created following the redistribution.

Three years on, the home-grown hero Kevin Rudd - minus his leadership and gall bladder - has been confined to campaigning in Brisbane's inner east and occasionally finding a regional candidate happy to have him on board.

Bubbling away in the electorate are a number of issues: disquiet over Julia Gillard's treatment of Mr Rudd, anger over the Bligh government's mismanagement of the state and the evolution of the Greens as the third force in politics after the demise of the Democrats.

Interestingly, Queensland's other high-profile Labour figure, Wayne Swan, used his speech at the Labor campaign launch to make a too-obvious plea to those still upset over the Rudd assassination.

"As Queenslanders we are also famous for many other great attributes energy, optimism ... natural good looks, high intelligence among many other things. But we are also known for our hospitality. So I know when you see Julia today you will give her one of those welcomes for which we are rightly famous in this state."

Regional seats such as Dawson, Leichhardt and Herbert are also witnessing strong local debate about issues such as Labour's proposed restrictions on fishing, state Labour's "wild rivers" laws, ailing hospitals and the mining tax.

In Labour's favour, the union movement remains strong in Queensland and the ACTU has been aggressively pushing the line that the LNP would bring back the unpopular Work Choices laws.

The importance of the issue was underlined by the fact the ACTU president Ged Kearney and ACTU secretary Jeff Lawrence spent the final week of the campaign attending rallies in Brisbane and regional Queensland.

Betting agencies have 10 seats as line-ball calls.

Whatever the final result, there's expected to be a scattergun approach to voting in the Sunshine State, with trends more resembling a series of individual by-elections in marginal seats than a general election.

- AAP