"In our own post-election work, we found about 7 per cent of voters across these 30 seats that we were tracking said they would change their vote if they knew the current result was going to be the case," he said. "But of course you can't wind back the clock and we of course accept the verdict of the voters." The poll was revealed on the same day the LNP filed into the opposition side of the parliamentary chamber for the first time in three years, its majority - and former leader Campbell Newman, who returned to Brisbane from an overseas holidays just days before - no longer part of the proceedings. Mr Henderson told attendees of a panel discussion dissecting the January campaign and election result hosted by the Australasian Study of Parliament Group that the "anyone but the LNP" message helped change the course of the election. "While we were advocating a vote for the LNP, we had Labor, Greens, PUP, WWF, GetUp, the unions, all advocating the put the LNP last vote," he said.

"In effect it was the combined resources of up to six, seven different groups into one voice. "It was an effective move to corral what has previously been a splintering of the vote with optional preferential voting." For the first time since optional preferential voting was introduced in Queensland, the exhaustion rate of votes dropped. Paul Reynolds, an honorary research fellow at the Queensland Parliament said he had crunched the polling numbers and found that in most seats, the exhausted votes - where people just number their preferred candidate - were only between 40 and 20 per cent. That left a lot of votes in play. And it was the votes of constituents who didn't want Labor, but wanted former premier Campbell Newman to heed their message, which played the biggest role.

"Labor gained 78.8 per cent of Greens preferences in these seats [which were lost in 2012], the LNP 15 per cent," Dr Reynolds said. "For PUP preferences in these seats which Labor gained, 62.8 per cent went Labor, 30 per cent went to the LNP. "For all other voters, Labor got 54.5 per cent of other preferences, the LNP 30.6 per cent." Dr Reynolds labelled the preference distributions "extraordinary". State Labor campaign director Anthony Chisholm called it the "Newman effect".

"Those people who weren't voting for Labor but wanted to get rid of Campbell Newman or send Campbell Newman a message, they knew what they had to do," he said. The LNP is still sorting through the submissions into their review examining what went wrong during the campaign, but some former MPs believe they already have the answer. "You know that letter that was left in the desk of the Executive Building, that nasty letter? That was everything that was wrong with our government," one said. Loading "A lot of nice notes and small gifts were left by other staff, just nice little messages for those coming in, but then someone just had to go and spit all over that with that letter.

"And that just sums up everything that people hated about our government."