Super Saturday: Labor's by-election wins leave Turnbull Government with questions to answer

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The parliamentary status quo has been maintained, but the ramifications are significant.

Labor holding on to the seats of Longman and Braddon will put paid to the pressure that has been rumbling around Bill Shorten's leadership.

It was not a good night for Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese, but it was a much better night for former prime minister Tony Abbott.

The argument — put within the ALP itself — that if Labor could not hold Longman, it would lose the federal election, has been answered.

And that leaves big questions for the LNP and the Turnbull Government over their hold on a swag of marginal seats throughout Queensland.

While the swings were not enormous in historic terms for by-elections, the results will put a stop to the political consolidation that the Prime Minister has finally been achieving in the past few months.

And the Government will certainly not be able to claim the results as an endorsement of its company tax cuts strategy.

The LNP has three Queensland seats on margins of 1 per cent or less — Capricornia, Forde, and Flynn — and a further four seats on slim margins — Petrie (1.6 per cent), Dickson (2 per cent), Dawson (3.3 per cent) and Bonner (3.4 per cent).

Dickson is the seat of LNP powerbroker and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton. It shares a boundary with Longman.

There will be renewed focus both on Malcolm Turnbull's lack of appeal in the north, and on the LNP's electioneering abilities.

Drilling down into the numbers from Tasmania and Queensland produces very different pictures of the mood of the nation.

The complexity of the trends in Longman was always going to make it the most fascinating seat to watch on the night.

Historically one of One Nation's strongest areas, the vote for Pauline Hanson's party was always going to be high. A primary vote of 15 per cent after a swing of 5.9 per cent confirmed that expectation.

But the unexpected trends in Longman were a big collapse in the LNP primary vote, which plunged 10 per cent, and the fact that Labor's primary vote was over 40 per cent — much stronger than even the ALP had been expecting.

There were conflicting reports on Saturday night about the flow of One Nation preferences, ranging from Labor picking up an unexpected 40 per cent to the LNP getting up to 80 per cent.

It seemed to be settling at a split of around 35 per cent to 65 per cent in favour of the LNP.

Sorry, this video has expired Video: Trevor Ruthenberg concedes defeat in Longman (ABC News)

The fact that primary vote trends were so different in Braddon is noteworthy.

While Labor's primary vote rose 4.5 per cent in Longman, it fell 4 per cent in Braddon.

However, the Liberal Party was able to contain the swing against the Government to 2.3 per cent, despite the fact that its candidate Brett Whiteley was not universally popular.

The primary vote of the two major parties was reasonably even — 39 per cent for the Liberal Party compared to 37 per cent for Labor — compared to the yawning gap of 42 per cent to 26 per cent in Longman.

Independent fisherman Craig Garland seems to have taken roughly equal numbers of votes from the two major parties, though his preferences were strongly favouring Labor.

The cause of all the by-elections, citizenship itself — as was the case in Bennelong and New England — was not an issue.

The different swings in Longman and Braddon do not suggest there is a coherent view of the Government and the Opposition around the country.

But this Super Saturday — in which the numbers didn't change — has changed the momentum in federal politics.

Topics: federal-government, government-and-politics, elections, political-parties, alp, liberals, liberal-national-party, australia, wa, tas, sa, qld