Seat of the week: Deakin

Update (3/9/12): Essential Research. The weekly Essential Research report has fallen into line with other pollsters in giving Labor its best result since March – up two on the primary vote to 34% and one on two-party preferred to 55-45. The Coalition is down a point to 48%, a result it last recorded in April. The poll has 52% thinking female politicians receive more criticism than men against only 4% less and 40% the same, and very similar results (51%, 6% and 38%) when the subject is narrowed to Julia Gillard specifically. A question on which groups would be better off under Labor or Liberal governments find traditional attitudes to the parties are as strong as ever, with wide gaps according to whether the group could be perceived as disadvantaged (pensioners, unemployed, disabled) or advantaged (high incomes, large corporations, families of private school children). Respondents continue to think it likely that a Coalition government would bring back laws similar to WorkChoices (51% likely against 25% unlikely).

Deakin is centred on the eastern Melbourne suburbs of Blackburn and Nunawading, extending eastwards along the Maroondah Highway to Ringwood and Croydon. At the time of its creation in 1937, it extended far beyond the city limits to Seymour and Mansfield, before gaining its wholly urban orientation in 1969 and assuming roughly its current dimensions when it lost Box Hill in 1977. A trend of increasing Liberal support as the electorate extends eastwards is better explained by diminishing ethnic diversity than by income: in its totality, the electorate is demographically unexceptional on all measures. The redistribution has cut the Labor margin from 2.4% to 0.6% by transferring 18,000 voters in the electorate’s south-western corner, at Blackburn South, Burwood East and Forest Hill, to Chisholm; adding 8000 voters immediately to the east of the aforementioned area, around Vermont South, from Aston; and adding another 10,000 voters around Croydon in the north-east, mostly from Casey but partly from Menzies.

For a seat that has been marginal for most of its history, Deakin has brought Labor remarkably little joy: prior to 2007 their only win was when the Hawke government came to power in 1983, and it was lost again when Hawke went to the polls early in December 1984. The seat presented a picture of electoral stability from 1984 to 2001, when Liberal margins ranged only from 0.7% to 2.5% (although the 1990 redistribution muffled the impact of a 4.3% Liberal swing). Julian Beale held the seat from 1984 until the 1990 election, when he successfully challenged controversial Bruce MP Ken Aldred for preselection after redistribution turned the 1.5% margin into a notional 1.9% margin for Labor. Aldred accepted the consolation prize of Deakin and was able to retain the seat on the back of a sweeping statewide swing to the Liberals. He was in turn unseated for preselection in 1996 by Phillip Barresi, who held the seat throughout the Howard years.

Barresi emerged from the 2004 election with a margin of 5.0%, the biggest the Liberals had known in the seat since 1977. The substantial swing required of Labor at the 2007 election was duly achieved with 1.4% to spare by Mike Symon, whose background as an official with the Left faction Electrical Trades Union had made him a target of Coalition barbs amid controversies surrounding union colleagues Dean Mighell and Kevin Harkins. Symon’s preselection had been achieved through a three-vote win over local general practitioner Peter Lynch, the candidate from 2004, who reportedly won the 50% local vote component before being rebuffed by the state party’s tightly factionalised Public Office Selection Committee. Andrew Crook of Crikey reported that Symon had backing from the Bill Shorten-Stephen Conroy Right as a quid pro quo for Left support for Peter McMullin’s unsuccessful bid for preselection in Corangamite. Symon was re-elected in 2010 with a 1.0% swing in the face of an attempt by Phillip Barresi to recover his old seat, which was perfectly in line with the statewide result. He was rated by one source as undecided as Kevin Rudd’s challenge to Julia Gillard’s leadership unfolded in February 2012, but soon fell in behind Gillard.

The Liberal candidate at the next election will be Michael Sukkar, a 30-year-old tax specialist with Ashurt, the law firm previously known as Blake Dawson. Sukkar emerged a surprise preselection winner over John Pesutto, a lawyer and Victorian government adviser said to be closely associated with Ted Baillieu. VexNews reported that also-ran candidates Phillip Fusco, Terry Barnes and Andrew Munroe were eliminated in that order, at which point Pesutto was in first place, state government staffer Michelle Frazer was second, and Sukkar and former Melbourne candidate Simon Olsen were tied for third. After winning a run-off against Olsen, Sukkar crucially managed to sneak ahead of Frazer, who unlike Sukkar would not have prevailed against Pesutto in the final round due to a view among Sukkar’s backers that she “wasn’t up to it”.

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.

1,969 comments on “Seat of the week: Deakin”

Comments Page 33 of 40
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  1. [lizzie
    Posted Monday, September 3, 2012 at 4:58 pm | Permalink
    Can’t anybody spell defence any more? Or is it compulsory to follow the USA now?
    Grrr.]

    Yes, its a pain in the ass 🙂

  2. billie

    [The Taliban don’t need to get their men into the Afghan National Army]

    I think you’re right on that.

    Also recruits getting nervous about their future – earn their ‘spurs’ and escape into the general community?

  4. [Bruce Billson ‏@BruceBillsonMP

    The Gillard #gonski announcement is a promise 5 elections away – she can’t keep a promise for 1 election, let alone 5.

    1m Craig Emerson MP Craig Emerson MP ‏@CraigEmersonMP

    .@BruceBillsonMP Libs already attacking needs-based school funding. No surprises there. Why oppose giving all kids a flying start in life? ]

  8. Billson
    It’s not 5 elections away. The contract for school funding has to be renewed soon, and will then hold for (?)5 years.

    Don’t they LISTEN?

  9. SK: She’s a fantastically generous, positive and happy person; one of those people who always makes you feel good when you are in their company.

    Part of the reason I am so passionate about marriage equality is that she bloody deserves to be able to marry the love of her life. She has given more back to society in terms of her money, her time and her love of other people than anyone I have ever met.

  11. Pyne gets away with it again.

    Now the ABC is parotting the same LNP lines (meat, feathers blah). Have they no shame? They have no idea how to comment or report on a large scale project like this.

  13. Boerwar @ 1527 where do you get your costs of $50,000 per refugee from

    A charity in Melbourne housing and supporting refugees says it costs $13000 to house and support them per year.
    A charter flight from Indonesia to Australia would cost less than $400 per passenger, hell we can fly to Bali for $500 return

  14. thirdborn314

    [being a simple country boy from a poor public school. Interestingly, my sisters both went to the private school whereas us boys were left at the public school]

    My older siblings – 1 male & 2 female – all went to private school. By the time my ‘turn’ came up to go to high school life on the farm was not so good so I was left to ‘win’ a place at a NSW Selective School – somewhat more a challenge than my siblings faced but something, in the balance, I have no regret about.

  15. Sorry Rummel @1610, the Gonski money has already been spent on more important national priorities such as demountables on Nauru and putting young Australians in harm’s way in Afghanistan. You know, the things that really matter.

  16. DL

    Thanks for your post. We heard the intersex mayor of Hobson’s Bay interviewed on Radio National once and I thought that he was (a) remarkably open about the issues and (b) remarkably sane considering the issues he had had to overcome.

    One of the (I hope) largely legacy issues of yesteryear is that parents were forced to ‘choose’ a gender for their children and thereafter both child and parents had to try and live with the consequences.

  19. billie

    [Boerwar @ 1527 where do you get your costs of $50,000 per refugee from

    A charity in Melbourne housing and supporting refugees says it costs $13000 to house and support them per year.
    A charter flight from Indonesia to Australia would cost less than $400 per passenger, hell we can fly to Bali for $500 return]

    Costs are over forward estimates. $50,000 over forward estimates is very conservative, as you yourself demonstrate.

  20. [Captain Obvious
    Posted Monday, September 3, 2012 at 5:19 pm | Permalink
    Sorry Rummel @1610, the Gonski money has already been spent on more important national priorities such as demountables on Nauru and putting young Australians in harm’s way in Afghanistan.]

    You know 10B spent on Gonski would be money well spent compared to over 10B on school halls…

  21. Well, Julia and Swannie will take a bag of money to the States and territories on education. Do you really think they’ll say how much before negotiations start?!

  22. CTar1 – I don’t regret my public schooling, at least most of my footy team mates were there too. Being in country SA that was very important, it was frowned on to talk to others from a different footy team. I even had my Dad as a teacher in primary school, that was rough. Up early to milk the cows, then off to school with Dad then back after school to milk cows again – that’s where I learned the value of hard work.

    TLBD – I will watch carefully for a stumble and raise it with Fran immediately 🙂

  23. Diogenes: My understanding is that she has deliberately eschewed surgery (ie the removal of her penis).

    In the first instance it was because she had concerns about whether the surgery would result in her looking “butchered”. That probably turned out to be a good decision, because she was weighing it all up before she became sexually active.

    With the benefit of hindsight, she is extremely glad she chickened out. Once she discovered the joy of sex, so to speak, she realised then how dreadful it would have been to be deprived of full sexual function.

    She has never regretted the decision, she says, and even thinks about her penis as an empowering reminder of the “awesomeness of nature”.

    Like I said in response to SK, she really is amazingly positive!

  24. rummel – Are you ready to go this Sunday(?).

    I’m still thinking I should turn out to get some photos of the daggiest person on the run who I can pass off as an RFS person (asserting, of course, that it’s you).

    😆

  26. lizzie

    Sound is an interesting metric of extinction. IMHO, in the short term there will not be a reduction in sound but there will be a reduction in the range of sounds. In fact, there already is.

    We have entered the first mass extinction event engineered by one of the planet’s participating organisms.

    The question is this: ‘Is winner-take-all, followed inevitably winner-left-with-nothing, the ultimate and necessary end of Darwin’s theory?’

  27. BW –

    So we have a plan that sees us out of Afghanistan at the end of 2013.

    ie there is no disagreement that we are getting out, the question is how to manage that departure.

    The plan may be a crap plan. The possible outcomes, as you say, are probably all bad – but there are different possible outcomes, and some are potentially less bad than others.

    I’m not an Afghanistan expert. Neither are you or anyone here I’d wager. Certainly talking about (as Diogenes was trying to) the rightness of public sentiment as a justification for politicians taking a particular decision with respect to Afghanistan would only really be valid if the public were experts on the situation and could make a complex decision weighing up Australian and Afghani loss of life, injury and suffering over the withdrawal period and the aftermath in an unstable situation with multiple possible strategic outcomes.

    My argument is that it is legitimate for the political process to affect the big decisions (do we go to war, do we not, do we decide it’s a lost cause and pull out, etc), but as far as the implementation of those decisions goes, it should generally be left in the hands of those responsible for implementing them – ie the military.

    The decision was made to end the Afghanistan misadventure. A plan was drawn up that presumably weighed up what was still reasonable to try to achieve given various timeframes, and we’ve been working through that plan (as far as Australian involvement is concerned, primarily training up the portion of the ANA we’re responsible for).

    This debate flares up when there are deaths – naturally – but the individual deaths themselves, unless they are significantly above the expected losses due to massive planning failures on the part of the military, shouldn’t change the process.

    Your specific points:
    (1) I agree, but in the scheme of things I don’t see that (in the context of this discussion) withdrawing all our troops now vs at the end of 2013 will make much of a difference vis a vis islamic radicalisation.

    (2) I agree there will not be a “right time” to withdraw. I suspect that there may well be wrong times and very wrong times to withdraw; I’m suggesting that within the overall decision to withdraw I’m happy to leave it up to the military to work out exactly how and when that occurs rather than armchair critics or the vagaries of public sentiment

    (3) I’m inclined to agree in general. However, I think there are time scale related potential outcomes that are affected by whether we stay another year or not. Particularly with respect to the ANA and the police, the difference between forming a stable organizational culture over (say) a 2 year period vs a 3 year period can be significant for the resilience of the organisation. If having a vaguely secular army and police force that can actually survive on their own is a potentially desirable outcome, then it is something whose success depends on exactly when and how we depart the scene. I am just speculating, but as I said I can see that there are subtle, complex decisions involving many factors that are in play, and much of the simplistic debate I see on this topic completely fails to even allow the possibility that there is more going on in the decision making process than meets the eye.

    (4) of course – that is stating the blindingly obvious, and it doesn’t change the equation. There are deaths associated with staying another year. There are physical injuries. There are mental disorders. No question. I have a reasonable degree of confidence that the people making the decisions and providing the advice to the government are aware of this.

    (5) I’m not quite sure what point you’re making here. As your final sentence suggests, it is ultimately a personal choice of those in our military to do that particular job – if they find it too stressful or overwhelming or dehumanizing or whatever they can choose to leave – they are not conscripts – but then I’m not sure what your point is. Possibly you are trying to make a point about the culture of our defense forces and that the individuals involved have been conditioned/brainwashed to feel that dropping out is not an option? Perhaps so, although I think that’s a bit tenuous these days, but regardless I don’t see it as being directly relevant to the Afghanistan question.

  29. Today’s ‘No Regard for Self Preservation’ Award goes to… davidwh

    [I wonder if women get more criticism than men is because their more emotional natures is not as well suited to government and leadership? ]

    😆

  30. Boerwar
    [A reduction in the range of sounds]

    I only know about birds, but as the larger birds (mostly) have a smaller range of sounds (fairy-wrens cf herons) and locally we are seeing a prevalence of larger invaders taking over from passerines, your theory sounds about right.

  31. [CTar1
    Posted Monday, September 3, 2012 at 5:24 pm | Permalink
    rummel – Are you ready to go this Sunday(?).

    I’m still thinking I should turn out to get some photos of the daggiest person on the run who I can pass off as an RFS person]

    Im almost ready to go. Got the big hair cut this friday night, photos will be put up of the massacre.

  32. Boerwar: I can’t imagine anything worse than, as a parent, being forced into making a decision on behalf of your child that could have such a dramatic impact on the rest of their life.

    My friend says she feels quite “lucky” because what she has downstairs is actually quite “small and tasteful”; I gather some intersex people can have a real mishmash of male/female external sex organs, so much so they don’t look either male or female.

    Parents of children born like that these days are often encouraged to surgically correct, which is a bit sad. I know I am a hopeless lefty tragic, but it would be nice to live in a world where sexuality and gender are the least important things about a person 😉

  33. [Boerwar
    Posted Monday, September 3, 2012 at 4:52 pm | Permalink
    Whoops, wrong button… @ 1569 (Cont)

    (1) I accept your point that war creates its own realities and that wars get a life of their own. The bits of the Afghanistan War that I particularly dislike are that it increases islamic radicalisation and that it has been instrumental in further destabilising an already-unstable Pakistan.]

    Why do you say that the A War “increases” islamic radicalisation when, as I understand it the very justification for the A War was to strike at islamic radicalisation that was rooted in Afghanistan. Of course there was always going to be a backwash from the strike but what possible basis (other than a simplistic faith) tells you that the backwash is/will be larger than doing nothing?

    For what it is worth my own “simplistic faith” is that islamic radicalism has been generated by the penetration of and threat posed by “Western values” that strike at the heart of fundamentalist islamic traditions and beliefs. There is an arrogant assumption (easily made by its beneficiaries – the current generation of people living extravagant Western lifestyles) that Western values are superior to fundamentalist islamic traditions. They are not “superior”, just different. Since fundamentalist islamic traditions strongly support “military strength” (The Prophet being no shrinking violet in this regard), my simplistic faith suggests that Western values that speak to that aspect of fundamentalist islamic tradition garner more respect (adherents) among those traditionalists than a hands off, “international terrorists will be international terrorists” just let them grow up approach which paints “the West” as indulgent and supine. Of course, it is difficult to run a control experiment to test our competing faiths.

    [(2) There is never going to be a ‘right’ time to exit Afghanistan.]

    Surely the “right” time to exit would be when the institutions of civil society are sufficiently strong to enable a civil society to self-perpetuate. Why you presumably think this is not possible I do not know. Does it have anything to do with racist assumptions about the Afghanis and their aspirations for a safe, predictable life?

    [(3) The choices made as to timing are always going to be political. In anything less than 50 years, they are always going to be arbitrary. And the result is always going to be a highly unstable heath robinson affair of a national mercenary army, an incompetent police form, and a grab bag collection of Taliban and assorted Mediaeval War Lords. No-one I know expects the outcome to be any different and no-one I know is willing to predict that this would last for anything longer than a year or two.]

    True enough but the history of human affairs does not permit certainty in predictions. Who knows what might emerge from “an incompetent police force” with a highly unstable heath robinson affair national army. Stranger thinks have happened than that a local organising force might somehow permit institutions of a civil society to survive, perhaps educational or legal. Northern Ireland was once thought to be an intractable problem. All of a sudden, what do you know?

    [(4) The ‘cost’ is not only to the military. Defence has something like 30,000 PSTD cases on its books. Based on what we know about long-term impacts of wars on individuals, our children will be paying for the Afghanistan War.]

    But you could not think there would have been no cost to not assisting in the A War. As for those pitiful critters “our children” they will “pay” for all the effects of our decisions, both good and bad.

    Perhaps the best thing Australia and others engaged in the A War could do is legalise all drugs. This would reduce the main cash supply to the Warlords, the direct beneficiaries of the continuing conflict and civil disruption.

    [(5) It troubles me significantly that it is taken as axiomatic that individuals in the military are not making an individual choice about staying in Afghanistan. The same issue is often couched around the professionalism and dedication of the troops. If I happened to be an Australia soldier in Afghanistan now I would demand to be relieved of duty and returned to Australia.]

    I am sure your demand would be met although of course you would also meet your dismissal from the Defence Force. People who join the Defence Force are rather expected to go out and fight where their Country tells them to. I for one do not think this an unreasonable demand.

  35. TLBD: I get the impression he has been banging on about this for a while. He says longer prosthetics give a longer stride and, therefore, a greater advantage.

    Well, fair enough, but isn’t that the case for runners who are just TALLER? What does he want, a height limit so that no-one is taller than him?

    And where does that leave short people who are at a natural disadvantage to HIM because he was born taller?

    He needs to accept he lost and either forget about it or get longer prosthetics himself.

  36. [You know 10B spent on Gonski would be money well spent compared to over 10B on school halls…]

    It is quite ironic that you try to post the stupidest thing you’ve ever posted and you have it exactly right on … both money brilliantly well spent, better than private enterprise could hope to do

  37. Canberra Blugers are invited to attend Queanbeyan RFS station 1930h this Friday on behalf of all bludgers to partake in the nights events and BBQ.

  38. Jackol

    Thanks for your response. I do not share your faith in the military’s ability to make political decisions. The latter includes the timing and manner of our exit from Afghanistan.

    I could give chapter and verse of reasons, but one example would be that the military has demonstrated repeatedly that it just does not get modern Australian mainstream gender politics.

    The military is also constrained by certain, what I might call, ‘military’ values that cause what I would call political near-sightedness. A salient example is those members of the military who think that exiting Afghanistan ‘prematurely’ would be a betrayal of their comrades who have died there. This is a fallacy and a dangerous one at that.

    I think it is important for the civil to accept advice from the military but I would leave it at that.

    My last point was not clear. The point I was trying to make was that dedication, professionalism and self-sacrifice of our military cannot offset being in a losing, bad, war. There is no equivalence. The war mongers try to conflate the two, as do our politicians of all stripes. The conflation is a lie.

  39. thirdborn314

    [Up early to milk the cows, then off to school with Dad then back after school to milk cows again – that’s where I learned the value of hard work.]
    There are enough PBers brought up on dairy farms that we will be able to do a great homage to Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen as the “The Four Cow Cockies”. 🙂

  40. [I wonder if women get more criticism than men is because their more emotional natures is not as well suited to government and leadership? ]

    David

    You should be ashamed of yourself

  42. Tom Hawkins + Gecko

    Before the possie gets sent out davidwh posted just after that there was a missing comment that was meant to show it was said in a 😉 manner .

  43. mmell and DAVID both liberals
    we need stiff upper lips re floods and fires not, people running around crying.
    i thought that if you are a member of a firebrigade you would know that
    its in the training
    shedding tear about a great achievement is totalay different.
    but i could tell by the pms face and demeiner at the time she was very up set.
    now if the male pm had cried would that be different

    and show me the money rummmel wtte.

    well you show me the money for all abbotts policies.

    CAN U

  44. rummel,

    Canberra Blugers are invited to attend Queanbeyan RFS station 1930h this Friday on behalf of all bludgers to partake in the nights events and BBQ.

    You know they’ll point at you and laugh about your 60-40 Newspoll predictions? 😉

  45. [p.s. I did add a footnote to post 1492 which seems to have been swallowed up in cyber-space somewhere. It would have indicated the post was tongue-in-cheek.]

    yeah, sure you did

  47. [wonder if women get more criticism than men is because their more emotional natures is not as well suited to government and leadership?} david a liberal said.

    look there is more types of leadship and pm or GG or the like

    mothers are a form of leadership in a family the old saying if MUM IS UPSET SO IS THE WHOLE FAMILY
    is so true. the things that mothers face every day with sick children.
    can you imagine the mess my daughers family would be in , if she lost it and cried about the things they have been going through with their baby.

    can you imagine a qc in court who is a lady or judge hearing terrible things and they cried.

    think things through out of the square

  48. Tom I am, I was and I did.

    Lizzie tarred and feathered me.

    BH poked me with a sharp stick.

    Boerwar threatened me with expulsion.

    guytaur wanted to send me to an institution.

    I hate to think what will happen when I get home tonight.

    I accept my foolishness and I am very sorry.

  49. The prosthetics have to be within a defined range and are measured before every race. Oscar has zero grounds for bitching.

  50. rummel and david wh

    are surprise for some reason labor supporters are still showing grief

    despite the last 2-3 good months for labor

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