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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  2. [Jonathan Green ‏@GreenJ

    Remind me of that ‘context’ thing next time i see blank, unquestioning reporting of debt, or power pricing etc etc ]

  3. Mandy Vanstone thinks that calling Abbott out for his trash talking of the economy and governance is simply mean.

    [My opinion is that riling up people to despise, demean or hate others is a bad thing whoever does it. History tells us that people in packs or mobs tend to descend more rapidly to their baser instincts. Jones is rightly criticised for appealing to the mob mentality, and I think there is a serious risk that social networks are being used to do the same thing back. Neither is attractive.

    In a quite different way, Julia Gillard has also, for a long time, been doing one thing and expecting a different standard from others. Is there a day that goes by when she fails to accuse Tony Abbott of being negative? She is allowed to be relentlessly negative about him, but we are not to see her as being negative. It is an old ruse.

    Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/the-pm-the-shock-jock-sexism-and-a-whole-lot-of-hypocrisy-20121014-27kv5.html#ixzz29JJWbYLb ]

    I see.

    Wyalla off the map, “toxic tax”, governments dying of shame, cobra strikes, python squeezes, octopus whatsernames, “bad government”, ditching of witches and bitches and so on… are now off limits according to Vanstone.

    Julia is so cruel to Tony. He, apparently, can’t help himself, just like Gillard can’t help being a woman (they don’t have natural leadership and decision-making skills, you know).

    Tony is the victim here. I hadn’t seen that before, but I do now. Poor bloke. I don’t how how he can bear to get out of bed with all this unfairness and nastiness about.

    No wonder they call Gillard a bitch.

  6. Whats wrong with Geneva? SBYlives there doesn’t he? Or is that the United Nations?

    I get confused sometimes…

    [The challenge is to see things more from Indonesia’s perspective and less from our own. When I say that Australia’s foreign policy should have a Jakarta rather than a Geneva focus, I don’t mean that we should stop lecturing countries in Europe and the Middle East only to start lecturing countries in our region.

    https://www.google.com.au/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2Fnational-affairs%2Fopinion%2Fcoalition-keen-to-enhance-australias-relationship-with-indonesia%2Fstory-e6frgd0x-1226495700409&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a ]

    At least it’s a good start. We’re going to see things from Indonesia’s perspective from now on, not just our own. If Indonesia doesn’t want boats, then neither should we.

  8. [I hope Felix Baumgartner can tell us the sort of things going through his mind as he was freefalling at 1100km/h]

    Luckily for him it was not a fly he bumped into at that speed.

  9. One of the nice things about all the research into climate/weather is that we get to learn all about previously undiscovered effects: in this case, ‘sting jets’. These are discussed in the second article in this link.

    The first article is the Met response to a misleading AGW article by Mr Rose of the Daily Mail (subsequently used uncritically, suprise, suprise, by Mr Watts of WUWT fame).

    http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/

  12. Your old media is Rapidly agin’ Please get out of the new one If you can’t lend your hand – hmmm, that sounds very familiar

  16. victoria:

    She’s trying to say that it’s those who eschew the OM in favour of getting their news when and where they want it who are the ones indulging in groupthink.

    In other words, she seems to be having a dummy spit.

  17. I just saw a CFMEU ad for spreading the benefits of the mining boom.

    I thought people already broadly supported the mining tax?

  18. Amanda Vanstone’s, “Is there a day that goes by when she [Gillard] fails to accuse Tony Abbott of being negative?” could best be answered with “Is there a day when Tony Abbott isn’t negative?”.

  19. Has anyone counted the number of subjects on which Tony Abbott is an ignorant fool?
    [sortius ‏@sortius
    Abbott on logging in old-growth forests: “they come back quite quickly” #facepalm #auspol]

  20. Morning. I’m looking forward to hearing later what subjects Tony brought up with SBY. He has to bring up turning back boats and he has to say so. Leaders can say at least what they talked about.

    Speech views now over 1.5 million.

  22. This from Jessica Irvine in The Punch, of all places..
    ‘In an extraordinary 15 minute speech last Tuesday, Australia’s first female Prime Minister gave voice to the silent rage of generations of Australian women’

  24. I read Katharine Murphy as saying that the Canberra Gang are not all middle-aged white men, and all who write op-eds are not based in Canberra.

    She’s right, but there is also the shadow of News Ltd lying across all the printed media, which blurs these little differences.

  25. Good Morning Bludgerville! 🙂

    So, today will be a day of parsing his words carefully for Tony Abbott and attempting to draw a veil over what is said between him and the President of Indonesia such that he hopes he doesn’t get a nasty ‘surprise’ himself wrt the leaking of the content of his conversation with SBY today, as happened the last time they met in Darwin.

    As I said, careful parsing of words. For it seems that we now have before us a bit of a crabwalk in Indonesia, which has replaced the perennial swaggering jock walk, when he is in Australia.

    For example, what does this mean?

    Australia needed to be ”less conscious of the impact of our decision-making on tomorrow’s domestic headlines, and more conscious of our impact of our decision-making on sentiment here in Jakarta,” he said.

    Is he saying that he realises that sentiment in Indonesia is negative towards his ‘Tow Back the Boats’ position, and, down the line, should Australia be unlucky enough to get him as Prime Minister, he will eventually bow to ‘sentiment in Indonesia’ and redefine and tailor his decision-making to their requests for a change in his policy?

    It could be read that way, the statement is so opaque.

    Or, is he making an aggressive statement towards Indonesia that he is ‘Not for turning’ on his ‘Turn Back the Boats’ policy fully conscious of the effect it will have on ‘sentiment in Indonesia’ but he knows that he is carrying the big stick of Aid to Indonesia in his backpack and he’s not afraid to use it to achieve his long term goals, despite acknowledging what sentiment may be in Indonesia.

    He never said he wanted a positive impact on sentiment in Jakarta as a result of his decision-making. He just said he would be fully conscious of the impact his decision-making would have and would not care about daily headlines.

    Now, he has also carefully stated today:

    TONY Abbott has said that, if he becomes prime minister, he would run important policies past the government of Indonesia before announcing them, as part of his ”no surprises” policy.

    Note it doesn’t say that he will take any notice of Indonesian reaction to his policies? Merely that he will deign to ‘run important policies past the government of Indonesia before announcing them’.

    Take note especially that he will still announce the policies, as he intended BEFORE ‘running them past the Indonesian government’. He says absolutely nothing about changing them in any way once run past the Indonesians.

    Such a kind and benevolent Colonial Master of the mendicant ‘Brown Muslim People to our North’ is the attitudinal bias that I pick up from his statements and his actions. Such as the one in the photo circulated yesterday of him arrogantly and/or ignorantly putting his foot up on to the table of the children. Whilst smiling facetiously(?) as he does it.
    (Interesting to note the horrified looks on the faces of the women as he does it).

    Then, Quizzed about the tow back the boats policy, decried in Indonesia as impossible, dangerous and a threat to its sovereignty, Mr Abbott said the discussions would remain behind closed doors.

    According to Mr Abbott: ”We will stop the boats, but we’ll do it by working in the closest possible harmony with Indonesia”.

    Apparently, by going in hard ‘behind closed doors’ like Alexander Downer was reputed to do and wielding his big financial stick. Also, that he will work with the Indonesians in the closest possible harmony.
    I guess that statement covers even 1% ‘harmony’.

    However, in the current context of Indonesia’s emergence as one of the new Tiger economies of Asia, I am not so sure that Tony Abbott can get away with it as easily as Howard and Downer used to be able to.

    Yes, Indonesia still has a relatively low standard of living for it’s citizens, but it has ambitious plans, as Trade Minister Craig Emerson pointed out today, about raising the amount of meat eaten by it’s citizens 10-fold. and Australia, as Tony Abbott has also pointed out, continues to want a large slice of that action.

    So I’m thinking that financial threats might be a two-edged sword for Mr Abbott. He wouldn’t like to be the Prime Minister that oversaw the collapse of the Live Cattle Trade between the 2 countries, now would he? And we all know that the whip hand is firmly with the Indonesians on that front. As I frankly don’t think John Cobb has the wherewithall to deal with that sort of crisis, and we all know that Mr Abbott himself is not too good when his plans don’t go to script.

    Mr Abbott may well be ‘Not for Turning’ on his ‘Turn Back the Boats’ policy. However, the Indonesians are ‘Not for Intimidating’.

    So, in the end, after Tough Guy Tony has tailored his policy ‘for domestic consumption’, in the run-up to the election, will he actually stick with it when push comes to shove, after the election?

    I don’t think so. 🙂

    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/abbott-would-consult-closely-with-indonesia-20121014-27kyn.html#ixzz29JRJhixi

  26. triton@1720


    Morning. I’m looking forward to hearing later what subjects Tony brought up with SBY. He has to bring up turning back boats and he has to say so.

    Do they risk a presser saying they have SBY/ Marty etc onside and that Labor are hopeless?

    Or do they verbal the Indonesian position in other ways?

    If so what do the Indonesians do about it, slap abbott down publically and issue their own warnings to him?

    More likely/ hopefully the Indonesians will say privately but firmly if you try turning the boats around you will be buying into big trouble and think seriously about the consequences before to try it on.

    Its not just the Indonesian Government they have to worry about – the Indons have some feisty parliamentarians as well.

    If they haven’t got a major breakthrough then it becomes a flop given abbott continual saying he “Will turn the boats around”.

    I’m sure OM will find the right context and nuance so that he comes out of it all as a hero….

  27. [Bernard Keane Bernard Keane ‏@BernardKeane
    And at The Oz: old white right-wing male declares “old white right-wing males got it right”. ]

    Too funny. Is totally the OO to a tee!

  31. No ifs or buts, you have to read all of this. Free article

    http://www.afr.com/p/national/jones_has_fewer_options_in_shock_F2cytT80OO0kqo5E3sNg3O
    [Jones has fewer options in shock-jock economy
    PUBLISHED: 8 HOURS 48 MINUTES AGO | UPDATE: 2 HOURS 13 MINUTES AGO

    NEIL CHENOWETH
    The internet had lit up with outrage and the Twitter feed was going off the dial as Alan Jones finished his shift, but he wasn’t worried. Shock jocks are made of sterner stuff. And he had more pressing issues on his mind.

    …………

    But there is a bigger story behind this saga, that begins with the growth in ratings that 2GB’s shock jock line-up has achieved — and how hugely profitable their opposition to the Labor government has been.

    PROFITING FROM POLITICS
    Fighting the carbon tax is a business – it’s arguably the most successful business in Australian media right now. Alan Jones has earned a fortune for his employer from his determined campaigning against the tax.

    The rise of the shock-jock economy is one of the biggest, unremarked media stories of the past three years.]

  32. Good morning, Bludgers.

    David Rowe with a repulsive Abbott upskirt!!

    Poor Widdle Tony Abbott; so victimised by those nasty Labor feminists! First he has to hid from them behind the wife & daughters’ skirts as they defend him from the results of his so-called 1950s’ he-man victimisation of PM Julia Gillard (er … how many of his vicious, lying SSSO rants has PM JG earned from him so far?).

    Then, when Poor Tony tried to call her out on HER sexism & misogyny – yes, Virginia, I know his Opposition defenders & the Canberra Press Gallery’s Angry Old Men have suffered bad “Senior Moments” and completely forgotten He Who Must Be Shielded From All Those Superordinate Labor Women (aka Tony Abbott) actually started it by ranting against her, hurling the exact words, “Sexism” and “Misogyny”, before she stood up to reply, confident in her ignoring his provocation as usual – That Dreadful Woman totally forgot her “weaker sex” place and turned his own words back on Poor Widdle Tony.

    Would you believe it! A mere woman, put in her place when a MAN called out her sexism and misogyny, had the HIDE to accuse HIM of the same behaviour; deriding him during the ABC’s Live Telecast to the Nation! Oh, the humanity! The humanity!

    How could anyone – yet alone a woman – be such a vicious, sexist bully, just after Tony’s wife & daughters openly had to defend his sensitivity, his lack of sexism, his “feminine side”?

    As Coalition and Press Gallery gathered to call out Nasty Sexist Gillard’s bullying of Poor Widdle Tony, things were getting worse. The ABC uploaded the full video. How DARE they! Some lowlife then copied Gillard’s demolition of Tony and sent it to blogs in the USA! So before the first Press Gallery defence of Tony appeared in print, some horrid feminist Yank blog posted it online. Before the evening news, it was being lauded in England as well.

    Then That Woman’s bullying of Poor Widdle Tony went viral across the globe, and article after article – even in Le Monde, would you believe! – spreading the bullying globally. Poor Widdle Tony Abbott was being publicly emasculated in every part of the Globe by That Awful, Aggressive Woman Who Stole Tony’s Prime Ministership! Add up the number of hits from every separate uploading of That Vicious Woman’s “rant” since Tuesday, and – what horror, what degradation of Poor Widdle Tony – the total is over 2,000,000 – most of it on that Pinko, Stalinist ABC’s upload!

    When a woman steals what is rightfully a man’s Office, there is no fairness in Australian Politics, is there! Tony the MAN had The RIGHT to call out the PM on “sexism” and “mysogyny”; but she, the WOMAN, had NO RIGHT to call him by those same words!

    Now Rowe’s has adding to it in his portrayal of the result of Liberal-Press Gallery’s attempts to recast Abbott as a victim of women’s sexism (Thanks, BK, for the inspiration!)

    I see Bleak (online Oz front page) has joined the Opposition and Press Gallery and taken the opposite stance. In a Murdoch paper. ‘OOd ‘ave ever thunk it!

  33. [Eric Campbell ‏@ericcampbellfcp
    The News Ltd fight-back has begun. To prevent any sideways attacks on my program, I am ceasing to tweet. My decision entirely. It’s been fun]
    According to another tweet, Bolt is the cause of Eric Campbell shutting down. Anyone know more?

  37. It seems that the result in the US Presidential contest is becoming harder to pick.

    In early October, with the conventions over, Obama ahead everywhere and particularly after the “47%” controversy, it was hard to see romney climbing back into this contest.

    I continue to believe that Obama will get there in the end, but there’s no denying that Romney is back in the game, which was almost unthinkable 2 weeks ago. Oddly, the Democrats seem to be doing better in the congressional races and the Repugs chances of achieving control of the senat have nosedived, so at the moment there is a possibility of starting 2013 with colours reversed from 2009 — a Republican President with a hostile congress.

    I should say that I’m glad I’m not an American. I don’t have to make a choice. Cosicdering purely the things in which a President has some power, it is very clear that Romney Ryan are likely to use cultural issues (abortion, DOMA, stacking SCOTUS) to keep their rightwing base while cutting a deal on the “fiscal cliff”, the bush tax cuts, ACA and the other promises. I obviously couldn’t vote for them.

    OTOH could I vote for torturing Bradley Manning, chasing Assange as an enemy of the US, backing Israel, drone strikes in Pakistan, doing next to nothing on climate change, off-shore drilling, shale oil etc? Of course not. Perhaps I’d have to do the write-in option and self-nominate. The Green candidate is about as “left” as Malcolm Turnbull. Roseanne Barr — running as a “socialist” would be a bit of a laugh I suppose.

    So I’m neutral. It’s tempting to take the view that America’s polity is simply broken. There is no widely supported candidate standing up even for the working people of the United States, leave aside humanity and equity as a whole. Telling people this simple truth seems not to work and it seem that there’s a chance that a presidential team that lies openly in public bevfore the election will be elected. That’s astonishingly poor. There must be a very great number of boneheadedly disengaged voters in the country. Even if you are a conservative, how could you vote for Romney-Ryan? It seems bizarre.

    In those circumstances, it may well be that for the country as a whole, ending the Obama regime might at least be educational. Maybe they need to be confronted with what lies behind the choice they have made. The Obama team failed to hold the Repugs to account after September 15 2008, and maybe that is the price they have to pay for that failure. I don’t wish ill-times on anyone, but if that is their choice, and they refuse to listen to all appeals to reason, then what can one do?

    Obama will need to come out swinging on Tuesday if he is to finally ensure his re-election. I couldn’t imagine that he’d have done anything else in the first debate, but yet he did. It’s not the Australian way which is never to give a sucker an even break, but there you have it.

    As these lines are being written, it seems that Americans may well vote to shoot themselves repeatedly in the foot and other body parts and hurt the world at the same time. How weird.

  38. C@tmomma

    [For example, what does this mean?

    Australia needed to be ”less conscious of the impact of our decision-making on tomorrow’s domestic headlines, and more conscious of our impact of our decision-making on sentiment here in Jakarta,” he said.]

    I hope that it means that he is learning from his many egregious mistakes in relation to Indonesia. Inter alia, I hope that it means that he has finally realised that an intra-Coalition Party proposal to cut our single most effective piece of foreign aid: support for Indonesian primary schooling, was utter stupidity.

    I hope that it means that he understands that ‘sentiment’ in Indonesia matters to the Australian national interest.

    I hope that it means that his racist habit of dissing third world countries and non-anglos is self-defeating for Australia’s national interest.

    I hope that it means that he understands that, when he stands by the likes of the muslim-baiting Mr Jones, Mr Abbott ‘gets it’ that muslims in places like Indonesia develop a ‘sentiment’ about it.

    I hope he understands that if the Indonesians do not want boats sent to them by Australian that they will not take them.

    The ‘no suprises’ policy is SOP, diplomatically. It is good to see Mr Abbott committing to it in government. Perhaps he has learned from his failures to follow this policy as LOTO.

    As for learning, the foot on the table incident is about what you would expect from Mr Abbott: Not a cultural clue; no international class: the walking embodiment of a reckless danger to our national interest.

  40. “@Kate_McClymont: I have never seen anything like it. There must by 80 lawyers here for the ICAC’s directions hearing for upcoming Obeid/Macca/Roozendaal case”

  44. Thinking of all the Coalition women leaping to Abbott’s defence, I am trying to think of the word that represents women who have adopted male-dominant attitudes. Someone here used it recently and I can’t remember.

    Because those such as Vanstone have succeeded in a “male” structure, they then see females who don’t make it as failures, and use all the same adjectives as sexist male do. Can anyone help?

  46. My friend in US who asked for the Julia Gillard speech you tube she had heard about, came back and said “wow she is dynamic” wouldn’t mind her as our leader, my friends also enjoyed it. They were on a weekend away, the power of the Internet?

  47. I will have a hearty guffaw if SBY emerges from his meeting with Abbott, Bishop and Morrison to announce under no circumstnaces will Indonesia accept boats being towed back.

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