Seat of the week: Lilley

Wayne Swan’s electorate of Lilley covers the Brisbane bayside north-east of the city centre, between the Brisbane and Pine rivers – an area accounting for industrial Eagle Farm in the south and residential Brighton in the north – along with suburbs nearer the city from McDowall, Stafford Heights and Everton Park eastwards through Kedron, Chermside and Zillmere to Nundah, Nudgee and Taigum. The redistribution before the 2010 election had a substantial impact on the electorate, adding 26,000 in Chermside West and Stafford Heights at the northern end (from Petrie) and removing a similar number of voters in an area from Clayfield and Hendra south to Hamilton on the river (to Brisbane), but the margin was little affected.

Lilley was created in 1913, originally extending from its current base of Nudgee, Aspley, Kedron, Eagle Farm and Brisbane Airport all the way north to Gympie. It did not become entirely urban until the enlargement of parliament in 1949, when Petrie was created to accommodate what were then Brisbane’s semi-rural outskirts. Labor won Lilley in 1943, 1946, 1961 and 1972 (by a margin of 35 votes on the latter occasion), but otherwise it was usually safe for the prevailing conservative forces of the day. A decisive shift came with the elections of 1980 and 1983, when Labor’s Elaine Darling won and then consolidated the seat with respective swings of 5.2% and 8.4%.

Wayne Swan succeeded Darling as the Labor member in 1993, but like all but two of his Queensland Labor colleagues he lost his seat in 1996. Swan stood again in 1998 and accounted for the 0.4% post-redistribution margin with a swing of 3.5%. He added further fat to his margin at the each of the next three elections, although in keeping with the inner urban trend his swing in 2007 was well below the statewide average (3.2% compared with 7.5%). The 2010 election delivered the LNP a swing of 4.8% that compared with a statewide result of 5.5%, bringing the seat well into the marginal zone at 3.2%.

Swan’s path into politics began as an adviser to Bill Hayden during his tenure as Opposition Leader and later to Hawke government ministers Mick Young and Kim Beazley, before he took on the position of Queensland party secretary in 1991. He was elevated to the shadow ministry after recovering his seat in 1998, taking on the family and community services portfolio, and remained close to former boss Beazley. Mark Latham famously described Swan and his associates as “roosters” when Beazley conspired to recover the leadership in 2003, but nonetheless retained him in his existing position during his own tenure in the leadership. Swan was further promoted to the Treasury portfolio after the 2004 election defeat, which he retained in government despite suggestions Rudd had been promised the position to Lindsay Tanner in return for his support when he toppled Kim Beazley as leader in December 2006.

Although he went to high school with him in Nambour and shared a party background during the Wayne Goss years, Swan has long been a bitter rival of Kevin Rudd, the former emerging as part of the AWU grouping of the Right and the latter with the Right’s “old guard”. He was in the camp opposing Rudd at successive leadership challenges, including Rudd’s successful challenge against Beazley, his toppling by Julia Gillard in June 2010, and most recently when he sought to recover the leadership in February 2012, when Swan accused Rudd of “sabotaging policy announcements and undermining our substantial economic successes”. Swan succeeded Gillard as deputy upon her ascension to the prime ministership.

Swan’s LNP opponent for the second consecutive election will be Rod McGarvie, a former soldier and United Nations peacekeeper. McGarvie won a July preselection vote from a field which included John Cotter, GasFields commissioner and former head of agriculture lobby group AgForce, and Bill Gollan, owner of a Deagon car dealership.

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.

2,173 comments on “Seat of the week: Lilley”

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  1. CM

    Of course it is media managed. I actually enjoyed the DNC, but could you imagine for eg Abbott’s wife giving a speech about her husband and declaring her undying love for him to the world? Or say at the end of her speech, that above all else, “she is mum in chief”?

  2. CTar1

    That is my point. There was a lot of spin at both conventions. That is why Clinton was a breath of fresh air. He talked about the bread and butter stuff

  3. victoria, one thing about Australian political conferences is it is much more policy orientated (at times vague, other times specific. Things like personality (except general leadership ethos and policy pathos) take somewhat of a back seat.

  4. ACL declines Kennett offer to replace PM at conference

    MEDIA RELEASE

    For release: Saturday, September 8, 2012

    The ACL has politely declined Beyondblue chairman Jeff Kennett’s offer to replace the Prime Minister at its National Conference.

    Mr Wallace said Mr Kennett had also been the victim of aggressive gay activist bullying after he wrote a column in the Herald Sun saying: “there is no substitute for parents of both genders”.

    “Unlike Mr Kennett, who capitulated after his funding was threatened, ACL stands by its principles that kids should wherever possible have the opportunity to be raised by their biological mother and father,” Mr Wallace said.

    “I’m not sure what purpose would be served in having Jeff Kennett speak. This is a man who compromised his principles in the face of the aggressive gay activist campaign against him,” Mr Wallace said.

    “At ACL truth is not something to be compromised for political or financial favour.”

    Cripes, I am glad PMJG is not going to that. What a mob of losers.

  5. I’d give Swan a much better chance of retaining Lilley than I would have done a few months ago – Cando Campbell has been a godsend to QLD Labor

  6. Is it important to know what politicians did in their youth?

    If the politician has changed their world view as they have aged then their youthful indiscretions are scuttlebutt.

    If the politician is hiding their visions and policies and they are thought not to have changed their world view as they matured then knowledge of their youthful views is revealing.

  7. William, if you’re about, from the previous thread, TLBD wanted you to forward me his email addy. Alternatively, you could forward mine to him. Thanks.

  8. TLBD

    [lynagh monica – Posted Saturday, September 8, 2012 at 1:40 pm | Permalink

    William, if you’re about, from the previous thread, TLBD wanted you to forward me his email addy. Alternatively, you could forward mine to him. Thanks.]

    I’m still not sure zoomster is zoomster.

    😆

  9. [I always find it amusing that brain surgeons are held up as highly intelligent over-achievers.]

    A friend of a friend is married to a brain surgeon. Admittedly I’ve only met him a few times, but he’s one of the most clueless men I’ve ever encountered.

  10. dio

    I always find it amusing that brain surgeons are held up as highly intelligent over-achievers.

    Shut up now! if I ever need my brain surgeoned, I would prefer to be still holding that misconception.

  11. Time for me to thank William for the seat of the week analysis.

    It’s so long since I read, re-read and analysed Malcolm Mackerras’s 1972 Election Guide as a young man, eventually confidently calculating the desired result for Gough.

    It wasn’t so pleasant doing the same for the 1974 election, even though the result was good and by 1975 and soon after, it was all doom and gloom.

    Now, Poll Bludger gives me a lift when I try to escape the incompetent group-think of the MSM and I look forward to the Seat of the Week.

    It revives that 1972 feeling.

  12. Voted earlier today in the local council elections(in New South Wales) – will be interesting to see how the major parties fare today

  13. While I’m here, I read someone discussing skills in different football codes last night, I think.

    We’re all biased, but it’s only follow-the-leader-forget-the-facts stuff to give soccer the title for skills. A soccer game is a procession of missed passes and poor decision making, interspersed with an occasional act of brilliant skill. This act wipes out the other 99% of the game in the minds of its followers.

    I don’t mind Rugby Union, but it’s a frustrating game, as they ruck and maul their way from one ball handling error to the next.

    Rugby League is tough and also has skill, but so much of it is predictable. Barge 2 metres into opponent. Tackle one. Repeat – tackle 2. Repeat, but try a bit more running – tackles 3 and 4. Run the ball and pass it a bit – tackle 5. KIck the ball in the air and hope they drop it -tackle 6.

    Try or turnover – repeat by other team.

    (This is where I place a ‘wink’ emoticon).

    As for Aussie Rules (not ‘AFL’), it can be criticised for a number of things, but skill isn’t one of them. You have to be able to kick the ball 50 metres and find a team-mate. You have to do it under extreme physical pressure and you have to be fit enough to run far further than in soccer or League.

    As for soccer’s skills, I wonder what the skill level would be like if they had a League or Aussie Rules player about to smash them when they’re about to kick.

    GIven they’re in extreme pain when breathed on by an opponent, I doubt they’d handle it well.

  14. [BB Your recent tirades against the MSM I suspect are a factor in the recent shift in the MSMs attitudes towards Abbott. Have you considered putting them (the PB tirades) together in a blog or similar? They are great pieces of political writing and deserve a wider audience.]

    The ones I contact eventually end up calling me either a “moron”, “hate filled” or tell me to “feel free to f**k off”.

    The single exception was Jason Koutsoukis back in 2007, and he delivered handsomely on the day the election was called, with a mocking Sunday Age piece on the Liberal Dirt Unit becoming the subject of much derision the following Question Time.

    I should stress I NEVER use this type language to them. But you don’t have to, to get their ganders up. Even gentlemanly types like Mr.Denmore and Grog get the shoofty from equally gentlemanly types like George Megalogenis when they brush too heavily across the media’s glass jaw.

    I wrote on the Political Sword months ago that the survivors who made it into the media lifeboat as the media Titanic sank, wouldn’t change attitudes willingly. Survival would embolden them. Their first class tickets that got them into the lifeboats would be seen as marks of First Class character as much as First Class privileges.

    If I may quote myself (a privilege we morons jealously guard):

    [The media lifeboat, full to the scuppers with by-lined opinion writers, tries to distance itself from the suction that will be generated by the sinking of the traditional medium of the printed page. In the meantime, any poor wretch who tries to climb aboard to have their side of the argument heard is mercilessly shoved off with the sharp end of an oar for their trouble. ]

    As they waved their boarding passes at swimmers in the water, saying “Show us your tickets” before they’d let them clamber aboard, they’d come to believe they had a right to be saved.

    So, we have Grattan, Coorey, Hartcher and all the rest of the usual suspects still there, still telling their bosses to stay the course, self-indulgently writing whatever they want to write according to their personal political preferences. There is little consideration for the damage this does to the nation’s psyche.

    When the news is always bad, when even a fall in unemployment is greeted as a disaster, when us being the top country economically in the world is dismissed as a mere detail, when shoe malfunctions are written about over and over again as “metaphors” for something or other, the national discourse suffers.

    They implicitly tell half their readers that they’re mad for preferring Labor, and that their vote is wasted. They continually refer to the polls (Michael Gordon does it again today, almost reflexively). They run leadership agendas.

    The amazing thing is that they think we don’t notice!

    Criticise an article by one of them and suddenly the broad brush with which they paint a picture of despair, political poverty and economic incompetence becomes a fine pencil, skewering nits picked out of your argument.

    Sentences, phrases and even words are quibbled over in an almost legalistic effort, designed to prove their “balance” and “professionalism”.

    And that’s if they haven’t already decided you’re a moron, or told you to f**k off.

    Of course I’m a moron, at least in their terms. I’m someone who criticises them and they don’t like it. Everyone else who does it gets similar treatment. There was someone else here at PB (sorry, can’t remember who) who used to publish his emails to and from Carney, saying Shaun seemed to be a reasonable fellow. But eventually he copped the “moron” treatment as well. It’s just a matter of time until you say something that offends them – not objectively offensive, but subjectively – and they pile on the epithets like papadoms at a curry night.

    But, let’s face it, it’s their industry that’s wrecked, not ours. It’s their industry that has the mass sackings, while ours is growing and forming into new media. They have the defunct business plan of the “journalist-savant” pontificating from on high, proudly proclaiming that “We’re paid to be cynics”.

    They are the ones who told us they were bored last election campaign and couldn’t be bothered reporting or hardly even enquiring into the wool that was being pulled over their own eyes, publicly.

    They are the ones who, looking out from their slit trenches during bombardments, can’t believe that the rest of the nation isn’t beseiged in the same way, to the same extent as their own business model. When you have a chronic bad back it’s easy to believe the world’s in pain. Likewise, when your industry is tanking, visibly, by the day, it’s easy to believe the rest of the commercial world is simultaneously going under.

    Add up the suspicion in the office, the fear, the tears, falling share prices, careers ruined or truncated, and empty desks in the workplace, plus the natural tendency to believe you’re better than others at the cynicism game, with the hubris you exude when your columns are quoted by parliamentarians as proof the Prime Minister must resign, or the government must fall, or the leadership is up for grabs (pick your peccadillo), and you have a perfect recipe for more failure.

    Nothing’s going to improve until the political and economics writers join their remaining colleagues in the other sections of the newspapers – the property writers, the sports writers, health, lifestyle and so on – in talking things in their areas of expertise up instead of down, providing confidence instead of destroying it. Bad news clearly doesn’t sell. It only kills hope.

    Fairfax let the wrong people go. They permitted the editors and sub-editors to take the package. These were core people, workers, productive, organized. Now they’re gone.

    They kept the lazy opinionistas, the stars, the group thinkers and the rest of the twerps who wake up in the morning and dash off 800 unaccountable words of stream of consciousness, who hear the phone ring from a nameless “insider” with a bodgy news tip and write it up as if it means something, or whose specialty is the “gotcha” question, inevitably hit for six into the car park by any competant politician, all so that they can then write up how “spin obsessed” the government or the opposition are.

    Such a shame, because it’s only going to make things worse when the final reckoning comes.

  15. A soccer game is a procession of missed passes and poor decision making, interspersed with an occasional act of brilliant skill.

    Tell that to the Brazil national team or Liverpool, Manchester Unted or Barcelona.

  16. I wonder what the skill level would be like if they had a League or Aussie Rules player about to smash them when they’re about to kick.

    They would neatly sidestep the oaf, pass the ball to the side to another player and run to open space for the split second return pass, while said oaf was chewing the dirt.

  17. Victoria, CTar1 & zoomster.
    The duck certainly seemed to be somewhat nonplussed by my reappearance. I’ve found another gumby for my avatar to try and reassure him.

    Rather than having some sort of personality transplant while I’ve been unable to post, it’s that I’m rather cheered by the PM and Labor’s performance over the previous weeks, we have a new baby grand daughter and my boss has given me a lovely project at work.

    Thanks to Nicola Roxon from when she was Health Minister, and it’s in an area that really needs it. It’s fired me up.

    Got to go shopping now, but will check in later.

    Curried duck balls, eh? Could make an interesting entree. Wonder where I can find an easily nonplussed duck?

  18. [Costello encouraged robust faith rather than pious introspection. Habits of worship were vital. Costello’s rule was: mass early and often. Life was to be lived and forgiveness was always available to the penitent.]

    You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know this.

    You just need to have gone to a Catholic boys’ school.

    I wrote about this years ago on PB: the first RK (Religious Knowledge) period on the sacrament of Confession was all about the forgiveness of sins.

    The second one, a week or so later, was about contrition: not only saying you’re sorry, but being sorry and genuinely intending to resist sinning again.

    A lot of boys either missed the second RK period, or ignored it, thinking that Confession was a simple “Get Out Of Jail Free” card.

    In Abbott’s Jesuitical context, there was also the concept of pre-dispensation for your sins if you were one of God’s Holy Warriors. You were forgiven in advance for the terrible things you were about to do.

    The historical character of “John Ballard” comes to mind as a Jesuit given the go-ahead by the Pope to assassinate Elizabeth I (Ballard was the fanatical Catholic priest played by Daniel Craig in Elizabeth).

    There’s a lot of that in Abbott, too, especially considering his relationship with Pell. When you have the local Cardinal on your side, egging you on, that’s a lot of pre-forgiveness.

    Even at the Christian Brothers we were told we should be “soldiers for Christ”, but they didn’t really mean it. Most of the political kids joined up as Labor supporters (as three Gillard cabinet ministers attest). Not to say they’re not religious, but Labor Catholics don’t usually burn with the fires that consume Liberal Catholics.

    At Riverview on the other hand, the fire and brimstone Jesuit priests meant every word of it. Don’t get between them and their mission for God.

    There are probably more, but Abbott, Joyce (both Riverview) and Hockey (St. Aloysius) at least come from the Sydney-based Jesuit background.

    In fact, I’ve often wondered whether the whole of politics today can’t be characterized as “poor” Catholics (Labor) versus “rich” Catholics (L, NP), still slugging out the age-old battles between “top” schools and the “second-raters”, a battle that started up to four decades ago, ostensibly on the football fields (but more about social standing and class), one which has continued ever since.

  19. PTMD, fine if you judge a sport by only it’s absolute elite (not that I’d put Liverpool in that bracket), but that would apply to each sport.

    Even for those you named, I’d back my description anyway:}

  20. BB,

    [I’ve often wondered whether the whole of politics today can’t be characterized as “poor” Catholics (Labor) versus “rich” Catholics (L, NP), still slugging out the age-old battles between “top” schools and the “second-raters”, a battle that started up to four decades ago, ostensibly on the football fields (but more about social standing and class), one which has continued ever since.]

    I suspect you are spot on.

    Btw, I only posted the Marr quote to emphasise something that I’ve been thinking and saying about Abbott since the late 1970s.

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