Seat of the week: Fisher

Despite an avalanche of controversy, polling indicates Mal Brough will have little trouble winning the Sunshine Coast seat of Fisher from its equally contentious incumbent, Peter Slipper.

Fisher covers the southern part of the Sunshine Coast, from Caloundra north to Mooloolaba on the coast and inland to Maleny and the Glass House Mountains. It originally extended inland to Gympie and Kingaroy when it was created in 1949, but assumed a progressively more coastal orientation as a result of the area’s rapid development. The seat was a fiefdom of the Adermann family for the first 35 years of its existence, being held for the Country Party first by Sir Charles until 1972 and thereafter by his son Evan. Evan Adermann moved to the new seat of Fairfax in 1984, and Fisher was retained for the Nationals by Peter Slipper.

The seat was one of a number of gains for Labor in Queensland amid the debacle of the 1987 Joh-for-PM push, which had found an ardent proponent in Slipper. For the next two terms it was held for Labor by Michael Lavarch, in which time the eclipse of the Nationals progressed. A redistribution in 1993 made the seat notionally Liberal, prompting Lavarch to move to the new seat of Dickson. Slipper then made an improbable return to the seat as a Liberal, and enjoyed double-digit margins between a 14.0% swing in 1996 and the statewide crunch in 2007, when there was a 7.9% swing to Labor.

Slipper managed to win promotion to parliamentary secretary for finance and administration after the 1998 election, despite lingering memories John Howard may have had of 1987, but he was pushed aside to make way for Peter Dutton after the 2004 election. He became increasingly marginalised thereafter, copping an avalanche of bad press in the local Sunshine Coast Daily newspaper and receiving the smallest swing of any Queensland LNP candidate at the 2010 election, when his margin went from 53.5% to 54.1%. It was reported during the campaign that Howard government minister Mal Brough, who had lost his seat of Longman in 2007, had sought to have Slipper disendorsed in his favour, but that Slipper’s position was secured by the terms of the Liberal National Party merger which guaranteed endorsement to all sitting members.

With a clear expectation that he would not again win preselection, Labor identified Slipper as a weak link in the Coalition after losing its majority at the 2010 election, and bolstered its position slighty by successfully nominating him for the deputy speakership at the expense of Coalition nominee Bruce Scott. Shortly afterwards, Brough confirmed that he would contest preselection in the seat. In November 2011 the government went one better in persuading Slipper to take on the Speaker’s position at the expense of incumbent Harry Jenkins, resulting in his expulsion from the LNP and a fierce campaign against him from elements of the media, most notably Sydney’s News Limited tabloid the Daily Telegraph.

In April 2012, a staffer to Slipper, James Ashby, launched legal action claiming he had been sexually harassed by Slipper, and presented evidence purportedly showing Slipper had misused Cabcharge vouchers. The matter soon embroiled Mal Brough, who initially dismissed suggestions he knew of Ashby’s actions in advance before conceding he had met him on multiple occasions and sought legal advice on his behalf. In December 2012, a Federal Court judge dismissed Ashby’s sexual harassment charge on the grounds that it was an abuse of process in which Brough had been directly involved.

None of this prevented Brough from winning a strongly contested LNP preselection in July, after spearheading a vigorous local recruitment drive which reportedly doubled the local party membership. The preselection contest played out against a backdrop of conflict going back to Brough’s tenure as president of the Queensland Liberal Party before the Liberal National Party merger was effected, which saw Brough stand down from the position over dissatisfaction with the terms of the merger.

A surprise late entrant in the preselection race was James McGrath, who had been the director of the LNP’s hugely successful 2012 state election campaign and was thought to be set to secure preselection for the neighbouring seat of Fairfax. McGrath’s backers included Malcolm Turnbull, Joe Hockey and Julie Bishop. Brough was nonetheless able to win the support of more than half the 350 preselectors in the first round, and McGrath has since been accommodated with Senate preselection. Also in the field were Peta Simpson, director of a local recruitment agency, who had backing from Brough foe Barnaby Joyce; Richard Bruinsma, a former adviser to Slipper; and Andrew Wallace, a barrister.

Labor’s call for Brough to be disendorsed after the Federal Court ruling on the Ashby matter met short shrift from Tony Abbott, who contented that Brough had been “quite transparent and upfront about his involvement”. The following month, Slipper received a Federal Police summons concerning the allegations he had misused Cabcharge vouchers.

In the immediate aftermath of the Ashby ruling, a ReachTel automated phone poll of 661 respondents suggested Brough was unlikely to suffer electoral damage, putting him at 48.4% on the primary vote against a derisory for 2.7% for Peter Slipper (who remained publicly committed to seeking re-election as an independent), 21.2% for Labor, 11.7% for the Greens and 7.4% for Katter’s Australian Party. Brough was viewed favourably by 41.8% of respondents against 34.0% unfavourably, while the respective figures for Slipper were 6.9% and 75.5%. Brough’s involvement in the Ashby matter made 37.3% of respondents less likely to vote for him, against 39.8% for no difference and 22.6% going so far as to say it had made them more likely to vote for him.

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.

852 comments on “Seat of the week: Fisher”

Comments Page 11 of 18
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  1. zoidlord @496,

    Can do may well have a plan but his time frame is not in sync with Federal intentions.

    He well may turn things around but it will be well after the Federal election before it takes any effect perhaps early next year at the earliest.

    With that in mind I do not think he will call a early election.

  4. BH it depends on which side of politics you follow. Newman won a lot of friends for his efforts following the January 2011 floods.

  8. Fed real politics seems pretty quiet right now. Calm before the storm I expect. Both parties will have been fine tuning their 2013 strategy …. We should see the outcome in the coming weeks. The big question is whether the LNP will drop the ‘negative’ of the last two years.

  10. [How can a state elect the likes of JBP and CN. Is it something in the water?]

    Jelkie Joh stayed in govt courtesy of the rural gerrymander.

    CanDo may well lose his seat next election even if his govt is unlikely to be voted out.

  14. [Bjelke-Petersen’s government was kept in power in part due to an electoral malapportionment where rural electoral districts had significantly fewer enrolled voters than those in metropolitan areas. This system was originally introduced by the Labor Party in 1949 as an overt electoral fix in order to concentrate its base of rural voters in as many districts as possible. Under Nicklin the bias in favour of rural constituencies was maintained, but reworked to favour the Country and Liberal parties.

    This bias worked to Bjelke-Petersen’s benefit in his first election as premier, in 1969. His Country Party only won 21 percent of the primary vote, finishing third behind Labor and the Liberals. However, due to the Country Party’s heavy concentration of support in the rural and remote zones, it netted 26 seats, seven more than the Liberals. Combined, the Coalition had 45 seats out of 78, enough to consign Labor to opposition even though it finished percentage points ahead of the Coalition on the two-party vote.]

    WA had a similar rural gerrymander which was removed by (I think) the Gallop Labor govt, so not that long ago.

  15. Well, let’s remember that Joh was a stopgap leader who not only benefitted from a malapportionment but also surfed on the anti-Whitlam feeling in Qld and then manoeuvred the Libs into imploding. The Nats didn’t get more votes than the Libs until 1977, never got majority of votes in their own right and only got a parliamentary majority in their own right once in 1986 (it took two Lib defectors in 1983 to get them majority government).

  16. BH:

    I recall Newman as Mayor put fibre optic broadband cable into the sewerage network, but can’t recall if it actually happened or was just mooted by the Council.

  17. One person one vote is a pretty sound principle.

    Psephos and others, Do u have a view on how the legislative changes to eligible voters (-I.e automatic registration for 18 yr olds) will affect the federal election?

  18. 510

    If it were not for the malapportionment (unequal sized electorates not the funny boundary shapes that constitute a Gerrymander) then Joh would never have been premier because the Liberals would have been the senior Coalition partner (they got more votes than the Country party until the 1974 election).

    The ALP may have also won the 1972 election.

  19. BH he was generally well regarded which is why the LNP risked the strategy they did to get him to lead the party from outside parliament. You only have to look at the polling pre and post his appointment to lead the LNP.

  22. BH he was generally well regarded

    … relative to the LNP monkeys in parliament, a surprisingly large number of whom had been leaders of the L or NP at some stage and none of whom was at all well regarded.

  24. One thing is puzzling. Labor is improving at state level in Queensland but not, it seems, in federal seats like Lilley and Fisher – despite all the messy business involving Slipper, Brough and so on. Even though Labor seems to have picked up a bit in most national polls.

  25. [Psephos and others, Do u have a view on how the legislative changes to eligible voters (-I.e automatic registration for 18 yr olds) will affect the federal election?]

    The dynamics of this are the same as in the US. Anything that encourages or enables young people, and people from ethnic minorities, to vote helps Labor, because people in these groups are more likely to be Labor or Green voters. That’s why the Howard government, like the US Republicans, did its best to disfranchise them through things like compulsory photo ID for enrolment etc. Automatic enrolment therefore benefits Labor, which is why the Libs oppose it.

  27. @Tom 518

    Looking at the numbers, the Coalition narrowly won the 2PP vote in 1972 by 50.8/49.2.

    In fact going back, the Gerrymander’s main effect was preventing a Liberal premier, since the Coalition won the vote in every from 1960-1986.

    1960 – 56.0 LNP/44.0 ALP
    1963 – 53.6 LNP/46.4 ALP
    1966 – 52.8 LNP/47.2 ALP
    1969 – 52.3 LNP/47.7 ALP
    1972 – 50.8 LNP/49.2 ALP
    1974 – 61.5 LNP/38.5 ALP
    1977 – 54.6 LNP/45.4 ALP
    1980 – 54.7 LNP/45.3 ALP

    I don’t have the numbers for 1983 and 1986, but they would have had the L/NP ahead too.

  28. Well, I’m not fussed about Labor’s vote not improving in Fisher as I don’t think there’s ever been any suggestion the ALP would win that seat, even with the conspiracy to tip out Slipper.

    Lilley is another matter though.

  29. If Newman was so smart as Lord Mayor how come he’s been so gungho as Premier. Surely he wouldn’t trash his reputation for Abbott

  30. 527

    I did mention that the Liberals would be the senior coalition partner and this generally means providing the premier.

    Hurting the Liberals was the main aim of the zonal system of malapportionment when it was introduced by the ALP. It was switched to favour the Country Party rather than the ALP under Nicklin.

  32. [One thing is puzzling. Labor is improving at state level in Queensland but not, it seems, in federal seats like Lilley and Fisher – despite all the messy business involving Slipper, Brough and so on. Even though Labor seems to have picked up a bit in most national polls.]

    There’s no point in trying to make seat-by-seat predictions eight months before the election. Experience tells us that if there is a two-party swing in a given state, then the seats will fall, in more-or-less pendulum order. So if, say, there is a 5% 2P-swing to Labor in Qld, then Labor can expect win around 7 seats. Some sitting members may defy the swing, as happened in NSW in 2010 in seats like Eden-Monaro and Page, but the bigger the swing, the more likely it is that the result will conform to the pendulum. So single-seat polls are not very meaningful exercises at this point.

  34. Speaking of Queensland elections, I’m starting to do work on stats for the 1977 election on Wikipedia now.

    For a while I thought it was odd that Labor did so poorly there for so long in the post-DLP period. I read a few books on it and it said in “The Light on the Hill” that Queensland Labor in the 1970-80’s was in desperate need of cleaning out old, ineffective executives that essentially poisoned the party there, and it wasn’t until the mid-1980’s that this happened.

  35. You really can’t roll the Lib numbers straight into the Nat numbers in 83 and 86 since they campaigned to some extent in opposition to JBP.

    There is no doubt that Queensland would have been conservative for much if not all of that period under a fairer system. But the question was why was someone like JBP able to be successful and the answer is partly some historical accidents internal to the CP, and partly the malapportionment that prevented a more orthodox Lib from becoming Premier.

  36. Well, a Cinderella moment in reverse.

    Djokovic changes shoes to an older, scruffier pair, into a losing streak to Stan the Man.

    Will the myth be changed forever?

  39. [You really can’t roll the Lib numbers straight into the Nat numbers in 83 and 86 since they campaigned to some extent in opposition to JBP.]

    I agree. They were separate parties and should be treated as such.

  40. CTar1@343


    BSA

    Agreed that if he loses he’s chopped meat. A failure. No use anymore & to be discarded.


    And that mortgage due to the $550,000 he had to pay out – it will hurt.

    Not sorry about that.

    What pay out was that ? Road-Kill is his destiny !

  42. Thanks William and Psephos. I should probably get more engaged in these things myself. I do wonder whether former Victorian MLAs like Tammy Lobato or Heather McTaggart might try running for Casey, it covering much of their respective former electorates.

  43. Psephos, I take your point. But aren’t you surprised to see Swan struggling? And Brough cruising?

    Katter is the wild card in Queensland. And he’s a friend of Rudd but not of Gillard. How significant is that?

  44. Well, everyone thought Kennett would flick the switch to a more gentler, caring approach once Victoria regained its AAA rating and banished ‘debt’.

    If he had, I doubt that Labor would have been in the position of forming a minority government.

    But Kennett was a slasher and burner of government by nature, and couldn’t change his spots.

  46. That’s true about the L/NP campaigning against each other in 1983/86, but Liberal preferences usually broke about 80 Nat/20 ALP and National preferences were about 95 Lib/5 ALP.

    If the Liberal Party’s vote was divided this way between the Nationals and Labor for the overall vote, then the 2pp for 1983 would have been about 52/48 to the Nationals, and a bit higher than that in 1986 since Labor’s vote went down and the L/NP’s went up.

    But yeah, I think if the Nationals were unable to rule in their own right, then the Labor/Liberal MP’s would have used their numbers to force change in the government, even if the Libs would likely never have used their numbers to support a Labor government in 1983/86.

  48. Wow the open letter re Ashby inquiry blog post I posted here earlier has produced the following response from Andrew Elder:

    [It depends what your understanding of the whole Ashby-Slipper-Brough thing is, really.

    First of all, let me reiterate that I don’t think Tony Abbott will become Prime Minister. Pragmatically, I share your doubt a formal inquiry will come to fruition, and there would rightly be questions about how big a showstopper this affair would really be for proponents of an Abbott Government.

    That said, I agree with Margo Kingston that an inquiry wouldn’t hurt anyone that didn’t deserve it. I know it’s anathema to call an inquiry without its outcome being foreordained, but perhaps you could look at the boomerang effect that befell the Costigan Royal Commission in the 1970s and ’80s and have some hope.

    Your fourth paragraph lets you down, and veers into straw-man territory. Bugger LNP preselection. We are talking about a campaign that sought to force Slipper to resign the seat to which he was elected, and which would have brought Brough into parliament before – not after – the next general election was due, with a change of government before rather than after that event. That’s where the anti-democratic, foul-play aspect comes in.

    You’ve framed the issue in a way that you can deal with, and while that’s the basis of public relations it doesn’t really help understand what this issue is about. Your first two points are completely invalidated by having wrongly framed this as a preselection tussle (in which the rules of the LNPQ, such as they are, become the final arbiter of this matter rather than the law of the land).

    Your third point is too cute. Abbott didn’t interfere in 150 preselections in the same way that Richard Nixon’s henchmen did not burgle every office building in Washington, nor even every Democratic party office – just the head office, in the Watergate building. One little burglary. I mean, geez, magistrates courts let people off such charges without so much as a slap on the wrist, amirite?

    The final sentence in that point was telling. It was a genuine bolt from the blue when Slipper was nominated for Deputy Speaker in 2010. His subsequent ascent should have surprised nobody: it should be covered by the provisions of the If They’ll Rat On You Once, They’ll Rat On You Twice Act, but you’ll have to check. You’re saying that Coalition strategists are blind as well as stupid, and hoping that will stand as a defence to the complex mendacity we see in this case.

    ‘Treason’ and ‘Sedition’ are legally-defined terms, and your reference to ‘some campaigners’ is more straw-man business; leaving that stuff aside what do we have in your fourth point? The prospect that a sitting MP should be forced from office on legally questionable invalid grounds to the benefit of political parties that could not convince voters that they should govern them is worth investigating – but as I said, don’t like the chances.

    Let us dispense with two points you raised that don’t help your case at all.

    “Now perhaps … you’re calling instead for an inquiry into the parlous state of Australia’s conventional media”. Umm, nope.

    “The Government would have already established one if they saw it as a way to get at Abbott”. Do you know what will “get at” Abbott? Endless appeals and stunts that see Ashby returning to the public eye, highlighting the fact that Slipper was overwhelmingly a Coalition man for decades, and that any opprobrium arising from him, Ashby, Brough, McArdle, Abbott, anyone else you like, will rebound to the discredit of the Coalition rather than the government.

    The proof of just how bad the Coalition have been at managing this issue will come when it has been shown to have lost them more votes than it lost for Labor. I also predict that the LNP organisation on the Sunshine Coast will hemmorrhage badly.

    Margo Kingston has made an important link between the shenanigans behind Ashby and those that saw Pauline Hanson imprisoned a decade or so ago: the shadowy funding and questionable legal structures. That is worth investigating, and not just as a matter of history. It would make it hard to support Marx’s quip about history repeating, as it’s hard to tell which would be the tragedy, which the farce.

    Kingston and Richard Ackland’s piece in Friday’s SMH, to name two, put the lie to your assertion that substance, analysis and objectivity are absent from the push for an inquiry into this matter. Filter as you please, but having been caught flinging precious live infants around it is idle for you to proclaim that it’s all bathwater.

    But you show your analytical capabilities are shot in your final paragraph:

    But if you find a way to challenge Tony Abbott with substance, analysis and objectivity, be sure to let me know. I’ll be one of the first to join the campaign.

    What do you mean, if? Do you pretend that Abbott has never been challenged from that basis? Do you pretend that any and all criticism of the man has been insubstantial, non-analytical and subjective – just deranged rambling by those without the nation’s best interests at heart? And if not, where the hell have you been?

    Your criticisms of Abbott have been muted feeble and belie this whole ferocious dragon pose in your online persona. After he goes down I’m sure you’ll be happy to say “I never liked him”, but the idea that you’d do a single thing to bring about such an outcome strains credulity.]

  49. @Leroy 541

    Thanks for that, but unfortunately that site doesn’t seem to have any info on state elections before 1996.

    I was honestly searching for over a year on elections before then, using info from Antony Green’s and Psephos’s sites for elections back to 1995. Then Green put up the Queensland archive back to 1986, and then I managed to get copies of Colin Hughes’s books for elections from 1890-1984.

    So it’s been a slow but steady process in getting this info up there.

  50. victoria 547

    Interesting stuff on a people’s bank. New Zealand Labour was persuaded by Left partners to introduce the Kiwi Bank, which operates though post offices.

    Katter the populist is on to something. Note his spelling of Henry Bolti (sic).

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