Month: September 2007

Roy Morgan has broken its usual pattern by publishing a second face-to-face survey in successive weeks, from a sample of 915 voters. As the headline makes clear, it’s another disaster for the Coalition: Labor’s two-party lead has blown out to 60-40 from a relatively mild 54.5-45.5 last time. Also up by 5.5 per cent is the number of people expecting Labor to win, from 55 per cent to 60.5 per cent; the number expecting a Coalition win is down from 31.5 per cent 26.5 per cent. Labor’s primary vote is up from 46 per cent to 49 per cent, while the Coalition has plunged from 41 per cent to 34.5 per cent, returning it to the previous lows of March and April.

UPDATE: For what it’s worth, Morgan also has Senate voting intention figures aggregated from the past two months’ polling. As usual, these overstate the likely combined minor party vote, particularly for the Democrats.

Wakefield has existed as a seat since South Australia was first divided into electorates in 1903, but was changed almost beyond recognition when the state’s representation was cut from 12 seats to 11 in 2004. It now covers the outer northern Adelaide industrial centre of Elizabeth (formerly the basis of abolished Bonython), the satellite town of Gawler, the Clare Valley wine-growing district and a stretch of Gulf St Vincent coast from Two Wells north to Port Wakefield. Elizabeth marks the first incursion into Adelaide of a seat that traditionally covered the Murray Valley and the Yorke Peninsula, which were respectively transferred to Barker and Grey. My 2004 booth result maps for Crikey paint a clear picture of support for Labor in Elizabeth and Liberal in Clare and the rural areas, along with a less pronounced leaning to the Liberals in Gawler.

Labor’s overwhelming dominance in low-income Elizabeth gave the redrawn electorate a notional Labor margin of 1.5 per cent, compared with a 14.7 per cent Liberal margin from the 2001 election. Wakefield had only previously been won by Labor in 1938 and 1943, and by the Country Party in 1928. It was otherwise held by the prevailing conservative party of the time: the early Liberal Party, the Nationalists, the United Australia Party and the modern Liberal Party. Neil Andrew became member in 1983, serving as Speaker from 1998 until his seat was effectively pulled from under him in 2004. After considering the obvious option of challenging Patrick Secker for preselection in Barker, Andrew instead chose to retire. Labor’s candidate in 2004 was the homeless member for abolished Bonython, Martyn Evans. Evans began his parliamentary career as an independent, winning the state seat of Elizabeth at a 1984 by-election after contentiously failing to win Labor preselection. He rejoined the party in 1993 to serve as Health Minister in Lynn Arnold’s minority government, and replaced the retiring Neal Blewett as member for Bonython at a by-election in 1994.

The job security entailed in this offer was shown to be deceptive by the 2004 redistribution and the following 2.2 per cent swing to the Liberals. This was driven by a Labor slump in Elizabeth which outweighed small positive swings in more affluent rural areas, delivering a narrow 1010-vote victory to hand-picked Liberal candidate David Fawcett (left). Fawcett had previously been an army officer for more than 22 years, most recently serving as commanding officer at the RAAF’s research and development unit. In February 2006, The Australian’s Matt Price wrote a profile on Fawcett which is not holding up too well 18 months on: it speaks of the likely re-election of a highly credentialled member who had persuaded locals to preselect him three months after he joined the party on a whim. This was compared favourably with Labor’s “nasty, narrow, cloistered, limiting, repulsive, infested, depressing and ultimately suffocating union gene pool”, then believed to be condemning it to certain defeat. More recently, the Sunday Mail’s Rex Jory wrote on August 19 of talk in Liberal circles that Fawcett might be enlisted as a future state party leader after his likely defeat in Wakefield. It was suggested he might attempt to recover the Gawler-based seat of Light, lost to Labor’s Tony Piccolo last year, or succeed Ivan Venning in the safe seat of Schubert in the Barossa Valley.

Labor’s candidate is former state party president Nick Champion (right), a one-time employee of the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association and a protégé of its powerful state boss Don Farrell (who will head Labor’s South Australian Senate ticket). Champion’s preselection does not appear to have faced any serious opposition. He has recently been preparing for his presumed future career with a position as adviser to the state Industrial Relations Minister, Right faction colleague Michael Wright.

NOTE: Please keep comments on this thread on-topic.

Michelle Grattan:

PRIME Minister John Howard is under pressure to call the federal election quickly, after the release of boom economic growth figures that threaten to push interest rates higher by November. Despite another horrendous opinion poll this week showing a potential election wipe-out, Mr Howard yesterday appeared to hint he would go to the polls sooner rather than later. Political pressure on him to do so has been intensified by the latest GDP figures, which show the Australian economy has been growing at its fastest annual pace for three years … With an increased prospect of an interest rate rise in November, many in the Government – which has staked its re-election hopes on its ability to sell its economic credentials – will be wanting the election before the inflation figures come out on October 24, or at least before the Reserve Bank board meeting to be held in early November. That would mean a polling day of October 20 or 27. An October 20 poll would have to be called in about 10 days.

Dennis Atkins:

THE Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee was in Cairns yesterday conducting its inquiry into the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Democratic Plebiscites) Bill 2007. This dry piece of parliamentary advice masks an intensely political exercise and explains why John Howard will not call an election the moment his APEC fiesta shuts down next Sunday. The legislation is the stunt law that Howard pulled out of his box of tricks to drive a wedge between Labor leader Kevin Rudd and his fraternal Queensland Premier Peter Beattie … The committee reports on Friday and the Senate will debate the law next Tuesday, when it’s expected to be passed, in time for plebiscites on Beattie’s amalgamations likely on October 20.

Gerard McManus:

THERE was speculation last night that Prime Minister John Howard could delay calling the federal election until November or even as late as early December. Yesterday, Mr Howard gave his strongest hint yet that the election date would not be held in October after declaring that the federal takeover of the Devonport Mersey Hospital would not occur until November 1. Mr Howard said the Tasmanian Labor Government had agreed to the terms of the handover of the hospital in the state’s north and that the documents would be signed between the two governments on that date. Senior Liberal insiders said it would be wrong to assume too much from the announcement, but said a later election was now a genuine possibility. “Nobody knows the date except the Prime Minister, but you would have to think a later election is now a good chance,” a senior government figure said.

Bryan Palmer:

A Canberra insider told me today with absolute certainty that the election would be announced on 13 September. I was told that Howard does not believe he can cut through the political disengagement that has grown up with the last 8 months of pseudo-campaigning. Howard needs a circuit-breaker. In whispered tones, it was also suggested that Howard would rather go to the polls now than face a leadership challenge from Costello, Abbott or Downer – apparently an almost certainty if the Coalition’s poor showing in the opinion polls continues for much longer. According to my source, there would be a longish seven week campaign designed to test Kevin Rudd in the reality of campaign politics (and hopefully expose some Rudd flaws and gaffes). The election would be on 3 November 2007. Living in Canberra, I often hear these (so called) insider rumours. Rarely do they prove true.

Crikey:

Tips and rumours: The election date will be Nov 3. This is based upon the bookings made with Australia Post for mass mailots by the coalition – including in Bennelong. The Coalition recently cancelled their November mailouts and have maintained October ones.

Stuck for a title for a new open thread, I thought I’d revive a beloved old brand name (royalties still owing to Adam Carr). You might like to discuss:

• The Australian statsmeister George Megalogenis‘s rundown on Mal Brough’s semi-rural Queensland seat of Longman. Megalogenis also elaborates upon his earlier identification of single mothers as an important demographic. The top 30 list for this group includes Wakefield (SA, Liberal 0.7%), Cowper (NSW, Nationals 6.5%), Lindsay (NSW, Liberal 2.9%), Dobell (NSW, Liberal 4.8%), Solomon (NT, CLP 2.9%), Page (NSW, Nationals 5.5%), Robertson (NSW, Liberal 6.9%), Kingston (SA, Liberal 0.1%) and Bass (Tas, Liberal 2.7%). Well down the order are Bennelong (number 119) and Wentworth (number 139).

• Bowman MP Andrew Laming and Moreton MP Gary Hardgrave getting tetchy about the six months taken by the Australian Federal Police and Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to resolve whether charges will be laid against them over the “printgate” affair (also of interest to Bonner MP Ross Vasta). The Courier-Mail ran an editorial criticising the AFP’s tardiness on this front way back on June 19.

• Still in Queensland, Possum Comitatus’s adventurous analysis of the safe Liberal (or is it?) Gold Coast seat of McPherson.

Professor David Flint, national convenor of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy and former chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority, offered an eyebrow-raising assessment of the state of Australian democracy in yesterday’s subscriber-only Crikey email. Things started innocuously enough, with Flint making the perfectly sound argument that too much is read into opinion polls in this country (see below). He then made a strange insinuation that Galaxy had slanted its recent Bennelong poll in favour of Labor, but I was willing to let that one go. Then came this line of inquiry:

And how do the pollsters measure the impact of fraudulent voting? Redesigned late last century allegedly to “make voting easier”, the system is still wide open to fraud, even if closing the polls early will reduce fraudulent registrations.

Got that everybody? In John Howard’s Australia, electoral fraud is so out of hand it has a measurable impact on the parties’ shares of the aggregate national vote. This problem is on a scale sufficient to raise questions about opinion poll methodology, so we’re not just talking preselection shenanigans of the kind unearthed by the Shepherdson inquiry. On even the most conservative of interpretations, Flint must mean that well over 100,000 votes are being rorted at each election in favour of one party over the other. None of this has raised a peep from the Australian Electoral Commission, the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters or the Court of Disputed Returns – not to mention the parties themselves, one of which has a right to feel greatly aggrieved. Which is the culprit, one wonders, and which the victim? Well, the whole point of Flint’s article is that there is reason to think Labor will not do as well at the election as the polls suggest. So obviously this renowned crusader for the conservative cause has his finger pointed firmly at the Coalition.

I’m hearing it, but not quite yet believing it – Labor’s Newspoll lead has apparently widened to a breathtaking 59-41 (from 55-45 last time). Details to follow as they come to hand.

UPDATE: Kevin Rudd’s lead as preferred prime minister has increased from 46-39 to 48-37.

UPDATE 2: Comments thread rumours tell of a Labor primary vote of 51 per cent, against 37 per cent for the Coalition.

‘Twas the night before Newspoll, and a new open thread was stirring.

Based around Penrith 50 kilometres west of Sydney, Lindsay was created with the expansion of parliament in 1984 to accommodate growth in the city’s outer west. It currently extends into conservative semi-rural territory to the north (Castlereagh and Llandilo) and south (Mulgoa and Orchard Hills), but most of the voters come from an urban concentration around Penrith. This area is stronger for the Liberals in the south and west (Glenmore Park and Emu Plains respectively) and for Labor in the east (Werrington). Before Lindsay was created, Penrith had shifted from Macquarie to Mitchell to Chifley, the general area becoming progressively stronger for Labor as it became more urbanised after the war. Lindsay had a notional Labor margin of 12.3 per cent when it was created, and the area remains a happy hunting ground for the party at state level: the corresponding seats are held by margins of 7.0 per cent (Londonderry), 9.2 per cent (Penrith) and 10.9 per cent (Mulgoa). My 2004 election booth result and swing maps for the electorate can be viewed at Crikey.

Labor’s Ross Free held Lindsay by margins of around 10 per cent throughout the Hawke-Keating years, having previously been member for Macquarie from 1980. He was most unpleasantly surprised to find himself voted out in 1996, following an epochal 11.9 per cent swing to Liberal candidate Jackie Kelly. Free was able to secure a re-match because Kelly, who did not expect to win, had failed to get her affairs in order before nominating (she was still serving as an RAAF officer, an “office for profit under the Crown”). Voters dragged back to the polls on a technicality rewarded Free with a further 6.8 per cent drop in the primary vote, and Kelly picked up another 5.0 per cent on two-party preferred. The combined 16.9 per cent swing to the Liberals meant the electorate’s demographic profile came to be seen as typifying John Howard’s constituency – high numbers of skilled workers on good incomes, low levels of tertiary education and a distinctly less multicultural flavour than suburbs closer to the city. Kelly was able to limit the Labor swing in 1998 to 0.3 per cent, one of a number of decisive marginal seat outcomes that ensured the return of the Howard government from a minority of the two-party vote. This secured Kelly’s status as a prime ministerial favourite, helping her win promotion to the position of Sport and Tourism Minister. Many thought this to be beyond her competence, and she did not return to the ministry after leaving it while pregnant immediately after the 2001 election. She nonetheless continued to perform well electorally, picking up a 2.4 per cent swing in 2001 and almost holding even in 2004.

Two events during the current term have given good cause to think that Lindsay might finally return to Labor at the coming election. The first was the unveiling of new electoral boundaries last July, which added Labor-voting St Marys, Oxley Park and Colyton in the east from Chifley, and transferred Liberal-leaning Glenbrook in the Blue Mountains foothills to Macquarie in the west. These changes cut the Liberal margin from 5.3 per cent to 2.9 per cent. The second came in May when Kelly announced her intention to retire, much to the Prime Minister’s dismay. Kelly immediately named Penrith councillor Mark Davies as her preferred successor, but he evidently found little support from the party. The Prime Minister and the Right faction hoped to enlist Penrith Panthers recruitment manager Peter Mulholland, but their approach was declined. The nomination instead went to Kelly’s electorate officer Karen Chijoff (right), who picked up a 6 per cent swing as candidate for Mulgoa at the March state election.

Labor’s candidate for the third successive election is David Bradbury (left), Blake Dawson Waldron lawyer, Penrith councillor and former mayor, who for all his campaign experience is still only 31. Bradbury was installed as candidate by the national executive using the power the national conference granted it in April to determine preselections in sensitive seats. This displeased the National Union of Workers, said by a number of sources to have been marshalling forces for union official Mark Ptolemy – although Brad Norington of The Australian reported in May that it was in fact backing Ptolemy’s fiancee, 23-year-old school teacher May Hayek. Ptolemy was Labor’s candidate for Macquarie in 2004, and turned his attention to Lindsay when it became clear the Macquarie nomination would go to Bob Debus. Norington reported the conflict in terms of a split in the Right, with Bradbury having “historical links” to the Transport Workers Union.