Seat of the week: Makin

Labor enjoyed blowout majorities in traditionally marginal Adelaide seats at the 2010 election, but the Liberals are expressing optimism that what went up might be about to come down.

The north-eastern Adelaide seat of Makin extends from Pooraka near the city to Tea Tree Gully and Greenwith at the limits of the metropolitan area. Labor is especially strong in the areas nearer the city, from Walkley Heights north to Salibsury East, beyond which are generally newer suburbs with more mortgage payers and families, who have helped keep the Liberals competitive or better for most of the seat’s history. The redistribution has added around 6000 voters from Port Adelaide in the west, including a newly developed Liberal-leaning area around the University of South Australia campus at Mawson Lakes along with strongly Labor Salisbury further north. The combined effect has been to shave the Labor margin from 12.2% to 11.8%.

Makin is one of three seats which went from being Liberal seats in the final term of the Howard government to Labor seats with double-digit margins after the 2010 election, together with Kingston in the south of the city and Wakefield in its outer north. It was created with the expansion of parliament in 1984 from an area that had mostly formed the southern end of safe Labor Bonython, the majority of which was in turn absorbed by Wakefield when it was abolished in 2004. Makin was held for Labor by uncomfortable margins from 1984 to 1996 by Peter Duncan, a former Attorney-General in Don Dunstan’s state government. A 4.8% swing put Duncan on the Keating government casualty list in 1996, and he returned to the headlines in 2007 after being charged with fraudulently obtaining government grants for his plastics recycling company.

Duncan’s Liberal successor was former nurse Trish Draper, who emerged as a prime ministerial favourite after strong performances at the next two elections. The swing against Draper at the 1998 election was just 0.2% compared with a statewide swing to Labor of 4.2%, and in 2001 she bettered her 1996 margin after picking up a swing of 3.0%. Draper went on to hit serious trouble in the lead-up to the 2004 election when it emerged she had taken a boyfriend on a study trip to Europe at taxpayers’ expense, in breach of rules limiting the benefit to spouses. She nonetheless survived by 0.9% at the 2004 election, despite suffering a swing which was not reflected in neighbouring seats. Draper retired at the 2007 election citing an illness in the family, before unsuccessfully attempting a comeback in the state seat of Newland at the March 2010 election.

Tony Zappia won Makin for Labor on his second attempt in 2007, and handsomely increased his margin to 12.2% in 2010. He had been the mayor of Salisbury since 1997, a councillor for many years beforehand, and at one time a weightlifting champion. Zappia was widely reckoned to have been victim of his own factional non-alignment when the Right’s Julie Woodman defeated him for preselection in 2001, and a repeat performance appeared on the cards when a factional deal ahead of the 2004 election reserved the seat for Dana Wortley of the “hard Left”. The arrangement displeased local branches as well as party hard-heads concerned that a crucial marginal seat should be contested by the most appealing candidate, and Premier Mike Rann prevailed upon Wortley’s backers to throw their weight behind Zappia.

The move appeared a dead end for Zappia in the short term, as he was unable to win the seat in 2004 whereas Wortley was elected from the Senate position she was offered as consolation. However, he performed considerably better with the electoral breeze at his back in 2007, demolishing the 0.9% Liberal margin with a swing of 8.6%. This was achieved in the face of a high-impact publicity campaign by Liberal candidate Bob Day, housing tycoon and national president of the Housing Industry Association who has since run for election with Family First.

The once non-aligned Zappia is now a member of the Left, and is believed to have backed Kevin Rudd during his February 2012 leadership challenge. His Liberal opponent is Sue Lawrie, who has variously run flower sales businesses and worked on the staff of various Liberal MPs. Lawrie has run several times at state level, most recently as an independent Liberal at the Port Adelaide by-election of February 2012.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,401 comments on “Seat of the week: Makin”

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  1. “@Simon_Cullen: ABC’s @abcmarkscott : “For all practical purposes, we will treat the election campaign period as running from the issue of the writs…””

  2. guytaur@1175


    @sspencer_63: Tipping point for print media? 3 of the best and most senior Gallery print journos leave for online in one week.

    Personally I do not include Grattan in that

    She’d be the “most senior” part of it, wouldn’t she?

    Personally, I can’t see where Murphy fits in.

  3. Dio

    I am sure that the Guardian will be looking for a quality psephy and William would be on top of the list…

    I will have a bit of a conundrum to add to my other conundrum: would I take up an Oz Guardian subscription straight away or would I wait until my Crikey sub runs out?

    (My other conundrum is whether to miss a Hawthorn final in order to hand out of HTVCs.)

  4. Taking those two Scott lines together, it looks as if they’re intending to run their usual slanted approach to politics until they’re forced to change at the point the election is announced.

    It would have been nicer if Scott could have said “We always strive to balance our coverage, so the calling of the election will have little effect on us in practical terms.” But he’s gone another way, it seems.

  5. Totally off topic but since you are all users and occasional buyers of PCs, it should be highly interesting.
    [You have heard of Apple, Lenovo, HP, Acer, Dell, Toshiba, Sony etc. Well guess where they shop?
    You won’t have necessarily heard of Inventec, Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn), Pegatron and a few more but these handful of Asian contract manufacturers make almost every main stream computing device on the planet.

    For example Compal makes around 13 million notebooks for Lenovo (about 42% of Lenovo’s 30 million shipments in 2012). Acer and Dell seem to favour Wistron, HP Quanta while Apple uses Foxconn and Pegatron.

    What this means is simply that Brand names are now not much more than bulk buyers that negotiate with the OEM’s for a branded notebook, tablet, PC or screen adapted to their style.]
    Where did I really come from?

  6. [One of Perth’s biggest councils is removing turf from grassed areas and replacing it with native plants in a bid to cut down on water and energy use and ease urban heat.

    The City of Vincent said it was turning to native plants amid fears that Perth was running out of groundwater and would soon have to start drilling deeper underground to find supplies for its parks and ovals. ]
    http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/wa/16105996/grass-turfed-out-for-native-plants/

    A good move. Incidentally Alannah MacTiernan is the Mayor of the City of Vincent.

  7. confessions

    Ta. When a top predator (even an introduced one such as the Laughing Kookaburra) markedly increases its numbers then you know something significant is probably happening to your natural systems. It is highly likely that if the drying trend is affecting ants to the extent of apparent extinctions in some cases, it will be disturbing all sorts of other species, and the relationships between species, as well.

  8. Now that the Guardian has started recruiting for its Australian edition, I wonder what is happening with the proposed Australian edition of the Huffington Post?

  9. citizen

    good question as well.

    As nimble consumers of digital product we will be getting much more choice than the standard twisted pro-Liberal dead tree stuff owned by old farts on the far side of the world.

  10. sustainable future at 1076

    [Howard and Costello got two things right in their whole time in office – gun reform and creation of a largely independent reserve bank. ]

    You are far too kind. Guns, sure probably Howard’s greatest achievement, but Reserve Independence? That’s just another myth that somehow the Libs have managed to conjure up to make them look more credible than they are.

    The Reserve was always ‘independent’ of government in that it had a governor and board tasked with certain duties even going back to before the Reserve was split from the Commonwealth Bank. What most people today would call effective reserve bank independence in Monetary Policy was around from 93 when Bernie Fraser publicly set the 2-3% inflation target. It is pretty much this mid term inflation targetting through the cash rate that has been what we talk about when we say the Reserve is independent.

    [The appropriate degree of price stability to aim
    for is a matter of judgement. My own view is
    that if inflation could be held to an average of
    2–3 per cent over a period of years, that would
    be a good outcome]

    http://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/1999/may/pdf/bu-0599-2.pdf

    Costello merely formalised this as part of the transition to the new Governor Macfarlane. During the 96 election campaign the Coalition’s policy was to ‘protect the integrity and independence of the Reserve Bank’ not to actually create independence. It’s independence was well recognised at this time. What Costello did was good as far as it goes, certainly much preferable than the alternative, but it was no great reform. Mostly it was political, a case of form over substance. Looking like you’re doing something really important when really all you’re doing is endorsing the status quo.

  11. Zoomster

    I really start to wonder if you have your finger on the political pulse anymore.

    Honestly what was wrong with Murphy’s analysis. Not earth shattering but still quite acceptable.

    You may not like her but your detailed attack actually made you look a bit out of date.

    Dot point one – I assume she was referring to the Bradbury release enthusiastically linked here, where he said the idea was going to cause traffic jams in Sydney. It was a bit b=daft and Barnyardesque

    Your comment about the mining industry was just silly – sure you have showmen like Palmer and gits like Gina, but the industry is a bit bigger than that. And frankly my dear loathsome they may be but they employ people, export stuff and are still what is keeping the economy afloat.

    Labor and Liberal Katter and YES even Greens need to be mindful of their impact and influence.

    You show your unwillingness to connect with the real world in your denial of the Katter influence. In the last Qld election Katter took much (even MOST) of the blue collar vote in Northern Qld. Cannot you see ha=w incredibly serious this is.

    Just as the DLP took much of the catholic working class and all of the catholic middle class vote to the Libs and nationals (especially in Qld) Katter is doing the same with the residual

    Katter voters will tend to follow a ticket and that will NOT go to Labor – at least not at the moment.

    Katter is biting at the heals of Labor and the Nationals and both parties are wide to try to stem the drift.

    Any yes bizarre as it may seem there in increasing friendliness between Katter and the Greens with the CSG issue one on which they are in lock step.

    Zoomster the world does NOT stop at the NSW Northern border. In a few short years Qld will have a larger population that Victoria and may even challenge NSW. You need to adjust to the real world, not the past.

  12. citizen

    good question as well.

    As nimble consumers of digital product we will be getting much more choice than the standard twisted pro-Liberal dead tree stuff owned by old f*rts on the far side of the world.

  13. Well, that is interesting. The original of 1217 went into moderation. I changed one ‘a’ into an asterisk (as per 1217) and it got through.

  14. bw@1198

    [ It would be great if Megalogenis and Tingle also headed to the Guardian. ]

    I wonder if the fact that the Guardian was in the field recruiting is the reason some journalists finally found the courage to ask some “tough” questions at Abbott’s NPC appearance?

    Were they just auditioning? If so, now that the positions available appear to have been filled, can we expect a return to the crap political journalism that has become the norm?

  15. DTT @ 1216

    ‘… frankly my dear…’

    Outing yourself right there, pal. You don’t actually have to be personally revolting to get your point across.

  16. PO

    You raise interesting possibilities. The NPC is one place that Abbott could neither run nor hide. Quality journalists finally had their opportunity to ask just the one question each.

    I have heard of hiding your light under a bushel but the Liberals’ lack of policy scrutiny and Abbott’s lack of personal scrutiny is a travesty of democracy.

  17. BW

    You can still hand out HTV and see your match. Take on one of those friendly rural booths in E-M and a well charged lap top with a wireless connection.

    You might even find the electoral office willing to let you all watch.

    I know that in rurl EM they are all very cosy

    🙂

  18. The ACT Liberal Party has moved into open warfare. Note the comment by Sen Humphries that the right wing is moving to control the party.

    [Internal feuding in the Canberra Liberals over the Senate preselection has been rife since Mr Seselja announced last week that he would challenge Senator Humphries for his seat.

    Senator Humphries and ACT division members have criticised the process saying it was timed to minimise the amount of support the senator could mobilise before the February 23 preselection vote.

    Senator Humphries said on Sunday there was a move by the right of the ACT Liberals to control the party both federally and in the Legislative Assembly.

    He said he was informed of the leadership deal over the weekend and Liberals MLAs had also been ”apprised of what’s going on”.

    ”There is essentially a move by the right of the party, with the Young Liberals basically in the thick of this,” he said.

    ”The trade-off is that Zed gets the Senate seat and Alistair gets the leadership of the ACT party.

    ”It’s all a move to have the right controlling the party in both sections {of government}.]

    Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/coe-set-to-lead-the-act-liberals-20130210-2e6v8.html#ixzz2KXb5uauC

  19. Boer @ 1178:

    The Guardian, I think, will beome my primary news source. Crikey (and Pollbludger) will slide into second place.

    Twitter, with all of its faults, is becoming increasingly important to me.

  20. DTT
    Agree. We had just the one Liberal punter who got vociferous in a nasty and personal way and his own side shushed him down. The rest of the day we spent as citizens doing our democratic stuff in an amicable sort of rivalry. (They beat us with the best spot for the signage by getting there half an hour early).

  21. dtt

    Frankly my dear, if you can’t work that out for yourself, you would appear to have missed noticing all that gender chat in the 20th century.

    Rhett was, after all, the 20th centuries’ archetypical male chauvinist, condescending, patronising, pig. Don’t even get me started on Scarlett.

  22. Citizen

    That Humphries stuff is almost amusing. It is great to see the Libs behaving like Labor at its factional worst.

    Maybe, just maybe this could be the time when a Green takes out the Liberal

    What is this Zed character like?

  23. SC
    We live in hope but, as someone very clever pointed out in relation to being a footy fan, and whose name I have forgotten, it is not the despair that sets you up for pain, but hope.

  24. [There’s no point anyone else bothering to enter the Public Relations Institute of Australia’s Golden Target awards this year – Team Packer blitzed all possible entries last night by taking over Channel 7’s Sunday Night program, the pinnacle of a campaign to turn Crown’s bid for a privileged Sydney casino licence into an act of philanthropy, a nation-building vision of something that means “more than money”.

    With both the O’Farrell government and what’s left of the Labor Party already in the cheer squad with sections of the city’s media for Crown avoiding a competitive tender, you might wonder why Packer is bothering. But a good PR machine leaves nothing to chance.

    On Friday the Daily Telegraph was gushing about James Packer building a $10 million training college as part of the Penrith Panthers complex.

    “It will be unabashed luxury, a creative masterpiece, a centrepiece for Australia’s biggest urban development – and it will all be staffed with eager workers from western Sydney,” was the Tele’s intro.

    “Crown also will push into local Penrith schools and create avenues for students to complete school-based traineeships and apprenticeships. Panthers staff also will be given the opportunity to be trained in the college and seconded to work at Barangaroo when required.”

    Given that Penrith Panthers is a casino in all but name, it’s a reasonable fit, particularly when Panthers has financial challenges of its own.]

    Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/packer-rolls-the-dice-with-dazzling-pr-blitz-20130211-2e73h.html#ixzz2KXcsuSdK

  25. BW

    Believe it or not I have never seen the film or read the book.

    Certainly NOT sexist in any way – could have used the phrase for male or female

  26. d
    Zed is energetic, clever and presentable. I assume that this means they will choose Humphries whose job is not to stir up a storm but pour oil on the roiling waters of imminent smash up of the ACT and regional economy, including therein Yass, Queanbeyan, Bungendore and Bateman’s Bay.

    Abbott’s smash at this regional economy provides us with hope that the punters in EM understand which side their bread is buttered on. And that side will be neither Gary nor Zed.

  27. DTT

    Due to the film which I fell asleep attempting to watch, that phrase is associated with exactly the stereotype produced.

    So in common parlance that phrase is a put down like it or not.

  28. d

    I see I have made a false assumption about a shared canon. It is the killer line in a movie watched by umpty squillions of people. It has entered popular usage to such an extent that even peope who have never seen the movie use the phrase.

    ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn’:

    Rhett to Scarlett when he informs her that all her scheming and manipulation count for nought and that he is off.

  29. CTar1
    Hey. We have 100% disagreement. He did neglect Belcoland for Nappy Valley which paid handsome dividends if not quite getting him over the line, millstoned as he is with the Party Room members from hell…

  30. BW

    The chance that the Libs would NOT get a senator is so low that it is not worth worrying about but perhaps a glimmer of hope occasionally.

  31. BW – He reminds me of Navy PO’s working at Russell.

    They walk around the office space briskly and look busy at their desk but are just deciding between Lamingtons or a pie with sauce for morning tea.

    Intellectually lazy with out doubt.

  32. probably mentioned already, but the UK Guardian has been the leader in invetigative journalism leading to the outing of Rupert Murdoch’s organs as serial law breakers.

    this lack of fear of the Murdoch narrative would be most welcome here. They could start with NewsLtd links with the Victorian police, and the Liberal staffer retirement home which is The Australian.

  33. DTT

    It is a fascinating example of individuals voting against their hip pocket nerve.

    I have discussions with small business people on the topic. I point out that the loss of large numbers of jobs would have an immediate and direct impact on their livelihoods. They don’t care because everyone knows that Labor is bad for the economy.

    The cafe operators in central Brisbane finally did get to put two and two together but it appears that they actually had to lose their money and their business before they are capable of understanding that the Coalition can be remarkably destructive economic managers when they put their heart and soul into it.

    As for Newman, so for Abbott.

  34. “@Simon_Cullen: Govt warning about scammers trying to get people to pay an admin fee to access NDIS. It says people DO NOT to have to pay to participate.”

  35. sprocket

    Good point. The latest complete failure in investigative journalism in Australia has been the sports corruption story. The problem may be that the journalists had jobs with MSM which was owned by folk who owned skin in the sport game.

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