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

    I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but the quote that Pies gives of Kim Beazley Snr is marvelous

    [“When I first attended the conferences of the ALP,” Kim Sr said, “I met the cream of the working class.

    Today, when I attend those same conferences, I meet the dregs of the middle class.”]

    It sums up Gillard’s generation so well

  4. C@tmomma and #1 C@tkitten,

    Huge quantities of positive plus vibes are heading in your direction right now.

    So both of you go to bed, get some sleep, and it will be alright in the morning.

    Hugs and :kiss: es

  5. confessions,
    I think it was rishane or rossmore who said that Nielsen was in the field this weekend.

    Don’t tell me it was another great poll for Labor! 😀

  7. TLBD,

    [Pies is responsible for what he allows on his blog.]

    I agree, but from what I have seen on most msm blogs (including the ABC) the “journalists” concerned are almost completely irresponsible.

  10. Scorpio,

    The trick, as I discovered this evening, is that once you have uploaded your desired gravatar pic, you then have to give it a rating (from G to X).

    After that you have to “confirm” it.

    Next you log out of the gravatar site.

    Then you wait.

    Then something happens (5 – 10 minutes).

    Good luck.

  11. Jason,
    Just beginning to disassemble mentally as my son does his HSC. Other than that I’m going OK. Would love a chat. 🙂

    Actually, I’m pretending to be OK for his sake. 😉

  13. Thanks everyone!

    Over and out! 😀

    Cheeky little bugger wants me to drive him to his exam and pick him up too tomorrow!

    I’m C@tmomma and I’m here to help, hopefully. 🙂

  14. fiona,

    Was your failed transmogrification an attempt to survive the coming nuclear disaster?

    Speaking of which, I think Ovid outdoes Chaucer in soft porn. He did dedicate a whole work to it, after all. I inherited a copy of Ars Amatoria from my mother. It has some excellent (seriously) pencil drawings in it. Danish translation; not the original.

  15. Speaking of sexism, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, when Mirabella is on Q&A tomorrow night, can we please… pretty pretty please keep criticisms of her limited to what she has said and what she stands for, not how she looks or her sex life… please?

    (This isn’t just directed at PB either. I have said it in other parts of the internets)

  17. C@tmomma – no they didnt know!!!

    At least one of them already does know now though. Another 2 close friends there who are benefiting from the pathways program (both brilliant young people) will probably know in the next few minutes!

    once more, all good wishes

  22. [when Mirabella is on Q&A tomorrow night,]

    I’m in the mood for a confession

    When I was 12 years old, the age when boys put pictures on their walls,I had two pictures,

    1. Bon Scott
    2. Pamela Stephenson

    I am so going to watch Q & A tomorrow night

  24. TLBD,

    It might not be such a failed metamorphosis after all 😉

    I agree with you about Ovid vis à vis Chaucer, but I’d put Apuleius on the same level as, or even slightly higher than, Ovid. However, it’s a very long time since I last read Ovid, whereas The Golden Ass was a mere twenty years ago.

  25. scorpio

    with the gravatar use the same similar account name even use the same crikey password,gravatar is separate account,worked with me

    Glad your little one fighting

    Daughter will have third child anyday,and main hope is both will be well.

  32. If I want soft porn I only need to watch question time.

    I’m waiting for Kate Ellis to join the Handbag Hit Squad. Keel O’ver didn’t know what hit her (!) when she coined that. Probably a Peta invention.

  34. Carey Moore,
    The first thing Mirabella will say is this government was elected on a lie! then she’ll go through all the other talking points as she does!
    She’ll claim to be offended by slipper’s texts and brush off the signs that she stood in front of!
    She deserves all she gets!

  35. Sophie and Morrison were very busy chatting during The Disembowelment. Soph checked her watch 9 minutes in – six to go.

  38. Schnappi

    [ scorpio
    Glad your little one fighting

    Daughter will have third child any day,and main hope is both will be well. ]

    With all the positive vibes you get from here, I’m sure everything will go well even though it is a very uncertain process as we have seen in recent times with My Say’s and my grandchildren.

  39. Murdoch in 4 tweets attacks Obama and Biden
    ______________________________
    In a savage and remarkable attack on the President ,Murdoch calls for a Republican vote…and says that Obama’s victory would be a “nightmare for Israel” for whom Obama has little time… Murdoch is a great friend of Natanyahu…( fact you can verify by reading any copy of The Australian)

    Unusual however for Murdoch to be so direct..and so openly partisan

    http://www.theage.com.au/world/biden-attacked-in-murdochs-twitter-storm-20121014-27kow.html

  41. scorpio

    helped gecko to get his avatar,treat gratavar same as your crikeyaccount,even use same password it is separate but tricky interlined.

  42. what I’m asking guytaur, is are there any people willing to do a little advocacy and fight the reactionaries on Whirlpool? And also there are other places where anti-NBN rubbish shows up.

  43. Carey Moore,
    And sometimes it doesn’t hurt to tell someone when they’re acting like an arse that they are!
    You can call it what ever you like! life isn’t lived in work places or boardrooms!

  44. You’re arguing a straw man, Jason. I am saying refrain from sexist slurs. I am not saying go easy on her. Surely her being an ultraconservative dinosaur with a pretty offensive attitude to a lot of things is enough to work with, without criticising her appearance or making comments about her sex life or any other stupid shit female figures are exposed to.

  45. Schnappi,

    [ scorpio

    helped gecko to get his avatar,treat gratavar same as your crikeyaccount,even use same password it is separate but tricky interlined. ]

    It keeps wanting me to get a new username & then tells me that it is already taken.

    Yeah, by me. I know that previously it wouldn’t let me get a new gravatar because someone else had the name scorpio with a capital “S”. A yank, I believe.

    I’ve got a nice scorpion picture to use & it won’t let me.

    Blimey! This is the third time I’ve tried. Time to give up me thinks.

    Yeah, and go to bed like I wanted to do earlier.

  46. scorpio

    i am schnappi, on twitter am schnappi5,gravatar schnappi something, just add scorpio1 to 5 if accepts,use same password something like that

  47. scorpio

    will have to get gecko ,jeez today if not work, and will try to help later today,gonna snooze in case moblile goes off.

  48. scorpio

    will have to get gecko ,jeez today if not work, and will try to help later today,gonna snooze in case moblile goes off.

  49. scorpio

    I have a step-by -step gravatar tutorial if you would like me to put it up.
    It sounds like you just need to pick a different Username for Gravatar. Your avatar follows your e-mail address not your username – you could call yourself King Kong and it wouldn’t matter. Just keep trying different usernames until you get one that Gravatar will accept. You can still use ‘scorpio’ on PB.

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