He is also predicting that Labor's deputy premier Jackie Trad will lose her seat of South Brisbane to Greens candidate Amy McMahon, despite party sources calmly saying the ALP will win on Green preferences.

Speaking on Wednesday night, Professor Wanna told Fairfax Media Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was now "sandbagging" seats Labor needs to hold, not trying to win extra Labor seats.

Professor Wanna said One Nation would not win Lockyer, or Buderim - now held by party leader Steve Dickson - but said it could finish second with more than 30 per cent of the vote in "six to eight seats" and win those seats with LNP preferences.

One Nation now has only one seat in Queensland Parliament - Mr Dickson's - and its base vote is low.

"I can guarantee she will probably win three: seats around Townsville - Mundingburra, Thuringowa, Burdekin - those sorts of places," he said, as he also nominated Maryborough and Logan.

"I think in some of the outer Brisbane seats and some of the seats in the mid-north, One Nation is a big chance.

"It's a different One Nation party to Pauline Hanson's fledgling party back in 1998, which was very anti-Asian, and Australians in general aren't anti-Asian. The party's now more protectionist."

Professor Wanna gave an example where many people in Mackay were "pissed off" to read about 3000 empty homes as the boom fades after the mining boom.

"They don't think either major party is listening to them," he said.

Professor Wanna said his reading was that One Nation was seen as "anti-establishment", which appealed to voters less "rusted-on" to the major parties and had more "resonance" in Queensland than elsewhere.

Fairfax Media has examined the voting trends for Queensland's major political parties since 1998, when One Nation last made an impact in the state political sphere.

Labor's first preference vote has dropped from 49 per cent in 2001 to 37.5 per cent in 2015.

Separately, the Liberal and National votes collapsed to the teens before the combined LNP was formed in July 2008, boosting the combined LNP vote to 41.6 per cent, to a high of 49.7 per cent under Campbell Newman's leadership, before voters turned on the former Brisbane lord mayor, with just 41.3 per cent in 2015.

Overall, it shows a redistribution of votes towards The Greens, rural parties and independents.

Professor Wanna said the biggest difference between Queensland 2017 and Queensland 1998, when One Nation won 11 seats with 23 per cent of the vote, was demographic.

"In the 1980s about 90 per cent of Queenslanders were born in Queensland, raised in Queensland and never left Queensland, and that is not true any more," he said.

"There is now a lot of people who have moved from interstate and there is a huge Chinese community and a huge Taiwanese community.

"There is a lot of people from New South Wales, a lot of people from Victoria, a lot of people from South Australia."

Professor Wanna said there were now 3.3 million people on electoral rolls, whereas in 1998 there was fewer than 2 million.

In 1998 One Nation won seats in north Queensland - Thuringowa, Mulgrave, Tablelands and Burdekin - mostly from the old National Party.

It won the Kingaroy-based seat of Baramaba, for almost four decades the virtual fiefdom of former premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

One Nation also won seats in Caboolture, in Hervey Bay, in Maryborough, Whitsunday and in Ipswich West and Lockyer, two seats around founder Pauline Hanson's home town of Ipswich.

Heather Hill from Ipswich, One Nation's Queensland leader in 1998, did not win the seat of Ipswich from Labor's David Hamill in 1998.

However, in 1999, she ran for the Senate, won more than 295,000 votes and was set to take her Senate spot before her British citizenship was confirmed and she lost her claim to political fame.

She now runs an aged care nursing consultancy from Toowong.

Other major changes in Queensland's political landscape include the 2008 merger of the former Liberal and National coalition parties to form the Liberal National Party.