UPDATE (Morgan): The weekly Morgan poll is little changed on last time, with Labor down half a point to 41.5%, the Coalition steady on 41%, and the Greens up two points to 9%. There is actually a slight move in Labor’s favour on two-party preferred as measured using preference flows from the previous election, presumably because of rounding, their lead up from 51.5-48.5 to 52-48. On respondent-allocated preferences, the lead is steady at 52.5-47.5. Regrettably, the poll does not come with state breakdowns, which keen observers among us had started to think would be a regular feature (as it surely should be with such a large sample size). We will surely have Newspoll along later this evening, while the regular Essential Research is delayed this week and will be along tomorrow.
Two for the price of one this week as I scramble to catch up with the Queensland seats suddenly deemed in play under Kevin Rudd 2.0 …
Seat of the week #1: Forde
Straddling the southern edge of Brisbane, Forde was one of a number of Queensland seats which fell Labor’s way under Kevin Rudd’s leadership at the 2007 election, only to be lost again in the wake of his demise three years later. The electorate contains the eastern part of the municipality of Logan City around Beenleigh and extends southwards along the Pacific Motorway to accommodate, somewhat awkwardly, the rapidly growing suburb of Upper Coomera at the interior northern edge of the Gold Coast. The latter area was acquired in the redistribution which preceded the 2010 election, when Forde provided the new seat of Wright with about a third of its voters in rural territories extending to the New South Wales border.
Forde was created with the expansion of parliament in 1984, at which time it covered Brisbane’s outer south-west. Liberal candidate David Watson won the seat on its debut by 43 votes, but was unseated after a single term at the 1987 election by Labor’s Mary Crawford. Watson would later return to politics in the state parliament, eventually leading the Liberal Party into a disastrous result at the 2001 election. Crawford meanwhile built up a handy margin on the back of swings in 1990 and 1993, before a punishing redistribution pulled the seat into the rural Beaudesert region on the New South Wales border. Thwarted in a bid to be reassigned to an outer suburban seat, in part as a consequence of the party’s determination to accommodate Kevin Rudd in Griffith, Crawford was left with no buffer to defend herself against the savage swing that hit Labor across Queensland, which struck in Forde to the tune of 9.6%.
Forde was then held for the Liberals throughout the Howard years by Kay Elson, who retained comfortable margins in 1998 and 2001 before enjoying a further 5.9% boost in 2004. Elson’s retirement at the 2007 election was presumably a factor behind the spectacular 14.4% swing to Labor, making the seat one of three in Queensland where Labor was able to overhaul double-digit Coalition margins. It was then held for a term by Brett Raguse, a former teacher, local newspaper publisher and TAFE college director who had more recently worked as an adviser to state ministers associated with the AWU/Labor Forum sub-faction of the Right. The aforementioned redistribution improved Raguse’s margin from 2.9% to 3.4%, but this proved insufficient at the 2010 election in the face of what by Queensland standards was a fairly typical swing of 5.0%.
The seat has since been held for the LNP by Bert van Manen, a financial planner from Slacks Creek who had run as the Family First candidate for Rankin in 2007. Van Manen’s Labor opponent at the coming election is Des Hardman, a radiographer at Logan Hospital. Brett Raguse meanwhile re-emerged as a candidate for the preselection to succeed Craig Emerson in the neighbouring seat of Rankin, in which he was narrowly unsuccessful despite claiming support from Kevin Rudd.
Seat of the week #2: Herbert
The Townsville-based electorate of Herbert has been in conservative hands without interruption since 1996, although it has been highly marginal throughout that time. The seat has existed since federation, at which time it extended north to Cairns and south to Mackay. More recently it has covered central Townsville and a shifting aggregation of surrounding territory, the pre-2010 election redistribution having transferred the southern suburbs of Annandale and Wulguru to Dawson and added Deeragun and its northern coastal surrounds from Kennedy. The strongest booths for Labor are generally around the town centre, while those in the outer suburbs tend to be more volatile as well as more conservative, having moved strongly with the statewide tides toward Labor in 2007 and against it in 2004 and 2010. Lavarack Barracks makes the electorate highly sensitive to defence issues, with the sector accounting for about one in eight jobs in the electorate. Presumably as a consequence, the electorate is unusually youthful, the median age of 32 being four years lower than for any other seat in regional Queensland.
Herbert was a working class and Labor seat for much of its history, being in Labor hands until the 1960s and turning in a 34.2% vote for Communist Party candidate Frederick Paterson in 1943 (Paterson went on to win the state seat of Bowen the following year, the only such success for a Communist candidate in Australian history). A watershed moment came with the victory of Liberal candidate Robert Bonnett in the 1966 landslide, which was followed by further Liberal swings against the trend of the 1969 and 1972 elections. The seat came back on Labor’s radar after the 1980 election, when their candidate Ted Lindsay succeeded in reducing the Liberal margin to below 1%. Lindsay went one better when he ran again in 1983, gaining the seat with a 3.7% swing and retaining it throughout the Hawke-Keating years. Together with most of his Queensland Labor colleagues he was unseated at the 1996 election, when unrelated Liberal candidate Peter Lindsay won off a 9.0% swing. Ted Lindsay came within 160 votes of pulling off a comeback in 1998, before Peter Lindsay consolidated with swings of 1.5% in 2001 and 4.7% in 2004. He survived another close shave by 343 votes in 2007, a swing to Labor of 5.9% being slightly below a statewide 7.5% which cost the Coalition eight seats.
Lindsay bowed out at the 2010 election and was succeeded as candidate for the Liberal National Party by Ewen Jones, an auctioneer for local real estate agency Ferry Property. Jones’s Labor opponent was Tony Mooney, who served for nearly two decades as mayor of Townsville and earned a footnote in Australian political history when his failure to win the 1996 Mundingburra by-election for Labor led to the downfall of the Goss government. Perhaps reflecting the loss of Lindsay’s personal vote, Jones picked up what by Queensland standards was a modest swing of 2.2%, which was nonetheless enough to secure his hold on a seat which the redistribution had made, by the narrowest of margins, notionally Labor. Jones’s Labor opponent this time is Cathy O’Toole, a former chief executive of a disability employment service and member of the Left faction.
Boerwar
Hate to be a pedant but I’m pretty sure Manus Island/PNG is too close to the equator to experience or be wiped out by cyclones.:p
Boerwar,
1. tick
2. tick
3. 60-40
4. tick
5. tick
6. tick
7. tick – sugar daddy Oz will provide
8. see 7
My ticks are for success.
Psephos
‘EVENTUALLY the elitist lawyers will have to learn that in Australia the Australian people are sovereign and not them.’
More or less inevitable, IMHO. If so, the sooner the better.
BK@1940
Burke did well. Thought he was going to put the boot right into uhlmann there for a while for asking dumb questions, but Burke kept himself in check.
Tory MPs are notorious for distasteful Internet use (and other ‘extracurricular interests’) so will be interesting to see how this policy pans out.
[The meaning of that from Margot James is unequivocal: you will have access to p0rn unless you choose not to.]
No it means the opposite. If you want “rape porn” you will have to opt in. Presumably there will be a Rape Porn Application Form. But no, she doesn’t get it.
Psephos,
Viva da English!
cud chewer,
33 days of an election campaign are more than adequate to expose Abbott for the policy free zone he is. Remember also that the point of the exercise for Labor is to win 76 seats in the Reps and get a Senate that they can at least work with. Anything more than that is just nice to have. If Labor is thinking ‘oh give it another month and we’ll win 90 seats’ then they deserve to lose for the hubris just as much as Abbott.
Labor has the preferred leader, it has the better and more popular policies, and now it has largely negated the major negatives they had working against them. They are in pretty much as good a position as any government looking for a third term should expect to be in.
All they need to do is campaign effectively and they should win.
Twaddle
[Hate to be a pedant but I’m pretty sure Manus Island/PNG is too close to the equator to experience or be wiped out by cyclones.:p]
What?? It works the opposite way to that. The closer to the equator, the more likely you are to get cyclones (souhtern hemisphere) or hurricanes (north). They rely on heat give off from the ocean to form. The hotter the ocean, the more cyclones.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Guba
For whatever reason I am reminded of Rex “the moose” Mossop’s most famous mis saying.
Prptesting against the path to a nude beach being next to his house he said:
“I am sick of having male genitalia thrust down my throat”
absolute twaddle
‘Boerwar
Hate to be a pedant but I’m pretty sure Manus Island/PNG is too close to the equator to experience or be wiped out by cyclones.:p’
Valid point, IMHO.
Failing a cyclone perhaps the ghost of Margaret Mead will return to Manus, causing a psycho-sexual ghost dance cult to erupt, incorporating Australian levels of xenephobia towards detainees, resulting in large scale detainee massacres, head shrinking events, and kuru-generating culinary breakouts…
But I have let my imagination run away with the possibilities…maybe the locals will just take the money while it lasts.
Do they rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere? 🙂
Oh well, forget my comment about valid point. Forget about the ghost dances and Margaret Mead. What Socrates said.
Psephos
‘EVENTUALLY the elitist lawyers will have to learn that in Australia the Australian people are sovereign and not them.’
Tat really is dreadfully shallow. For someone around the government for so long, you should have learnt a bit more than mere political expediency and standard politicians’ put-downs of the judiciary.
We in fact have an excellent balance in our system between the executive and the judiciary that you would do well to appreciate a lot more. Without it, and dependent on politicians to strike the proper balance, we would soon become a lynch-mob society. We are certainly way ahead of the US on that score.
TLBD
I am happy to leave it as a matter of judgement, acknowledging that we are doing best guesses.
[Do they rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere? :)]
Is the 🙂 because you know the answer is yes?
Psephos
Other way round – clockwise in the south. But yes, that is the difference.
P
They do rotate in different directions but I don’t know which is which.
sorry the opposite – clockwise southern hemisphere
[ It works the opposite way to that. The closer to the equator, the more likely you are to get cyclones (souhtern hemisphere) or hurricanes (north). They rely on heat give off from the ocean to form. The hotter the ocean, the more cyclones. ]
Err – except there is not much there to be wiped out to start with.
Look it up!
No, actually cyclones on or or very close to the equator are exceedingly rare. They rely on the coreolis effect for cyclogenesis which is next to non existent at or close to the equator.
[Hate to be a pedant but I’m pretty sure Manus Island/PNG is too close to the equator to experience or be wiped out by cyclones.:p’
Valid point, IMHO.]
No, it is not. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone
The Cyclone I referred to before, Cyclone Guba, killed ov 100 people in PNG.
Cyclones form over warm waters (27 deg+) but they do not normally form near the Equator – something to do with the Eath’s rotation. In the Australian region the most cyclone-prone areas are between latitudes 10 to 20 degrees South, but sometimes they move further South towards Northern NSW or Perth.
An account of David Manne and the legal team that stuffed Malaysia
http://www.theage.com.au/national/manne-of-the-moment-20110903-1jrm1.html
ratsak,
for me its not about give it another month and get 90 seats, its about having the best chance at 76.
Despite the popularity of Rudd, underneath it all is a lot of misinformation an lies and a lot of damage to the Labor brand. Everything from pink bats on up. I would dearly love to see Labor not just do the political fixes it has to, but go back to explaining to the electorate why its the party of progressive nation building and why the Libs do nothing but cling to the past.
Can we have a definitive ruling from the Bludger Weather Gods? Is it either possible or likely that Manus might be flattened by a cyclone?
Greenpeace Aus Pac @GreenpeaceAustP 10m
June was one of the hottest months on record, continuing 340 month trend of above-average temps: http://huff.to/15YcHyz #climatechange
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Ivan
Psephos@1962
Water going down drains does.
Manus Is is a long, long way north of the main island.
Someone from The Age came to the door today offering delivery of the paper and full online access for a month for $1. Smart or desperate?
My last post on cyclogenesis:
http://m.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=7079
my say
I think they also said that if you were 28 years old you will never have experienced a globally averaged June temperature that was cooler than the twentieth century average.
This might be true conceptually. But the reality is that no one experiences a globally-averaged temperature.
Still it is an interesting sort of statistic.
triton
‘Someone from The Age came to the door today offering delivery of the paper and full online access for a month for $1. Smart or desperate?’
Did you take the $1?
Manus Island is about three hundred kilometres north of the north coast of the main island and around 900km north of the south coast of the main island.
Therefore cyclone experiences of southern main island areas could well be very different from cyclone experiences of Manus.
Boerwar
[Is it either possible or likely that Manus might be flattened by a cyclone?]
Feck me even Perth can get one.
[Tropical Cyclone Alby passed close to the southwest corner of WA on 4 April 1978 killing five people and causing widespread but mostly minor damage to the southwest. The damage bill was estimated to be $39 million (2003 dollars). One man was blown from the roof of a shed and a woman was killed by a falling pine tree. Another man was killed when a tree fell on the bulldozer he was operating and two men drowned at Albany when their dinghy overturned. Storm surge and large waves caused coastal inundation and erosion from Perth to Busselton. Fires fanned by the very strong winds burned an estimated 114 000 ha of forest and farming land.]
http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/history/wa/alby.shtml
Boerwar@1979
Interesting that Manus pollie wanting the AS centre built on the adjoining Los Negros Island – out where the airport is. See Google maps.
Would have thought he might have been a bit sharper than that and ‘requested’ construction be done in such a way as to enable the new centre to be used further down the track for school buildings or a Fishery College or whatever.
Milk it for all its worth – for the local community.
Twaddle
Doh! Sorry my bad. I did not realise just how close to the equator Manus Island was. Cyclones do not form right on the equator but close to it so you are right – odds of a cyclone that close to the equator would be very low.
Cud chewer @8:40pm I would dearly love to see Labor not just do the political fixes it has to, but go back to explaining to the electorate why its the party of progressive nation building and why the Libs do nothing but cling to the
Agree, but they have no hope in today’s political and media climate. However, should the ALP win the election, that’s exactly what they should do.
triton
‘Someone from The Age came to the door today offering delivery of the paper and full online access for a month for $1. Smart or desperate?’
Did you take the $1?
______________________-
Let’s Haggle
shellbell
That is a very interesting article. On the one hand I admire Manne for his motivation and his skill.
On the other hand, it reminds me of the coroners whose work is, IMHO, far too much all care and no responsibility: they make recommendations with no reference at all to what might reasonably be called the practical considerations of government budgets.
Bottom line, I suppose, is that the law cannot actually do all that much. It might channel stuff. It might stop stuff but it has very little power to make stuff happen where this requires large-scale resources and popular support.
triton@1980
Hope you ‘explained’ you just don’t trust them on anything they write – and after that there is nowhere to go – but you are happy to take all the freebies while they continue their journey to bankruptcy and unemployment for the opinion writers.
lol.
Possum Comitatus @Pollytics 2m
The Poms trying to stop internet porn – what, someone threatened to upload the Tory afterparty footage or something
dave
Haste makes waste I am afraid.
OC@1960: I was watching Controversy Corner on the glorious day that Rex came on to make a public statement about the “citizen’s arres he had performed on a man walking naked from Reef Beach past Rex’s house in Balgowlah, i recall Rex’s exact words being “I’ve got nothing against male genitalia but I object to having them shoved down my throat.”
There was an intriguing and somewhat apposite back story to that quote – involving the close mentoring of a young Roosters second-rower – which was going around Sydney gay circles in the late 1970s. But my lips must remain sealed on that subject (so to speak).
But the Moose was OK in my book. He was to the right of Genghis Khan and he rivalled Frank Hyde and Howard Cossell as being the worst sports commentator in human history. But he was fun, and he didn’t take himself too seriously.
@Ruawake
I’m pretty sure that Rudd could visit the GG as late as next Monday to call an Aug 31 election.
Re Cyclones, absolutetwaddle is spot on. Nice to see another one of my passions, weather, being discussed here!
mb
*laughs*
[triton
‘Someone from The Age came to the door today offering delivery of the paper and full online access for a month for $1. Smart or desperate?’
Did you take the $1?
______________________-
Let’s Haggle
]
They literally cannot give them away.
The Australian is of course worse, each day Qantas pulps thousands of copies, unread. These and other ‘circulation scams’ bolster what are already dire circulation figures.
If it weren’t for their ABC dutifully laundering Australian and other News Ltd stories and passing them off as their own, no-one would read their trash, passed off as news.
[I would dearly love to see Labor not just do the political fixes it has to, but go back to explaining to the electorate why its the party of progressive nation building and why the Libs do nothing but cling to the past.]
If talking about how much you’ve done for people and how great you are actually won elections Tony Abbott would never have been elected LOTO. Forget the batts and BER. We both know they were excellent schemes that made a massive contribution to saving hundreds of thousands of jobs and also will produce ongoing benefits for decades – but the people who get their news from the Telegraph and talk radio know they were bungled and will never have that opinion changed. Give it up, that fight is over. Rudd conceded defeat on it in 2010.
The path to victory is simply this – make enough people fear that electing Abbott is just too much of a risk. I doubt that Labor needs more than the month of the campaign to achieve that. It is a message most are already willing to believe. Even Liberal voters have grave doubts about his suitability for the job.
Labor will obviously be highlighting their positive programme and the contrast with the grab bag of slogans Abbott offers, but that will be mostly to again paint Abbott a risk of taking away the goodies, not as some sort of virtue deserving of re-election of itself.
It’s simple for Labor. Before they could call the election they had to look like the disunity is a distant memory (looking good so far), and look like they’ve heard the complaints and have adjusted their policies to better reflect what the country wants (again looking successful with Carbon, Boats and internal reform). That gives them the baseline of competence to be in the game. I say that’s been achieved. Now it’s time to go to the second part of the plan – call the election and put the focus squarely on Abbott to crack him.
Boerwar@1924
So Borewar, how much did Peta Credlin pay you for writing and publishing that garbage?
My advice to all:
IGNORE THE BORE
Boerwar@1984
No serious cyclones on mainland PNG or the New Britain or Bougainville Islands in my time of 20 years.
Earthquakes, ie Guria’s yes. Heaps – been in many. Many and have lots of stories.
Tsunamis some. One bad on the North Coast of New Guinea at Aitape, between Wewak and Vanimo – place just washed out to sea. As they say up there – Em e go finish.
Those coastal villages can be truly beautiful places.