Consisting of Darwin and its satellite town of Palmerston, the electorate of Solomon was created when the Northern Territory was divided into two electorates at the 2001 election. This appeared set to be reversed at the 2004 election, when the Northern Territory was found to be 295 residents short of the requisite number. Since both major parties felt they could win both seats (a more sound judgment in Labor’s case, at least at the time), the second seat was essentially legislated back into existence. This has left the two Northern Territory electorates with by far the lowest enrolments in the country: at the time of the 2010 election, Solomon had 59,879 enrolled voters and Lingiari 61,126, compared with a national average of around 94,000.
The Northern Territory gained its first member of federal parliament in 1922, but the member did not get full voting rights until 1968. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Northern Territory electorate had recently fallen to Sam Calder of the Country Party after a long period in Labor hands. With Calder’s retirement in 1980, the seat transferred to the Country Liberal Party, which had been established as a local alliance of Liberals and Nationals to contest elections in the newly established Northern Territory parliament. Labor gained the seat with the election of the Hawke government in 1983, defeating CLP member Grant Tambling (who returned as a Senator four years later). It subsequently changed hands with great frequency: future Chief Minister Paul Everingham recovered the seat for the CLP in 1984, Warren Snowdon won it back for Labor in 1987, Nick Dondas held it for the CLP for one term from 1996, and Snowdon recovered it in 1998.
Going into the 2001 election, the new seat of Solomon had a notional CLP margin of 2.3% while Lingiari had a notional Labor margin of 3.7%. Warren Snowdon naturally opted for the safer option of Lingiari, and Solomon emerged as an extremely tight contest between Labor’s Laurene Hull and David Tollner of the CLP. Tollner suffered a 2.2% swing against the national trend, but was able to hang on by 88 votes. The Northern Territory recorded only a modest swing to Labor at the 2007 election, but it proved just sufficient to deliver them their first victory in Solomon, with former football coach Damien Hale prevailing by 196 votes. The defeated Tollner returned to politics after winning the seat of Fong Lim in the Northern Territory parliament at the 2008 election, and has been health, housing and alcohol rehabilitation minister since the CLP’s election win in August 2012. Hale meanwhile enjoyed a short tenure as member, suffering a 1.9% swing in 2010 and what by the electorate’s historical standards was a relatvely large 1.8% defeat. The seat has since been held for the CLP by Natasha Griggs, who had previously been the deputy mayor of Palmerston.
Solomon’s distinguishing demographic characteristics are a high proportion of indigenous persons (10.3% in the 2006 census compared to a national figure of 2.3%) and a low number of persons aged over 65 (5.3% against 13.3%). Darwin is divided between newer Labor-leaning suburbs in the north, including Nightcliff, Casuarina, Jingili and Sanderson, and the town centre and its surrounds south of the airport, an area marked by higher incomes, fewer families and greater support for the CLP. Stronger still for the CLP is Palmerston, a satellite town established 20 kilometres south-east of Darwin in the 1980s that accounts for just over a quarter of the electorate’s voters: it is less multicultural than Darwin and has a high proportion of mortgage-paying young families.
Labor’s preselected candidate for the coming election is Luke Gosling, a staffer to Senator Trish Crossin and volunteer operations manager of a charity he co-founded which works in East Timor. Griggs meanwhile faces a preselection challenge from Peter Bourke, a doctor at Royal Darwin Hospital.
ABSOLUTE CRAP!
Going Caps … again.
Not hot enough in Adelaide, Shows?
FORUM QUIZ. WHO DO YOU PREFER:
1) Florence
2) The Machine
Am I the only one who thinks Locked out of Heaven by Bruno Mars sounds a lot like Message in a Bottle by The Police?
Shows – Answer is Yes.
Interesting article about the legacy opprobrium that drug cheating champions will have to bear.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/the-baseball-hall-of-fames-shocking-message-in-the-end-cheaters-lose/267040/
PVO on twitter
At this year’s federal election I think I’ll just pay the $20 fine…seems like good value for not having to vote for what’s on offer!
Tweet from bernard Keane
Hey @tennewsmelb did you just described retired politician and climate denialist Nick Minchin as a “climate change expert”? On what basis?
[PVO on twitter
At this year’s federal election I think I’ll just pay the $20 fine…seems like good value for not having to vote for what’s on offer!]
Typical PvO usually spews lib talking point but when he has a momentary credibility panic he goes for ‘pox on them all’.
If I was on twitter and not block (not and probably would be) I’d ask the clown exactly what it is about Labor he dislikes.
[I’m old enough to recall that Mumble spent the entirety of 2004 blasting Labor for having made Mark Latham leader. If this were happening right now, it would of course be seen through the prism of his News Ltd shill-dom.]
Lemmings come to mind, that was mumble and not you PB wasn’t it? I have long thought you and mumble would make excellent co-writers, or at least writing for the same platform on similar issues. But don’t invite PvO to join you.
[I’m old enough to recall that Mumble spent the entirety of 2004 blasting Labor for having made Mark Latham leader. If this were happening right now, it would of course be seen through the prism of his News Ltd shill-dom.]
Another point two is that it is in hindsight easy to downplay how great a call this was. Latham’s ‘collapse’ and ‘trouble’ was largely after the election. Most Labor people still liked him and still expected him to win in the week leading up to the election.
I remember the WA Labor launch, on the Swan River not far from Guildford can’t remember the venue, where Latham and Beazley both talked to the crowd during the Federal election. Latham seemed oddly subdued and flat, while Beazley was all fire and passion (almost the exact opposite to their public perceptions) but even being a Beazley fan it was good to see him so passionately support his leader and Labor people were generally expecting a win.
The embarrassment and ‘Crazy Mark’ stuff was all after the election.
Having said that Federal Caucus has an absolutely terrible record with leaders as most recently evidenced by Adam who stated that Rudd was always a selfish self-involved one man band, yet Federal Caucus made him PM. It is certainly a situation with negative synergy as the whole is substantially less that the sum of the parts.
[The embarrassment and ‘Crazy Mark’ stuff was all after the election. ]
The only good memory from that election was as a booth captain the show was over before my count was finalised and I got to go home and have a couple of quiet ‘if only’ drinks rather than feel the collective disappointment and energy drain of the labor faithful in a full sized election night party.
Some may find this satire gross – it is, but only because, I reckon, the Republican attitude towards women is so vile (parody of the ‘legitimate’ rape assertion)
http://www.williamkwolfrum.com/2013/01/11/scientists-discover-that-human-body-will-stop-a-bullet-in-a-legitimate-shooting/
Evening All
Had a bit of running around to do so didn’t get to reply straight away
Zoomster – the reason some of the single parents are losing their concession cards is that they are caught out by the changing income tests
http://www.theage.com.au/national/parents-in-limbo-on-newstart-swap-20130112-2cmo4.html
Fairfax Media has also uncovered a previously undisclosed double whammy for at least 10,000 of the single parents who have been told they will permanently lose their pension cards. They are no longer eligible for income support when they are switched to Newstart. The single parents will be ruled out of income support under Newstart because they earn more than $1400 a fortnight.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Human Services confirmed up to 10,000 single parents not receiving payments from Newstart would also lose all their pension concession entitlements.
”Those single parents who are not eligible for an income support payment [for example, Newstart Allowance] will not be eligible for a pensioner concession card, and should destroy their card,” she said.
I have no idea how anyone can support this move by the government. On one hand they want to encourage people to work on the other they whack them for doing so. If you looked at the financial impact of losing the concession card and included it in the calculation of their effective tax rate they may well be better off if they quit their jobs. i.e. the exact opposite of what the government is hoping to achieve.
Personally, I don’t see all pensioners / welfare recipients being the same or requiring the same treatment so some differeniation makes sense. Joel Fitzgibbon is right on that count but I fear might want to go down the wrong path with it. In saying that, it does seem strange that some can get study assistance while others can’t – obviously someone has done the sums though and said we can’t afford to give it to everyone.
It’s not an easy policy area but you think there would be a clear dividing line in this area between Labor and Liberal, it seems not.
On pokies – the biggest problem for Labor wasn’t getting the votes from the cross-bench, they wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest if they couldn’t guarantee all their own votes in the first place.
Unfortunately it would have been political suicide for some to vote for the original package of reforms.
[ because they earn more than $1400 a fortnight.]
Really this is quite Howardesque in its determination to give people charity no matter how much they earn. So presumably $100 a day isn’t enough to live on.
Are we still stuck on 158 Telecrap comment replies.
My comment didn’t get a jersey. I didnt make the run on team.
A Month Of Maher continues:
Bill Maher – The Decider
We Want Paul, I’d rather the government take things of families earning a lot more than $100 per day than those that do
jeffemu@367
Yep – same here. Even after several hours my positive comment never got a guernsey – but my negative comment (posted under a different name/email address) got through in seconds.
Been offline for the today.
My post no 58 made it onto the DT website. Obviously needed to add some posts to show a semblance of balance
where is the daily terrorgraph article? i might have a go at that comment game.
I’m listening to the ABC news – I rarely bother nowadays – but I was so very pleasantly surpirsed.
The announcer said that the ABC will do week long reports on climate change, predictions, effect on health, economy etc ..
I’m blown away .. what has changed? (Don’t get me wrong, this is amazing .. I’m hoping they limit themselves to qualified experts CSIRO/BoM/AMOS/Universities .. but I wonder what brought this on)
I think the single parent issue is one where an inconsistency has arisen – largely through historical circumstances – and correcting it leads to people losing out.
When people have been getting a benefit and it’s withdrawn – even if that benefit was poorly thought through to begin with, or poorly targetted, or whatever – of course they complain. But that’s no reason not to try and reform the system.
When the rules to Youth Allowance were changed, so that money no longer went to students whose parents were more than well able to support them, of course there was an outcry. That didn’t mean the original payments were justified.
In this case, the rules for single parents were drawn up when it was expected that one parent would be there full time for the children (not only that, but would spend all their working life at home).
But nowadays, that’s not the norm. Most parents are out working when their children are a few years old – expecting single parents to do the same is thus simply bringing them into line with the rest of society.
A couple on Newstart don’t have the luxury of one of them nominating to be the stay at home parent. Both are expected to be looking for work, no matter what the age of their child, and both would have to accept work were they offered it.
A single parent, on the other hand, is able to avoid job seeking until their youngest is eight.
Maybe the answer is to make all support payments, Newstart, SPP, DSP, Austudy, equal as far as money and concession cards are concerned, with varying criteria for qualification.
I think it is appalling that an adult who has been on Newstart loses money, including rent assistance, when they go into fulltime study and get Austudy instead. Talk about dis-incentive!
Puff, the Magic Dragon.@372
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/prime-minister-julia-gillard-shares-her-plan-to-win-back-voters/comments-fndo28a5-1226552687087?pg=2
I think it is now closed for comments. Or at least the positive ones.
[We Want Paul, I’d rather the government take things of families earning a lot more than $100 per day than those that do]
Very simplistic. The Government has been taking this on from all directions.
I am just wondering if Mr Abbott is still on ‘standbye’ or has he been deployed in fighting any fires? As the media have not shown any pictures of him doing anything apart from walk along with another firey doing a burn off- I suspect that he’s not doing much.Depsite praise on his Facebook page and the Daily Terror rthat he’s out ‘fighting fires’
I am not denigrating our fire volunteers- just wondering how useful TA has been
I am just wondering if Mr Abbott is still on ‘standbye’ or has he been deployed in fighting any fires? As the media have not shown any pictures of him doing anything apart from walk along with another firey doing a burn off- I suspect that he’s not doing much.Depsite praise on his Facebook page and the Daily Terror rthat he’s out ‘fighting fires’
I am not denigrating our fire volunteers- just wondering how useful TA has been
Catalyst,
I’m sure Abbott is still warbling “Stand By your Mantra” even as the bushfire threat abates.
I won’t post her comments again but Penny Wong was spot on with what she said about the move when Howard started to change the payments in 2006, it wasn’t right then and it’s not right now
Puff if all welfare recipients were the same and had the same needs one payment would do. The answer is probably about more targeted assistance rather than less. E.g. Zoomsters study payment
victoria @ 358
Tweet from bernard Keane
Hey @tennewsmelb did you just described retired politician and climate denialist Nick Minchin as a “climate change expert”? On what basis?
That’s not half of it. They did indeed have Nick Minchin saying Flannery’s comments were “ridiculous, cynical and opportunistic because heatwaves are natural, we are after all a desert”.
They also had Malcolm Roberts on to say “humans cannot influence the level of CO2 in the atmosphere”.
Malcolm Roberts is the Project Leader of the Galileo Movement. He is a businessman and mining industry consultant with a degree in geology. (Wikipedia)
Then they did a street walk vox pop and got 2 comments (one pro and one anti) to add even more “balance”.
[ it wasn’t right then and it’s not right now]
You really need to explain why I need to pay to tax to pay single mothers, rather they work like I have too. If the Govt would pay me I would like to be at home full time with the kids.
[I am not denigrating our fire volunteers- just wondering how useful TA has been]
I think about as useful as he has been at positive policy development and honest public discussion. About as useful as tits on a bull.
Ten “News” has long been ludicrously bad so I can’t say I’m surprised by reports of this latest effort.
Testing
Testing
Kevin
Re: Channel 10 news
I have not had a TV for years so I saw it on someone elses TV and it appeared to me to be incompetent rather than deliberate. The sort of thing you get when you give a template to a work experience kid and they do it by the numbers.
courtesy of the Geek. Article by Chris Kenny from 2009. Worthwhile read
Unhappy with this result, the conservative minority pushed for a leadership spill but still fell well short of the required numbers. Confronted by this defeat, the conservative wing, from its power base in the Senate, unleashed a shock-and-awe campaign of frontbench resignations, forcing the Liberals into a policy and leadership crisis, from which Abbott won by a solitary vote.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/liberal-senators-upper-hand-spoils-the-party/story-e6frg6zo-1225809556051
Is PB working at present?
davidwh,
[ Is PB working at present? ]
Sort of, sort of not, sort of etc…………. 😉
Apologies for the extended meltdown. If you can read this comment I guess it means things are improving, because no one else has managed to leave one for a few hours. Anyhow, there’s a post up on the WA Newspoll result, although Labor supporters of a sensitive disposition might prefer to look away.
374
A requirement to find work was introduced for all singe parent payment recipients in the Howard Government`s last term. New recipients then were to get Newstart from their youngest child tuning 8 with existing recipients getting it until their youngest child turns 16. This is not about searching for work, this is about taking money away from vulnerable people.
The work test is reasonable. Newstart is too low and should be raised. There is a reasonable argument for single parents to get higher payments because they have greater cost pressure than partnered parents. Just like a single aged pension is larger than half a couple aged pension.
C/- Marksj1,
Kiera @KieraGorden
“@AndrewJaffrey: First 2013 Morgan Poll out tomorrow has Federal ALP 52.5% and LNP 47.3%.” #AusPol (Morgan consistently most accurate poll)
That might make the Labor supporters of a sensitive disposition feel a little better! 😉
If there’s a good time for you to forget to pay you electricity bill William then is it while things are quiet. Hope you don’t forget around Sept/Oct 🙂
Scorpio if its a Morgan FTF then it’s the same result as their last December result.
I get the impression in the single parent debate that ALL the children are the results of virgin births.
Everyone says how miserable the government is but no one takes into account the support that should be coming from the non-custodial parent.
I am not these children’s father.
davidwh,
[ Scorpio if its a Morgan FTF then it’s the same result as their last December result. ]
Maybe they just re-badged it to save money! 😉
Nooooo, they wouldn’t, would they???????
William Bowe,
[ Apologies for the extended meltdown. ]
I suppose Crikey Technos blaming Global Warming is as good an excuse as any! 😉
Only four comments so far and I’ve chased everyone away already! 😉
Common, it’s safe to come out now.
The OH has arrived home and has given me a cheeky grin and a wink. I wonder what she has in mind?
Goodnight all.