On the eve of Queensland’s election day, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson appeared on Channel Seven’s Sunrise program.

She was given two minutes to make her final pitch to voters, just like Labor premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Liberal National party leader Tim Nicholls before her.

“We can reduce the electricity prices by 20%, we can do it straightaway,” Hanson said on Friday. “We want to provide water security throughout the state. There is a lot of things.”

That was it. She had scant time to explain how her party could realistically make electricity prices drop 20% overnight.

But she had plenty of opportunities during the weeks-long election campaign, and she struggled to provide details.

Guardian Australia asked some economists to look at One Nation’s policies, based on the information the party has released to the public, to see what impact they may have on Queensland’s economy.

Independent economist Saul Eslake said it wasn’t possible to subject them to rigorous analysis because there was very little information available.

“I started out attempting to be serious about the [party’s] economic development policy, but once I got past there, the more policies I looked at, the harder it was to take them seriously,” he said in an email.

“There’s very little detail – except for the policy on ‘firearms and gun control’, the ‘zero tolerance for crocodiles’ policy, and ‘Agenda 21’ which has a lot of ‘detail’, nearly all of it entirely spurious,” he said.

“There are no costings, and in most cases no timelines.”

David Richardson, a senior research fellow at the Australia Institute, a progressive thinktank, found the same thing when he attempted some private analysis of the party’s policies.

He said One Nation’s policy platform for the election, Queensland: It’s in your hands, was “very vague” on detail, but enough information was provided about its payroll tax policy to try to estimate its effect.

According to Richardson, the payroll tax policy will be “almost completely ineffective”.

One Nation says it would like to introduce a five-year moratorium on payroll tax for all new, innovative, start-up businesses in Queensland that employ up to 40 people, that will be established after 2017.

To be eligible, businesses must be able to demonstrate that they are new to Queensland and will not use the tax break to cannibalise existing businesses or markets.

“An important consideration is how that proposal would fit in with the present policy which imposes a payroll tax of 4.75% of a business’s wages bill above $1.1m,” Richardson says.

“Hence, with respect to new businesses with wages bills below $1.1m the policy is going to have no impact, positive or otherwise.

“The $1.1m wages bill threshold is consistent with a threshold of about 28 employee full-time equivalents on the minimum wage, or about twelve and a half full-time equivalent employees on average weekly earnings.

“We do not have figures at a state level for the number of new businesses by number of employees but those figures are available for Australia as a whole and there is no reason to think Queensland would be much different from the rest of Australia.

“It would be surprising if the One Nation payroll policy were to affect more than 1% of new businesses.

“Superficially, a policy to exempt new businesses up to 40 employees sounds appealing but in the light of the above facts the policy would be almost completely ineffective,” he told Guardian Australia.

John Quiggin, University of Queensland school of economics professor, said it was difficult to glean detail from One Nation’s website on substantial federal economic polices, because some of the links were dead (see: economics and tax policy, employment, and manufacturing).

When Hanson announced in February that she would campaign for a flat-rate 2% turnover tax nationally, Quiggin warned it destroy small business and result in a collapse in government revenue.

The Australia Institute warned the tax would produce a “catastrophic reduction” in government revenue worth $232bn, or 13.3% of GDP, with $116.5bn to be cut from commonwealth funding to the states, including Queensland.

On Thursday, two days before election day, Queensland One Nation leader Steve Dickson announced a six-point plan which he said would save Queensland $10bn.

But his office would not release costings to show how those savings could be made.

The plan includes redirecting the $5.4bn in funding for Brisbane’s Cross River Rail, of which only $2.7bn has been allocated in the budget, and $1bn from the renewable energy target funding, the majority of which comes from federal funds.

Dickson also committed to using the dividends from state-owned power assets to cut power prices by 20%, as well as build a coal-fired power station in the state’s north. He has not said how One Nation would pay for the new asset.

One Nation also says it would like to decentralise government department head offices to regional cities, over a ten year period, to eventually adopt a regional model of government.

Eslake told Guardian Australia there was no persuasive evidence that decentralisation initiatives worked, or represented value for taxpayers’ money.

“The Grattan Institute did a very good report on this six years ago and they still hold that view,” Eslake said.

“It’s just another name for pork-barrelling. A ‘regional model of government’ sounds like another layer of bureaucracy, unless One Nation are proposing to abolish local councils, or the state government?,” he said.