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. Cheers Leroy.

    I ask because I see Coles have a new ad stating all of their bakery bread uses ‘100% Australian Flour’ as if it some unique thing. I immediately thought – what bakeries WOULD’NT use Australian flour?

  5. [Do you wish Alan Jones was your Dorm Master?]

    Please J6P, there are images that are, really, just not fair to inflict on people here regardless of what you may think of them.

  6. gloryconsequence@1551


    Cheers Leroy.

    I ask because I see Coles have a new ad stating all of their bakery bread uses ’100% Australian Flour’ as if it some unique thing. I immediately thought – what bakeries WOULD’NT use Australian flour?

    I think I read somewhere, maybe even on PB, that they were bringing in frozen dough from overseas. Maybe not Coles, but one of the big ones.

  8. gloryconsequence

    I think some people use Italian flour for certain things, at home and at restaurants, because grains are a different size (or something). But I see what you’re getting at, sounds like there might be some bulk importing going on, at least enough to justify a brag of “100% Australian flour”.

  9. [Stephen Kaye is just about the nastiest piece of work we’ve seen here. He would make an excellent LOTO.]

    Arguable. And yet, even the worst on PB seems mild compared to some of the right wing nuttbagger inhabited sites out there.

  11. Gosh!…Steven Kaye..most pundits say they; “Pull their figures out of the air”…but you..?..I do trust you apply some gel and use a Ansel Sheaf-glove for your self-exploration in the search of prognostic knowledge!

  13. My two favourite PMJG memories are that pre Rudd slide she went on to Insiders to front Barry – KR assiduously avoided the tough interviews, but PMJG fronted. Same again in 2010, funnily enough on Jones program – she fronts up.
    And this illustrates why she is streets ahead of the rest – she fronts up – I love that about her, and I think that come election time the public will see that clearly.
    Even with the speech, she could have “smoothed” it, shit it down – but she fronted up – good on her too – and I am mightily thrilled that 1.5m people have enjoyed it to – she is a rare one, and I hope she is here for a long time

  15. “Steven Kaye”??? His language, attitude and “intelligence” would suggest he is probably a Woolworths executive on squillions who does this as a lark.

    Ignore him/her.

  19. Can you believe this? Take a valid issue-sexism-and bend it all out of shape to suit the agenda of the Conservative White Males that think they run the joint:

    Piers Ackerman in a piece accusing Kate Ellis of sexism allows this comment to go through.

    ‘Kate Ellis reminds me of a well made blow up doll’

    I just wish that women like me, that have no fear of those wastes of space and oxygen, and who can do a fine line in Gillard-standard ‘Cold Rage’ themselves, were allowed access to the creeps to tell them what most of the thoughtful citizens of this nation think about them and their perversion of the debate and our society.

  21. [Piers Ackerman in a piece accusing Kate Ellis of sexism allows this comment to go through.

    ‘Kate Ellis reminds me of a well made blow up doll’]

    Sounds like Piers has had a bit of experience with blow up dolls.

  23. Oh well, time for a Primal Scream….Aaaarrrggghhh!!!…and then off to bed. (The HSC for #1 Son starts tomorrow! I have already started to pull my hair out…lucky for me it is thick. 🙂 )

    Arrivederci, babies!

  24. C@tmomma,

    Being a mere tigger, I didn’t do Latin at skool – just Germin. But I suspect that you are right.

    As for the Ackerperson quote – where did that come from? Horrid stuff.

  26. I had a terrible fright tonight. I was in the toilet and happened to look down and thought that piers was stalking me, then I realised it was just something I went into the toilet to void.

  27. Puff the Magic Dragon,
    I second your emotion for grey to come back into the warm embrace of people who care about him, here on PB. 🙂

    grey, if you are reading this, get back in contact, please!

  29. fiona,
    Roughly translated, it was ‘Equals and sisters’. 🙂

    Akerman’s latest column was source of outlandish claims of sexism on Kate Ellis’ part+ rancid comment from his blog.

  32. C@tmomma, all the best to you and the student.

    Quite a few of Fort Street High Year 12 2011 lurk here by the way – they like your work and they all survived the HSC in fine style too

    Can you give us a reference for “Piers and the real girl”? I would like this to be something that gets 1,500,000+ hits too …

  33. gloryconsequence@1551


    Cheers Leroy.

    I ask because I see Coles have a new ad stating all of their bakery bread uses ’100% Australian Flour’ as if it some unique thing. I immediately thought – what bakeries WOULD’NT use Australian flour?

    Yes, I heard that too. Apparently frozen bread dough was/is being imported from the USA and cooked in Australia which qualified it to be called ‘Made in Australia’!

  35. Paul Sheehan has felt the need to do this. Call the wambulance……

    [The following comments were selected from hundreds drawn predominantly from Hansard but also other published records. They are confined to comments made by members of the Gillard government, and directed at Tony Abbott’s character, and were made this year. These comments were searched and selected by me and are listed in chronological order, not in order of venom or wit.]

    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/comments-directed-at-tony-abbott-20121014-27lcd.html#ixzz29H89CJEh

  36. [Peter Brent ‏@mumbletwits
    @Pollytics @sspencer_63 Nielsen next weekend/week. ]

    Is this true? I thought a PBer had said they’d been Neilsenned this weekend.

  39. As I understand it, American bread is so full of preservatives that you can scrunch it down to a tennis ball and it rebounds.

  40. victoria:

    Caving in to pressure more like. There’s a twitter account which tweets Abbot comments. Perhaps the pressure is becoming a little hard to bear?

  46. Marrickville Mauler,
    Do they know I am an Old Fortress/Fortian?
    😀

    Actually, my son was a 2011 Year 12 Gosford High student but broke down last year after his father’s death and couldn’t complete the HSC. He did one subject but that was all. So he went back this year and did it all again via a magnificent Federal Labor Government initiative, ‘Pathways to Higher Education’. He was given Counselling at Headspace & access to a Psychologist for some Cognitive Behavioural Therapy & a Social Worker was assigned to us as a family to help us through it all and get him back on track. Which he is in spades!

    I truly feel we have been blessed with this federal government at this time because I know that if Abbott would have been in power my son would have been consigned to the scrap heap as ‘not worthy of an education’, according to the criteria he has spoken about previously, if he were to become our Prime Minister, Dog forbid!

    Now we are about to embark upon the beginning of the rest of my son’s life, and I couldn’t be more proud of him. 🙂

    And sick to death with worry, unlike him. 😀

  49. fiona,

    I realise that. Pies is responsible for what he allows on his blog.

    You reckon Bilbo wouldn’t pick that one up quicksmart and issue a permanent red card?

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