The central Queensland electorate of Capricornia has existed since federation, with Rockhampton as its constant as boundaries shifted over the years. It currently has Rockhampton at its southern coastal end, from which it extends northwards to the southern outskirts of Mackay and westwards through farming and coal mining communities as far as Belyando 250 kilometres inland. Rockhampton has kept the seat strong for Labor for most of its history, the party’s only defeats after 1961 coming with the demise of the Whitlam and Keating governments in 1975 and 1996 (the margin on the former occasion being 136 votes).
The proverbial baseball bat having been wielded in 1996, the seat was recovered for Labor in 1998 by Kirsten Livermore, member of the “soft Left” tendency associated with Martin and Laurie Ferguson. Livermore picked up an 8.8% swing on her debut and retained the seat with reasonably comfortable margins thereafter, until an 8.7% swing in 2007 boosted it to very safe territory. Then came a 0.7% redistribution adjustment followed by an 8.4% swing amid the Queensland backlash of 2010, which reined it back to 3.7%. In December 2012 she announced she would not seek another term, as she wished to spend more time with her family.
A preselection to choose Livermore’s successor was held in February and won by Peter Freeleagus, a Moranbah miner, former Belyando Shire mayor and current Isaac Regional councillor. This was despite the local party ballot being won 65-37 by Paul Hoolihan, who along with most of his Labor colleagues lost his seat of Keppel at the 2012 state election. However, Hoolihan was overwhelmed by a 41-9 to win for Freeleagus in the 50% component of the vote determined by the state party’s electoral college, which consists mostly of union delegates. Michael McKenna of The Australian reported that Freeleagus was backed by the Left faction CFMEU, but also harnessed support from the AWU Right at the behest of Wayne Swan. The implication appeared to be that this was a counter to Kevin Rudd, whose “Old Guard” Right faction included Hoolihan. The deal was also said to require that the Left back AWU Right over Old Guard candidates in future state preselections.
The Liberal National Party has again endorsed its candidate from 2010, Michelle Landry, who owns a small book-keeping business in Yeppoon. Landry won preselection ahead of real estate agent Alan Cornick and anti-council amalgamation campaigner Paul Lancaster.
gg
I hadn’t realized that bluepill was claiming to be a lapsed Laborite.
BTW did you know that bluepill is not all about the Matrix or whatever?
The real bluepill was used in the 19th century as a purgative.
Boerwar
The msm, Abbott and his cronies are making a lot of noise and throwing mud around, with the intention of making it stick. hubris writ large. PMJG on the other hand is keeping her powder dry. Looking forward to when she decides to make a move. It will be an almighty splatt me thinks.
@latikambourke: Sure feels like a campaign…RT @mearesy: Snapper @DHughesy shoots PM @JuliaGillard for the @theprojecttv http://t.co/7NP4GmUbZh
@guytaur: @latikambourke @mearesy @dhughesy @juliagillard @theprojecttv Not out here in voter land. No tv ads flyers etc U get in campaigns #auspoi
Bar Bar@1842: I agree 100% The quality of Abbott’s performance as opposition leader has been a massive surprise to everyone who knew him, including I suspect the man himself.
Of course he has had enormous help from the Press Gallery but, nevertheless, he has managed largely to control his tendency to put his foot in his mouth and he has been able to project a public image of being more thoughtful and competent than has been generally thought. (The operative word here is “more”: he still comes across to most people as being a bit of a goose, but not a complete turkey: which is what I and many others expected would happen when he was made leader back in 2010).
The latest EMC Poll is dangerously close to 43/57 2PP … For anyone who cares
http://essentialvision.com.au/documents/essential_report_130304.pdf
Classic Bait & Switch from 2GB…
Shock jock Chris Smith, after whingeing and whipping resentment all last week about how long it takes to travel to the City from Western Sydney – remember all the mirth about staying at Rooty Hill because it’s such a long trip from Kirribilli, and about how Westies have to put up with this EVERY day? – now saying “Wy would you WANT to travel to the CBD in any case?”.
Reason: Gillard is talking about funding the tunnel from Strathfield (current end of Western Sydney M4) to… the City.
Smith says, “Who works in the City anyway? Anyone who does takes trains don’t they?”
Another stupid Gillard idea, according to Smith, snubbing businesses in Western Sydney for silvertails in the CBD.
Annoouncement by Gillard was made next to the M4, where passing vehicles sometimes drowned out reporters’ questions.
According to Smith, this is another “Fail”. Can’t even organize a press conference, they’re so incompetent. Couldn’t hear reporters’ questions (you never CAN anyway!).
Callers rang in to whinge about elitists in CBD taking money from “us here in the West”.
No mention that it’s a Barry O’Farrell policy too.
@MayneReport: Murdochs have paid hundreds of pollies over the years as part of their desire for a monopoly on power. Disappointed Peter Costello latest.
[Senior Press Gallery Person: “Yeah, every week.”]
Lol, so now the group on PB wo have been railing against “un named” sources provide a un named source to fuel another consperecy theory.
spur212
No one cares. Why? Because a heck of a lot is going to happen between now and the election.
Watch this space. Dont say you have not been warned
Bailleau siad that the Liberal Party were not helping Weston find a job. These tapes clearly show that to be untrue.
If Bailleau has been mislead by his COS Nutt then Nutt must resign today. If Bailleau was aware of the situation and gave out lie, then he’s in deep shit!
The Leadership putsch are looking for a safe seat to parachute Matthew Guy in to. Bailleau’s seat of Hawthorn fits the bill!
bluepill
On reading the posts last night I want to congratulate you on your post @ 1451.
I agree with all you said and I am just about to read your above.
JV and yourself along with alias really add something to this blog.
GG
Either Baillieu is lying or he is incompetent. The Fibs are on the nose here in Vic. This is disastrous for them
BH:
Simpkin has already wrongly said attendees had to show their ALP membership cards to get into the PM’s speech.
He’s clearly not interested in reporting accurately, sadly.
vic,
It can be a yes to both!
GG
Indeed.
@MTBW/1861
When someone calls another person or others bigotry it’s not wise to congratulate that same person, ignore and scroll – don’t enter the debate.
Using that word bigotry can mean so many things – especially to those Muslims and hostility towards homosexuals hatred.
[Job advertisements surged in February by the most in almost three years, adding to evidence that companies may be starting to respond to lower Reserve Bank of Australia interest rates.
ANZ Bank’s monthly job advertisements index jumped 3 per cent in February – the biggest gain since May 2010. The index has now gained for a second month after 10 straight months of falls.]
http://afr.com/p/national/job_ads_surge_by_most_in_years_8TSikOEj7J26eDwI50jiEL
spur212
I seem to have lost a post.
I care and thanks for posting
Would that be Tony Nutt, one of Sinondinos’ predecessors as Howard’s chief-of-staff?
Phew. What is that stench?
IMHO, the best thing to do would be to make Howard GG. You can always trust a Liberal to do the right thing when it comes to double dissolutions, elections and the like.
rummel
“He [Hugh Riminton] told us that News was out to get Gillard, plain and simple.”
[Last week on the 2GB Ray Hadley program – the Sydney shock jock obsessing over the story – Morrison used the Macquarie campus incident to suggest that asylum seekers in the community were running amok and causing chaos. He told Hadley that, “police are increasingly having to step forward and pick up where the Department of Immigration and the Federal Labor Government have let everyone down”.
The police intervention Morrison was referring to relates to fire alarms going off when asylum seekers cooked food in their accommodation adjacent to an aged care facility in Adelaide.
The stupidity and deception of this narrative should be setting off alarm bells in all of us.
Ray Hadley claimed numerous times last week that the women at Macquarie University accommodation felt they were being “perved on” by the Sri Lankan asylum seekers – although none of the women have yet spoken publicly. He says the women felt scared and intimidated when the men were staring at them.]
http://thehoopla.com.au/scott-morrisons-tarbrush/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=March+4+The+Hoopla&utm_content=March+4+The+Hoopla+CID_86dab22d68db73915a953e4a57f5f55f&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=SCOTT%20MORRISONS%20DOG%20WHISTLE
I don’t know how anyone can listen to Hadley. What a revolting man! And no surprises that Abbott and Morrison have found natural homes with him.
zoidlord
Are you now the moderator?
rummel, given all the noise made about PMJG’s diary (that the publicly available version is not sufficiently comprehensive), I’m sure you will be able to swiftly debunk this conspiracy theory by providing relevant excerpts from OLTA’s publically available, comprehensive diary.
bluepill,
[If, however, there are SO many of the issues listed, one after the other, the cognitive dissonnance is extreme. This can cause increased cortisol levels and has been found in groups like settlers on the Gaza strip, people who live in Afghanistan with constant tension and in cultists (particularly doomsday cultists) in the US who are constantly scrutinised by those outside. As a result, emotional responses initiated by the Amygdala, rather than the cerebrum (which normally takes over from more primal Amygdalian affective control some phase during or after adolescence)
That is a load of old tosh. The Amygdala and the Cerebrum do entirely different things and one does not ‘take over’ from the other in adolescence.
[The amygdala, Latin corpus amygdaloideum, is an almond-shape set of neurons located deep in the brain’s medial temporal lobe.
See also:
Health & Medicine
Psychology Research
Nervous System
Birth Defects
Shown to play a key role in the processsing of emotions, the amygdala forms part of the limbic system.
In humans and other animals, this subcortical brain structure is linked to both fear responses and pleasure.
Its size is positively correlated with aggressive behavior across species.
In humans, it is the most sexually-dimorphic brain structure, and shrinks by more than 30% in males upon castration.
Conditions such as anxiety, autism, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and phobias are suspected of being linked to abnormal functioning of the amygdala, owing to damage, developmental problems, or neurotransmitter imbalance.]
[Cerebrum:
The cerebrum, also known as the telencephalon, is the largest and most highly developed part of the human brain. It encompasses about two-thirds of the brain mass and lies over and around most of the structures of the brain. The outer portion (1.5mm to 5mm) of the cerebrum is covered by a thin layer of gray tissue called the cerebral cortex. The cerebrum is divided into right and left hemispheres that are connected by the corpus callosum. Each hemisphere is in turn divided into four lobes. The cerebrum or telencephalon, along with the diencephalon comprise the two major divisions of prosencephalon (forebrain).
Function:
The cerebrum is involved in several functions of the body including:
Determining Intelligence
Determining Personality
Thinking
Perceiving
Producing and Understanding Language
Interpretation of Sensory Impulses
Motor Function
Planning and Organization
Touch Sensation
]
http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/amygdala.htm
http://biology.about.com/od/anatomy/p/cerebrum.htm
Boerwar
The same Tony Nutt mentioned here as well
[PREMIER Ted Baillieu’s most senior adviser, Tony Nutt, has been dragged into the Peter Slipper sex scandal and faces damaging questions over his knowledge of the Speaker’s previous indiscretions.
A former chief of staff to former prime minister John Howard, Mr Nutt is accused of trying to hush up sexual harassment allegations involving Mr Slipper dating to 2003.]
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/claims-baillieu-adviser-hid-old-slipper-claims/story-fn7x8me2-1226335232517
victoria
And these are the sort of creeps that rummel, MTBW, alias and bluepill are going to vote for…
Hey guys. It is not too late.
Boerwar:
It’s the same guy.
The stench certainly is getting more powerful!
victoria:
Jeez, so many dots and yet OM STILL can’t be bothered joining them.
Unbelievable!
Spur I care as well thanks. There was an interesting question with the poll on the stickiness of voting intentions. With only 58% of L-NP voters polled sticky it shows there is still room for things to tighten up for Labor. Mind you the Labor stickiness was only 50%.
Boerwar@1869 and Victoria@1875: Tony Nutt and Arthur Sinodinos were in Howard’s office at the same time. Although Sinodinos is often described nowadays as “Howard’s former Chief of Staff”, I think that title actually applied to Tony Nutt and Sinodinos was termed Howard’s “Principal Private Secretary” (although it might have been the other way around: my memory for these sorts of things is a bit hazy).
Basically, Nutt was Howard’s chief party political adviser and Sinodinos was Howard’s chief policy and strategic adviser. Sinodinos was far and away the more intelligent and impressive of the two, but Nutt was politically more powerful and had good contacts with everyone important who was worth knowing.
As I said before, Nutt being made Chief of Staff to Baillieu represented a sort of Federal intervention in Victoria.
Yep the stench around the fibs is getting stronger. As I said earlier, watch this space.
Meanwhile the coalition lackies can get all excited about the polls.
meher baba
And there will be federal implications
The same Tony Nutt who makes up this pretty ugly trio ?
[The alleged Peter Slipper cover-up
What did George Brandis, Tony Nutt and Eric Abetz know about the alleged 2003 incident and did they and the Liberal Party cover it up until it was politically convenient?]
http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/politics/the-alleged-peter-slipper-cover-up/
[Lol, so now the group on PB wo have been railing against “un named” sources provide a un named source to fuel another consperecy theory.]
Rummell, I know the source as the source spoke to me directly, with two other witnesses present.
The source was asked to confirm, and did so.
The reason I’m not naming the source is because I wouldn’t want the person to get into any trouble, as remote a possibility as that may be.
I quoted other sources in the blog post, but I thought naming this one, due to the sensitivity of the information, was going too far.
One further comment: Nutt’s past tendency to overlook Slipper’s previous indiscretions is not something for Labor supporters to get too excited about IMO. I’m sure that, in their time, the senior people in Rudd’s and Gillard’s offices have overlooked lots of stenches in relation to various Labor MPs.
By switching parties, Slipper delivered an important previously National seat into Liberal hands. He would have had to have been proven to have done some pretty bad stuff for them to want to ditch him.
Anyway, I recall plenty of Labor people on here dismissing the past accusations against Slipper. Have you now changed your minds? The earlier accusations against Slipper have been known for a long time, so they were overlooked by Gillard as well when she made him speaker.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too, you know.
In any case, as unnamed sources seems to be all the rage, I don’t experience much bad conscience about it on this occasion.
Boerwar
You are so caught up in your own ego that you may not have noticed that I have never voted anything but Labor all of my life and it will always be so.
I fret for what is happening to the party at the moment and if you really want a Labor Government after September 24th they better lift their game.
In that scientific note is the way difficult and aggressive male animals are dealt with on farms.
We shrink their amygdala.
Just saying. 👿
@AP: ‘Another soldier in my life has fallen.’ -Smokey Robinson on passing of Bobby Rogers of The Miracles: http://t.co/jo8AFBLmlb -RJJ
not sure where people are getting this “robo poll in the US is reliable” rubbish. here is one example from there:
[84% Hung up on Robo-poll: Another Test Raises Serious Questions
Frequent readers of The Edge know that we take every opportunity to test the claim that robo-polling is on par with surveys conducted by live interviewers. Our latest experiement came on election eve last November. A client wanted to get a quick read on how the national election results might be affecting local turnout. The idea was to make thousands of calls in a very narrow window at very low cost. Enter robo calls.
For this project the client hired professional voiceover talent to record just three simple questions. Of the 2,637 numbers dialed, a human (the targeted voter on the list?) picked up the phone 1,379 times. A penetration rate of slightly more than half is, frankly, not too bad. But here is the big problem: Of those who answered the phone 1,103 hung up before responding to ANY of the questions. That’s 80% who refused to take the survey! Another 60 people responded to only one or two questions so the actual refusal rate was 84%. In comparison, CERC typically gets cooperation from about 80% of the folks it contacts for a 3-question survey. Could a legitimate pollster possibly trust data when more than half the people contacted do not participate? It’s time robo-polling firms start posting their true cooperation rates.
]
http://cerc.net/in-the-news/84-hung-up-on-robo-poll-another-test-raises-serious-questions/
and a more comprehensive study on refusal rates there..
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/09/30/we-are-the-91-only-9-of-americans-cooperate-with-pollsters/
in short, when most people are rung by a robot they hang up.
MTBW
There is a whole footy season to go before the Grand Final siren sounds. Literally.
Labor is not yet campaigning as we know. No need to panic yet.
Two weeks in the campaign then yes panic big time.
BB
You are doing exactly the correct thing. There are witnesses that this was not doodled up on the back of an envelope. It is not necessary and may be detrimental to name names. If anyone does not like it, tell them to go play on a barbed-wire fence.
Watching Sky coverage of the PM “out west” and so far they have been surprisingly even handed. A reporter even kept challenging a Lib candidate over their claims rather than the usual acceptance of whatever crap is said.
MTBW,
You betteer buy a better calendar. The election’s on September 14.
Imagine if you turned up ten day’s late to do your HTV shift. There’d be no one there to listen to your endless bagging of the ALP. What a calamity!
guytaur
[Labor is not yet campaigning as we know. No need to panic yet.]
I am not panicking I am in despair at just how poorly they are performing.
Mari R @randlight
@PaulBongiorno “You know Abbott has lunch at News Corp every week, don’t you?” Do you know if this quote is true from a respected journo?
Expand
8 mins Paul Bongiorno @PaulBongiorno
@randlight Dunno. But senior pollies in regular contact with editors of any MSM is not unusual or scandalous.
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7 mins blacksheep @sheepofblack
@PaulBongiorno @randlight Of couse not…we saw that with Leveson right?
Expand
6 mins Paul Bongiorno @PaulBongiorno
@sheepofblack @randlight Yes like anything abuse is always possible, not inevitable though.
Expand
5 mins blacksheep @sheepofblack
@PaulBongiorno @randlight Interseting note considering current parliamentary media hunted scandals that aren’t stuff hey?
There you go, but at least Paul has the decency to reply
Gosh, isn’t it fun being a journo! Even a luggage label can cause lots of jolly laughs 😮
[Latika Bourke @latikambourke
Cracker of a snap in the AFR – PM’s luggage for Western Sydney trip tagged ‘overseas visit.’ #rootyhillard http://instagr.am/p/Wa0ZLMwJNu/ ]
Boerwar
As remarked by me in the past. I find it very instructive by what posters fail to comment on, rather than what they do comment on. If you get my drift…..
meher baba
Thanks for the clarification on the roles of Nutt and Sinodinos. IMHO, the fact that they worked concurrently in Howard’s office is significant in terms of clarifying who knew what and when about Sinondinos’ corporate ‘involvement’ (or ‘non-involvement’, if it hadn’t been for a journalist doing his job) and Nutt’s potentially dirty tricks.
GG
Unlike you I am fallible! And you have worked on how many election campaigns?
“Bagging” really? Despair yes!