Still famous 15 years later as the former electorate of Pauline Hanson, the modern seat of Oxley was created around the satellite city of Ipswich west of Brisbane in 1949 (a seat bearing the name earlier existed in southern Brisbane, before being renamed Griffith in 1934). Redistributions in 2004, 2007 and 2010 sent the electorate’s remaining share of Ipswich to Blair, pushing Oxley towards Brisbane with the addition of Middle Park and Jindalee in the north and Algester to the east. The changes before the 2010 election garnished the margin from 14.1% to 11.3%, and the punishing statewide swing against Labor that followed pared it back to 5.6%.
Oxley was was held for the Liberals on fairly comfortable margins for a decade after its creation by Donald Cameron, who served as Health Minister in the Menzies government. However, a 9.4% swing in the near-miss election of 1961 portended a long-term shift, delivering the seat to Labor’s Bill Hayden. Hayden did extraordinarily well to lift his margin to 19.1% by 1969, but Queensland’s reaction against the Whitlam government was enough to cut it back to 3.8% in 1975. By the time Hayden resigned to become Governor-General in 1988, the seat was safe enough for Labor that Les Scott was able to survive a sharp swing at the resulting by-election with a 4.0% margin.
After retaining a margin of 12.6% at the 1993 election, few suspected that Scott would be in serious danger despite the hostile environment Labor faced in 1996. However, trouble came in the form of Liberal candidate Pauline Hanson, whose campaign remarks about Aboriginal welfare saw her disendorsed by a party sensitive about its leader’s complicated history on racial issues. The voters by contrast rewarded her with an astonishing 48.6% of the primary vote, resulting in a 4.7% win after preferences. Unfortunately for Hanson, Oxley was substantially redrawn with the 1998 redistribution, losing its rural areas beyond Ipswich to newly created Blair along with parts of Ipswich itself, while absorbing the very safe Labor urban area of Inala. Rightly or wrongly, Hanson decided the new seat offered her the better prospects and Labor’s Bernie Ripoll had no trouble regaining Oxley at the 1998 election.
A member of the Australian Workers Union/Labor Forum faction, Ripoll served as a parliamentary secretary in opposition after the 2004 election, but was passed over when Labor came to office in 2007. His preselected Liberal National Party opponent for the coming election is Andrew Nyugen, a 28-year-old policy adviser to Brisbane lord mayor Graham Quirk.
Election 2012:
QLD Labor had 26.7%, they have gained 6.3% (33% atm) since Newman was elected
QLD Greens had 7.5%, they have gained 1.5% (9% atm) since Newman was elected
For a 7 month period, QLD LNP have lost quiet abit of ground.
Of all the tough issues the Gillard government has dealt with over the past year, the only one they are not now on top of in a political sense is boat arrivals. This is still toxic for Labor and can still cost Labor government. The government is still not willing to face the fact that there is no “regional solution” to boat arrivals. There is only one solution: announcing that no-one who arrives by boat will ever get a visa.
Victoria didn’t abbott only find out many years later that he may have been the father of a child who was adopted out by the mother only to then find out he was never the father to begin with.
But you are correct like the PM’s personal life many years ago it is not relevant to their positions today.
davidwh
You are incorrect
[When his girlfriend, Kathy McDonald, became pregnant, 19-year-old Tony was unwilling to marry her as it would rule out the priesthood. It would also mean he could not apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, as it was then open only to single applicants. The relationship broke down when she was seven months pregnant but he came to the hospital when the baby was born and held him for a few minutes, before he was adopted out. (Thirty-five years later, the son was found not to have been Abbott’s.)]
For something completely different, this bloke has without a doubt the cuuuuuutest cat/kitten pix I have ever seen. It is enough to make even Julie Bishop only half grimace.
[Adam Post, Author @500ThingsMyCatT
<<> slurpy holiday kitty! #awesomecatbook #catlover #cats pic.twitter.com/RHUG1iuD ]
Bruce Wilson maybe an alleged fraudster but at least he shows some guts.
Ratsars@493
Actually thats bemused’s comment not mine.
This bit is mine.
[ I think you will find that that phrase was used by Gillard in the S&G internal investigation writings {they were in fact a transcript of an interview the partners had with Gillard} way back when and its been picked up and run with from there.
It would be virtually impossible to back away from it now.]
Fair enough Victoria.
Ratsars@493
Dave was quoting me I think.
“Slush Fund” just sounds bad to most people.
She did not set up a “Slush Fund” as there is no such legal entity. She set up an “Incorporated Association”. End of story.
phes
if you think that why not phone bowen i am sure you know him
no good saying that here,, actully i agree with you.
o and o todays non stop topic
id say most people are watching the cricket
and dont give a dam
There is only one solution: announcing that no-one who arrives by boat will ever get a visa.
Psephos,
However having arrived in spite of never getting a visa what does one do with such arrivals? Can one send them back if they come from a war zone? Can one send them back to the country where they boarded the boat if that country will not accept them back?
JBishop just shown on ABC – looks like crap. Feeling the noose closing?
[The government is still not willing to face the fact that there is no “regional solution” to boat arrivals. There is only one solution: announcing that no-one who arrives by boat will ever get a visa.]
What do you mean by a “regional solution” here? A regional solution is the only thing that will work — absolutely nothing will be achieved unless it does something for Malaysia or Thailand where the asylum seekers are.
Also what will we do with the boat arrivals? Can’t deport them back to Indonesia, they won’t accept them. Can’t send them back to their home countries where they face persecution. Just lock them up?
Bruce Wilson maybe an alleged fraudster but at least he shows some guts.
Yes, he has put on some weight…
my say
[d say most people are watching the cricket
and dont give a dam]
I think you are right.
my say
Agreed. It is only us political tragics that focus on this stuff.
CTar1
Bishop was really nasty. I think she is getting really desperate.
[Since when has it become de rigeur for the Prime Minister of Australia to dance to the Deputy Opposition Leader’s tune?]
Indeed!
Hilarious when, after PM Gillard’s responses to Friday’s Presser, most QT watchers can already write down the PM’s responses to Julie “Birther” Bishop’s questions – only slightly tweaked versions of the ones she gave during last HoR session’s QTS! Unless, of course, she dishes up DLOTO a serve similar to that Abbott copped!
The Oppo doesn’t have the numbers to roll her; not with 5 Indies (2 with huge axes to grind) & a Green who surely don’t want to spend their Christmas Hols on election campaigning!
Though the way Albo decides the Government will respond to the Oppo’s expected SSSOs could make this session memorable!
Psephos
It is unfortunate but I think you are right – it could be sweetened by a substantial increase in official refugee places – I could live with 30K p.a. which is much more than the boat arrivals. If it means leaving the convention so be it – the convention was set up under a very different situation when a large number of European nations were going through a process of ethnic cleansing. I don’t see evidence of official ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka or Afghanistan but there is racial prejudice in both.
BTW – did you make Nurnberg this year? – the Palace of Justice “interpretation centre” is quite interesting.
A slush fund, colloquially, is an auxiliary monetary account or a reserve fund while is used in accounting to describe a general ledger account in which all manner of transactions can be posted to commingled funds and “loose” monies by debits and credits cancelling each other out.
A point that Laura Tingle made on The Insiders this morning.
I think there’s a big element of hubris among the media right now.
Having gotten so many things so wrong over the past year – “Gillard gone!”, the polls, Bob Carr, Costello as head of the Future Fund, Thomson, Slipper (and yet more to come there, too), The Speech and now, it seems, Slatergate – they are quite energized, even desperate to reassert the “authority” they believe they should enjoy.
Look at it from a journo’s point of view. People are yell at them, “Ah, shaddup!” and they go in harder and harder, gossiping among themselves, all fancying themselves as latter day Woodards and Bernsteins, when in fact hardly any of them have ever done any investigative journalism in their lives, much less lately, beyond picking up a press release from their in-box, or receiving a mobile phone call from a party “insider” with an agenda to push.
They wake up in the morning and are expected to deliver instant, accurate opinion on their radio and TV shows and in their newspapers. It’s so easy to just make stuff up. In fact it’s about the only way to get through the day.
Their ranks are under seige, with literally hundreds, if not a thousand or so of their colleagues retrenched and thrown onto the scrap heap. Their ratings and circulation figures are tanking, especially the latter.
They are so wrong, so often, that – dare I say it – questions must be asked as to just what their job description is, and how well are they carrying it out.
In the case of all desperate situations a sense of doom pervades their workplaces. They find it hard to shake off the miserable feeling in the pits of their stomachs that they might be next, in the next round of sackings.
Like someone who has a chronic bad back, it’s hard to imagine, after a long time suffering, that the rest of the world isn’t suffering to, or if not, why shouldn’t they be? If the journalists world is miserable, why not spread a little of that misery around?
They are living out a declining paradigm. Clinging to the wreckage, every now and again one of them drops off the piece of driftwood they are holding onto, or gets taken by a shark. One by one they disappear. Black funk has long ago taken over any optimism they may have felt.
Human decency, good judgement, fair dealing, honest assessment and analysis are all overshadowed by the panic and hopelessness they feel about their own occupation: press journalist, when the press is dying by the month.
Faced with so many egregious errors, confronted by their own group think what do they do?
They do what all desperate people do: the do the same thing, only harder, stupider, harsher, more cynically, more flippantly in the Gotterdammerung they have convinced themselves is the “real” world.
Seeing Kelly, Tingle, Cassidy and even the usually reliable Probyn today on Insiders just made me think to myself, “why do they bother?” Why were they so desperate to keep this story alive when it’s pretty clear there’s not much, if anything to it?
Why the obsession with the events of 20 years ago, as if it was yesterday?
Just saying “It goes to Gillard’s character” is so astoundingly insensitive and banal – as if no-one, least of all them, had ever made a bad career move, fallen for the wrong person who then took advantage of them, or had put their best case forward when being grilled by the boss over a concerning incident at work, or that no-one had ever forgotten a single piece of paper (that may or may not have come across their desk) in a file of hundreds of pieces of paper, itself in a filing cabinet of thousands of files.
The same went for the inquisitors on Meet The Press. It was as if all the laws passed, reforms enacted, policies generated, vicissitudes overcome, world leaders met with, and people benefited by the government’s actions were all for naught when faced with what happened in an office interview, or what was in a memo two decades ago.
They’ve put their foot down. Drawn a line in the sand. Desperate for relevance they’ve declared that their agenda is the correct one, just like they declared all their other agendas to be the only correct way of thinking over the past five years (and certainly the last two).
They were wrong all those other times, and I think they’re even more wrong now. The best defence I’ve seen put is, “Yeah, but aren’t you curious? I am!”
One last effort is all it will take. The witnesses and main drivers are either disgruntled former unionists, ex-employees of a decade’s standing who have stolen files before they left, shysters, rock-spiders and frauds no longer uninvolved (and already investigated at the time), out-of-work shock jocks, officially declared racists, asbestos industry barrel girls, subsidized Murdoch hacks, Fairfax remnants facing the chop, egomaniac TV show hosts who regard themselves as more important than their guests, or has-been commentators and political operatives from the 80s who write long articles condemning the failures of the pundits, and then indulge themselves in exactly the same thing they were condemning… without blinking an eye or blushing with embarrassment.
This is a last, desperate plea for relevance by a trade whose careers are rightly dying by the dozen.Faced with such a desperate situation they just go in harder, making up stories for their sheltered workshop newspapers, and closing off comments just in case anyone might wish to disagree with them.
The old paradigm of the pontificating pundit, delivering judgement from on high, free of feedback, from the decaying edifice of institutional journalism is dead.
It just won’t lie down.
well i off to the nursery to by a native
called
mary mckillop. ive started a new native garden for her
waterfall and all.
plan to have wax flowers in red and white.
correas, and native berries.
Mimhoff
What to do with the boat arrivals who can not get a visa?
Malaysia is offering a 4 for 1 deal – a bargain in anyone’s language.
I hope the police charge Blewitt with whatever is appropriate. I would rather he be in gaol than on a plane. The thought of him going back to Asia sickens me, for obvious reasons. How many thousands like him are over there now? It turns my stomach.
my say,
The garden sounds beautiful.
Mod Lib @# 431
”So, some of the questions are:
PM, do you agree with MP Shorten that the fund you set up was “inappropriate”?
P M, what did you mean by using the term “slush fund”?
PM, what was the purpose of the “slush fund”?
PM, what is your response to x & y & z (the three people involved in this affair who have made statements this week)?
PM, do you think the fund you set up in 1993 should be made illegal?”
How silly are these questions and why has Mod Lib not being able to determine the answers from what Gillatd and others have already said.
A) This question is based on an incorrect interpretation of what Shorten said.
He said that Member funds should be used for the benefit of the members. Gillard had no say at all over what funds were applied to the fund or what the funds were applied against.
This was the sole responsible of her clients.
B)The term slush fund can be applied auxiliary monetary account or a reserve fund and is used in accounting to describe a general ledger account in which all manner of transactions can be posted to commingled funds and “loose” monies by debits and credits cancelling each other out.
C)This was answered by Gillard during her 80 minute press conference in respect of this matter. You can also find it in the Articles of Association of the Association.
D)She is only responsible for her actions and responsibilities not that of others
E)There are thousand if not millions of such funds why should they be made illegal.
Just childish mutterings by Mod Lib.
BB
Whatever the msm has predicted for this week, I am sure none of them will get it right. The closest they will come is that this last week of parliament will be a bruising affair. Wow how insightful, blind freddy can see that!!!!
[The government has no alternatives in its treatment of asylum seekers other than deterrence. It will stick to his guns no matter the public outcry over camp conditions.]
From Bernard Keane article in Crikey, just been pointed out to me by one of my followers on Twitter, wanted to know if the Government is a male entity?
my say
Hope the plant blooms and flourishes!!
Oakeshott, no I didn’t go to Nuremberg this time; I’ve been there twice previously. The IMT courtroom is certainly with a visit but it’s surprisingly small. The Germans have put back in the walls that the Americans took out and it’s once again an ordinary German courtroom.
From Bernard Keane article in Crikey, just been pointed out to me by one of my followers on Twitter, wanted to know if the Government is a male entity?
mari
well, it is le gouvernement in French…
[It will stick to his guns no matter the public outcry over camp conditions.]
It’s not a “public outcry”. It’s an outcry from All the Usual Suspects.
dave
“Dave @# 401
’The mistake she did make (I think) was to use the term ‘slush fund’”
Actually thats bemused’s comment not mine.”
My humble aploogies
Psephos,
There is another issue.
Labor have a problem with NSW. On the current figures they will lose 6 or so seats and Government regardless of other States.
Perhaps it’s to do with the previous Labor Government. Perhaps it’s to do with the coalition Leadership being very NSW top heavey. Perhaps there’s something in the “Lindsay” test. However, the Government will need to tickle the voters tummies in NSW to have any real chance of being returned.
BH
[I’m having trouble working that one out. Why should other countries take people from this area when they have so many crossing their own borders. It’s fanciful stuff.]
Considering the population density of many of the main recipient states, the economic problems most are suffering through the GFC, and the countries of origin of those seeking Asylum damned if I can see what selfish Aussies in a geographically vast country are whinging about!
Mod Lib @ 415
[The longer we spend in the national discourse on the issue of corrupt behaviour from the union movement…]
One wonders about coverage of the behaviour of the building companies. This takes me back, for example, to a comment by the NSW Casino Control Authority…
[In 1994, the Authority concluded that it could not be satisfied that Leighton Holdings, Leighton Properties and Messrs King and Vella were suitable persons to be associated with the management of the Sydney casino.
This was because of the involvement of Messrs King and Vella in the payment of special fees, the payment and receipt of unsuccessful tenderers’ fees and the practice of false invoicing exposed by the Gyles Royal Commission into Productivity in the Building Industry.]
http://www.ilga.nsw.gov.au/resource/reports/mediareleasedecision.pdf
GG
I think the ICAC is really bad news for Labor in NSW. It keeps reminding voters of why they tossed NSW Labor out and makes the Libs look a lot better than they should.
Bolt continues the Glorious Unhinging: telling us what was on his show today, (in italics).
Nationals Leader Warren Truss, challenges Bruce Wilson to go to the police if he really thinks Gillard did nothing wrong with his slush fund.
I hope this is a misprint on Bolts website coz as written it makes no sense.
Labor Senator John Black’s tip: Kevin Rudd now has about 40 votes in Caucus, Shorten is building up his own numbers – about 12 – and the maths then becomes obvious. He says Gillard will not last to the election.
Well Andrew the maths has been obvious for quite a while and it is still the same. Gillard won and is still there. Can this idiot Black be real ? Surely he could not have said that.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/bolt_report_today11/
And while NSW issues are state problems, the NSW Labor Right has its fingers all over federal Labor so damage to the NSW Labor Right brand damages the federal brand.
Dio
[I think the ICAC is really bad news for Labor in NSW. It keeps reminding voters of why they tossed NSW Labor out and makes the Libs look a lot better than they should.]
I do not think that this is particularly bad news for federal Labor
I think people in NSW can (and have) distinguish between the two
[What to do with the boat arrivals who can not get a visa?
Malaysia is offering a 4 for 1 deal – a bargain in anyone’s language.]
There is some good news in the agreement with Malaysia. Malaysia had assured that the people sent there would have had access to work and education.
It’s not perfect but it’s a good sign that countries in the region are willing to cooperate. After all no country wants to see people living without rights in refugee camps. Malaysia is willing to take refugees from Australia and give them rights, but signing the Convention or otherwise enshrining these rights in legistlation will mean it has an enormous obligation to the thousands of people currently in their country.
Diogs,
Maybe. However, it is up to the MPs in NSW to start and differentiate themselves from their State colleagues and focus on Federal issues.
I’d also suggest the self indulgent Ruddistas need to be told a few home truths about the potential cost of their ongoing undermining in an election year.
[Scarpat
Posted Sunday, November 25, 2012 at 12:17 pm | PERMALINK
From Bernard Keane article in Crikey, just been pointed out to me by one of my followers on Twitter, wanted to know if the Government is a male entity?
mari
well, it is le gouvernement in French…]
Everything is gender related in French, but not in English, and Australia is English speaking,so think Mr Keane or the editor has let through a mistake?? Surely not a Freudian slip??
Reason fot Labor losing seats in NSW?
Answer: The Daily Telegraph.
Yes I agree about NSW. I did refer to policy issues, but NSW Labor is a a political problem which federal Labor cannot solve. I think eventually there will need to be federal intervention. But that makes it all the more important to deal with the boat arrivals issue, because it resonates strongly in Sydney.
Bogans in western sydney – love boats!
It’s over 20 years since Black was a Senator.
“Bogans” is what we once used to call the great Australian working class.
Thanks for those figures OPT
The number of asylum seekers is only into 5 figures in the old, rich EU.
The numbers are minimal in EU nations which were formerly 2nd world.
Those with a cynical mind might make hasty conclusions about the importance of economic causes rather than persecution in the decision to seek asylum.
[When his girlfriend, Kathy McDonald, became pregnant, 19-year-old Tony was unwilling to marry her as it would rule out the priesthood. It would also mean he could not apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, as it was then open only to single applicants. The relationship broke down when she was seven months pregnant but he came to the hospital when the baby was born and held him for a few minutes, before he was adopted out. (Thirty-five years later, the son was found not to have been Abbott’s.)]
Thanks Victoria. I could accept all that about anyone, even sympathise, but the thing that gets up my nose about Abbott, in particular, is he still thinks he can sermonise on issues of morality, to the rest of us.
He must be one of the biggest hypocrites to walk on Australian soil.