Seat of the week: Franklin

With Saturday’s election in the corresponding state upper house seat of Huon fresh in the mind, Seat of the Week takes a visit to the Tasmanian seat of Franklin.

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

The only seat left standing for Labor in Tasmania after a 9.4% statewide swing at the last election, Franklin covers the Hobart suburbs on the eastern bank of the Derwent River together with Kingston on the city’s southern fringe, small towns further to the south, and the unpopulated southern part of the World Heritage area in Tasmania’s south-west. The remainder of Hobart, including the city centre and the suburbs on the river’s western bank, constitutes the electorate of Denison. As one of Tasmania’s constitutionally mandated five House of Representatives seats, Franklin has an enrolment of roughly three-quarters the national average and an uninterrupted history going back to the state’s division into single-member electorates in 1903.

Labor first won Franklin at a by-election held two months after the election of Jim Scullin’s government in 1929, then lost it again amid the party’s debacle of 1931. The seat subsequently changed hands in 1934, 1946, 1969 and 1975, before remaining in Liberal hands throughout the Fraser years and the first 10 years of the Hawke-Keating government. Labor finally won the seat when colourful Liberal member Bruce Goodluck retired at the 1993 election, which together a strong statewide result for Labor delivered a decisive 9.5% swing to Harry Quick. Quick maintained the seat with only mild swings either way at subsequent elections, although there were occasional suggestions he might be brought undone by internal party machinations. When his preselection appeared threatened ahead of the 2004 election, Quick was able to secure his position partly by indicating that he might run as an independent.

After choosing his own time of departure at the 2007 election, Quick sought to keep the seat out of factional hands by promoting his staffer Roger Joseph as his successor. This was thwarted when a deal assigned Franklin to Kevin Harkins, state secretary of the Left faction Electrical Trades Union, and Bass to the Right-backed Steve Reissig. Objecting that Harkins was a “right thuggish bastard” who would lose the seat, Quick declared that he planned to vote for the Greens. His attacks drew blood as newly anointed Labor leader Kevin Rudd sought to distance the party from unsavoury union associations, with Harkins carrying baggage from the 2003 Cole royal commission into the building and construction industry. Harkins’ position ultimately became untenable in July 2007 when the Australian Building and Construction Commission brought charges against him over an illegal strike. When he won preselection for the Senate ahead of the 2010 election, he was again rolled by the intervention of Kevin Rudd.

With Harkins out of the picture and the election looming, the preselection was referred to the party’s national executive, which maintained the factional balance by choosing the Left’s Julie Collins, the state party secretary and a strongly performing though unsuccessful candidate at the March 2006 state election. The loss of Quick’s personal vote combined with the manner of his departure resulted in Collins suffering a 3.1% swing, one of only four swings to the Coalition at that election. Coming off a suppressed base, she went on to enjoy a 6.8% swing at the 2010 election, the highest recorded by a Labor candidate anywhere in the country. She then emerged Labor’s only lower house survivor in the face of a swing that unseated sitting members in Bass, Braddon and Lyons, her margin reduced to 5.1% by a 5.7% swing to the Liberals that was 3.7% below the statewide result.

Collins was made a parliamentary secretary after the election, and progressed to the outer ministry as Community Services Minister in December 2011. After backing Kevin Rudd’s successful leadership bid in late June she was promoted to cabinet, adding housing and homelessness, the status of women and indigenous employment to her existing area of responsibility. Since the election defeat she has held the shadow portfolios of regional development, local government and employment services.

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.

904 comments on “Seat of the week: Franklin”

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  1. Fran,

    I can always tell when you know you have said something hard to justify by your ensuing reams of justification.

  3. [ Laocoon
    Posted Wednesday, May 7, 2014 at 8:27 am | Permalink

    From AFR

    ICAC probe inches closer to Abbott]

    Please please let him be called to give evidence.

    The “I don’t recall” routine would just go down a treat.

    We might even see him doing “lizard tongue” and the best of all his “noddy” routine.

    Popcorn! 🙂

  4. Caught a few minutes of Hadley this morning in the car, in which he

    * Blamed any and all problems with Indonesia on Rudd and Gillard (spying and live cattle respectively), saying Indonesia privately welcomed boats being turned back, but couldn’t say so for diplomatic reasons,

    * Dismissed evidence from the Batts RC that information was withheld from Peter Garrett, because Hadley had already personally “informed” Garrett of the dangers of using foil insulation,

    * Called Greg Smith a boofhead again,

    I must be getting old and infirm. Three minutes of this was all I could take.

    It seems pretty clear that the shock jocks have been engaged to rally the troops in the face of slumping polls.

    Pretty pointless to try to gee-up the punters, I’d think. Joe Hockey wanted everyone on-edge, and stressed, he got his way. What’s the problem? Come the Budget we’ll all love him again, right?

  5. Good comparative poll summary on perceptions of Climate Change

    [Perhaps more than people in any other rich nation, Americans are skeptical that climate change is a dire issue. In Pew Research Center surveys conducted last spring, 40 percent of Americans said that global climate change was a major threat to their country. More than 50 percent of Canadians, Australians, French and Germans gave that answer. More than 60 percent of Italians and Spaniards did. And more than 70 percent of Japanese did.
    ]
    http://nyti.ms/Qbqxt8

  6. For those who Twitter – This stock fell out of bed last night – down just under 18% during the session – after the expiration of the so-called lockup period, which banned sales of the stock by company insiders after its public offering.

    TWTR floated at on the stock exchange at $45 in November 2013 – peak at $75 last last year and closed today at $31.85.

  7. Goodness Abbott only called SBY yesterday to explain why he did not attend forum in Bali. Apparently he will go to Indonesia next month

  9. [
    ICAC probe inches closer to Abbott]

    This AFR article, on top of the Fairfax story of the Liberals’ dodgy fundraising arm charging $3,000 for a budget dinner with Hockey and other ministers, is becoming bad news for the Federal Coalition.

    The purpose of the batts RC also doesn’t seem to be going to plan. I’ve seen a few headlines, buried along with other news but the screaming headlines especially in Murdoch papers seem to be missing.

  10. BB – Coalition tactics are all fox in the henhouse stuff. Run around frightening the chickens hoping they either dont see the one that gets ripped apart or are so glad its not them that goes down they dont care.

    In the budget the foxes (weasels?) will enhance the lot of its backers and consolidate power by further removing funding to those who threaten it. They will rely on the shock jocks and Murdoch media to spin any damage to the Howard battlers. At least thats what they hope.

    Hadley… You lasted a few minutes? That long? (shudder). It was partly Hadley that turned me off Rugby League after nearly 2 decades of loyal support. But to be honest, the rot started when they dumped the Jets.

  11. SIMON – Rugby League: Battle between pokie palaces using underpaid working class kids who risk getting brain damage.

  14. K17 – the game is not the same. Stopped watching some time ago.

    Brain damage – many things have changed to increase this risk and many things can be done to reduce the risk; why they dont implement the changes is beyond my interest these days to try to answer.

  15. Huge call from Rob Burgess on DD prospects for abbott – but he doesn’t share with readers why a PM so unpopular so early into his term would be backed by voters who hate the very so called “reforms” being proposed –

    [ ….one of the options available to an Abbott government hell-bent on pushing through controversial reforms, is to bounce them off the disapproving Senate a couple of times and then ask Governor General Sir Peter Cosgrove to dissolve parliament.

    It is an intriguing prospect, for two main reasons.

    Firstly, it’s almost certain that the Coalition would not lose government, despite its poor standing in the opinion polls. Yes, Abbott would lose seats in the lower house, but in terms of prosecuting a reform agenda he may well reason that it’s worth a gamble.

    Governing with a reduced majority and a hostile Senate would not be too different from the current situation – so Abbott may have “little to lose”.

    Secondly, there is a reasonable chance Abbott would retain enough MPs and senators to win a vote in a joint sitting of both houses of parliament.

    Is a double dissolution a gamble worth taking? Without sophisticated polling data from within the Coalition bunker, I’d have to put it at close to 50-50 – a bit like throwing a ball onto a roulette wheel after placing a bet on both odds and evens.

    But as any gambler knows, that’s not strict 50-50 odds. On the roulette wheel, zero is counted as neither odd nor even. ]

    http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2014/5/7/politics/will-abbott-play-double-dissolution-roulette

  17. Lizzie, Vic, SMCyril, Zoom, SK

    I agree 101% with youse about communication requiring the recipient to get the message.

    If this doesn’t happen then it’s shite communication.

    Zoom’s point about tailoring the message to the audience is it in a nutshell.

    With due respect to FB the fact is that she has NFI about “common touch”.

    Reminds me of teachers who say “I taught it and if they didn’t learn it it’s their fault”.

    As I said, it’s a classic NFI situation.

  18. [victoria
    Posted Wednesday, May 7, 2014 at 9:53 am | PERMALINK
    Goodness Abbott only called SBY yesterday to explain why he did not attend forum in Bali. Apparently he will go to Indonesia next month]

    Abbott now has a new problem. The ABC today says

    [Indonesia’s foreign minister says the apparent addition of three extra passengers to an asylum seeker boat turned back into Indonesian waters is a “very serious development”.]

    On top of this, adding extra people to the boat could constitute people smuggling under Australian law – ABC again

    [The director of the Australian National University’s Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy, William Maley, believes Australian criminal law could have been breached if the extra passengers had been in Australia’s jurisdiction.

    “It actually raises the question of whether {those} involved in this particular exercise have committed the offence of people smuggling,” he told AM.

    “Because under the Australian criminal code division 73, there’s a provision which says that a person is guilty of an offence of people smuggling if that person organises or facilitates the entry of another person into a foreign country and the entry does not comply with requirements under that country’s law for entry.]

  20. Stephen Koukoulas ‏@TheKouk 1h

    @JoeHockey Your chart is a dreadful misrepresentation. Excluding major countries, an odd starting and end date.

  21. Also the quote below from Burgess is not supported by the history of DD’s I believe.

    Its my understanding that in DD’s were the Government is returned (first hurdle)…getting the bills in question passed in a joint sitting of both houses has a poor history of success and that minor parties tend to benefit from DD’s.

    [ Secondly, there is a reasonable chance Abbott would retain enough MPs and senators to win a vote in a joint sitting of both houses of parliament. ]

    Its also interesting how Burgess has moved from – Palmer and his PUP’s plus the other independents will side with abbott and all will be fine.

    Now he is not only talking DD – but a DD which “it’s almost certain that the Coalition would not lose government”.

    Lets see what actually occurs – above all whether abbott has the nads to actually call a DD.

  23. psyclaw

    Fran’s communication deteriorates when she knows she has said something a bit silly or is being very defensive. Normally I enjoy her posts.

  25. KEVIN-ONE-SEVEN@119

    dave – do people have to pay business spectator to read this sort of tosh?

    Some is paywalled – Gottliebsen, Kohler etc. But the GG google trick works just fine.

    Other articles are not paywalled.

  26. [Firstly, it’s almost certain that the Coalition would not lose government, despite its poor standing in the opinion polls. Yes, Abbott would lose seats in the lower house, but in terms of prosecuting a reform agenda he may well reason that it’s worth a gamble.

    Governing with a reduced majority and a hostile Senate would not be too different from the current situation – so Abbott may have “little to lose”.]

    I’m sure the marginal seat holders whose time in Parliament would be reduced from at least three years to one would take solace from this.

    [Secondly, there is a reasonable chance Abbott would retain enough MPs and senators to win a vote in a joint sitting of both houses of parliament. ]

    ‘A reasonable chance’? If they’ve won government again, it should be more than that.

    [Without sophisticated polling data from within the Coalition bunker..]

    What’s wrong with the sophistocated polling data put together by polling companies? (Apart from the fact that they suggest a possible loss of 19 seats, not the 9 the Coalition can ‘afford’ to lose..)

  27. [
    Huge call from Rob Burgess on DD prospects for abbott – but he doesn’t share with readers why a PM so unpopular so early into his term would be backed by voters who hate the very so called “reforms” being proposed –
    ]

    dave

    I think most of those sorts of predictions are based on the fact no first term federal government has been chucked since before the war (although Labor went damn close in 2010). It’s kind of assumed the Libs will win no matter what.

    Personally, I think it is better to say that while history shows the Liberals are likely to win re-election, there are no certainties in life and they could lose. Likewise, history shows that Federal governments tend to cop a decent swing at their first attempt at re-election.

    I wonder if Abbott will be the one to break the run of first term governments being re-elected.

  28. On ICAC

    Labor has come out better because of its structure. All those years of fighting over such things are paying off. Having State and Federal fundraising has kimited Obeid damage to NSW

  29. zoomster@99

    lizzie

    huge stress in English teaching in Victoria that if your audience doesn’t understand you, it’s your fault.

    Same with maths in my classes. If one or two kids don’t understand, I pull them aside and help them. If most of the class doesn’t understand, it means I did not teach well enough.

    But you get pretty good at reading the body language when the message is not getting through, and adjust what you are doing, starting again if necessary from the top.

    And after a while in the class, and with encouragement, the kids become good at saying they don’t understand, when there are no penalties, no put-downs, just rewards (of understanding) for admitting such.

  30. Simon Katich @110

    The Jets play the North Sydney Bears this Saturday at Henson Park, game 1 of the Frank Hyde Shield for 2014.

    See you on top of the hill.

  32. SMC

    my recollection is that governments who go to a DD are generally short lived any way. (Happy to be corrected on this one…)

  33. zoomster

    Yes, I was ignoring the whole DD part of it and you are probably correct. Although I think Hawke called a DD in 1987 if my memory is correct. So that one would buck the trend.

  34. Meher

    Sorry but what you say is just not so. There was a large and very powerful section of the UK aristocracy that were very pro German. This included of course Mosely but ALSO members of the royal family especially the Duke of Windsor and his brother Michael of Kent. Kent was the brains (indeed was used by the foreign office). He was very well connected (in ALL senses of the word) and amongst his close (very close) friends was Noel Coward and lots of the glitterati. Kent “disappeared” not long after the failed attempt by Hesse to make an alliance with Germany.

    The REAL reason for the whole Wallis Simpson affair was because Wallis was VERY CLOSE (again possibly in all senses) with the German ambassador Ribbentrop.

    Churchill’s family included connections with he Nazis – his nephew’s sister in laws for example included Diana Mosely and the other fascist sister Unity Mitford. (The nephew was a communist and married to Jessica Mitford). One only has to read and think about the attitudes of a major writer like Evelyn Waugh to suspect where his deeper sympathies might lie.

    So in 1939 Hitler was NOT delusional in thinking he could install a sympathetic regime in the UK.

    Hitler (like everyone else) underestimated Churchill. Churchill was really a bit of a nutter and NOT well regarded, he was however the perfect man for the wartime PM and did a fantastic job. Had Britain not had a charismatic, slightly bonkers, autocratic PM like Churchill, Hitler would probably have achieved his aim, installing a fascist government in the UK, with a reinstated King Edward.

    Remember that for the British upper and middle classes the enemy was Russia and this they shared with Hitler (and many in the USA). Remember too that powerful interests in the USA (like Joseph Kennedy) were angling for the German/UK /USA alliance against Russia.

  38. “@mpbowers: All Sydney Morning Herald photographers have been called to a meeting in the boardroom, staff are concerned the axe is about to fall”

  39. dtt

    right, so members of Churchill’s family were pro Nazi (and the list you give was one I’d already given…) but Churchill wasn’t.

    A handful (and that’s all they were, given that your list and mine are identical) of pro Hitler advocates amongst the Upper classes (with the exception of Mosely, not even Members of Parliament) does not make a groundswell of support for a pro Hitler government.

    Yes, they helped feed Hitler’s delusion, but that doesn’t make their delusion real.

  43. [guytaur
    Posted Wednesday, May 7, 2014 at 10:46 am | PERMALINK
    Expert on 24 saying secrecy on OSB could be covering criminal activities and the AFB should be investigating]

    Did he say what sort of criminal activities the secret border patrollers could get up to?

  44. [
    thanks for that! As I said, it was an impression only.
    ]

    zoomster,

    No worries, I was under a similar impression. Maybe it’s the fact Gough called one in 1974 that sticks in the brain.

  47. further evidence that talcum is a spineless shit

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/policy/malcolm-turnbull-admits-coalition-border-policies-harsh/story-fn9hm1gu-1226908408949

    the policy is not working (boats keep coming and we keeping paying more than it would to train each refugee to be a doctor in order to dehumanise them in concengtration camps where disease, violence and mental health issues are rife) and is not ‘necessary’ – how one of the best off society’s in history can claim this must look great to the rest of the world. I expect himmler thought his policies ‘harsh but necessary’ also.

  49. [The Greens, a party that supports left liberal populist capitalism]

    Actually I found Fran’s description of the Greens to be a very accurate and concise summary.

    Particularly when compared to the other parties.

    Clearly the COALition is a right wing conservative capitalist party.

    Is there anyone here, apart from our resident Menzies House types, who would fundamentally disagree with that?

    Particularly when seen in the context of Hockey’s Forum, ICAC revelations, Murdoch’s support, Gina and her mates, xenophobic asylum seeker policy, homophobic and misogynism and so on?

    Would any here still argue that the ALP is ‘socialist’?
    That it is free of the ultra social conservativism of the far right ideologues such as Bullock, Farrell, De Bruyn, that Obeid et al are not mates with business?

    Does anyone here seriously believe [apart from those Menzies types mentioned above] that any of the 3 main parties in Oz advocates a socialist form of government and economy?

    Really I think its time we admitted the well known fact that parliamentary style public discourse in this country is tightly confined within the parameters of conservative capitalism – we operate on the far right of the Overton window.
    Its interesting to check the Political Compass and how it places the policies of the 2 major parties on the left/right-soft/hard axes scales and how it shows that in recent years our dominant party political discussion occurs around fine tuning of ideas in the upper right of that scale which puts most discussion in the realm of detail around right wing hard authoritarian policies with the Greens occupying a centrist position.

    Here – see for yourself:
    http://www.politicalcompass.org/aus2010

  50. [guytaur
    Posted Wednesday, May 7, 2014 at 10:48 am | PERMALINK
    AFP Sorry. This expert says if true transfer of “extra” AS is a clear breach of the criminal code]

    I just read this after my previous post. The expert is presumably the director of the Australian National University’s Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy, William Maley (my 118).

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