helpful suggestions on an earlier draft.

The 2004 state election in Queensland makes a fascinating study of electoral politics — not because of the eventual outcome (an expected victory for the Labor government headed by Premier Peter Beattie) but for the way the result was achieved. The 2004 election campaign broke the conventional rules of modern party campaigning. It was a campaign of structured under-achievement, of deliberate down-playing and minimalist engagement. Public interest in the campaign never lifted above rock bottom. The main protagonists, sensing that voters might punish anyone talking ‘serious policy ’ or ‘hard-nosed politics ’ consciously toned down their performance and restricted their exposure. At the state level, they consciously tried not to disseminate policy, inform the electorate, push propaganda, or launch into adversarial commentaries on their opponents. Queensland may have pioneered the art of ‘non-campaigning ’ as an alternative model to the more recent media-driven techniques of campaigning. Queensland’s 2004 election was a ‘non-campaign ’ but not because the campaign was uninteresting, did not excite voters, turned off the media or bored many of the key protagonists. Rather, it was a ‘non-campaign ’ because the main political actors chose this strategy as a way of avoiding campaigning — at least in the state-wide context and at the leadership level. The term ‘non-campaigning ’ is used here to denote intentional inactivity during the formal campaign period, to avoid the usual generation of interest in issues, to reduce the risk of inciting a protest vote, and to obviate the need to outline extensive election commitments. ‘Non-campaigning’, we argue, was a deliberate decision not to campaign in the lead-up to the election, and interestingly all the major political parties complied with this strategy for their own different reasons