Queensland vote reveals a state split in eight

As one Brisbane newsroom wag put it, southern journalists come up every three years to write how the latest Queensland poll has been as "a tale of two elections" - pitting the south-east against the rest of the state.

The reality, of course, is a lot more complicated than that.

Queensland is, and always has been, a very diverse and regionalised state.

Part of that comes down to size - Queensland is nearly eight times the size of Victoria, after all, while Brisbane is closer to Melbourne than Cairns.

Politics in the sunshine state is also very fragmented.

That's why we've embarked on a regional analysis of Queensland voting trends.

Here is the primary vote at Saturday's election when you divide the 93 seats into eight different regions. (If you'd like to scroll through it in more detail at your own pace, we have included a version at the bottom of this story.)

You can see that, while Labor might yet win a parliamentary majority, in two regions of the state they failed to win even 25 per cent of the primary vote. Meanwhile, One Nation might have polled 'only' 13.8 per cent state wide, but did nearly double that in some areas.

There were four new electorates and lots of boundary changes in this election, making individual seat swings hard to measure. But by taking a regional approach we can see the general trends across Queensland.

Labor looks likely to win office, despite losing primary votes in many areas.

But if Labor did poorly, the LNP did worse, losing one in five Brisbane residents who voted for them in 2015, while the swing was double-digits in Ipswich and North Queensland.

The majority of these votes seem to have flowed to One Nation and, to a lesser extent, the Greens. One Nation also seems to have absorbed a lot of the five per cent of people who voted for Clive Palmer's party in 2015.

A lot has been made of the fact One Nation flopped as it only picked up one seat, but it still obtained a considerable percentage of the primary vote for a minor party.

Ultimately, though, the primary vote only means so much, especially with compulsory preferential voting reintroduced at this election. One Nation did poorly on preferences, while the ALP's ability to secure a high percentage of Greens voters' second preferences is what helped them over the line in a number of seats.

At last count, the ALP had secured 43 per cent of the primary vote in Brisbane, but at least 82 per cent of the seats. Meanwhile, the LNP secured nearly 33 per cent of the Brisbane vote, but has just 13 per cent of the seats.

And it's Brisbane that appears to be making the difference. It is the only place the ALP has yet increased its number of sitting members, although there are still nine seats to call.