Held since the 2010 election by independent Andrew Wilkie, Denison encompasses Hobart along the western shore of the Derwent River and the hinterland beyond, with the eastern shore Hobart suburbs and southern outskirts township of Kingston accommodated by Franklin. Like all of Tasmania’s electorates, Denison has been little changed since Tasmania was divided into single-member electorates in 1903, with the state’s representation consistently set at the constitutional minimum of five electorates per state.
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| Grey and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Andrew Wilkie and Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room. |
Prior to 2010 the seat was presumed to be safe for Labor, notwithstanding the local strength of the Greens. Labor’s first win in Denison came with their first parliamentary majority at the 1910 election, but the seat was lost to the 1917 split when incumbent William Laird Smith joined Billy Hughes in the Nationalist Party. Over subsequent decades it was fiercely contested, changing hands in 1922, 1925, 1928, 1931, 1934, 1940 and 1943. It thereafter went with the winning party until 1983, changing hands in 1949, 1972 and 1975.
Denison was held through the Fraser years by former state MP Michael Hodgman, who joined his four Tasmanian Liberal colleagues in picking up a swing against the trend of the 1983 election due to local anger over the Franklin dam issue. However, Hodgman’s margin wore away over the next two elections, and he was defeated in 1987 by Labor’s Duncan Kerr. Hodgman returned as a state member for Denison in 1992 before eventually bowing out due to poor health in 2010 (he died in June 2013). His son, Will Hodgman, is the state’s current Liberal Opposition Leader.
The drift to Labor evident in 1984 and 1987 was maintained during Kerr’s tenure, giving him consistent double-digit margins starting from 1993. In this he was substantially assisted by preferences from the emerging Greens. The preselection which followed Kerr’s retirement in 2010 kept the endorsement in the Left faction with the nomination of Jonathan Jackson, a chartered accountant and the son of former state Attorney-General Judy Jackson.
What was presumed to be a safe passage to parliament for Jackson was instead thwarted by Andrew Wilkie, who had come to national attention in 2003 when he resigned as an intelligence officer with the Office of National Assessments officer in protest over the Iraq war. Wilkie ran against John Howard as the Greens candidate for Bennelong in 2004, and as the second candidate on the Greens’ Tasmanian Senate ticket in 2007. He then broke ranks with the party to run as an independent candidate for Denison at the state election in 2010, falling narrowly short of winning one of the five seats with 9.0% of the vote.
Wilkie acheived his win in 2010 with just 21.2% of the primary vote, crucially giving him a lead over the Greens candidate who polled 19.0%. The distribution of Greens preferences put Wilkie well clear of the Liberal candidate, who polled 22.6% of the primary vote, and Liberal preferences in turn favoured Wilkie over Labor by a factor of nearly four to one. Wilkie emerged at the final count 1.2% ahead of Labor, which had lost the personal vote of its long-term sitting member Duncan Kerr. This left Wilkie among a cross bench of five members in the first hung parliament since World War II.
Wilkie declared himself open to negotiation with both parties as they sought to piece together a majority, which the Liberals took seriously enough to offer $1 billion for the rebuilding of Royal Hobart Hospital. In becoming the first of the independents to declare his hand for Labor, Wilkie criticised the promise as “almost reckless”, prompting suggestions from the Liberals that his approach was insincere.
The deal Wilkie reached with Labor included $340 million for the hospital and what proved to be a politically troublesome promise to legislate for mandatory pre-commitment for poker machines. When the government’s numbers improved slightly after Peter Slipper took the Speaker’s chair, the government retreated from the commitment. Wilkie responded by withdrawing his formal support for the government, although it never appeared likely that he would use his vote to bring it down.
Wilkie was comfortably re-elected at the 2013 election with 38.1% of the primary vote, despite an aggressive Labor campaign that included putting him behind the Liberals on how-to-vote cards. Both Labor (down from 35.8% to 24.8%) and the Greens (down from 19.0% to 7.9%) recorded double-digit drops, and most of the northern suburbs booths which had stayed with Labor in 2010 were won by Wilkie. His final margin over Labor after preferences was up from 1.2% to 15.5%, while the Labor-versus-Liberal two-party preferred count recorded a 6.9% swing to the Liberals and a Labor margin of 8.9%.
Page 10 sems a problem here so test post,
People read The Australian? When did that start happening?
Mumbles is mostly a realist once he got past his dislike for both Abbott and Gillard. For a brief time after the second coming of Rudd he actually let himself believe Rudd would be re-elected.
dwh
It is not ‘realist’ to describe Shorten as an empty policy vessel.
It is a serious misrepresentation.
davidwh
Mumbles has always seemed to me what his nickname implies – a miseryguts. Whenever I read anything of his, I feel a wave of depression sweeping over me.
[The piece on Shorten is GG hackery. Fancy calling Shorten an ‘empty vessel’.]
Not being much of a Shorten fan myself I consider empty vessel at the kind end of possible descriptions.
Hello all,
Something is afoot.
Somebody on this forum pointed out there has/have been no mention of politics in The Daily Telegraph for the last few days.
Why would that be? No news is good news?
I think tonight’s Newspoll might be a horror result for Abbott, that’s why.
54-46 my prediction
WWP
[Not being much of a Shorten fan myself I consider empty vessel at the kind end of possible descriptions.]
Not being much of an Abbott fan myself I consider ‘narcissist’ at the kind end of possible descriptions.
sm
They had a piece on Hunt’s Whale Watching Scheme today.
[Not being much of an Abbott fan myself I consider ‘narcissist’ at the kind end of possible descriptions.
]
I agree with you there!
WWP
I am not at all sure that Shorten is the one who will win us an election and agree with a number of Mumbles views on him.
For mine Albo would have been the better option but the weighting in the ballot would not ever have returned that result.
Whatever his positives in the AWU they are not met with skills of Parliamentary performance.
I think you sell Mumbles a little short if all you take out of that article is the “empty shell” throwaway comment. You have to take that comment in context around the current political situation which is basically that people elected the unelectable because the alternative was more unelectable than the unelectable. I know it’s hard for a lot of people here to come to grips with but that is the cold hard reality we all are left with after the last three years of political insanity.
Shorten is like a blank page waiting for the story to be written which I think is the main point Mumbles was making. He has to stamp his place in the big picture which he hasn’t done yet.
Of course Mumbles was endeared with Rudd so anyone involved in the 2010 coup would not be on Mumbles Christmas Card list including Shorten.
Albo seemed a bit better.
Albo has fire. He may have been a Keating-like leader, good at the political level without ever really being accepted by the general population. Albo would have been very good if he had his own Hawke for balance. Sadly neither Rudd or Gillard reached Hawke levels of leadership.
davidwh
And a bit of fire in the attack is exactly what we need now.
Everyone may not love you they don’t have to but Albo cuts through.
dwh
[Of course Mumbles was endeared with Rudd so anyone involved in the 2010 coup would not be on Mumbles Christmas Card list including Shorten.]
No judgement then and no judgement now.
Skills in parliamentary performance does not necessarily equal victory in an election campaign.
I’m not getting into another leadersh*t war over Labor leaders, however. It’s a bit counter productive if the aim is to get rid of Abbott.
silentmajority
I hope you are right – this current government is killing itself.
zoomster
No one asked you to!
Boerwar,
Ok then. One “good news” story.
Why tho, have they gone so quiet?
The only reason I can surmise is Abbott is on the nose big time & we’re getting no reporting to keep the punters minds off politics.
dwh
It has become clear that Abbott got himself elected on a number of strategic lies endlessly repeated and not challenged by the MSM.
These are:
You can trust me.
No lies
No excuses
No suprises
Improved accountability
Improved transparency
Less taxes more expenditure and a surplus.
Climate science is crap but we are going to spend $3 billion on it anyway.
We will put downwards pressure on the COL.
Every time Abbott moved his lips for the past four years, some variation pr other of these Big Lies whistled past his lips.
That is the core reality of the last election. It is also why, four months later, his petsonal figures are collapsing and why his 2PP figures have collapsed.
I don’t think we will see any leadership wars this term from either side of politics. Hopefully the lessons have been learned. I am pretty sure we will go to the next election with Abbott v Shorten with the loser fading from the scene.
Surprise No 81. Despite repeatedly promising to put downwards pressure on the COL the Abbott Government, after four months in office, has done absolutely nothing positive about any climate driver that is helping to generate the massive inland heatwave that is sending fruit and vegetable prices up.
Boerwar the core reality is that Abbott got elected despite all that. Why? People must have thought the alternative was even more scary.
Some useful information for those of us tackling climate change deniers —
[A SCIENTIST who 40 years ago wrote about global cooling has admitted his story was probably wrong and has distanced himself from climate change deniers who champion his story to this day. ]
[…climate change deniers often cite a story which appeared in Newsweek magazine in 1975 about the theory of “global cooling”. That humble nine paragraph story which appeared on page 64 of the respected journal is one of the key weapons deniers turn to.]
[..However the science and technology reporter who wrote the story has today distanced himself from it. His name is Peter Gwynne. Now 72-years-old, Gwynne spoke this week to US website climate.org.
“When I wrote this story I did not see it as a blockbuster,” Gwynne told the site. “It was just an intriguing piece about what a certain group in a certain niche of climatology was thinking.”]
http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/peter-gwynne-reporter-who-wrote-story-about-global-cooling-is-a-climate-change-believer-after-all/story-e6frflp0-1226800020634
Just to test the article’s assertion, I googled the original story —
Sure enough, it rates a couple of paragraphs in wikipedia’s global cooling entry —
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
Newsweek’s editor describes the story as
[“the most-cited single-page story in our history.”]
[No judgement then and no judgement now.]
I assume you mean mumble, but it applies equally to Shorten.
If Parliamentary performance was strongly related to election results, Julia Gillard and Gough Whitlam would have been long term PMs. Parliamentary performance is only noted by political tragics. Most get their knowledge of the political arena filtered by the mainstream media.
dwh
[I don’t think we will see any leadership wars this term from either side of politics.]
They have already started in the Coalition. Turnbull has already put a couple of destabilisers out for public consumption. There have been all sorts of leaks in relation to the control freak behaviour of Abbott and Credlin as well as the tensions experienced by the hard dries who think that Abbott was lying when he publicly called his some time political muse, Santamaria, a ‘troglodyte’.
The interesting thing will be the extent to which, over the Christmas break, Credlin/Abbott and the Climate Nutter Faction have been able to put bandaids on the fear and loathing inside and between the Liberal and National parties.
WWP
[ No judgement then and no judgement now.
I assume you mean mumble, but it applies equally to Shorten.]
Mumble is a GG hack, paid to badmouth Labor, Labor figures and Labor policies – except when the OO was running its Rudd Love leadershit campaign.
Shorten is LOTO with 2PP figures of 52/48 just four months after an election. I would go with Shorten’s judgement over Mumble’s judgement at any time.
No one asks anyone to post anything here, MTBW.
I look forward to the day when you only post because you’ve been invited to.
Last nite, another poster (Mick77, I think) described the Labor Government as a “debacle”.
Of course, saving us from the Great Recession of the GFC must have been a debacle.
Much better that we had followed the US into deep recession, with the resultant high unemployment etc.
Fair Dinkum these Fiberals are dumb.
Fancy describing the government that successfully saved us from the GFC as a debacle.
And the likes of Sean and Mick77 wonder why they attract so much ridicule.
[Mumble is a GG hack, paid to badmouth Labor, Labor figures and Labor policies – except when the OO was running its Rudd Love leadershit campaign.
]
I consider that to be wrong and unfair – Peter’s views don’t seem to have shifted much since he moved to news. He has long held the ‘lemmings’ in contempt.
dwh,
Abbott got elected because a screaming shrilling media, run by a couple of barons, backed him to the hilt. No other reason.
Now the chooks are coming home to roost.
Abbott plans to hold a ‘Repeal Day’ where legislation deemed out of date – or merely undesirable – are presented to Parliament for repeal as one lot on one day.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/199173984/Christopher-Pyne-Release
When I wss on local council, this kind of approach was the sign that something dodgy was going on.
For example, one CEO kept bringing in hundreds of job descriptions for ‘review’. They were all to be covered by the one motion of acceptance.
Most of them were straighforward, simply extending the relevant job description for another few years. But, strangely enough, buried within these was a document giving the CEO expansive new decision making powers.
Each time these documents were presented, the councillors refused to accept the changes to the CEO powers. Each time they came back to council, the CEO would assure us the changes had been made — yet, when we checked, they hadn’t been.
Abbott’s legislative repeals might well sail through the HoR, but I predict they won’t find passage through the Senate easy going.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/199173984/Christopher-Pyne-Release
zoomster
[I look forward to the day when you only post because you’ve been invited to.]
tsk tsk tsk! You are not in the classroom now!
Jacethe ace
__________
re reading “the Australian”
I have always been an avid reader of newspapers despite a lifetime of loathing for the Mudochs/father and son
I grew up in a house where “old” Murdoch was hated for his politics(though in a sense he was a good newspaperman…innovative and clever)
In the late 1960ies when “young” Murdoch started The Australian I rather liked it…and he was a critic of the then conservative governments of Holt.Gorton and McMahon
That remained so and in the 197ies he first supported Whitlam with some effect…but as the Whitlam Govt progressed he became a critic and lead an unrelenting anti-Labor camoaign….in a way he has alwayhs run with both sides in politics whgen it seemed to his advantage
That’s Rupert ,crude,ambitious.ruthless and cycnical
but as he’s aged he has become a fan of neo-liberal economics and a cetain number of other tings…he LOVED Thatcher …and to a degree…Reagan…he loves the US Empire and is a great warmonnger…his long standing passion for Israel is a constant theme in his journals…he is in every sense a passionate zionist..see The Autralian praise for Sharon today…he wasa ganster politiocan and murder,,,but Rupert loved him too.he hates the welfare state and unions…but in an odd way much of the world is now not much to his liking despite his efforts…
There is a recent book by an australian academic McPhillips on his politics which explains much of the above
I have long ceased to buy the Australian but do see it… it has never had a big readership,and it costs him $25 million a year in losses …but it is his tool for power and he loves that …as all his tyoe have always done..The Packers/Beverbrook in the UK…it;s a disease of newspaper barons…power rather thann money
but the Australian remains is favourite “baby” ..and will die with him
lizzie@505
You must be a terribly precious petal to react like that.
Mumbles tries to be a realist, and reality is not always comforting. I don’t always agree with him but his views cannot be lightly dismissed.
silentmajority #533 I think that’s a very simplistic view of the 2010 to 2013 period which ignores much of what went on within the government. It’s important for the country that those who make the key decisions within Labor are more comprehensive in their review of the period than to simply blame the media.
Regarding the chooks, well they were always going to come home to roost. I am a little surprised just how quickly they have come home.
Mumbles should write a post on Abbott’s ‘suprises’.
Now that would be a suprise.
MTBW@535
Who issues these ‘invitations’ to post?
Seems to me a few on here think they own the blog. I wonder what William thinks?
WWP
[I consider that to be wrong and unfair – Peter’s views don’t seem to have shifted much since he moved to news. He has long held the ‘lemmings’ in contempt.]
Lemmings? Mumbles should do some extensive work on Abbott’s suprises, pathetic excuses and lies.
After all, Abbott is Prime Minister, not Shorten.
Albo isn’t good looking enough to ever become Prime Minister, fraid to say.
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/mumble/index.php/theaustralian/comments/stranger_in_the_lodge/
I found one for you Boerwar.
Perhaps it is time for Mumbles to do a very extensive post on all the lies Abbott told, and is telling, the Australian public in order to get voted in as Prime Minister.
But perhaps Mumbles already did all that before he turned his attention to Shorten for yet another of his Labor leadershit crapola pieces?
And if mumbles does not fancy concentrating on Abbott’s lies how about a piece on Abbott’s pathetic excuses for all the surprises?
And if not that how about a piece on all the lack of transparency and accountability?
No. Well then, how about a leadershit piece on Shorten? Great idea! Murdoch has been around, sniffing for some savings at The Australian which cost him $25 million a year to buy an Abbott Government.
Abbott is Prime Minister. The Liberal and National parties are wrecking the joint.
Perhaps mumbles should focus on the main game?
ST
How good looking are you?
BTW I asked you the other day to describe the “left” to me and I didn’t receive a reply.
MTBW,
Don’t worry… I’m not good looking enough to become PM either 😀
Re lemmings see http://www.mumble.com.au/federal/lemmings
The pictures I think were linked to the Parliament House website
ST
You still haven’t explained the “left” to me.
dwh,
90% of people never look past the headline or know “what went on within the government” except for what the TV news tells them. They don’t realise they are being fed propaganda, they have very short memories (think workchoices for example) and have voted against their best interests(tax thresholds) because of the relentless propaganda they get fed daily.
If the media had been truthful & held the libs to account the public would have returned Labor with a majority.
Perhaps mumbles should spend some time on what Abbott&Co are doing to, and/or about, the climate?
You know, mumbles could fill in all the bits that ‘The Australian’ avoids when talking about heat waves and warming trends.
Like the 9001 scientists story. Why is mumbles not challenging the Abbott Government on their climate lies?