Seats of the week: Mayo and Sturt

After going through a lax period, Seat of the Week plays catch-up with a double-header featuring two Liberal seats in South Australia.

Mayo

Blue and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Liberal and Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

Based around the Adelaide Hills, Fleurieu Peninsula and Kangaroo Island, Mayo was created with the expansion of parliament in 1984 from territory which had mostly been covered by Barker, which was compensated for its losses by absorbing the Riverland from the abolished seat of Angas. All areas concerned are strongly conservative, with Labor never having held Mayo, Barker or Angas. It presently extends southwards from Kersbrook, 22 kilometres to the north-east of Adelaide, through Mount Barker and McLaren Vale to Goolwa at the mouth of the Murray River, and westwards to the Fleurieu Peninsula and Kangaroo Island.

Alexander Downer entered parliament as the seat’s inaugural member in 1984, his father Sir Alec Downer having been member for Angas from 1949 to 1963. The only threat to Downer’s hold on the seat over the next 24 years was the strength of the Australian Democrats in the Adelaide Hills, which became a live concern in 1998 when John Schumann, former lead singer of folk group Redgum (of “I Was Only Nineteen” fame), increased the Democrats vote from 12.4% to 22.4% to overtake the Labor candidate and fall 1.7% short of victory after the distribution of their preferences. The Democrats polled a more typical 14.8% in 2001, before collapsing to 1.8% in 2004. As well as bringing an end his 11-year career as Foreign Minister, the November 2007 election reduced Downer’s margin against Labor to single figures for the first time, following a swing of 6.5%. Downer stepped down from the front bench after the election defeat and announced his resignation from parliament the following July, initiating a by-election held in September.

The Liberal preselection was won by Jamie Briggs, who had worked in the Prime Minister’s Office as chief adviser on industrial relations, giving him a politically uncomfortable association with the unpopular WorkChoices policies. With the backing of Downer and John Howard, Briggs won the preselection vote in the seventh round by 157 to 111 over the party’s recently ousted state leader Iain Evans, who remains a senior figure in the state parliamentary party as member for Davenport. Among the preselection also-rans was housing mogul Bob Day, who reacted to his defeat by running as the candidate of Family First, for which he would eventually be elected a Senator in 2013. Labor did not contest the by-election, but Briggs was given a run for his money by Lynton Vonow of the Greens and independent Di Bell, a local anthropologist who had the backing of Nick Xenophon. With the Liberal vote falling from 51.1% to 41.3%, most of the non-Liberal vote split between the Greens (21.4%), Di Bell (16.3%) and Bob Day (11.4%). The distribution of preferences from Day and others left Vonow leading Bell 28.2% to 24.1% at the second-last count, with Briggs finishing 3.0% clear of Vonow after distribution of Bell’s preferences.

Briggs had no difficulties winning re-election in 2010, when he prevailed with a near-identical margin to Downer’s in 2007, or in 2010, when the margin returned to double-digit territory after a 5.2% swing. He won promotion to shadow parliamentary secretary in September 2012, emerging the beneficiary of the one minor reshuffle of the term occasioned by Senator Cory Bernardi’s resignation. After the 2013 election victory he was promoted to the outer ministry as Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development.

Sturt

Blue and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Liberal and Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

Christopher Pyne’s electorate of Sturt covers the inner eastern suburbs of Adelaide, including Payneham, Kensington, Tranmere and Skye east of the city, Klemzig, Campbelltown, Paradise and Highbury to the north, and Glenunga, Glen Osmond and Beaumont to the south. When created in 1949 it also covered northern Adelaide, which after 1955 formed the basis of the new electorate of Bonython (eventually to be abolished in 2004). The loss of this territory made Sturt notionally Liberal, prompting Labor member Norman Makin – who had gained Sturt from the Liberals at the 1954 election – to contest the new seat, which was very safe for Labor. Sturt has since been won by Labor only at the 1969 election, when a 15.0% swing secured a narrow victory for Norman Foster. South Australia bucked the national trend of the 1972 election in swinging slightly to the Liberals, enabling Ian Wilson to recover the seat he had lost at the previous election.

Wilson thereafter retained the seat by margins of between 2.0% and 10.3% until the 1993 election, when he was defeated for preselection by Christopher Pyne, a 25-year-old former staffer to Senator Amanda Vanstone. Pyne was already emerging as a powerbroker in the party’s moderate faction, and won promotion to shadow parliamentary secretary a year after entering parliament. However, he would have to wait until the Howard government’s final year in office to achieve ministerial rank, which was widely put down to his closeness to Peter Costello. Following the November 2007 election defeat he ran for the deputy leadership, finishing in third place with 18 votes behind Julie Bishop on 44 and Andrew Robb on 25. He served in high-profile positions on the opposition front bench over the next few years, first in justice and border protection under Brendan Nelson, then in education, apprenticeships and training under Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott. In February 2009 he further gained the important role of manager of opposition business, to the chagrin of the party’s Right.

Pyne’s hold on Sturt came under serious threat at Labor’s electoral high-water mark in 2007 and 2010, his margin being cut on the former occasion from 6.8% to 0.9%. He did well on the latter to secure the seat with a swing of 2.5%, going against the trend of a statewide swing to Labor of 0.8%, and was safely re-elected with a further swing of 6.5% in 2013. Since the election of the Abbott government he has served as Education Minister and Leader of the House.

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.

1,368 comments on “Seats of the week: Mayo and Sturt”

Comments Page 28 of 28
1 27 28
  1. “@wardlejon: Interesting point I’d not considered before MT @cyenne40 If it’ll cost $6 a jab to get your child vaccinated, expect a drop in the vax rate.”

  2. bemused@1326

    spur212@1319

    Bemused

    Yes! Symbolism! It’s a perceived barrier to entry. Bill’s just removing it from the “brand”

    A mis-perception aided and abetted by people like Shorten continually referring to it.

    So he has built up a great big straw man and now successfully demolished it!

    What a surprise.

    I hate to rain on your one man anti-Shorten crusade, but section 5.3.4 of the ALP membership rules (http://www.viclabor.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Final-Rules-April-2013.pdf) says:

    [ Any person who is not a member of any union at the time of his/her application who is eligible to belong to a Union which is affiliated with the Party must belong to such a Union before he/she can be admitted to membership of the Party. ]

    Or in other words, you don’t know what you’re talking about – as usual.

  3. Six years of silence as Shadow spokesperson for Health. No questions in QT. No policy announcements.

    Now, as Minister for Health, he strikes:

    Six Dollar Dutton.

  4. CTar1@1348

    bemused

    So what are you doing to fix it?

    Joining and speaking up is a start.


    It has nothing to do with ‘Joining Up’ and such bull shit.

    If the average voter is not engaged you are rooted.

    The others offer Minties while tearing off your gonads.

    The ALP needs to grow up. Shearer’s are long gone.

    I surrender to your brilliance and await your prescription for success.

  5. zoomster@1350

    GG

    I just wish that Labor would stop talking about itself and focus more strongly on the issues that concern voters.


    But these are not mutually incompatible.

    If Labor opens its membership up to cater for a wider group of people, then there are a wider number of viewpoints taken on board as part of the policy process, meaning that policies formulated and adopted are more likely to tackle issues which concern voters, in ways which voters like to see.

    There are some who prefer to be big frogs in small ponds and share the spoils of opposition.

  6. Rex

    given in the past, membership numbers have been far higher than they are at present, there’s a fair way to go before this becomes a problem.

  7. [“@AustralianLabor: “If you don’t engage in politics, you’ll be governed by vested interests…” @billshortenmp #rebuildlabor #auspol”]

    Echoes of Plato:

    “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

  8. guytaur
    [Palmer predicting a Labor Government in Queensland after next election]
    I think he was actually predicting a PUP government by his subsequent comments!

  9. Player One@1353

    bemused@1326

    spur212@1319

    Bemused

    Yes! Symbolism! It’s a perceived barrier to entry. Bill’s just removing it from the “brand”


    A mis-perception aided and abetted by people like Shorten continually referring to it.

    So he has built up a great big straw man and now successfully demolished it!

    What a surprise.


    I hate to rain on your one man anti-Shorten crusade, but section 5.3.4 of the ALP membership rules (http://www.viclabor.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Final-Rules-April-2013.pdf) says:

    Any person who is not a member of any union at the time of his/her application who is eligible to belong to a Union which is affiliated with the Party must belong to such a Union before he/she can be admitted to membership of the Party.


    Or in other words, you don’t know what you’re talking about – as usual.

    I put some emphasis into your rules quote to help you with your cognitive difficulties.
    1. Most of the workforce are not covered by an “affiliated union”.
    2. Many other members are not in the workforce. e.g. students, retired etc.
    3. As per an earlier post I made, there is no enforcement mechanism for that rule. However most eligible to join an affiliated union would have as it is part of Labor values.

    I see nothing anti-Shorten in what I wrote. To be critical of a statement does not mean general criticism of a person and I did not confine that particular criticism to Shorten.

    So stop talking out of your arse you unpleasant grub.

Comments Page 28 of 28
1 27 28

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *