Seat of the week: Wills

Located in Melbourne’s middle north, Wills was once home to Bob Hawke, is now home to Kelvin Thomson, and was home in the interim to independent Phil Cleary. It has never been home to the Liberals.

Red and green numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Labor and the Greens. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

Wills covers an area of Melbourne’s middle north, from long-established Brunswick in the south and Coburg in the centre to post-war suburbs further north. Like its eastern neighbour Batman, it straddles the divide between the Greens stronghold of the inner city and the expansive Labor heartland of Melbourne’s northern suburbs. However, the former area carries lesser weight in Wills than in Batman, being confined to the area around Brunswick, which makes the seat substantially more secure for Labor. The electorate was created with the expansion of parliament in 1949, though at that time its southern end was covered by the since-abolished electorate of Burke (an unrelated electorate of the same name covered Melbourne’s outer north from 1969 to 2004). Prior to 1949, an electorate called Bourke had boundaries similar to those Wills has had since Burke was abolished in 1955. Labor’s strength in the area was established early, with Bourke being held by either Labor or socialist independents from 1910 until it was abolished.

The inaugural member for Wills was Bill Bryson, who had won Bourke for Labor in 1943 before losing to an independent in 1946. Bryson was among seven Victorian “groupers” who were expelled from the party during the split of 1955, and he contested that year’s election as the candidate of the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), which would shortly evolve into the Democratic Labor Party. However, Bryson was defeated by Labor candidate Gordon Bryant, who went on to serve as Aboriginal Affairs Minister in the Whitlam government. When Bryant retired in 1980, the seat was used to accommodate Bob Hawke’s long-anticipated entry to parliament, enabling him to assume the prime ministership three years later.

Hawke resigned from parliament immediately after losing the leadership in December 1991, providing Paul Keating with an early electoral test in the form of a by-election for a seat the party had never lost before. The test was failed disastrously: in a record field of 22 candidates, local football identity Phil Cleary outpolled the Labor candidate 33.5% to 29.4%, prevailing by 15.7% after preferences. The result was declared void the following November when the High Court ruled Cleary had not been qualified to nominate as his job as a teacher constituted “an office of profit under the Crown”. The imminence of the 1993 election meant no new by-election was held, but Cleary won the seat at the ensuing election by a margin of 2.4%. Cleary’s position was subsequently weakened when redistribution pushed the seat westwards, and Labor candidate Kelvin Thomson provided his party with a rare highlight at the 1996 election when he polled 50.0% of the primary vote to prevail over Cleary by 5.8% after preferences.

A member of the Labor Unity (Right) faction, Thomson entered politics as the state member for Pascoe Vale in 1988, and served in the shadow ministry following the Kirner government’s defeat in 1992. He was elevated to the federal shadow ministry in 1997, serving in portfolios including environment and regional development. However, he resigned from the front bench in March 2007 when it emerged he had given a reference to colourful Melbourne identity Tony Mokbel. From February 2013 until the government’s defeat he served as a parliamentary secretary, first in the trade portfolio and then in schools after Kevin Rudd resumed the leadership in June, after which he returned to the back bench. Thomson supported Julia Gillard in the February 2012 leadership ballot, but was among those who defected to the Rudd camp in June 2013. Together with the rest of his faction, he supported Bill Shorten in the post-election leadership contest. While Thomson’s electoral position has at all times remained secure, the Greens achieved a minor milestone at the 2013 election when they finished ahead of the Liberals to secure second place, ending up 15.2% arrears after the distribution of preferences.

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.

1,597 comments on “Seat of the week: Wills”

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  1. It is true that you can override a parent’s wishes if the child’s life is at risk if you follow the parent’s wishes.

    That was not the point I was making.

    The point I was making was that when a patient does not want a treatment due to some unsubstantiated belief, the correct response is to educate and inform, not insult.

    My posts were about suggesting that we not insult each other…..doesn’t seem to have gone down very well, but not a great surprise there I guess! :devil:

  2. Mod, since you like moving averages, may I point you to this random document I found. Specifcally, page 280 (or 4 out of 8) should provide you with some help in determining the window size needed to filter out signals with a period of less than around 15 years, and so tell you how many more years you will need to wait before you can talk with confidence about the trend over the past 15 years.

  4. imacca,

    The report was removed from all official sources.

    The good work of one in the fifth estate, and others later, has ensured that it is now front and centre.

  6. DN:

    I am not claiming that global warming has stopped or that global cooling has started, just that in the last 15 years there has been a flattening of the warming curve, and I said in the very same post that it was probably a blip and would probably correct.

    The fact that we then spend hours with multiple posters attacking me for a simple statement of fact is an example of exactly the thing I have been talking about here!*

    * Not that anyone will get it of course, I do recognise that- don’t worry!

  7. Z

    You can definitely override the wishes of a minor. But once they turn 18 we respect their wishes fully, no matter how bad we think their decision is.

    The only way they can have treatment forced on them is by detaining them under the Mental Heath Act.

  9. On gravity —

    [– but even with several well-received theories out there attempting to explain why a book falls to the ground (and at the same rate as a pebble or a couch, at that), they’re still just theories. The mystery of gravity’s pull is pretty much intact.]

    http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question232.htm

    Even a fairly basic source acknowledges there are several accepted theories about gravity.

    Another site describes Newtonian theory as ‘damn good’ in that it can provide us with a good approximation of what goes on.

  11. Mod Lib,

    There are courses you can take which will try to teach you facts about climate change. Whether you will drink is, I think, of 1% probabilty.

  15. Diogenes

    [The IPCC says it is 97% sure AGW is happening. It’s not even in the same ballpark as a theory.]

    Hmm Diogenes, I disagree.

    [Theory: 1. A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.]

    AGW easily meets that standard.

  16. [zoomster
    Posted Monday, October 28, 2013 at 10:05 pm | PERMALINK
    ML

    My posts were about suggesting that we not insult each other

    Right – and where did I insult you?]

    Haha 🙂 This question coming from the person who “despises” me.*

    *but please note, everyone, that “despise” has a different meaning to “hate”!!!

  18. Roger Miller@1464

    If the government examines the csiro report on hip they might be forced to reinstate it.

    I think, on performance since 7 Sep, this totally inept government feels to be forced to do nothing but to fawn to its enablers: Gina, George and Rupert.

  19. Fran

    I think you missed what my comment was referring to. I’m not saying AGW isn’t a theory. It clearly is.

    I’m saying that it’s not in the same ballpark as the theory of gravity as a theory in terms of accuracy, acceptance evidence.

    Z

    We know gravity theory is about 99.995% accurate so it’s an incredibly good approximation.

    We don’t know how gravity works, although they are getting closer to detecting gravity waves.

  24. Diog

    right. But we know how AGW works.

    So we’re a lot more certain about how CO2 warms the planet than we are about why a stone falls to the ground.

  26. [zoomster
    Posted Monday, October 28, 2013 at 10:12 pm | PERMALINK
    ModLib

    I haven’t said so in the context of this discussion, and that’s what your post implied.]

    OK. Then you show me where I said you had insulted me. Then we can discuss further

    …..fair enough?

  28. Z

    We are very uncertain how CO2 effects climate.

    On a very basic level we know about greenhouse gases raising global temperatures but how that will affect climate overall is a matter of much debate.

  29. Diogenes

    [I’m not saying AGW isn’t a theory. It clearly is.]

    If so, then this is misleading:

    [The IPCC says it is 97% sure AGW is happening. It’s not even in the same ballpark as a theory.]

    Perhaps instead It’s not as robust as the explanations offered by physics of gravity.

  30. [imacca

    Yup, but read it when it came out.

    The point is that it has been memory holed on the gubbermint website.]

    Yeah, but wot? They expect they will have an inquiry and flay the principle people from the last Govt with it and all the witnesses will have just forgotten that CSIRO did that report in 2011??

    Would also neatly attract attention to some of the other stuff they have tried to excise from the web like the collective writings of :monkey: ??

    Still, they are an arrogant lot aren’t they??

  32. [zoomster
    Posted Monday, October 28, 2013 at 10:18 pm | PERMALINK
    No thanks, Mod Lib, I really am not interested in playing your games with semantics tonight.]

    Quel surprise!

  34. Diog

    [

    We are very uncertain how CO2 effects climate]

    We are not at all uncertain about CO2 causing warming, however, or that burning fossil fuels releases CO2 – which is the basic theory.

  38. Diogenes

    [On a very basic level we know about greenhouse gases raising global temperatures but how that will affect climate overall is a matter of much debate.]

    Again here I’m going to disagree. While there is indeed much debate about regional climate impacts, the distribution of severe weather events and their frequency and the interaction of Charney forcing with other elements in the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, there is little debate amongst publishing scientists about the overall impacts on climate.

  39. zoom & mod

    This is one of those situations with several people involved in a conversation and the threads of dialogue are becoming mixed up.

  40. Fran

    True. Robust would have been better.

    Z

    Climate change is a lot more complicated than just warming.

    Fess

    Pyne still hasn’t shut up

  41. Modlib

    I guess you are just an idiot.
    My apologies for assuming you understood what you were saying, or understood simple logic.

  42. [Astrobleme
    Posted Monday, October 28, 2013 at 10:26 pm | PERMALINK
    Modlib

    I guess you are just an idiot.]

    zoomster:

    You were seeking an example…..Bingo!

  46. Diog

    [Climate change is a lot more complicated than just warming. ]

    Indeed. But the theory underlying it is relatively simple…that fossil fuels contain carbon, that burning fossil fuels releases this as CO2, and that CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat, causing warming.

  47. Diogenes

    “We are very uncertain how CO2 effects climate.”

    Where is the uncertainty?
    This is too broad a statement to have any meaning.

    And if I took it at it’s broad nature I would say it was rubbish, as we know, that increasing CO2 will make the world warmer, we understand in a global sense what that means.

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