UPDATE (Morgan poll): The latest Morgan multi-mode poll, which will be reporting fortnightly for the rest of the year at least, is a better result for the Coalition than the last, having their primary vote up 1.5% to 43.5%, Labor’s down 2.5% to 34.5%, the Greens up a point to 10%, and the Palmer United Party steady on 4.5%. As was the case in the previous poll, there is an implausibly huge disparity between the respondent-allocated two-party result (51.5-48.5 to the Coalition) and that using 2013 election preferences (55-45), and as was the case last time, I can only conclude that something is going awry with the latter calculation. My own modelling of preference flows from the recent election produces a result of 51.5-48.5 from these results, exactly the same as the Morgan respondent-allocated preference figure.
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| Blue and red numbers (if any) respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for the Liberal and Labor parties. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room. |
Cook covers southern Sydney suburbs to the south of the Georges River, including Kurnell, Cronulla, Miranda and Sylvania. The electorate was created in 1969 to accommodate post-war suburban development, the area having previously been accommodated by Hughes from its creation in 1955 and Werriwa beforehand (an unrelated seat called Cook covered inner southern Sydney from 1906 to 1955). There has been little geographical change to the electorate since its creation, its boundaries being set by Botany Bay and Georges River in the north and Port Hacking in the south, but its character has transformed from marginal mortgage belt to affluent and safe Liberal. The seat’s inaugural member was Donald Dobie, who had won the hitherto Labor-held seat of Hughes for the Liberals with the 1966 landslide, but he was unseated in 1972 by Labor’s Ray Thornburn. Dobie again contested the seat in 1974 and 1975, suffering a second narrow defeat on the first occasion and winning easily on the second. Thornburn followed Dobie’s example in twice recontesting the seat in 1977 and 1980, but like all future Labor candidates he was unsuccessful. Dobie prevailed by 148 votes when the Fraser government was defeated in 1983, and the closest margin since has been 3.5% in 1993.
Dobie was succeeded upon his retirement at the 1996 election by Stephen Mutch, who had been a member of the state upper house since 1988. Mutch fell victim after one term to an exercise of power by the party’s moderate faction, which at first backed local barrister Mark Speakman, who had been best man at Mutch’s wedding nine years earlier. The resulting dispute ended with the installation of another noted moderate, Bruce Baird, who had been a senior minister through the Greiner-Fahey NSW government from 1988 to 1995. Mutch’s demise greatly displeased John Howard, who pointedly failed to promote Baird at any point in his nine years in Canberra. It also did not help that Baird was close to Peter Costello, and was spoken of as his potential deputy when fanciful leadership speculation emerged in early 2001. After reports that growing Right control of local branches was putting his preselection in jeopardy, the 65-year-old Baird announced he would bow out at the 2007 election.
Even before Baird’s retirement announcement there was talk of him being succeeded by Scott Morrison, former state party director and managing director of Tourism Australia. According to Steve Lewis in The Australian, Morrison boasted “glowing references from a who’s who of Liberal luminaries, including Defence Minister Brendan Nelson, Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull, former Liberal president Shane Stone, Howard’s long-time chief of staff Arthur Sinodinos, and Nick Minchin, the Finance Minister and another close ally of Howard”. However, it quickly became clear that such support would not avail him without the backing of the Right, which had been successfully courted by local numbers man Michael Towke. Imre Salusinsky of The Australian reported that Morrison was further starved of support when moderates resolved to resist Towke by digging in behind their own candidate, Optus executive Paul Fletcher, later to emerge as member for Bradfield.
The ensuing preselection ballot saw Towke defeat Fletcher in the final round by 82 votes to 70, with Morrison finishing well back in a field that included several other well-credentialled candidates. However, Towke’s preselection success met powerful resistance from elements of the party hierarchy, whom conservative Sydney Morning Herald columnist Paul Sheahan credited with a series of damaging reports in the Daily Telegraph. The reports accused Towke of branch-stacking and embellishing his CV, culminating in the headline, “party split as Liberal candidate faces jail” (a defamation action brought by Towke against the paper was eventually settled in his favour). It was further reported that Towke had been the victim of a whispering campaign relating to how his Lebanese heritage would play in the electorate that played host to the 2005 Cronulla riots (Towke’s surname being a recently adopted Anglicisiation of Taouk). The party’s state executive narrowly passed a resolution to remove Towke as candidate, and a new preselection involving representatives of local branches and the state executive duly delivered victory to Scott Morrison.
Morrison was quickly established as a senior figure in a Liberal Party newly consigned to opposition, winning promotion to the front bench as Shadow Housing and Local Government Minister when Malcolm Turnbull became leader in September 2008 and securing the high-profile immigration and citizenship portfolio when Turnbull was deposed by Tony Abbott in December 2009. He further gained productivity and population after the 2010 election, before having his political role sharpened with the title of Immigration and Border Protection Minister following the 2013 election victory.
My question is to the authorities. If I could tell at my level that we were entering a particularly bad fire risk period, why weren’t there a lot of high profile bells being sounded. Surely the alarms were going off somewhere. Where were the public announcements to get ready, where was all the public effort to reduce hazards?
GG
ACT calls it Marriage. You just have to live with it like it or not because it is done.
kakuru,
Nice strawman argument!
If you weren’t trying to do the same you’d be living in a cave far from the millieu instead of making values judgements about my value judgements here on PB.
“@FinancialReview: Treasurer Joe Hockey will shortly announce the panel for the Coalition’s Commission of Audit #auspol http://t.co/7GtcMYr3tA”
Sebator Milne on 24 now
don
I was responding to this comment
[A strange position for anyone with even a faint claim to scientific understanding to take]
GG @ 2178
[It’s actually a definitional issue. I’m sure you would not call Carbon Monoxide Carbon Dioxide just because it was politically correct to do so.]
I am sure Scott Morrison will have a job for you with that twisted logic and twisted attitudes.
@chrispytweets: Golf anyone? @ruokday are having a fundraising Golf Day on November 15 at Moore Park Golf in Sydney https://t.co/DxDswOiOEX
Diogenes@2205
My apologies, I missed that comment.
Yes, I will defend Diog against the ‘appeal to authority’, because I started it…
“@stephenbsander: Now: #homophobia, #hate, #discrimination & @TonyAbbottMHR
v
#LGBT #HumanRights #equality #love #decency #SocialJustice & #MarriageEquality”
Hockey now with Audit announcement 24 live
[And as someone who actually has a PhD in science, I know that you can’t demonstrate that any single bushfire is due to climate change.]
That’s a classic example of trying to take the argument apart by picking at nits.
Of course, an electricity short circuit, an errant Army explosive test, a lightning strike or an arsonist can cause a fire anytime.
No-one’s disputing that.
It’s whether there’s fuel for it to spread, and whether its hot enough and dry enough for the fire to morph into a full-blown firestorm that counts.
The warm winter (one of the warmest on record) in a warm year (the absolute warmest on record, so far) promotes both the growth of fuel and its dessication.
An unseasonably hot October following the warm winter provides the perfect conditions for an accidentally or purposely lit fire to spread, which these ones have. All over the state of NSW.
As to whether any of these particular fires were “caused” by Global Warming, is moot.
It’s the increased chance of them occurring which is critical.
Hotter, dryer weather, earlier in the year extends the bushfire season, thus extending the chances of major bushfires.
And there’s plenty more bush to burn yet. It’s just waiting there to be lit.
The Frog-In-The-Pot analogy is apt here. Between any two arbitrarily short periods of time the increase in temperature in the slowly boiling water is not noticeable. But that doesn’t mean the frog is going to survive when it finally boils.
If we keep looking for excuses and keep inventing exceptions, keep splitting hairs, keep quoting our qualifications, keep one-upping each other, if we keep telling ourselves that now is never the right time to discuss the matter as to which fire is or isn’t directly, inextricably and absolutely caused by global warming, with no other significant contributing factors, we’ll be that frog sitting in the pot. And we’ll be just as doomed as he is.
The worst excuse of all for not dealing with the matter of global warming is to claim that it’s “political”, and thus somehow insensitive orpoor form to bring it up. Usually you find that the people who trot out this argument are the very people who turned a well-accepted, scientifically compelling consensus among the vast majority of scientists, over a long period, into a matter of cheap political point scoring and wedging. They should either shut up or “come to court with clean hands”. You can’t create a wedge issue and then claim we can’t discuss it because it’s a wedge issue with any kind of moral force.
Directly to the argument that discussing global warming and its effects is insensitive… the logical conclusion of this line is that, as climate outrages and disasters get more common, then discussion should be shut down further. It’s like saying the more people die of some new kind of deadly flu, the less we should try to stop it, or even talk about it, in deference to the bereaved.
If we stop talking about global warming because its embarrassing, or passe, or boorish to interrupt the afflicted in their time of grief, then all that will lead to is all of us being disadvantaged by it,and future generations hating us for turning climate science into an ersatz form of political science.
For Australia, in turn the world’s worst polluter (we churn out roughly three times our share by population’s worth), the world’s biggest carbon dealer and the world’s richest per capita nation to cry poor on global warming, the world will look unkindly upon us in furtre generations.
Given the chance to show that even the worst offenders are capable of repentance and mitigation, if we squib it then we’re worse than the rest.
If the sole criterion for helping out was an ability to directly make a significant difference, we wouldn’t participate in anything. We’d close our borders, cease all UN activity, stop all foreign aid, we’d let others fight our wars for us, we’d refuse to co-operate on any of a number of international environmental treaties (like the ozone treaty), and we somply give a big “F**k Youse All!” to the rest od the world. If leading by example is worthless, then we can’t claim to be a member of the world community, and can’t claim the benefits of it either.
Demanding that members of the global warming consensus (the overwhelmingconsensus) go through each bushfire, each cyclone, each hot day, each extinction, each drought and each death due to heat stroke, and prove it was because of global warming, or piss off, is cynicism and faulty logic at its worst.
Just as you can’t tell exactly which cigarette causes lung cancer, you can’t tell exactly which fire was caused by global warming.
But you can tell what the ultimate effect of global warming will be – more fires, more storms, more droughts, more extinctions and all the rest.
Here we go, Hockey about to blame Labor.
“@danielhurstbne: Hockey announces debt limit to increase from $300 billion to $500 billion #auspol”
“@danielhurstbne: Hockey: $500bn debt limit as buffer of $40-60bn needed to provide stability to the issuer. “This is the legacy of bad Labor govt” #auspol”
https://twitter.com/702sydney/status/392502660005261312/photo/1 These are the heroes
“@GeorgeBludger: Debt is bad! Debt is bad! Debt is bad! Debt is bad! Debt is… a warm shepherd’s pie with a side serve of minted peas & fried spek…. #hockey”
GG
Given that other countries have been able to change the definition of marriage, it’s not a great argument to say that’s the definition so it can’t be changed when it clearly can.
I have not noticed any reference to the GFC from Hockey or his mate – ridiculous.
swamprat,
So nice of you to misrepresent what I have actually written.
My point was that Morrison and the Homossexual Lobby were using pretty much the same tactics on their issue de outrage. Re-defining the meaning of a word to mean something it does not.
“@SimonBanksHB: “No surprises, no excuses”: @joehockey promised to reduce the debt, now he’s increasing debt limit by 66% to $500bn”
Medibank Private to be sold.
Hockey is a mess.
Hockey ‘we are going to raise the debt limit but live within our means’ – this is driving with the foot on the brake and accelerator at the same time. I am no mechanic, but that can’t be good for the car.
Annabel Crabb @annabelcrabb 6m
Far out. Joe Hockey annouces Government will extend debt limit to $500 billion.
Expand
even Annabel Crabb
Diogs,
Most of the world drives on the other side of the road. Why don’t you try it sometime and then plead your case to the magistrate when you’ve caused more chaos than usual on the streets of Adelaide.
I’m sure she’ll be impressed.
Hockey now saying he doesn’t have a credible plan to reduce the debt, that is why he is having a commission of audit. How the hell does a party win an election when the say themselves they don’t have an economic plan?
GG
You are wrong. See definition in Oxford English Dictionary.
The closest to an english language bible on definitions we have.
Hockey not selling this at all, sounding like a victim to me. No excitement, no enthusiasm. As a business owner I am not feeling confident these guys have a clue.
Running from Journos.
Not a good look Hockey. Means bad press from finance types.
That was a hopeless presser, god help us with this lot running the place.
[Alan Kohler @AlanKohler 2m
RT @BernardKeane: “The only reason the government needs to lift the debt ceiling again is ..incompetence.” A.Robb, 2011. That was to $250b.]
To me it sounds like the coalition need a massive increase in the debt limit because it is going to happen regardless, they are not able to influence it. The appropriate word for Hockey would seem to be ‘flaccid’.
“@TheKouk: Wow: Hockey raises debt ceiling to $500 billion. Gross debt was forecast to peak at $370 billion under Labor and then fall”
@TheKouk: My take on Mr Hockey’s debt ceiling increase from last week http://t.co/jozcrsWVxj
And for ever and ever, Polls agree that the Coalition are the best at running the economy. How can anyone say that voters always know best.
Tony Abbott, stop fighting bushfires and start the job you were elected to do
The prime minister’s presence at the bushfires is causing a security headache, taking him away from his work and looking increasingly self-indulgent. It’s time he dropped the hose
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/22/tony-abbott-bushfires?CMP=soc_568
Besides an ex-polly and head of an industry group who else is on the audit of commission.
mb,
Beezlebub!
Hockey looked terrified!!!
I still see a $5.3 billion dollar white elephant on the federal budget.
@abcnews: Details on @joehockey’s move to raise Commonwealth debt limit and set up commission of audit http://t.co/6Il2CYH9Y9 #auspol
lizzie, I’m a voter and the me of limited capacity hates being flattered that I “know best” :P.
So, we have 500,000,000,000 reasons why we can’t believe the Liberals when they faff on about the evils of debt. Just what do they plan to do with our economy?
Boerwar, they’re going to “fix” it.
Abbott should rush back from the fires and hose down Hockey.
“@senatormilne: For Commission of Audit read Abbott Cuts,Cuts, Cuts. For Newman Abbott MOU on one stop shop environmental assessment read job cuts in Qld.”
GG:
[ Nice strawman argument!
If you weren’t trying to do the same you’d be living in a cave far from the millieu instead of making values judgements about my value judgements here on PB.]
The values of a society can (and do) change for the better.
The current (non-ACT) definition of marriage excludes same-sex couples. I think you need a pretty powerful argument to exclude certain people from what the rest of us are entitled to. Your semantics aren’t cutting it, IMHO.
“@TheKouk: @joehockey Mar 2012 “we will achieve a surplus in our 1st year of office and we will achieve a cash surplus in every year in our first term””
“@ALeighMP: Looked like Hockey & Cormann couldn’t run out of that press conference fast enough. What have they got to hide? #auspol”