Corangamite has covered a shifting area around Colac 150 kilometres west of Melbourne since its creation at federation, its complexion changing somewhat with the absorption of the Geelong suburbs of South Barwon and Belmont in 1955. It was one of Labor’s two gains in Victoria when Kevin Rudd came to power in 2007, giving Labor its first win in the seat since the Great Depression. In its current form the electorate includes the Geelong suburbs south-west of the Barwon River and the Great Ocean Road as far as Apollo Bay, together with rural areas to the west and north. The Geelong suburbs, which include Liberal-leaning Highton and marginal Belmont and Grovedale, contain a little over a third of the electorate’s voters, and are distinguished (along with Torquay) by a younger demographic profile and a preponderance of mortgage payers. Growth in Geelong, Torquay and the Bellarine Peninsula left the seat over quota at the redistribution to take effect at the next election, resulting in the transfer of most of the Bellarine Peninsula (accounting for about 5700 voters) to Corio. This has had a negligible impact on the Labor margin, which on Antony Green’s calculation goes from 0.4% to 0.3%.
Labor’s only wins in Corangamite prior to 2007 were in 1910, when future Prime Minister Jim Scullin became member for a term (he would return as member for the inner Melbourne seat of Yarra in 1922), and at the 1929 election when Scullin’s short-lived government came to power. The Country Party held the seat for one term from 1931, after which it was held by the United Australia Party and then the Liberal Party. The enlargement of parliament in 1984 cost the electorate its most conservative rural territory in the west, but it took another 23 years before Labor was able to realise its hopes of gaining the seat. It was assisted to this end by the “sea change” phenomenon, the ABC TV series of that name having been set in the electorate at Barwon Heads. This has drained about 10% from the Liberal primary vote in the Great Ocean Road towns since the early 1990s, with the Greens vote there burgeoning to 17% at the 2010 election.
Corangamite was held from 1984 to 2007 by Stewart McArthur, who to the dismay of some in the Liberal Party sought another term in 2007 at the age of 70. His Labor challenger was 31-year-old Darren Cheeseman, an official with the Left faction Community and Public Sector Union who won a hotly contested preselection over Peter McMullin, the Right-backed mayor of Geelong and candidate from 2004. Cheeseman went on to overwhelm McArthur’s 5.3% margin with a 6.2% swing that was evenly distributed throughout the electorate. Faced at the 2010 election by a fresh Liberal candidate in Sarah Henderson, a former state host of The 7.30 Report and daughter of former state MP Ann Henderson, Cheeseman was brought within 771 votes of defeat by a 0.4% swing that went slightly against the trend of a 1.0% statewide swing to Labor. Cheeseman went on to receive substantial publicity in February 2012 when he declared Labor would be “decimated” if Julia Gillard led it to the election, which set the ball rolling on Kevin Rudd’s unsuccessful leadership challenge a week later.
Sarah Henderson will again represent the Liberals at the next election after winning a fiercely contested struggle for Liberal preselection against Rod Nockles, an internet security expert and former Peter Costello staffer who also sought preselection in 2010. Henderson’s backers reportedly included Tony Abbott and Michael Kroger, with Nockles having support from Peter Costello, Andrew Robb, Senators Arthur Sinodinos and Scott Ryan and Higgins MP Kelly O’Dwyer. In the event, Henderson won a surprisingly easy victory with an absolute majority on the first round.
Kidette
Why don’t you go over to Sky News. Chris Kenny just said that after the break the panel would be on to discuss the carbon tax!
@JuliaGillard: It’s Swanny’s birthday and the end of the financial year. Happy Birthday @SwannyDPM. You were born to be Treasurer! JG
@Fluffula: Hmm just saw more push back on Reith’s views & claims on #sunrise7 that was better than any push back ive seen on #abcnews24 when he’s on it
BK,
Just complained to the sky news room on the phone.
Zoomster i hope you replired and clicked share
Morning bludgers.
I see Gillard is good for boat people, good for people smugglers and good for there profits.
@MrDenmore: The Myth That Entitlements Ruin Countries, Busted in 1 Little Graph – The Atlantic http://t.co/2SRhea07
Write to the ministers minisrerial office in melbourne
Sen. Conroy has an eletorate office and a ministerial off ice in melbourne.
Mail is seen quicker,
U would have to ring and get email for their
does anyone else find pb very slow – i have found it on three computers that i use – it drives me crazy!
[ABC News 24 @ABCNews24
Today on #WeekendBreakfast: Do you support the carbon tax? Are you prepared to wait & see how it affects you or have you made up your mind?]
rummel
I see the Liberal Party is good at being Stalinis to quote one of its luminaries. It is also good at having conflicts of interests ignored.
What a shame you cannot tweet shows as they show them like q and a
@ChrisOgilvieSnr: “@ABCNews24: Do you support the carbon tax? have you made up your mind?” Can we change it maybe? ABC appears to be campaigning against AGW
[BK,
Just complained to the sky news room on the phone.]
Kidette
What sort of response did you get?
Blimey, these Greens are a cheeky lot. They want to be the tail that wags the dog.
[ GREENS leader Christine Milne has accused Julia Gillard of failing to come to grips with the reality of “power-sharing” in a minority government ]
Not only that, she blatantly admits what Labor supporters on PB have been pointing out for some time (and vehemently denied by one-eyed Greens supporters here) that the Greens are quite willing to lie down with dogs and get covered with Liberal fleas.
They don’t give a stuff about engineering an Abbott government in 2013 and seem to be actively working towards that aim going by this statement.
[ Senator Milne also criticised Tony Abbott for wasting more than 18 months on negativity when he could have sought to work with the Greens against Labor on areas of agreement — an approach she said would have allowed the Opposition Leader to deliver policy outcomes and improve his political credentials. ]
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/milne-takes-aim-at-gillard-abbott-over-wasted-years/story-fn59niix-1226412786798
[64
guytaur
Posted Saturday, June 30, 2012 at 8:52 am | Permalink
rummel
I see the Liberal Party is good at being Stalinis to quote one of its luminaries. It is also good at having conflicts of interests ignored.]
I had a good laugh about Clive saying that.
Weekend breakfast have a tweet do t they also face book
Write something on face book also shame them in to usi g the word price
BK,
I hammered them for being factually incorrect and that they KNEW IT to be incorrect, that thirty seconds on google would have confirmed the difference between a market based mechanism and a broadbased consumption tax.
She just said she saw my point but did they fix it? I don’t get sky.
I urge all green PBs to read Laurie Oakes this morning. Says it all really.
It confirms for me that my decision to no longer vote green in the senate is the right one.
scorpio
You are the one being one eyed. Milne is making the point I have made in the past.
If the Liberal party had really wanted to it could have been constructive and positive in its approach to politics. They could have worked with the Greens and as I have suggested cross benchers in the House to get legislation up. This would have achieved Liberal aims of damaging Labor far more than Mr Abbott’s no no no the vevuluza tone.
Milne is just pointing out the political reality of the opportunity cost of the Abbott approach. Incidentally supporting Mr Albanese comments about the biggest dummy spit in political history.
If anyone else wants to get excited:
Contact Sky News
Phone: (02) 9886 8000 (Intl: +61 2 9886 8000)
Laurie Oakes
http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/giving-new-meaning-to-the-term-rats-in-the-ranks/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
[And the Greens can pat themselves on the back for helping Abbott, whom they loathe, to destroy a government they ostensibly support.
Because no-one should be in any doubt – Gillard and Abbott certainly aren’t – about the electoral impact of the asylum seeker issue.
“Like the carbon tax, it’s killing us,” one of Labor’s longest-serving MPs said on Thursday evening as he watched the senate vote down the compromise bill that would have combined key elements of the coalition’s asylum seeker policy with Gillard’s Malaysian people-swap proposal.
And he noted bitterly that Labor owes much of its misery over the carbon tax to the Greens as well.]
Thanks OPT … This underlines the place where the non-reality-based community in the US (aka the post-truth movement) has gone.
Just as freedom, for them, entails the right to suffer second hand smoke, so too it entails the right to second hand ignorance. Opposition to enlightenment-style subversion demands protection of mediaeval-style dogma and indoctrination.
In the US today (and to some extent here too) there has been an increasing tendency on the right as part of what have come to be known as “the culture wars” to blur the distinction between observable reality and personal opinion and to assert that reality should conform to one’s own canonical paradigm.
About 25 years ago, Alan Bloom wrote the ironically entitled The Closing of the American Mind which in his view at least, described the threat to enlightenment values such as reason and empirical observation posed by “relativism” and “postmodernism”. At the time of publication, the book was seen as putting into words the basic existential objection of the right to liberal education — yet today the right wants the freedom to have its own “truths” and as you point out above, demands freedom from the subversive and corrosive impacts of analysis and observation. It’s a damned shame that Bloom isn’t available to write a 2nd edition of his book, this time focusing on the attempts of the right to debauch public discourse in just the way that they claimed that liberals were in 1987.
In 2004, Ron Susskind described Bush spinmeister Karl Rove as follows:
[{Rove} said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do]
It seemed like an astonishing self-parody, but clearly, Rove was part of a cultural movement.
Today, the right says that smoking can be a workplace productivity factor (google tobacco control tactics) and that the world’s climate scientists are in a conspiracy to impose socialism, world government and a pleistocene-era lifestyle, even by people who swear that there is no such thing because the world is but 6000 years old. The bible is cited as a text on climate change by Republican congressman. Laws attempting to protect low income Americans from crippling health debts are described by the right as an attack on freedom. It’s an article of faith amongst wide sections of the right that Obama is simultaneously a radical Muslim, born in Kenya or Indonesia, a radical christian and the anti-christ who will usher in the end of the world but who had to forge his birth certificate first. (Personally, I’m not sure why people who believe in the rapture would be bothered about this — presumably, it ought to be a good thing). In South Carolina, Republican legislators, ignoring the message of the King Canute story, all those years ago, have purported to legislate sea-level rises for the end of the 21st century, and barred resort by state agencies to any research method that would predict a different result.
Let nobody doubt that in the US today, the right wishes to impose a dull, ignorant, theocratic, priggish orthodoxy aimed at serving its propertied elite and brutalising the disadvantaged. For them, that very much starts with erecting a ring fence around children to prevent them developing the ability to think for themselves.
The culture war that began in earnest during the Reagan-Thatcher period with protests at “PC” is now become a disease crippling all of public policy discourse and bearing down upon those trying to decide who will become the next person to control the US military.
We here in Australia ought to be concerned, and doubly so since Abbott is nothing if not a slavish follower of rightwing American cultural chic.
What’s happening in the Australia media signals where we’re hurtling as a nation. The Labor Party was formed in the late 19th century to counter the power of wealth and capital. If it is annihilated at the next election, we will potentially leap backwards more than 100 years in our social history. I predict there will also be an all-out assault on the ABC, described only a few weeks ago by Andrew Bolt as ”a giant news agency for the left”.
Hyperbole of this sort is on a par with saying all journalists are communists, which Gina Rinehart is said to do. (When did you last meet a communist? Seriously. I’d have to go back 30 years.) The argument for the ABC is one of quality, that its news and current affairs programs plus its documentaries are demonstrably better than those on commercial television…
The ideological right has had the ABC in its sights for decades. Simply because it is a state-funded body, some label it Marxist…
It is radicals who are leading the charge against the ABC, radicals of the right, and, along with the extremely rich and powerful, they are poised to get their way…
Any national media reflects the national mind. Within a few years, we could have a national mind dominated by Rupert Murdoch, Gina Rinehart, talkback radio hosts and tabloid newspaper columnists.
That is what scares me most about the holier-than-thou Greens atm. They seem so enamoured of ideological purity as to have become utterly oblivious to the dangerous role they are playing as useful idiots for the powers of darkness.
@TheKouk: Did you know that in the last 40 years, only the Gillard/Rudd and Whitlam Govts have never had an unemployment rate above 6%?
Well what a disgrace mother milne is sucki g up to abbott
May her chickens come home
This of course her democrate time
Gone
When she could of been with labor to get things done
Done care if her precioys enviroment gets trashed, 🙂
Was this only a poloy to be differert
T least when slipoer returns we can tell brandt to get lost
I’ll try again:
“What’s happening in the Australia media signals where we’re hurtling as a nation. The Labor Party was formed in the late 19th century to counter the power of wealth and capital. If it is annihilated at the next election, we will potentially leap backwards more than 100 years in our social history. I predict there will also be an all-out assault on the ABC, described only a few weeks ago by Andrew Bolt as ”a giant news agency for the left”.
Hyperbole of this sort is on a par with saying all journalists are communists, which Gina Rinehart is said to do. (When did you last meet a communist? Seriously. I’d have to go back 30 years.) The argument for the ABC is one of quality, that its news and current affairs programs plus its documentaries are demonstrably better than those on commercial television…
The ideological right has had the ABC in its sights for decades. Simply because it is a state-funded body, some label it Marxist…
It is radicals who are leading the charge against the ABC, radicals of the right, and, along with the extremely rich and powerful, they are poised to get their way…
Any national media reflects the national mind. Within a few years, we could have a national mind dominated by Rupert Murdoch, Gina Rinehart, talkback radio hosts and tabloid newspaper columnists.
That is what scares me most about the holier-than-thou Greens atm. They seem so enamoured of ideological purity as to have become utterly oblivious to the dangerous role they are playing as useful idiots for the powers of darkness.
my say
See my post at 73
Oaks article….
Yes the greens have done a wonderfull job for the libs and deserve high praise.
Just witnessed Peter Reth / Natasha Stott Despoya on weekend sunrise
Peter Reith was embarassing – but people listen to his crap – the host actually called him on one of his ridiculous statements ‘there are 20-30 million people trying to get her and we can not handle that’ Host actually said there are only 20 million living here there are not that many people trying to get here and that inflames the debate.
Then people rang up saying that the host think it was Andrew okeefe over stepped the line – for once the Libs get called on something and people think they shouldn’t.
Reith prattled on with crap about minority govt and this never happened under us and gave no one else a chance to contribute – this influences the polls and infuriates the hell out of me no actual rational debate and people like Reith actually are allowed and encouraged by the general punter to sprout their rubbish
Laurie Oakes reports the ALP view that this issue is a disaster for the government – make no mistake despite some benign views here this one issue is enough to lose the 2013 election.
[ In the meantime we can expect more drownings.
And the Greens can pat themselves on the back for helping Abbott, whom they loathe, to destroy a government they ostensibly support.
Because no-one should be in any doubt – Gillard and Abbott certainly aren’t – about the electoral impact of the asylum seeker issue.
“Like the carbon tax, it’s killing us,” one of Labor’s longest-serving MPs said on Thursday evening as he watched the senate vote down the compromise bill that would have combined key elements of the coalition’s asylum seeker policy with Gillard’s Malaysian people-swap proposal.
And he noted bitterly that Labor owes much of its misery over the carbon tax to the Greens as well.
When they see an Abbott government moving to repeal carbon pricing the penny might finally drop for Milne and her mates.]
http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/giving-new-meaning-to-the-term-rats-in-the-ranks/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
@BBCWorld: Armstrong is charged over doping http://t.co/0adGjwmx
Best thing is milne may scare voters back to labor in droves
Seems they never think thi gs through
Not greens re enviroment just opportu nits
Their so called csu e is tbe enviroment if this is so
Why line up with some o e who would mine everythi g in site
my say
Are you saying Mr Albanese is wrong about the longest dummy spit in political history?
See my 73
guytaur,
At least I live in the real world, not some fantasy land like your mob who seem to like the idea of holding the balance of power with a Conservative government.
Well it certainly worked well for the Democrats and was a tremendous benefit for the country. Just look how far backwards we slid during the Howard years.
I don’t need to list all its failings including war mongering, middle class largesse, no infrastructure development etc etc ……….
You lot just can’t wait to see history repeated but with a diabolical twist. Abbott ain’t no Howard. He’s 100 times worse.
r once the Libs get called on something and people think they shouldn’
tscotdog
Id say you g liberals on duty,
I bet tney are even rostered on
Guytaur:
Doesn’t sound very – what was the word? – consistent of the Greens. Is Milne saying that she’d have been willing to negotiate and compromise with the Coalition to reach a solution, but that any and all attempts by the ALP to reach consensus with the Greens ought to be rejected?
On the one hand they reject compromise, and on the other they seem to be actively courting it. When it’s politically expedient to do so, of course.
I think a few here need to be reminded. What did the Editor of the Australian say before he moved to the Daily Telegraph? It was we will destroy the Greens at the Ballot Box.
The media is moving on to the Greens now. They see a chance of causing a split between Labor and the Greens. If they do that then circumstances where a no confidence motion is made in the Labor Government increase.
The difference in AS is a golden opportunity for them.
Do not forget Greens supported Labor and not Liberal for a reason. A lot of Labor people have voted Green for a reason. More in common in policy terms than is different.
That still remains the case despite the AS difference.
Aguirre
From day one the Greens have said they will vote issue by issue.
No change there.
Bob Brown said that Christine Milne would do alright because she’s a good negotiator.
Jury is now out.
Suddenly occurs to me to wonder whether the real reason Bob Brown called it quits was because with SHY and her ilk in the Party, he had seen the future of the Greens and didn’t like it
No rummel
U have no idea,
The greens get teir biggest vote preferenced from labor to green
Mother milne has just sent them s curri g back to labor
The greens would get no where with abbott re tbe enviro e t
I am starti g to think tne enviroment is a crutch. No-w bob has gone
Do the give a fig about the enviroment
U have to ask them now i would think
They now that bob has gone have turned another corner
scorpio
Milne is out there slamming Abbott and you see it as support for the Liberal party. That is what I mean by one eyed.
Good morning all.
Some excellent news to start the day.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-06-29/scientology-numbers-going-backwards/4101958
I guess Greens may have one last chance to redeem themselves, if there is an emergency recall of parliament to let labor’s policy through the senate
Milne is doing a job of enlightening voters that to vote for them is to waste their vote. I guess this nation can consider itself lucky that the mad rabbit didn’t see what he could have achieved had he pandered to the Greens.
So many here in PB are busy attacking the Greens as Murdoch wants as the Labor, Greens, Independents Carbon Price becomes realty.
Murdoch would be happy indeed.
Watching Milne and SH-Y standing together yesterday, I had the distinct feeling that SH-Y had been pulled into line by “the boss”. That’s definiely a good thing.
89
my say
[Posted Saturday, June 30, 2012 at 9:12 am | Permalink
r once the Libs get called on something and people think they shouldn’
tscotdog
Id say you g liberals on duty,
Reckon you are right- would love some balance in the media though but realise this is not realistic
I bet tney are even rostered on]
zoomster:
I hope you don’t sustain further damage to your home.