Seat of the week: Rankin

Recent polling may have steadied his nerves a little, but senior minister Craig Emerson remains no certainty for re-election in a seat that has stayed with Labor since its creation in 1984.

Craig Emerson’s seat of Rankin has been held by Labor without interruption since its creation, but like all the party’s Queensland seats has looked precarious during the worst of its polling during the current term. The seat came into being with the enlargement of parliament in 1984, at which time it extended far beyond the bounds of the metropolitan area to the south-west, encompassing Warwick and a stretch of the New South Wales border. It is now located wholly in the outer south of suburban Brisbane, covering the northern part of Logan City from Woodridge and Kingston north to Priestdale and west to Hillcrest. The redistribution before the 2010 election drew it further into the metropolitan area, adding Algester, Calamvale and Drewvale north of the Logan-Brisbane municipal boundary. This territory accounts for much of Brisbane’s mortgage belt, and furnishes the seat with the equal lowest median age of any electorate in Australia. The Logan area is the source of Labor’s strength, but it is balanced by naturally marginal territory around Calamvale to the west and Springwood to the east.

Prior to the 1996 election, the seat was a highly marginal combination of Labor-voting outer suburbia and conservative rural areas, which Labor held by margins of between 0.6% and 5.5%. It was then transformed with the transfer of the rural areas to Forde and the compensating gain of low-income Brisbane suburbs, which boosted the margin by 9.8%. In the event Labor needed every bit of it to survive the Queensland backlash of 1996, which in Rankin manifested in an 11.1% swing. An unfavourable redistribution ahead of the 2004 election cut the margin by 5.3%, but there followed a 0.8% swing against the statewide trend at that election, followed by a 8.8% swing when the Rudd government came to power. The backlash of 2010 produced a swing to the LNP of 6.3%, cutting the margin to 5.4%.

Rankin has had only two members since its creation: Craig Emerson since 1998, and David Beddall beforehand. Emerson emerged through the Labor Forum/Australian Workers Union sub-faction of the Queensland Right, working over the years as an adviser to Hawke government ministers and then to Hawke himself, before taking on senior state public service positions in Queensland under the Goss government. After one term in parliament he rose to the shadow ministry, serving in the workplace relations portfolio in the lead-up to the 2004 election. He was then contentiously dropped after losing the support of his faction, a legacy of his defiance of powerbroker Bill Ludwig in supporting Mark Latham’s successful leadership bid in December 2003 (which by no stretch of the imagination spared him the lash of The Latham Diaries).

Emerson’s career returned to the ascendant after Labor came to power in 2007. spent the first term in the junior small business portfolio and further acquired competition policy and consumer affairs in June 2009, before winning promotion to cabinet as Trade Minister after the 2010 election. On the morning of the July 2010 leadership coup he announced he would support Kevin Rudd if it came to a ballot, but he took a very different tack during Rudd’s February 2012 challenge, accusing him of having undermined the government ever since the election campaign. Emerson achieved, for better or worse, considerable penetration of the soft media in July 2012, with his semi-musical critique of the Coalition’s campaign against the carbon tax.

An LNP preselection in July 2012 attracted six candidates and was won by David Lin, a 39-year-old Taiwanese-born solicitor who founded the Sushi Station restaurant chain at the age of 22.

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: Rankin”

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  1. Just Me

    I think Shanahan was using the number of ‘clicks’ on the Australian’s link to the video.

    No person worth counting would access it in some way other than via the Australian, would they?

  2. There has long..long time-line in the debate within the catholic church about conflict between the worship of “Maryism” and “Jesusism”. It did cause an awful lot of friction in the first century of catholicism.

  3. janice2

    Here’s a bloke who hides behind his wife’s skirts when he gets into trouble because of his attitude to women, and then has people splitting hairs over a definition of his attitude to women allowing him to hide his objectionable views of women behind papal skirts.

    Why should his misogyny be downgraded? Because he has been indoctrinated by a misogynistic theology that is difficult to shed?

    Abbott has had the advantage of the highest education yet all that is for nought when he can’t use that scholarship, which presumably included the most basic study of logic, to rid himself of long-held cherished beliefs when they are shown to be insultingly discriminatory on the basis of gender.

    To constantly demean women by proscribing a superiority of men over women is misogyny and no amount of forgiving his attitudes because of his religious beliefs doesn’t change that one iota.

  4. I am not a lawyer but this stinks. How can admitting to signing a false statutory declaration not be chargeable? I’m sure Peter Slipper would be interested in the explanation:
    [THE lawyer for the woman who blew the whistle on the disgraced former MP Steve Cansdell for falsifying a statutory declaration has accused police of threatening her and then lying about their reasons for not pursuing charges against him.
    He is also calling for an independent inquiry into the way police have handled the case.
    Mr Cansdell, who was parliamentary secretary for police, resigned from State Parliament in September last year after admitting to signing a false statutory declaration that an aide, Kath Palmer, was driving when he was caught speeding in 2005.
    On Wednesday NSW police issued a statement saying they would not pursue charges as the Commonwealth director of public prosecutions said there were not reasonable prospects of a conviction for a federal offence. It noted that Ms Palmer ”declined to be interviewed by officers”.]
    http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/police-lying-about-mp-case-whistleblower-20121012-27iel.html#ixzz297hl1fJa

    NSW police is a pretty rotten barrell by now.

  6. It is going to be interesting to see how all the political shows treat the PM’s speech and if they are going to continue the domestic press inclination to try and bury the lead of last weeks Parliamentary stories.

  7. 51
    CTar1
    [I think Shanahan was using the number of ‘clicks’ on the Australian’s link to the video.

    No person worth counting would access it in some way other than via the Australian, would they?]
    Perish the thought.

    Mind you, even limiting it to the number of clicks via their own site, that is still a lot of views.

    I acknowledge and approve of this contribution by The Australian to spreading this particular message.

    🙂

  8. frednk:

    [Perhaps the way to separate Allan Jones and Abbott is to call Abbott a “centralist misogynist” and Allen Jones a “right wing misogynist”.]

    Actually, they are both ignorant reactionaries. They feel challenged by all appeals against the structures that underpin privilege and consequently, threaten to found more inclusive society.

    Misogyny is unavoidable for them because women amount to about half of the people holding up the sky. You can’t share with the other half without giving up at least some of their privilege flowing naturally to them as males. They are misogynists because they are attached to the defence in principle of privilege — which they see as the natural and inevitable order of things, and this side of them abandoning that vision they will be misogynists whatever honeyed words they use to describe their sentiments and regardless of how many women they wheel out as political referees.

    Their weakness in this area is highlighted because they are ignorant and intellectually indolent. Save in the crudest of forms, there’s no evidence that they have ever self-examined and reflected on the substance of their connection to power and privilege, with the result that they constantly speak out of turn, and utter it unwittingly. Misogyny is part of their discourse and frames their tone and manner. Learning how to be otherwise would be nearly impossible for them and isn’t happening on any timeline of relevance to us.

    Jones of course, who has far less interest in hiding his angst than Abbott will never do so. Fear and loathing is his major tradeable commodity — an authentic expression of who he long ago learned to be. He hates with visceral passion and is thus primed to channel the angst of the ignorant and disempowered who form his primary listener base, including not a few women. Sadly, too few of them self-examine and seek to identify the reasons for their disempowerment, and like the mentally-ill person who self-harms, instead reach for adaptive behaviours, trying to see virtue and sense in the very things that limit them.

    Listening to Jones this week, I at first found the arrogant manner in which he spoke over the top of his ostensible supporters as ludicrous — as surely likely to be read by them as insulting. Yet Jones and to some extent, Abbott are for their plebeian base, self-harm-as-politics — about feelings of pain and loss rather than a declaration for inclusion and the policies that would underpin it which is why it continues to appeal to them.

    Jones and Abbott have in the short run (which is all that really matters to them), nothing but misogyny and xenophobia to trade on — to hold their base. That’s a given.

  9. New2This
    Posted Saturday, October 13, 2012 at 6:57 am | Permalink

    STFU Is that like covering your ears, closing your eyes and yelling lalalala.

    No, it’s using one’s own discretion to decide that some posts aren’t worth the time of day. Never have been, never will be.

    Though I am always willing to be persuaded by a good argument by those on my stfu list, and will no doubt be alerted to it by others if and when it occurs.

    Until such time my ‘Freedom of Choice’ will help me to decide which speech I freely wish to associate with and spend my valuable time reading.

    This is why rummel, bluegreen, davidwh and Mod Lib are not on my stfu list. They have demonstrated to my satisfaction that their brains are in their heads and not somewhere else.

    If I wish to read aggressive Liberal anti-Labor circle jerks, I know where to go for that. To so choose not to read it here, is exactly that, my choice, and something which I thought those aggressively supportive of individual choice, Liberals, would have understood as a justification for stfu. Lord knows, progressive views are moderated out of existence on RW websites, blogs or media outlets. Or left in as a mechanism to enable derision and abuse.

    Others here may seek to mock or argue the toss with the RW nutjobs. For mine, I’d rather use my time to have substantive arguments. 🙂

  10. Just Me – It’s a good demonstration of how Mr Shanahan does his work.

    95% of the Australians readers will read the article and think ‘all this going on about the speech and only 100,000 looked at it’.

  14. [The opposition delegation is hopeful of meeting with the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa. It would be unusual to have a formal meeting with the Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, because Mr Abbott is not Australia’s leader.]

    http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/abbott-team-to-build-ties-with-jakarta-20121012-27i91.html

    Abbott, Bishop the younger, Morrison and Cobb are about to experience humiliation, Javanese style.

    3 days “talking to the Indonesians” will be spent in ante rooms, junior functionaries with halting English, and cold tea.

  15. Also I want the journos to talk about the “context” of private text messages that were between a then LNP member and a person who was not yet employed by him, being used in parliament as a reason for sacking. Does that mean all MPs are in this some precarious position. Should MPs not be allowed to send and receive private text messages from friends and family. What are the codes of conduct in place for this? Arent journos meant to give us this “context” too?

  16. Got my new iPhone 5 up and running. Very impressed with the snappiness of any web interaction, and little improvements to all the apps I use.

    I’d suggest the negative reporting is competitor shills.

  18. Sprocket

    OH and son have iphone and daughter went with the Samsung galaxy. I needed to upgrade, so I mucked around with both phones. The Samsung galaxy one. Dollar for dollar, the Samsung is fantastic.

  20. [Shanahan reproting only 100, 000 hits on JG video on Oz website. Also mispells his name in byline. Denis.]

    WriteorWrong – How good is that. It means so few are signed up to read the OO. That works out to 25,000 per day – nothing to get excited about. NewsLimited in all its guises seems to be spinning furiously for Tony today.

  22. Maybe Abbott isn’t a misogynist. Maybe he just hates anyone who doesn’t fit into his world view.

    As women are the least likely subset of personhood to do this, therefore he hates more women than men.

    And I’m terribly worried about all those poor benighted idiots viewing Julia Gillard’s speech outside of its proper ‘context’. Can we start a ‘rent a journalist’ program so they can hire someone to come around and watch it with them?

  23. Zoomster

    I am now expecting our esteemed journos to give us the context on everything they report. As far as I can tell, it seems to have been particularly important to them to have given us the context of Gillard’s speech.

  24. Should any rude texts from :monkey: emerge; and I am thinking Tony Windsor, how will the MSM deal with those? Anything ruder than agreeing with someone that another is a ‘botch’ or comparing a vagina to a mollusc he will have no option but to resign as leader of the opposition and to set an example of how he wants things he should resign from Parliament also.

    I can already hear the silence.

  25. hugh moran

    I am seriously interested in the question of personal text messages emerging by any MPs in future, that may make a disparaging remark to a friend or relative with respect to another MP. What needs to occur then?

  27. sprocket@64,
    Abbott, Bishop the younger, Morrison and Cobb are about to experience humiliation, Javanese style.

    3 days “talking to the Indonesians” will be spent in ante rooms, junior functionaries with halting English, and cold tea.

    I’m sure Marti Natalegawa, the smartest guy in the room in the Indonesian government, is well aware of the aphorism:

    ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’.

    However, I might also add that I doubt the cringeworthy Coalition junketeers will care not one whit that they have been stood up. It won’t be allowed to get into the press here in Australia that they only got to meet Indonesia’s Fumigator-In-Chief and the like. 🙂

    They’ll have their carefully-scripted lines and appropriate backdrops all ready to go for the domestic market.

    Cue Tony with a backdrop of a few Indonesian Fishing Boats.

  28. Morning all.

    Hilarious that the OM are persisting with this defence of Abbott’s inherent sexist attitude to women. If he has genuine respect for ambitious, high-achieving women, why can’t we see it for ourselves?

  30. confessions

    Have the journos made any reference to the fact that Abbott says JG across the bench on numerous occasions to “make an honest woman of herself”? What do the female journos in particular think of that? Would they like a male colleague to continually ask them to make an honest woman of themselves? There is a lot of context the journos could tell us about. i am yet to hear it.

  32. Comment on the Grattan piece in the SMH today….

    Michelle said:” In Slipper we do seem to have a model misogynist”
    Really? A ribald, tasteless, private text between two adult males (and this was all whilst he was still a coalition MP and before Ashby even became his employee) – compare this with Abbott’s public rape joke during the election campaign directed at our PM:
    “Are you suggesting to me that when it comes from Julia, ‘No’ doesn’t mean ‘No’.”
    http://www.smh.com.au/federal-election/abbott-criticised-over-no-means-no-gaffe-20100803-114hz.html#ixzz291evCmhB

    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/misogyny-war-has-no-winner-20121011-27fm3.html#ixzz297uucrEq

  33. I note also that the whole “Vagina Monologue’ shows how out of touch Canberra – not just the journalists, but MPs and advisers – are with community attitudes.

    As for ‘the joke’. Seriously?

  34. Psephos at 20, love the middle aged sex kitten thing! Reminds me of how conservative men went into meltdown over Sarah Palin when she came on to the scene, although Bishop junior might be fighting above her weight there.

  35. A thought occurred to me as I wished today to track down Lizzie’s fantastic and apt definition of ‘misogyny’ from the previous thread…would it be possible for us to have a search function, similar to the one you can use on Twitter, so that we may put a particular poster’s name into the search bar and access all their previous posts in a convenient form?

    I also would appreciate this as sometimes I just don’t have the time to catch up on all of the previous discussions that have occurred here from the day just past and I would therefore like to be able to just punch in the commenters I am most interested in catching up on & quickly read through their contributions.

    I know ‘context’ is the new black, but I’ve always been a contrarian. 🙂

  39. victoria,
    I’m a Samsung/Android/Free Market type person myself. I have never bought an Apple product and never will. They are too aggressively anti-competitive and like too much to use the law for their own selfish ends, ie to squash the competition. 🙂

  40. fran

    I once read a great little piece about misogyny in the Victorian era.

    It said wtte that, as a male in those times, no matter how insignificant you were, no matter how great a failure, every time you walked into a room you knew you were superior to half the people there.

    It’s thus no coincidence that the men who consider themselves (even if it’s only in the privacy of their own mind) to have failed in some way who tend to be the greatest haters.

  41. victoria:

    I still think it’s telling that a work lunch discussion about the risible creature Berlusconi naturally segues to Tony Abbott.

    And this is from people who don’t follow politics.

  42. c@tmomma

    My older daughter holds the same view as you re Apple. But i was given an Ipad for my birthday last year, and I love it. 😀

  43. Michelle Grattan is a disgrace to the journalism profession and the female gender and should be put out to pasture forthwith.

    Julia Baird isn’t.

  44. c@tmomma @ 77

    The Indonesians will play it by the book. They will be aware that according to the polls an election held today would put Mr Abbott in the Lodge, and they will have far too much sense to engage in displays of gratuitous discourtesy.

  45. [I am seriously interested in the question of personal text messages emerging by any MPs in future, that may make a disparaging remark to a friend or relative with respect to another MP. What needs to occur then?]

    Of course, private messages should always remain private and once upon a time before this age of post truth politics I believe they were so. However the LNP has opened a can of worms using Slipper’s texts to shaft him. We are already seeing with Ms Stoner’s tweets to Rob O the MSM response to that side of the political divide. Private citizen, freedom of speech etc and certainly not given the run that Bowen’s wife tweets were.

  47. Shock horror, should texts emerge by an MP slagging and bagging our Prime Minister, what are the press gallery going to do. condemn it? Or give us a perfectly good explanation by giving us the “context”

  50. pedant,
    My friends who have lived in Indonesia have told me that they are a people that are capable of great subtlety. 🙂

    Which will, of course, fly right over the heads of the Coalition cabal of junketeers and intimidatory Bovver Boys.

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