Morgan face-to-face: 59-41 to Coalition; Seat of the week: Bass

Morgan’s face-to-face polling from last weekend, which has been published a day earlier than usual, shows Labor up slightly off a record low the week before, with their primary vote up a point to 30.5%. The Coalition is also up slightly, by half a point to 46%, with the Greens steady on 12%. A narrowing in the headline respondent-allocated two-party figure, from 60.5-39.5 to 59-41, is mostly down to a slight increase in the preference flow to Labor. With regard to the ongoing disparity between this result and the two-party figure derived from preference flows at the last election, which is steady at 55.5-44.5, Morgan has taken to adding the following footnote: “An increasing proportion of Greens voters are indicating a preference for the L-NP ahead of the ALP. At the 2010 Federal Election only 20% of Greens voters preferenced the L-NP, but recent Morgan Polls have this figure closer to 40%”.

The latest instalment of Seat of the Week, like the last two, is brought to you by the letter B.

Seat of the week: Bass

Still famous for the by-election that provided a catalyst for the Coalition’s decision to block supply in 1975, Bass has been an arm wrestle between Labor and Liberal ever since, changing hands at five out of the six elections between 1993 and 2007. The electorate has been little changed since it was created with the state’s division into five single-member electorates in 1903, at all times covering Launceston and the state’s north-eastern corner. Launceston accounts for slightly less than three-quarters of its voters, and has been trending to Labor over the past two elections: between 2004 and 2010, Labor’s two-party vote in Launceston progressed from 47.6% to 58.3%, compared with 46.4% to 54.0% in the remainder of the electorate.

Labor first won Bass when it secured its first ever parliamentary majority at the 1910 election, and lost it six years later when its member Jens Jensen followed Billy Hughes into the Nationalist Party. Jensen retained the seat as a Nationalist at the 1917 election, and it remained with the party after he lost its endorsement in 1919. Labor’s next win came with the election of Jim Scullin’s government in 1929, but it was again lost to a party split when Allan Guy followed Joseph Lyons into the United Australia Party in 1931. Guy was re-elected as the UAP candidate at that year’s election, before being unseated by Labor’s Claude Barnard in 1934.

The next change came when Liberal candidate Bruce Kekwick defeated Barnard when the Menzies government came to power in 1949. The seat returned to the Barnard family fold in 1954 when Kekwick was defeated by Claude’s son Lance, who went on to serve as deputy prime minister in the Whitlam government from 1972 to 1974. The famed 1975 by-election followed Barnard’s mid-term resignation, ostensibly on grounds of ill health, but following a year after he lost the deputy leadership to Jim Cairns. A plunge in the Labor primary vote from 54.0% to 36.5% delivered the seat to Liberal candidate Kevin Newman (the late father of Campbell Newman and husband of Howard government minister Senator Jocelyn Newman), encouraging the Coalition to pursue an early election at all costs.

Bass remained in the Liberal fold for 18 years, with Tasmania bucking the national trend during the Hawke years in the wake of the Franklin dam controversy. Kevin Newman was succeeded in 1990 by Warwick Smith, whose promising career progress was twice stymied by the vagaries of electoral fortune. In 1993 he lost to Labor’s Sylvia Smith by just 40 votes, part of a statewide swing that gave the first indication that election night that things were not going according to script. Warwick Smith recovered the seat in 1996 and served as Family Services Minister in the first term of the Howard government, before the 1998 election produced a second GST backlash and another painfully narrow defeat, this time by 78 votes at the hands of Michelle O’Byrne, a 30-year-old official with the Miscellaneous Workers Union.

O’Byrne held the seat until 2004, when Mark Latham’s restrictive policy on old-growth logging provoked the wrath of Tasmanian unions and Labor politicians, and resulted in John Howard receiving a hero’s reception from timber workers in Launceston in the final week of the campaign. Michael Ferguson gained the seat for the Liberals with a 4.5% swing, but he was defeated after a single term by a 3.6% swing in 2007, and has since pursued a career in state politics. The successful Labor candidate, Jodie Campbell, would likewise serve only one term, announcing she would not stand for re-election as reports emerged her preselection was under threat. Campbell was succeeded by Geoff Lyons, a staffer to Right faction Senator Helen Polley and former manager at Launceston General Hospital. Lyons’ endorsement was determined by the intervention of the party’s national executive, an arrangement which had reportedly been smoothed by the Left not contesting the preselection for Denison. He performed strongly at the election, consolidating Labor’s hold on the seat with a 5.7% swing.

The Liberal candidate at the next election will be Brigadier Andrew Nikolic, whose military service has included postings in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has more recently worked with the Defence Department’s international policy division. Nikolic had been rated a favourite for preselection in 2010, but he withdrew citing work and family reasons. He made the news in May 2012 when he threatened to send “formal letters of complaint” to the employers of those responsible for a satirical blog post about him, and of anyone who had “liked” the post on Facebook.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,598 comments on “Morgan face-to-face: 59-41 to Coalition; Seat of the week: Bass”

Comments Page 26 of 32
1 … 25 26 27 … 32

  4. [There is just no accounting for taste, is there? ]

    Tree Surgeon, it’s time you go Tweeting and let me rip you apart & whip you 😉 in public

  5. Well Dio the most trusted ALP member just made the Liberals a whole lot less trustworthy if reaction to QandA is anything to go by.

  7. Puts the amount into perspective somewhat, doesn’t it?

    Bob Ellis offers to repay HSU members $500k allegedly misused by MP Craig Thomson
    [LABOR figure Bob Ellis has offered to repay members of the embattled Health Services Union the $500,000 allegedly misused by Independent MP Craig Thomson.

    Mr Ellis has posted the offer on his blog arguing that there are 85,000 HSU members, equating to a refund of $6 each based on the findings against Mr Thomson in the recent Fair Work Australia investigation.

    “Since the maximum amount of HSU funds Craig might have spent dodgily was half a million dollars, and since there are eighty-five thousand members of the union, and since the money he cost each member, if he did it, was six dollars, no more than six dollars, six dollars only, I will make the following offer,” Mr Ellis wrote.]

  8. Good grief!!

    [Stephen Koukoulas @TheKouk 6m
    Catching up on mkts: Wowowowow… a 50 ciut is about 50% priced in: Looking at sub 2.5% cash rate by year end! This is serious.]

  9. Interesting topic boer, searches a bunch of the’11 singularity summit recently on youtube. I think the 29 prediction he makes is too optimistic, but only because he defines it as “human-like” intelligence. Computer intelligence will clearly outpace human function soon, if it hasn’t already, but not as general purpose, nor as a conscious entity.

    Unless our genetic algorithms get suddenly better, and it creates itself. Could happen.

    Watch his (kurzweil) talk at singularity summit. Watson was a watershed moment.

  12. vic, my reaction exactly

    @TheKouk hmmmm, 2.5%, the BISONs would go berserk, so would PvO. To think Howard’s crowning was 22%

  15. leone@1239,

    Just saw this on Twitter –

    Christopher Pyne has a poll on his website asking who will lead Labor to the next election. Julia Gillard isn’t on his list.

    I would have thought it more appropriate for Mr Pyne to have a poll asking who will be Manager of Opposition Business at the next election? 😀

  17. SZ

    I was particularly interested in his notion that the advanced intelligence stuff, via nanotechnology, will result in solar being very cheap. Extrapolating from that, solar being much cheaper than coal/oil will therefore address AGW.

    Problem solved.

    I assume, without knowing very much about it, that this is an extreme postulation of the view that technology will stop AGW, or fix it.

  18. Flipper Boy

    [Tree Surgeon, it’s time you go Tweeting and let me rip you apart & whip you 😉 in public]

    I’m seriously thinking of joining twitter just so I can block and unfollow you. 👿

  19. There have been two views about the official interest rate bisons. One is that they go down because the economy is heading kaka-wards. The other is that they are going lower because the Government is lowering its share of the cake.

    Right now, I reckon that the kaka party are probably closer to the mark. It is implicit in Mr Koukoulis’ remark that, ‘…this is serious.’

  22. OS
    *laughs*
    His point, I imagine, was that to diss the crocodile tears from the Liberals about the tremendously nasty impact Mr T. has had on the long-suffering poor of the HSU membership.

  25. Europe looks like it really is ushering in GFC Mark II.
    It was no mistake of PM David Cameron that he talked of a decade long depression.

  26. Boerwar,
    My son wants to study Neuroscience at Sydney University next year exactly for the reason he is fascinated by the Eternal Life movement and people such as Mr Kurzweil.
    Sigh. Kids. 🙂

    Here’s a Guardian interview with Mr Kurzweil about Climate Change if you’re interested:
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/21/ray-kurzweill-climate-change?CMP=twt_gu

    I also found a mention of him here as well though:
    http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Crank

  27. [Christopher Pyne has a poll on his website asking who will lead Labor to the next election. Julia Gillard isn’t on his list.]

    Wow. They really ARE threatened by her, aren’t they?

    Poor wittle boys scared of the big, stwong lady 😉

  29. He talks a lot about the exponential growth of IT stuff, like moore’s law for processors. In his talk he shows that solar installation is following the same path, doubling capacity every two years. In 6 more doublings solar would supply 100%, so twelve years.

    The key to the exponential growth theory is that it ignores technology. Computers have followed moore’s law since vacuum tubes, and didn’t skip a beat going to transistors or integrated circuits. So while solar will change, according to kurzweil, the trend should stay stable.

    Doubt it myself, because it ignores battery tech not following the same trajectory. Still, I really enjoy hopeful futurists like him.

  30. Gauss

    [Me thinks your Bisons are starting to look very mangy.]
    The mangiest BISON will beat the Coalition’s WARTHOGS everytime.

  32. [There have been two views about the official interest rate bisons. One is that they go down because the economy is heading kaka-wards. ]

    BW, Singapore has lived with 0.5% to 1% interest rate for almost 10 years now. So far, so good.

  34. [I agree. It is serious. The situation oversea appears to be deteriorating]

    The worse it gets in Europe, the better it will be for Australia. We are the Ark.

  35. Oops! Have just received a lecture from #1 Son that Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity Movement are a bunch of wangkers and his theory of Transhumanism is something my son has moved on from because he no longer believes that we should live forever. It is selfish.

    Ah. Kids. 🙂

  37. Bushfire Bill

    [The worse it gets in Europe, the better it will be for Australia. We are the Ark.]

    What type of parallel universe do you live in?

  39. Oh cheer up, Hanrahan.

    If we’re all rooooooooooooooned you will have the pleasure of saying, “Told you so.”

  40. [The worse it gets in Europe, the better it will be for Australia. We are the Ark]

    relax. by next year, the outputs from BRIICs etc will surpass the old G7. Where you rather be then? here, in Osstrayria

  42. Cat, your son is on a good path there. Neuroscience is booming. Don’t sigh, even done of the more wacky claims of the eternal life crowd as you call them are not so far fetched.

    The world is gonna change a huge amount the next 50 years. How comfortable are you all gonna be with human/machine interfaces and human enhancement tech becoming widespread?

    There are already teams installing chips in peoples heads today to control robotic limbs. Even college kids are implanting magnets in their fingertips, granting a new magnetic sense. They can feel magnetic fields. The world is changing!

  46. The ink on the 2012-2013 budget has hardly dried and already the bottom line forecast surplus is under seige.

    But then again who believes in fairies in the bottom of the garden?

  47. China will not get below 7.5%- 8% GDP ( on a trend basis ) for one simple reason.

    Millions of rural workers rely on factory and construction jobs to secure income. Take that away and all hell would break loose.

    Unlike other countries China does not have the luxury of elections every three years to show their anger. The only option ? Social unrest and riots.

    China will not allow this to happen.

  48. Bludgers

    After over 25 years of using a computer keyboard while drinking coffee, I have finally managed to combine the two, just sufficiently to knock out the bottom row of letters.

    Does resuscitation work, or is it a myth? I have even read on the web that you can put a keyboard in the dishwasher 😮

  50. lizzie

    Depends on the keyboard. Unless you are getting an Apple one for about $30 upwards its easier to get a new one. The ten dollar ones do just as good a job in most cases. Except for Apple layout.

Comments Page 26 of 32
1 … 25 26 27 … 32

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *