Seats of the week: Kooyong and Higgins

A double dose of the Liberal Party’s inner eastern Melbourne heartland, encompassing the seats held by Josh Frydenberg and Kelly O’Dwyer.

Kooyong

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.

Presently covering Melbourne’s affluent inner east from Kew and Hawthorn eastwards to Balwyn North and Camberwell, Kooyong has been held by the prevailing conservative forces of the day without interruption since its creation at federation, including by Robert Menzies throughout his 31-year career in federal parliament. The seat has had only seven members in its long history, of whom the first two were William Knox and Robert Best, the latter succeeding the former in 1910. Best was defeated as Nationalist candidate at the 1922 election by conservative independent John Latham, who ran in opposition to the prime ministership of Billy Hughes. With that end accomplished by an election that left the anti-Hughes Country Party holding the balance of power, Latham in time joined the Nationalists and served as Attorney-General in Stanley Bruce’s government from 1925 until its defeat in 1929. Bruce’s loss of his seat of Flinders at that election saw Latham emerge as Opposition Leader, but the defeat of the Labor government two years later was effected when Joseph Lyons led Labor defectors into a merger with conservative forces as the United Australia Party, with Latham agreeing to serve as Lyons’s deputy. Latham served as Attorney-General and External Affairs Minister in the Lyons government from 1931 until his retirement at the 1934 election, and a year later was appointed Chief Justice of the High Court.

Latham’s successor as both member for Kooyong and Attorney-General was Robert Menzies, who had been a state parliamentarian since 1928 and Deputy Premier since 1932. Menzies ascended to the prime minister after Joseph Lyons’ death in April 1939, serving for two years as the nation’s wartime leader before resigning in August 1941 after losing the support of his cabinet colleagues. Following Labor’s landslide win at the 1943 election, Menzies returned to the leadership of the United Australia Party which had been held in the interim by Billy Hughes, and brought fragmented conservative forces together a year later under the new banner of the Liberal Party. Two elections later he led the party to a resounding victory, commencing an epic 16-year tenure as prime minister from December 1949 until his retirement in January 1966.

Menzies was succeeded in Kooyong at an April 1966 by-election by Andrew Peacock, who went on to serve as a senior minister in Malcolm Fraser’s government from 1975 until April 1981, when he unsuccessfully challenged Fraser for the leadership. He briefly returned to the ministry from November 1982 until the election defeat the following March, after which he defeated John Howard in the ballot for the party leadership. Despite leading the party to an honourable defeat at the December 1984 election, he was obliged to surrender the leadership the following September after a bungled attempt to force Howard out as deputy. A party room coup returned him to the leadership in May 1989, but he failed to win the March 1990 election despite securing for the Coalition a narrow majority of the two-party preferred vote. He then relinquished the leadership to John Hewson, and served in the shadow ministry until his retirement from politics in November 1994.

The seat’s next member for Petro Georgiou, who as member for so prestigious a seat was generally assumed to have a career as a heavy-hitter ahead of him. However, he instead emerged as a permanent back-bencher and a thorn in the side of the Howard government, particularly in relation to his liberal views on asylum seekers. Georgiou retired at the 2010 election and was succeeded by Josh Frydenberg, a banker and former adviser to Alexander Downer and John Howard who had earlier challenged Georgiou for preselection in 2007. Frydenberg won the 2010 preselection with the backing of the Michael Kroger faction, while rivals associated with the then state Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu initially backed John Roskam, the director of the Institute of Public Affairs. However, Roskam declined to run and instead threw his weight behind industrial relations lawyer John Pesutto, whom Frydenberg defeated in the final round by 283 votes to 239. Frydenberg was promoted to parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister after the September 2013 election victory.

Higgins

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.

Held by the Liberals since its creation in 1949, Higgins owes its blue-ribbon status to the affluence of Toorak and suburbs further to the east, including Glen Iris and Malvern. Prahran in the electorate’s west provides a strong basis of support for Labor and the Greens, while Carnegie and Ashburton in the south-east are naturally marginal. At the time of the electorate’s creation the Toorak end was accommodated by Fawkner, which prior to 1949 had boundaries resembling those of Higgins today. Higgins assumed its present character when Fawkner was abolished at the 1969 election. The seat’s inaugural member was Harold Holt, who had previously been member for Fawkner since 1935. Holt remained in the seat until his disappearance in December 1967, at which point it was used to parachute Senator John Gorton into the the lower house to enable him to assume the prime ministership. Gorton stayed on for two elections after being deposed as Prime Minister in March 1971, before indulging in a quixotic bid to win one of the Australian Capital Territory’s newly acquired Senate seats as an independent in 1975. Roger Shipton subsequently held the seat until 1990, achieving prominence only in 1988 when he stood firm against maverick businessman John Elliott’s designs on his seat. Shipton stared down Elliott only to lose preselection to Peter Costello, who was at no stage troubled in Higgins through his 11 frustrating years as Treasurer and Liberal deputy.

On the morning after the November 2007 election defeat, Costello made the surprise announcement that he would not assume the leadership. Speculation that he might later do so lingered until October 2009, when he announced his resignation from parliament. The Liberals had at this time just completed their preselection for the following election, which was won by Kelly O’Dwyer, a National Australia Bank executive who had earlier spent four years as an adviser to Costello. O’Dwyer was chosen ahead of Toorak businessman Andrew Abercrombie by 222 votes to 112, with candidates earlier falling by the wayside including Tim Wilson, then a policy director at the Institute of Public Affairs and now a Human Rights Commissioner, and the IPA’s executive director John Roskam, whose bid reportedly suffered from an article he wrote for The Punch which had put Costello’s nose out of joint. Tony Abbott said in April 2011 that O’Dwyer was “knocking hard on the door of that Shadow Cabinet”, but she is nonetheless yet to have won promotion.

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.

1,620 comments on “Seats of the week: Kooyong and Higgins”

Comments Page 25 of 33
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  5. I got newspolled yesterday but there were no questions on politics; just superannuation, what would I spend an extra $150 a week on, the ADF Reserves (army, navy, raaf) as in deployment i.e. do I agree etc with deployment in Oz, overseas for disaster relief, peacekeeping, support roles in combat, in combat roles.

    With usual strongly agree to strongly disagree scale.

  6. [Ha wtf is she doing?]

    Mainlining stupidity. Cwlth funds aged pension, not the states, unless she is thinking wider, more radical reforms….

  12. Jackol – it will when it comes to passing it, when Shorten ideally wants to pass it but can’t.

    Why “can’t”? Do you honestly think the media can hold Shorten to stuff he said in response to the moving feast that was budget speculation? If Shorten can’t dismiss any nonsense along those lines then he doesn’t deserve to be leader.

    And the LNP are certainly not going to be in a position to throw stones in the budget context of broken promises.

  13. A few times tonight Jones blatantly interrupted both Stone and McTiernan mid sentence tonight, when they were providing detailed answers.

    He’s a terrible moderator.

  15. Libs 46% in the Q&A audience?

    can you imagine the OUTRAGE if labor supporters were represented at 8-10% above their primary vote? I can hear Gerard Henderson and Chris Mitchell’s heads exploding merely at the thought. The ABC is cowed.

  18. QANDA didn’t change the % in the audience when Labors primary vote was less than 30. I queried that at the time but noone here agreed with me. Something seems to have changed since then.

  19. I think the senate should block supply, the ALP should support this to protect the country from this destructive government..

    The Australian people didn’t vote for what the LNP are proposing.

    Would the budget pass with a joint sitting if all non coalition senators voted to block supply?

  20. [Shorten’s issue is he went too hard on the deficit tax too early when the speculation was it’d be starting at 80k. Now he doesn’t want to backtrack.]
    There’s nothing wrong with Shorten constantly calling Abbott a lying liar who lies over it, but then letting it pass parliament.

  22. Dio,

    My problem isn’t that is favours the Liberals, it’s maybe shifting 10 audience members at most. I think it’s highly improbably that the people who turn up for/apply to be in the audience of Q&A match, or even approximate current polling, let alone remain curiously stagnant. Maybe quarantine shoe-throwers but I hardly think it matters whether a mostly silent and invisible member of the audience votes for any particular party. If you want to be in the audience of Q&A with your friends and you all vote, say for the Sports Party, you should be able to.

  24. It pisses me off that the ABC TV news report says “both Gillard and Wilson were present”, when the alleged payoff for her renovations was done.

    Evidence specifically pointed out that Gillard was in the front room and Wilson was out the back with his mates. It was out the back that any transaction took place.

    But the way the ABC put it you’d think Gillard helped Blewitt count the money.

  25. Oooh Day and LDP guy are total Laffer curve nuts.

    Increase revenue by lowering taxes!

    Hurray for magical thinking.

  26. [Oooh Day and LDP guy are total Laffer curve nuts.

    Increase revenue by lowering taxes!

    Hurray for magical thinking.]
    They’re complete nutters.

    Bob Day was a Liberal for a long time but he got pissed that the Libs didn’t hand him Mayo when Alexander Downer retired so he essentially bought the Family First party (he is a wealthy property developer) in order to get himself into the Senate.

  27. AussieAchmed@1129

    The fuel excise is a double-dipping tax rates.

    The double dipping – GST on top of excise

    GST applies to the fuel excise, a tax on a tax…

    So your point is?

    It was for this reason that Howard, eventually, put a freeze on the fuel excise. Even he could see that tax on a tax was a fcuked idea no matter how much the rich thought it was good

    Bollocks!
    We do it with alcohol and cigarettes.
    It has cost the govt billions over recent years.

  28. Disappointing interview by Alberici. She normally does better in my opinion, but she just let both nutters ramble with no contrary point of view or challenging of the silly assertions from both.

  29. BB,

    Why would they start reporting the matter accurately, fairly and critically now? They’ve already proven they have no shame, no need to pretend otherwise now

  30. The Laffer curve is purely hypothetical conjecture, with little evidence as to where the apex of the curve (Laffer point? It’s been a while) actually lies.

    At a guess, I’d place it above the 85% mark, as a tax rate in the 90’s seemed to have very little effect upon the US (although I imagine the effective tax rate was quite a bit lower.)

  31. [1219
    liyana

    I think the senate should block supply, the ALP should support this to protect the country from this destructive government..

    The Australian people didn’t vote for what the LNP are proposing.

    Would the budget pass with a joint sitting if all non coalition senators voted to block supply?]

    Budget measures and Supply are not the same thing. Sections 53-55 of the Constitution….

    [53. Proposed laws appropriating revenue or moneys, or imposing taxation, shall not originate in the Senate. But a proposed law shall not be taken to appropriate revenue or moneys, or to impose taxation, by reason of it only containing provisions for the imposition or appropriation of fines or other pecuniary penalties, or for the demand or payment or appropriation of fees for licences, or fees for services under the proposed law.

    The Senate may not amend proposed laws imposing taxation, or appropriating revenue or moneys for the ordinary annual services of the Government.

    The Senate may not amend any proposed law so as to increase any proposed charge or burden on the people.

    The Senate may at any stage return to the House of Representatives any proposed law which the Senate may not amend, requesting, by message, the omission or amendment of any items or provisions there in. And the House of Representatives may, if it thinks fit, make any of such omissions or amendments, with or without modifications.

    Except as provided in this section, the Senate shall have equal power with the House of Representatives in respect of all proposed laws.

    54. The proposed law which appropriates revenue or moneys for the ordinary annual services of the Government shall deal only with such appropriation.

    55. Laws imposing taxation shall deal only with the imposition of taxation, and any provision therein dealing with any other matter shall be of no effect.

    Laws imposing taxation, except laws imposing duties of custom or excise, shall deal with one subject of taxation only; but laws imposing duties of customs shall deal with duties of customs only, and laws imposing duties of excise shall deal with duties of excise only.]

    If the Senate twice rejects any bill (including a budget bill) in the required time-frame, a DD may be ordered by the Governor General. But if the Senate fails to pass Supply at all it is open to the GG simply to dismiss the House of Representatives. The Senate would not necessarily be forced to an election only as a consequence of the blocking of Supply. At least party for this reason, Labor has promised never to block Supply.

    Some have mooted possible moves by the LNP to attach budget measures to an appropriation bill (to Supply) but this would clearly breach s.54. Were the LNP to pass such an appropriation its legality would immediately be in doubt and would be liable to be struck down by the High Court. Presumably even Abbott would not risk having his money cut off by a constitutional challenge.

  32. Jimmyhaz,
    I believe that the research has been done and the apex of the Laffer curve is around the 90% mark.I think it is pretty safe to assume that in Australia lower tax rates will generate lower revenues.

  33. [1220
    ShowsOn

    Shorten’s issue is he went too hard on the deficit tax too early when the speculation was it’d be starting at 80k. Now he doesn’t want to backtrack.

    There’s nothing wrong with Shorten constantly calling Abbott a lying liar who lies over it, but then letting it pass parliament.]

    Labor should oppose the Abbott budget in its entirety (unless the repeal of -ve gearing is also included!).

    Abbott promised not to increase taxes along with a hundred other commitments. He must be held to them. He’s playing a game so he can assail Labor’s social programs in the name of fiscal necessity. It’s all a fraud. Abbott should be opposed at every step.

  34. [Bollocks!
    We do it with alcohol and cigarettes.
    It has cost the govt billions over recent years.]
    $25 billion over the last 10 years.

  35. [Labor should oppose the Abbott budget in its entirety (unless the repeal of -ve gearing is also included!).]
    Yeah I think the Opposition should consider opposing the whole budget simply to force the government to deal with the cross bench in the Senate.

    But I think one Opposition objective should be to try to make the deficit of the final budget outcome bigger than the budget projections so that the Opposition can point out that the Government hasn’t actually improved the budget situation.

  36. In any case, excise is collected for use by the Commonwealth and GST for allocation to the States. But punters really do not like fuel excise and in time will raise much more than the high income levy. I think there is a better case for reducing the rebates paid to mining and agriculture than hitting commuters and other businesses.

  37. ruawake: A little-discussed effect of the change to OPV in Senate voting is that the Territory seats will be sewn up as 1 ALP, 1 Lib. Exhaustion means that there is no prospect of the Green coming from behind and overtaking the Liberal for the ACT’s second seat.

  38. [1235
    ShowsOn

    Labor should oppose the Abbott budget in its entirety (unless the repeal of -ve gearing is also included!).

    Yeah I think the Opposition should consider opposing the whole budget simply to force the government to deal with the cross bench in the Senate.

    But I think one Opposition objective should be to try to make the deficit of the final budget outcome bigger than the budget projections so that the Opposition can point out that the Government hasn’t actually improved the budget situation.]

    I also think it is a really bad idea to chop social incomes/ transfer payments. It’s bad social policy and bad economic policy. The force that is acting to retard labour demand is weak per capita income growth. We’re going to find net exports will be slow (coal, iron ore and rural products are going to be weak) and real disposable per capita income growth could easily turn down again.

    We know that manufacturing job losses are already built into the outlook. There are some very early signs that property is already peaking, meaning that domestic demand will ebb to some degree. Policies that will add to pressure on the labour market are wrong-headed. They should be resisted by Labor with as much energy as they can find.

  39. [In any case, excise is collected for use by the Commonwealth and GST for allocation to the States. But punters really do not like fuel excise and in time will raise much more than the high income levy. I think there is a better case for reducing the rebates paid to mining and agriculture than hitting commuters and other businesses.]
    No, the Commonwealth collects excise on petrol, tobacco products and alcohol and gives it to the state it was collected in. This is due to a high court case circa 1997 that found that the states don’t actually have a right to impose excises on petrol, tobacco or alcohol. To get around this the federal government now imposes the excises at whatever rates the states request, once the Commonwealth collects the money it is then given to the relevant state.

  41. James Kiunstler on the problems of the USA
    _________________________________
    In his usual clever weekly column James Kunstler from the US…looks at the folly of the US policy in funding a failed client state like the Ukraine when it can’t even organise a decent train service betweeen New York and Chicago,as he says _

    As Kunstler says the internal collapse of the Ukraine,now far advanced ,will come soon to a crisis as they MUST meet the Gas Bill to Russia for $3.5 billion ny the end of May… and then pay in advance from then onwards for June …or the gas goes off

    The IMF has given a loan of $3 billion but that will not be enough and as Kunstler says why are US taxpayers being held to ransome..and for what ends ..to support a failing policy

    A very good picture of the US dilemma ..having made themselves a real burden in the Ukraine by their foolish policies
    http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/whose-client-state/
    =v

  42. And the ALP really need to be thinking about the long game here.

    If the ALP win in 2016 they face the same diabolical Senate as Abbott is going to shortly, but it will be even more hostile to the ALP than it is going to be to the LNP.

    There won’t be a lot of sweet-talking that Senate.

    Sure they can threaten to go to a DD (and clearing out the Senate is a worthwhile outcome in any case and we can start afresh with sensible voting), but that’s a risky strategy at the best of times.

    If they can get the LNP to push through any elements that the ALP would be in favour of in the longer term – and automatic indexation of the fuel excise and extra tax on the highest income earners are both things the ALP should not be opposed to on principle – then put them through now. The ALP isn’t going to get the chance to do anything major unless they get really lucky and chance deals them in with a good chance at carrying off a successful DD play.

  43. 1239
    ShowsOn

    I thought this applied to tobacco as a replacement for the States so-called Franchise taxes. I didn’t realise it applied to the other excises as well. So does Hockey intend to pass the extra fuel excise to the States…for his road-building plans?

  44. [If they can get the LNP to push through any elements that the ALP would be in favour of in the longer term – and automatic indexation of the fuel excise and extra tax on the highest income earners are both things the ALP should not be opposed to on principle – then put them through now. The ALP isn’t going to get the chance to do anything major unless they get really lucky and chance deals them in with a good chance at carrying off a successful DD play.]
    Sure, but there’s nothing stopping Labor from making the government sweat before accepting these policies. And in the interim if the cross bench plays hardball, the the Opposition could get things it wants in return, like no GP tax for families with combined income under $100,000 or whatever.

  45. [1239
    ShowsOn

    I thought this applied to tobacco as a replacement for the States so-called Franchise taxes. I didn’t realise it applied to the other excises as well. So does Hockey intend to pass the extra fuel excise to the States…for his road-building plans?]
    I’m pretty sure it is everything. Alcohol excises and petrol excise all has to go to the Commonwealth first because it has “exclusive power” in this area:
    http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s90.html

    The states do get to decide the rate though.

  46. LOL. Apparently Abbott has been ‘reassuring’ his backbenchers – as if he has the faintest idea what he’s doing. :p

  47. [1242…Jackol]

    The LNP are pulling their same old stunt…higher taxes, reduced social spending but higher spending overall, attacks on services….Labor should resist them.

    Labor should depict the LNP as the party of higher taxes, fewer jobs, lower wages and reduced services…and higher spending. The LNP are wreckers. They will wreck public finances, the economy, jobs and household security.

    The LNP will blame Labor for everything – the cuts to social incomes, the tax increases, the job losses. Labor should oppose the whole lot. They are not necessary. None of it is necessary. In order to defend its record if nothing else, Labor should reject the LNP’s plans.

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