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 29 of 32
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  2. Anyone care to do an analysis of investment in war, global or civil (now, there’s a word!), against prosperity / impoverishment?

    Choose your own time lag.

  4. Rossmore

    [Any substance to claim that Lawler has been ‘stood down’ at FWA]

    It has been noted he is on” long leave”,Lol

  7. Puff – big hugs to you

    Schnappi – apparently some of the allegations against Thomson are ‘out of time’ which means they can’t be included in any proceedings.

    For Abbott to want this due process changed it means he will stoop to absolutely anything to get his own feet in the doors of Kirribilli. Don’t let’s pretend he will live in Canberra because we know that, just like Hyacinth, his wife will not move to the Lodge.

    Somebody has to put a stop to the nonsense this man speaks. He wants Ashby to be left alone and yet he is pushing Thomson to the absolute extreme. I despise Abbott and Kelty is wrong – he is not a good example of an Opposition. Kelty obviously does not follow politics much nowdays or he would never have made those comments about the media and the opposition.

  8. They have hides thicker than Jessie the Cow in the Liberal Party and they use them to deflect criticism of their actions towards the federal Labor government.

    I couldn’t believe my ears yesterday when I heard Chilla Porter’s son, Christian, WA Treasurer, say that the reason they have had to put up prices for electricity etc., is because the big, bad federal government has reduced their GST by ~$667 million! Of course nothing was said about the reason that GST to WA was reduced, our Horizontal Fiscal Equalisation policies, which see the wealthy States, such as WA, carry the less well-off, such as Tasmania, when times are tough. And vice versa. Which the Eastern States did when WA was on it’s uppers.

    Also, I fail to understand how, if things are so tough…and prices and charges have to be increased on the citizenry…how they can afford to have $4.5 Billion to sock away??? And, could they not have used some of that $4.5 Billion to amortise the amount they were putting up charges by???

    Instead, they would prefer to use the $4.5 Billion to create a Publically Funded sinecure for their mates to play around on the stockmarket, and generally fail, if Costello’s Future Fund is any guide.

    In fact, they remind me of nothing so much as those shonks that suck people in in Investment seminars to parting with their hard-earned life savings, and who don’t really give a flying fig about the destitution they impel them into as they rip them off.

    They’re good at selling the lies though.

  9. http://andrewelder.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/adultery-suffrage.html

    [18 May 2012
    Adultery suffrage

    I doubt that Australian conservatives have a more thoughtful commentator than Paula Matthewson. Certainly, there are other conservatives who wear their learning less lightly than she does (e.g. Christopher Pearson), or who are more bombastic (Bolt, Akerman), or simply nasty (Paul Sheehan, Miranda Devine), or who are just toe-ing the line (any Coalition MP). Unlike those people, in her articles for The Kings Tribune and her blog and elsewhere, you have to think about the issues that Matthewson raises. She cannot be lightly brushed aside as those others can. The fact that conservative publications don’t publish her is an indictment on them.

    She raises some good points in this article, but some of her assumptions about politicians, the media and voters simply cannot be sustained.]

  10. [Claiming the Australian government has a high level of debt is bullshit.]

    fredn, I may have jumped into a conversation at the wrong point. If so, sorry, I thought the conversation was about Greece, Italy, Spain or somewhere were austerity was a genuine philosophy.

    I don’t assert that the Australian Government has a high level of debt. I agree with your statement above.

    Private debt in Australia is another kettle of fish

    I do however assert that you can’t fix a debt problem by borrowing more money.

  11. Diogenes FYI

    FEDERAL COURT OF AUSTRALIA ACT 1976 – SECT 39
    Civil trials to be without jury

    In every suit in the Court, unless the Court or a Judge otherwise orders, the trial shall be by a Judge without a jury.

    As you can see, the judge can do what he wants as to jury or not.

  12. TLBD

    ]I despise Abbott and Kelty is wrong – he is not a good example of an Opposition. Kelty obviously does not follow politics much nowdays or he would never have made those comments about the media and the opposition.]

    Never heard all bills speech,but surely he meant abbott was a typical liberal scumbag.

  13. confessions @ 1403

    Victoria. The Hamer-Thompson administration was from 1972-1982, and was arguably – even by Don Dunstan’s standards – one of the most progressive state administrations of the 20th century.

    They were both truly admirable people – even John Howard said of Lindsay Thompson:

    [I can honestly say I never heard anyone say a nasty thing about Lindsay Thompson, and I can tell you that has to be a first in Australian politics.]

  14. I do however assert that you can’t fix a debt problem by borrowing more money.

    Government debt, you certainly can (Wayne didn’t sell his teeth to the tooth fairy). Private also, if you have the nous, but then you would not have been there in the first place.

  15. C@tmomma,

    [Of course nothing was said about the reason that GST to WA was reduced, our Horizontal Fiscal Equalisation policies, which see the wealthy States, such as WA, carry the less well-off, such as Tasmania, when times are tough. And vice versa. Which the Eastern States did when WA was on it’s uppers.]

    I wish that one or more of the economically-savvy PBers could chase up the figures for the number of DECADES that the eastern states supported WA – I’m too tired to go chasing that data right now.

  16. Schnappi,

    You may have erred in the identity of your interlocutor.

    Speaking of which, did anyone watch the final (2010 reprise) of Letters and Numbers? Wow, just wow!

  17. Can’t resist posting this piece by Kenneth Davidson, March 15, 2007 – hope it’s not too long!

    The key difference between the economic policies of the Howard-Costello Government and the Hawke-Keating government was the different attitude to foreign debt.

    Labor was prepared to engineer a recession in the late 1980s to slow the economy and slow the recently deregulated banks’ appetites for foreign debt so they could profit from financing an explosion in share and property values that the banks themselves largely engineered.

    Until the election of the Coalition Government in 1996, all Australian postwar governments were constrained by the balance of payments. The lessons of the 1890s land boom, and the excessive and wasteful state government borrowing during the 1920s and the resulting depressions when agricultural commodity prices fell were that the prime task of economic policy was to keep foreign debt at manageable levels.

    It was understood that when Australia’s export and import competing industries couldn’t generate or save the necessary foreign exchange to finance the debt, it was the government’s responsibility to apply the brakes to the domestic economy to curb imports even if that led to recession, lost jobs and the threat of electoral defeat.

    Thus Keating’s statement about the “‘recession Australia had to have”, which the electorate still remembers. He was saved in the 1993 election by the unpopularity of John Hewson’s Fightback! policy.

    Howard didn’t make the same mistake in 1996. He eschewed Fightback! and promised to make Australians “relaxed and comfortable”, while in the background his deputy, Peter Costello, ran the “debt truck” with a counter showing how much Australia’s foreign debt was growing each second to create the impression that the re-election of Keating would lead to another recession.

    At the time of the election, net foreign debt was $193 billion. The day after the election the debt truck was garaged, never to be seen again.

    Instead, the new Government found a $7 billion “Beasley black hole” in the budget that provided the excuse to make the swinging cutbacks in government spending that were promised originally in Fightback! Gutted was funding for government school education, workforce training and retraining programs, higher education, the CSIRO and the 140 per cent research and development allowance — in short, most of the human capital investment that could sustain new export and import competing industries that would stabilise Australia’s foreign debt.

    Since then, net foreign debt has grown 170 per cent to $520 billion and is continuing to grow by nearly $50 billion a year despite the biggest export commodity price boom since the Korean War. Now, more than half the build-up in debt each year is the interest on the existing debt. Until the 1980s, there were capital controls to ensure that foreign borrowings were used to finance direct investment, which, provided it generated a return in excess of the cost of borrowing, would not add to the foreign debt burden of the nation.

    Now, the lessons of the 1890s and 1920s have been lost. Most of the borrowings that aren’t used to pay the interest on the existing stock of borrowings have been used by the banks to finance the housing bubble. We are assured by authorities that the growth in household debt doesn’t matter because the debt burden has been reduced by low interest rates and rising house values.

    But the housing bubble will pop if interest rates and/or unemployment rise as a result of foreigners deciding to withdraw the foreign needle. Our future is no longer in our hands. In the past decade we have frittered away the savings generated by accumulated budget surpluses and asset sales.

    It is scandalous that Telstra has been sold off without a plan in place to roll out a first-world fibre-optic broadband network and that Costello can’t see the attack on the public interest generated by the private equity partners in the Qantas takeover, who will appropriate the $200 million a year in tax now paid by the airline to pay the expense on the $9 billion borrowings to finance the deal. The Government also sees nothing wrong with wasting $100 million subsidising an unproven process to “clean” brown coal to black coal standard, or in spending $6 billion on an interim fighter aircraft with dubious strategic value.

    The Government can’t see the economic opportunity offered by engaging industry in the new opportunities opened up by climate change. Instead, it wants to protect the coal industry (our biggest export earner), which is doomed in the long term unless the world is prepared to live with catastrophic climate change.

    In fact, the Howard Government is operating on autopilot in the hope that something will turn up to save the “lucky country” from a major accident that could rival the events of the 1890s and 1930s.

  21. IMOHO,

    I can’t help wondering whether Kenneth Davidson is the Cassandra of modern Australian economics.

    He always made sense to me, anyway.

  22. [Also, I fail to understand how, if things are so tough…and prices and charges have to be increased on the citizenry…how they can afford to have $4.5 Billion to sock away??? And, could they not have used some of that $4.5 Billion to amortise the amount they were putting up charges by???]

    ABsolutely! As an example, pensioner subsidies don’t increase, yet utilities charges continue to do so.

    I don’t know if Labor has on its agenda a promise to raise pensioner subsidies in line with increases to charges, but if they don’t they should.

  23. Thought this was apt to people talking about economies.

    [Schtang‏@Schtang

    So my friend said “you’d think ur in a depression” I said no, but we are in a Abbott Regression , a return to a less develop state]

  24. IMOHO,

    Nice one!

    The simple: when money is tight the government spends and vice versa, does not seem to be obvious to assorted economists.

    Any theory of economics that suggests that the polloi should tighten its collective belt to let greedy investors of past times of plenty recoup their losses ignores any concept of the common good.

  26. TBLD

    Any theory of economics that suggests that the polloi should tighten its collective belt to let greedy investors of past times of plenty recoup their losses ignores any concept of the common good.

    Well said!

  27. TLBD:

    [“Long leave” is a precursor to “gardening leave”, should the situation dictate.]

    Does “gardening leave” entail digging or manuring – or both?

    DG:

    [Followed then by “spending more time with the family”.]

    Ermmmm, which one?

    TLBD (again):

    [Too Loose Lautrec….]

    Sounds like a good time for a norgy…

  29. Ashby’s barrister: Stuart Wood SC
    Jackson’s barrister: Stuart Wood SC
    Victorian gov’s barrister in Victorian public sector enterprise agreement dispute before Fair Work Australia: Stuart Wood SC

    Wood’s views on Peter Reith in address to the HR Nicholls Society
    “And on any fair view, Peter Reith, stands head and shoulders above those who have gone before. He has been the best Labour/IR Minister of the last 50 years. We will miss him.”
    http://www.hrnicholls.com.au/archives/vol23/vol23-4.php

    He also represented Patrick’s in the MUA waterfront dispute.

    Well at least we know which side of the fence Stuart sits on.

  30. fiona,

    By all reports, he was.

    Did some good paintings. I sort of thinking him as the Edith Piaf of the canvas.

  32. [Sydney house prices have risen 2.48% p.a. since 2005. In 2011 they fell 3.17%, and fell a further 1.77% in the March quarter of this year.]

    Steve Keem over cooked his goose and it is now DEAD:

    [It is a revealing exercise writing down some of the claims Steve Keen has made:

    1. In 2006, Keen said we may already be in a recession (we were not).

    2. In 2006, Keen said the Australian Debt/GDP ratio would exceed 160% by 2007 (it did not).

    3. In 2006, Keen said Australia will be in recession long before our Debt/GDP ratio falls (we did not go into recession).

    4. In 2008, Keen said interest rates would be at 2% by 2009, and ZIRP by 2010 (the interest rate trough was 3%; today rates are at 4.25%).

    5. In 2008, Keen said we would have double digit unemployment (up to 20%). Unemployment only rose to 5.8%, and is 5.3% today.

    6. In 2008, Keen said we would have a severe recession, possibly a depression. We had neither.

    7. In 2008, Keen said house prices would be down 40% within ‘a few years’. They fell by about 3% in 2008 (less than one-tenth of what Keen predicted), rose strongly in 2009, rose again in 2010, and have fallen by 2.8% in 2011.

    8. In 2008, Keen famously made a house price bet with Westpac’s Rory Robertson, which he lost, forcing him to hike from Canberra to Mount Kosciuszko wearing a t-shirt exclaiming, “I was hopelessly wrong on house prices – ask me how.”

    9. In 2008, Keen sold his Sydney home at a cyclical low point, just before prices rose more than 10%.

    10. In mid 2010, Keen predicted an “an accelerating rate of decline in Australian house prices now, as they did in the USA when “Flip That House” ceased being a winning trade.” In Zappone’s latest SMH profile of Keen, he makes exactly the same prediction again. Zappone writes that Keen expects an “accelerating slide in prices.” In fact, Australian house price declines have not accelerated. They have depreciated slowly and consistently by a cumulative 2.8% in 2011. CJ: Yes, there is leading indicator evidence to suggest that rate of price declines will soon slow to a halt.

    Every single one of these calls has been wrong. ]

    http://christopherjoye.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/debunking-steve-keens-predictions.html

  33. [“get rid of her” they yelled “get rid her]

    Obviously talking about mirabella yelling at kelly O’Liar

  36. Finns

    Never heard of Keen before, thanks for the education.

    Given those calls, perhaps he would fit into the LNP economics team well. 😆

    Oh and BTW,
    [Every single one of these calls has been wrong. ]
    Should be
    [Every single one of these calls has been wRONg. ]
    😉

  37. To whoever posted the #pop leveson story, you made our night.

    Since I wouldn’t know how to tweet here’s my offering:

    “”I did not say you were one, Mr Lennon.  But isn’t that precisely what a dreamer would imagine?  “

  39. [Every single one of these calls has been wRONg.]

    Dan, for a moment, i thought it was Diog who made all those predictions

  42. Oh and just for informational purposes, according to the ABS, house prices since 31/12/2005 have performed thus:
    (in alphabetical order, all figures per annum)
    [Adelaide 4.88%
    Brisbane 4.18%
    Canberra 5.24%
    Darwin 7.73%
    Hobart 3.41%
    Melbourne 6.40%
    Perth 5.31%
    Sydney 2.48% ]

  43. Finns

    [ Every single one of these calls has been wRONg.

    Dan, for a moment, i thought it was Diog who made all those predictions]

    I predict that this site will continue to be infested with links to BISONs.

  46. Puff:

    [That norgy in the duck’s hot tub did not get legs.]

    I naow that TLBD says that you aint frist in the queue, but if you wanna go frist you may (assuming that I have anything to say about it!).

    Hugs for last night and tonight.

  48. [sPuffTheMagicDragon PuffTheMagicDragon ‏@PuffyTMD

    I did not say you were one, Mr Lennon. But isn’t that precisely what a dreamer would imagine? #lpopleveson (from Graeme, PB)]

  49. IMOHO,

    Great link, remember reading that article by Kenneth. Funny thing is he has gone a lot quieter on Australia’s private debt problems in recent years even though we are actually in a worse position now.

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