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.
victoria
Andrew would be referring to no rise in TPP for the ALP. Of course, no one in the govt said it would, no one praising the speech in print or on blogs said that, and even ALP supporters here were divided (most seemed to think it wouldn’t,), but I sensed last week that this would be the straw-man argument, tipped off by the reaction of one of the house pessimists on PB.
You know – after a look to find the lowest metric, “Look at the polls! It proves the whole govt approach is wrong!” blah blah.
Von Kirsdarke
[Francois Hollande has announced plans for education reform in France. Probably the most interesting part of it is abolishing homework.]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/french-president-francois_n_1962494.html%5D
Thanks for the interesting link; I largely agree with Hollande for a number of non-equity reasons that relate to quality of education. A lot of attention is paid to the rates at which hot-housed students get entry to tertiary courses, but far less notice is given to how they perform after they get there. The students “pushed” through high school tend to fall behind unless they are highly motivated. The student still needs to learn discipline, but not via hours that kill the body and mind.
I think there is far too much pressure on school students today, and too many time demands. It strangles creativity and sometimes the ability to learn for themselves. Some students simply learn to buy essays on the internet. It also stops them learning how to relate to their peers, having time to be fit, and to be healthy.
Pesonally I almost never did the three hours per night of homework recommended for us in high school. At university I only once staid up past midnight finishing an assignment (never at high school), and never craming for a test. I thought then that such efforts were often counter-productive, and am even more convinced of it now.
Puff
Three cheers for Francois Hollande. My views too.
Schools send work home simply because parents demand it. It is not done to finish work that could not be completed during the school day. I refused to have anything to do with homework whn I was teaching primary school, unless school policy made it unavoidable.
Homework helps no-one. Bright kids don’t need to rehash the day’s work at home and kids who are having problems get absolutely no benefit from it. If they get it wrong then they have just reinforced incorrect methods and it will take extra effort in class to fix that. Often parents will do the work themselves, that doesn’t help anyone. Valuable class time has to be spent marking and going through the damn stuff, time that could be spent on real, important learning. I won’t even start on the family friction all that ‘go and do your homework NOW’ nagging brings on.
People take a long time to admit, even to themselves, that they might change their vote.
It just doesn’t happen that millions of voters change voting intention at the drop of a hat, week by week, issue by issue.
It’s “safe” to say Gillard did OK last week and uptick your personal approval for her.
It’s an entirely different matter to say that your “decision” not to vote Labor and all those articles telling you that Labor is gone for all money are wrong, and that it’s YOUR decision to do something about it.
The punters are stubborn. They still think they should be angry with the government over the CT, even though the CT hasn’t hit nearly as hard as it was supposed to. They’re like children, chucking a tanty and refusing to say sorry.
They’ll come around and, frankly, the longer Abbott stays as the front runner, the better. He’s one of the best things Labor has going for it right now.
That Essential result is excellent. It helps to put the whole think in context (to adopt an utterly abused word of late):
Two weeks ago Essential was showing 53-47, in from 55-45. On the rolling average, that would mean the most recent component was somewhere around 51-49. Last weeks 53-47 was a result of last week’s component swinging back toward 55-45 again. It means this week’s component is back down near 51-49. it may have flattened out a little, but it’s definitely closer than 53-47 this week.
As always, you have to be a bit speculative with Essential because you can never be exactly what each week’s component looks like, you can only guess from what you’re given. But seeing as Newspoll swung back from 50-50 (from quite a while ago) to 54-46, there is some consistency across the two polls.
What it means is that Abbott’s “but my wife thinks I’m a top bloke” gambit did indeed work, and quite spectacularly. I think we here at PB were a bit shocked by that and mostly refused to believe it. But that’s certainly what it looks like now. It was timed to hit the press right through the polling period, and it did its job the way it was intended.
However, it only stalled the general flow of votes back to the ALP. On Tuesday Abbott managed to kick himself in the arse and reverse all the good work of the weekend. Any halfway intelligent operative might have attempted to capitalise on the change in sentiment and flaunt a new, sensitive Tony around the place. But no, he decided to place sexism, in particular his own, right back on the agenda. Well done, Tony.
His approval ratings have gone up a bit, so that part of it has lingered a little. But the party are declining again.
@Boerwar 1893
[They were more interested in whether Ms Milne thought Mr Feeny’s joke was sexist. Ms Milne thought so. It was definitely a personal jibe at Ms Milne but I found it difficult to find any sexism per se in it.]
Especially since, based on the description of said joke (“a series of pictures that feature the same image of Senator Milne with the caption, ‘the different emotional states of Senator Christine Milne'”), it’s a venerable internet meme which has been repurposed to refer to various people, both male and female. If I recall correctly, the first occurrence was “The different emotional states of Steven Seagal”.
Murdoch’s various campaigns__
_______________________
The Murdoch press in OZ is running endlessly with the story about Gillard and her previous legal activities with Slater and Gordon
Do the old monster’s men see this as an as a new Front in their campaign against the Labor Govt
Interesting too that in the USA …via his much loved Tweets in the last few days Murdoch had unleased a bitter attack on Obama and Biden
Hyper about the Bengazi kilings ..and today an attack on Ob ama saying he is a threat to Israel which Murdoch says he has no sympathy for and saying he dislikes Natanyahu greatly
Some of this may be true in many ways but why would Murdoch go for broke in utterances which make him an eneny of Obama in the years ahead…if he wins
He is the most powerful man in the world after all
It’s said that Murdoch loved getting into the White House and No 10 in London…all gone now I suspect
Murdoch is know to be close to the Israels but his open attacks on Obama as strange at this stage of history
theclaw
[If I recall correctly, the first occurrence was “The different emotional states of Steven Seagal”.]
Well remembered. Here is the picture.
[Steven Segal’s Emotions Chart]
I don’t entirely agree. I suspect it’s another of those things that varies enormously from student to student.
I remember from my own schooling that there was quite a difference in some qualitative way to what I learned in class vs what I learned via homework. One wasn’t necessarily better than the other, but there was some reinforcement due to coming at knowledge in different ways.
I was kind of a class “swot”, although in later years I tried to live that down a bit – you know not putting my hand up all the time etc etc. But things didn’t necessarily come easily, and sometimes it was having an arbitrary amount of time where I sat down to bash something out that got me where I needed to go, sometimes it was talking about it with family (who obviously weren’t particularly invested in whatever the subject was at the time, although my family was quite academic so they always had some input).
The difference in concentration required for a significant project vs day to day lessons was also a factor. I could concentrate in a short-term way for normal lessons, but if I needed to spend any length of time working on something I couldn’t concentrate properly on it in the normal scheduled school hours – something about a period ending at a certain time removed that sense of “I just need to work at this until I get it done” and turned it into “I just need to faff around long enough until the period is over and deal with this later”.
I’m sure homework doesn’t work for everyone, and isn’t appropriate in all circumstances, but … I don’t think it should be just abandoned as a concept. I suspect that doing so might advantage some students while disadvantaging others.
The speed of sound at sea level is 1,235 km/h. It is not absolute. It varies with both temperature and air density. Mr Baumgartner is said to have travelled at around 1,100 km/h.
On those figures, Mr B does not appear to have broken the speed of sound. OTOH, the folks doing the support stuff clearly knew their stuff and I would not expect them to make either idle or ill-informed claims about Mr B going faster than the speed of sound.
I would dearly love someone who knows sound physics to have a close look at what really happened. According to Mr Baumgartner he felt nothing when he is supposed to have gone through the sound barrier. OTOH, objects such as planes create a sonic boom when they pierce the sound barrier and the stresses involved are quite large. In early attempts at breaking the sound barrier, test planes sometimes disintegrated in the attempt.
As a passing note, not all that far above where Mr Baumgartner started his descent, there is no sound; sound has no speed and there is no sound barrier.
All the special effects you see in space movies involving earth-like sound effects during space flight are the result of earthlings getting it wRONg.
Aguirre the only reason the Margie intervention helped was the blanket, fawning coverage News Ltd and the ABC gave it. The Herald Sun had a free colour front page advertisement. How could it not help?
Andrew@1848,
How is Abbott’s approval up 5? Hard to believe
My guess is that Abbott cornered the vote of those who swallowed the media line that:
1. ‘They’re all the same’ after the CFMEU joke fiasco.
2. He was the only one of the 2 leaders ‘principled’ enough to try and get Slipper out of the Speaker’s chair after the text messages were ‘discovered’ and covered endlessly in the media for the last week or so.
As opposed to the PM who ‘supported’ Slipper.
It’s all spin and wild contextual conjecture by the media, of course, but some people keep taking the bait and get hooked. I think especially if Laurie Oakes, Mark Riley, Kochie & Mel, and Karl & Lisa follow the same script.
So according to essential TPP is steady. The PM’s approval is up and her PPM rating up.
Will be interesting to see if approvals filter through to the TPP over the next few weeks.
I wonder what “par” is for a five year old government a year out from an election – ie to have a 50% chance of winning. 48-52?
Snap, Leone!
Back to work for me; I agree the Essential Research result was good for Gillard. She should call Abbott on misogyny more often. The shoe fits.
Home work did me good, IMHO. It created an on-going learning connection with parents. It fostered self-discipline. It fostered revision.
I am sure that it is useful or useless equally for everyone equally.
deblonay
[The Murdoch press in OZ is running endlessly with the story about Gillard and her previous legal activities with Slater and Gordon]
They are walking down the same road to obsession that Pies has with his never ending claims about the (drum roll) Heiner Affair.
It seems the same slow creeping of polls heading of Labor’s favor.
Apologies if this has already been posted. A prize example of what a horrible, nasty, old swine Mordor has well and truly become;
[Rupert Murdoch has labelled victims of phone hacking “scumbag celebrities” after they met David Cameron during the Conservative party conference.
On Saturday night Murdoch took to Twitter to criticise the talks in Birmingham between the prime minister and members of the Hacked Off campaign, singer Charlotte Church, former Crimewatch presenter Jacqui Hames and actor Hugh Grant.
Murdoch tweeted: “Told UK’s Cameron receiving scumbag celebrities pushing for even more privacy laws. Trust the toffs! Transparency under attack. Bad.”
The comments sparked a storm of disapproval, with Murdoch repeatedly asked to apologise for the remarks and remove the tweets. Hames hit back at the head of News Corp, tweeting: “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story eh Rupert. Happy to discuss our concerns with you sometime?”. She added: “I’ve been called worse, but admittedly not by CEO of large multinational corp.”]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/oct/14/rupert-murdoch-phone-hacking-scumbags
Chances of an el Nino are receding:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
Oh Oh. Remember “The Macarena”? This will be worse in saturation.
@psy_oppa: I’m coming Sydney~!!! Are Ya READY~!?? #PSYatSYDNEY1016 http://t.co/PQj6pC1B
Jackol
[I’m sure homework doesn’t work for everyone, and isn’t appropriate in all circumstances, but … I don’t think it should be just abandoned as a concept. I suspect that doing so might advantage some students while disadvantaging others.]
True but the evidence is taht it doesn’t work for the majority. We should make policy for the majority. It can be optional for those who want it. But your beign a swot and doing well with homework proves Leone right – the good students still do well anyway. The bad ones would be better off going for a run around the block and relaxing.
[Aguirre the only reason the Margie intervention helped was the blanket, fawning coverage News Ltd and the ABC gave it. The Herald Sun had a free colour front page advertisement. How could it not help?]
Ordinarily you’d think they’d save something like that for closer to the election. Its an approach with diminishing returns, really.
From the Grauniad’s article about Murdoch’s “scumbag” tweet..
[Murdoch replied, somewhat incomprehensibly: “They don’t get arrested for indecency on major LA highways! Or abandon love child’s”…….
The incident was not entirely without humour, however, with one wag tweeting: “The real scandal here is that the head of a news empire can’t pluralise the world ‘child'”.]
M Hollande had better spend some quality time focusing on the french economy rather than worrying about homework.
rishane, it was very instructive that it happened now, and not at election time. It shows Abbott’s position within his party is parlous; maybe he is one bad newspoll (2PP-wise) from oblivion
@Jackol, @Socrates,
I disagree, when I was at school, TAFE etc, they told us that learning is preparing for Work, so if that is the case, we should leave all our work at school/tafe/uni/etc.
I don’t think “optional” works Socrates. I think compulsory homework is a valid additional teaching strategy. It can be overdone, and excess homework or reliance on assessment of homework is not good.
My point was that I think I would have done significantly worse in school without compulsory homework, and I doubt I’m the only one.
My further point was that scheduled school hours are a quite artificial structure to place around learning. Learning after leaving school can’t be placed in nice little boxes; you have to have the discipline, willpower, concentration to keep working at something without a deadline, and no other part of the schooling process trains you in those circumstances.
I’m not up on teaching theory or what evidence you’re referring to, but I would be surprised that a clear statement that “it doesn’t work for the majority” can be made, given that homework has to be part of a broader picture. Perhaps in a marginal sense you’re right – more homework doesn’t improve student learning outcomes beyond a certain point etc.
My computer just chewed up my post. I’ll try to rephrase because I’m not going through all that again:
Abbott’s approval is probably exterior to anything he’s said or done against the ALP. Both leaders’ approvals went up, so neither of them were at the expense of the other.
The Margie saga probably reached more people than Gillard’s speech. Sounds awful to have to say it, but because one was filtered uncritically through the media and the other fought tooth and nail by journalists, the message was clearer with Margie.
Margie effect can’t last though – it fights against the tide. We know what Abbott is like; he can’t sustain the fiction that he’s a sensitive new-age guy. Gillard’s speech was within character, so it can be built on.
While I still remember…I noticed a new meme this morning that the Coalition are trying out in the media.
Did you know that, ‘Our interest rates are among the highest in the world and that is causing the Australian $ to be too high and that is wrecking the economy at home and causing all sorts of problems for business’?
It has a kind of plausible believability as an explanation for why consumer and business confidence is down and people aren’t spending. Plus it has the added benefit of making what is a stellar economic performance in this country seem like a liability.
I mean, that is where the Coalition have still got it over the Labor Party. They seem to have people working tirelessly for them who come up with a new wrinkle, every time the last one gets ironed out by the government. So the government has to play catch-up constantly and deconstruct the new scaffold they have created and filter out into the electorate via their media megaphones and political brethren in the Cooalition States.
John McTernan, George Wright and their staff, should be sharp enough to be going through every day’s media transcripts with a fine tooth comb and antennae tingling to pick up on these new kites that the Coalition constantly keep putting up. Then get someone out toot sweet to pull them apart and expose them for what they are. Misleading, misconstrued, misinformation.
Learning is not “preparing for work”. Business and government keep trying to focus on some measurable direct economic connection between schooling and work so as to reduce the equation to simple economics. There are many types of work, and for some work it may be an appropriate sentiment.
Learning, and the important subset of learning how to learn, is about training people about how to function in life, and life is more than work, but sticking to the context of learning as applied to work:
There are a significant proportion of jobs where learning is part of work – most of the professions – scientists, engineers, medical practitioners, etc. I know as an engineer that a significant part of my job was being able to learn new technologies, new standards, design new products and analyze them, etc. For that job the concept of learning in nice little hour long chunks just wouldn’t have worked for me, and I suspect without homework I never would have developed the discipline to sit down and solve a problem or understand a new technical standard – something that might take a week or two of diligent effort on my part.
I’m actually somewhat shocked that people are suggesting what amounts to a one-size-fits-all solution (“no one should get homework”) when we know perfectly well that education doesn’t work the same way for everyone.
Aguirre, Abbott couldnt sustain the good guy image for two days. I’m suprised that for a man who is supposedly intelligent, he would not have seen the good strategy behind at least pretending to be nicer for a few weeks to enable any bounce from Margie to set in
You make a good point though Aguirre, as I’ve said previously. I wonder how much uncritical OM support is worth in voting terms. Imagine if the PM’s speech was treated in the same uncritically positive way as the Margie story? I think she would have gotten a bounce out of it in PV and 2 PP terms
But as I have said, I dont think the immediate electoral impact is not what matters; it is the long game. And the PM did something last week that may be looked back upon as the real turning point in her fortunes.
Just what to do about OM; they will fight her tooth and nail to the ballot box
Ah, but that’s the thing – he had a window of opportunity of only an hour or two to move his Slipper motion. He knew, as everyone in parliament knew, that Slipper was being counseled to resign as the motion was being moved. In another hour Slipper could well have announced his resignation (as he subsequently did), and the opportunity to pull his stunt and kick the government would have passed.
That’s context for you. Tony Abbott knew he could have sat on his hands and let Slipper step down on his own terms and preserved Tony’s new “SNAG” image. Instead he couldn’t help himself but to pull his stunt at the only time available.
Maybe Gillard’s rise was because Obama kept defending Big Bird last week and Abbott’s rise was because Romney won the first Presidential debate …
In short, most are reading too much into it
You know how they’ve been saying Abbott has a problem with women but Gillard has a problem with men? I’m not sure they should be counting on that too much. Checking the PPM figures at Essential, it turns out men are split 40-40 on their choice of PM, while women prefer Gillard by 47-33.
Jackol:
[I’m sure homework doesn’t work for everyone, and isn’t appropriate in all circumstances, but … I don’t think it should be just abandoned as a concept. I suspect that doing so might advantage some students while disadvantaging others.]
The problem here is that you can’t really prevent people from doing homework (or more typically) prevent parents from insisting upon it, so any attempt to “ban” homework really isn’t going to work in favour of equity or even produce meaningful data to assess the net impact of the measure.
It’s my professional view that as much as is realistically possible of a student’s professionally guided learning should take place on school grounds during school hours. Of course, not all learning can always be performed effectively in a class setting. Students sometimes need extension work or fail to finish things they perhaps should heve in class — not always because they are lazy or less able or because the teacher has required too much. Some people actually work better in a quiet home setting and these days with IT, they can get access to course materials at home, bring the work to school on laptops and storage devices and so forth. They may be able to research the web more easily from home in some cases as DET doesn’t always classify sites consistently. Some practical activities — which could be surveying their families, doing human movement activities or working on practical tasks such as food tech exercises or in textiles, may require some home-based work. In one exercise, recently, students had to diarise the ads their siblings were watching in the afternoon for a health class. These data were then part of an IT-based task on data entry and design of spreadsheets/databases and also a maths task on quantification and graphing.
In short, providing we aren’t simply handing out “busy work” to impress the parents with our insistence on academic application — but have an academic justification for the home-based task and therewith some means for assessing and reporting on the task itself — I have no problem with homework. On such occasions, I set it.
What’s not to despise about Bibi Netanyahu? And Rupert Murdoch for that matter? Talk about ‘Birds of a feather’. I can fully understand why Prfesident Obama may not like either of them. 🙂
My reading of the Essential result is that the impact of the gender wars on their sample was probably small, and not even clearly detectable. I base this on comparing their netsat changes over the period 10 Sep – 15 Oct with Newspoll’s netsats for the Newspolls of Sept and Oct. Average the two Sept Newspolls and compare them to the Oct 8 Newspoll and Gillard and Abbott were each up 7 in Newspoll over the same period as of Oct 8. So for Gillard to be up 9 and Abbott up 6 in Essential – it’s not a statistically meaningful difference and it may be that Gillard would have picked up anyway. People can read these big netsat changes as down to the gender war thing and be puzzled but not realise the gap between Essential readouts is large.
It’s quite common for the commentariat to go nuts about parliamentary goings-on having a big voter impact only to find that the polls don’t agree, at least in the short term.
Note also that the trend so far this term has been that Gillard netsat, Labor 2PP and Abbott netsat all run together in the same direction.
Will be interesting to see what other pollsters get.
Fran Barlow –
Thanks for that response. I agree and it’s reassuring to hear this perspective from someone working as an educational professional.
@jackol/1931
So you think that homework should be forced on all of us if you think homework is OK for you?
Another lie from the Canberra Press Gallery smashed that PM has men problem – latest Essential shows men are split 40-40 for PPM
When the great Zhou Eng-Lai was asked about the French Revolution. He said “It’s too early to tell”. Ditto with PM gillarding of Abbott
Zoidlord –
I think homework has its place.
Part of our working lives and part of being in our society is about doing things that we are effectively forced to do. That extends from completion of tax returns to learning new technologies for work or our social life.
Homework shouldn’t be overwhelming; it should have a point.
It being “forced on all of us” is neither here nor there.
If it were possible to work out which students would benefit from compulsory homework and which students would not beforehand, then I would say absolutely tailor the education for the child.
I can’t help but suspect that all children benefit from the concept of homework to some extent – if only, as I have been arguing, in terms of breaking down the boundaries of where learning applies. You don’t only learn in school in neat one hour chunks. In day to day life, including work, learning doesn’t fit that pattern.
Anyone know where can find a link to the David Feeney pictures of Christine Milne???
I’d interested in people’s thoughts on them
[You know how they’ve been saying Abbott has a problem with women but Gillard has a problem with men? I’m not sure they should be counting on that too much. Checking the PPM figures at Essential, it turns out men are split 40-40 on their choice of PM, while women prefer Gillard by 47-33.]
Shh, you’re gonna spoil the ‘they’re as bad/unpopular as each other’ narrative! 😉
[I’d interested in people’s thoughts on them]
Womble – stupid but a copy of what has been done before.
jackol:
[If it were possible to work out which students would benefit from compulsory homework and which students would not beforehand, then I would say absolutely tailor the education for the child.]
In principle that sounds good, but in practice, most students said to be likely to “benefit” from it would feel as if you you were singling them out, which would prejudice the calculus. In practice, (save in those cases where we are talking about work that needs to be completed and could have been in class but wasn’t) you have to give a specific piece of homework to everyone, and ensure you assess and report professionally on it in a timely way, or not give it out at all.
I should have probably posted this at the ACT election thread, but anyway:
[Police have been called over an election campaign incident at the weekend with Chief Minister Katy Gallagher complaining about being ”harassed” by a group of young men working for the Canberra Liberals.
The Chief Minister’s staff called ACT Policing after Ms Gallagher was allegedly pursued by two car loads of young male Liberals while she was campaigning in southern Canberra on Saturday.
The Chief Minister, who was alone in her car but had staffers in nearby vehicles, said she was followed at one point during the pursuit into a deserted Kambah car park.
But the Canberra Liberals yesterday accused the Chief Minister of ”overreacting” and said reporting the incident was ”an absolute waste of police resources”.]
Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/gallagher-complains-of-libs-pursuit-20121014-27la6.html#ixzz29KvBh9kh
“@JamesPMorrison: Mississippi Tea Party says women are too emotional and diabolical to vote http://t.co/ceL0gNpa via @examinercom”