Kooyong
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| 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
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| 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.
Diog
Its a Coalition Budget. Not a Labor one. No surprises no excuses sounding very hollow.
This budget is going to make No Carbon Tax Under a Government I Lead look like a model of integrity by comparison
US: If there is a housing bubble about to burst, then surely we want as many overseas investors as possible to have bought in before then, so that the loss in value is worn by them.
[Labor only have themselves to blame for it. Swan and Gillard promised on more than 100 occasions to bring the budget into surplus. Gillard even said “failure is not an option”.
]
Gillard and Swan were appalling at politics and couldn’t have spun a top to save their lives. Swan was a very effective treasurer though.
Lynchpin
Completely agree. Most economists agree it will harm the economy. And as someone said yesterday, the economy is a means to an end not an end in itself.
Governments are meant to act for the good of the people. The economy isn’t the people.
Just me@1446,
Sadly your link describes a situation common indeed normal in British towns these days. My guess would be that the writer was not targeted specifically for being blind (although it does render identifying the perpetrators difficult), but for being different. Exactly the same mentality is at work here as in schoolyard bullying, so any convenient lever will do.
The social descent which has led to such a situation was well under way decades agoand was a major decider in Mrs Bogan and myself moving to Australia. It’s regrettable that our adopted country has voted in a government which will take US down the same route.
Zoid
It’s very hard for Labor to get up and say getting the budget back in surplus isn’t that important when they told us for three years that it was and they were going to do it.
[Governments are meant to act for the good of the people. The economy isn’t the people.
]
Yes buy sadly the libs don’t see the unemployed, the disabled or even working class Australians as people they are just an economic drag that should be cut off.
No one has ever explained to me the benefit of a surplus.
What is it?
Algeria, Kazakhstan, Lesotho and Liberia are in the black. Perhaps Abbott is modeling our economy on theirs?
[ No one has ever explained to me the benefit of a surplus.
What is it? ]
It allows you to offer your wealthy mates tax rorts while still pretending to be good economic managers.
Lynchpin
I recall some rubbish about Gov surplus taking pressure off interest rates therefore lowering the borrowing cost for business to piss against the wall .
How relevant that is with record low rates now ( & nigh zero overseas) not sure.
In reality it’s all just spin for right wing loser business types ( like Shepherd) to excuse their incompetence.
@Leroy_Lynch: Essential poll: TPP ALP 52 L/NP 48. Shorten leads pref PM, 37 to Abbott 36. Abbott has -20 point approval rating. http://t.co/CqpwFyjTrB ($)
[No one has ever explained to me the benefit of a surplus.
What is it? ]
Is it a trick question?
I hope labor and the greens can link the ‘repair job’ meme with repairing howard era tax cuts and middle class welfare – many of the measures are just that. labor should offer to support some of the measures, but put forward a fairer version and challenge abbott to call a fresh election so the voters can make a decision not based on his lies. I know it’s a stunt, but abbott got away with this shite for years. ‘Call an election and let the people decide’ is good tactic against a deeply unpopular government and it should be trotted out as loudly and often as possible for the next 2 years.
@1456
And you going to be gullible to believe that, just as much as Coalition Party supporters think they are good economic managers, once they rip out every little bit of Safety Net, legal or money wise.
caf @1452
Whoilst that will improve the situation in the short term, in the long run it is a catastrophic move for our future.
guytaur @1462
About bloody time Abbott started to trail in the PPM stakes
Roy Morgan @roymorganonline 53s
ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence Falls a Further 2.4% Ahead of Tonight’s Budget http://ow.ly/wLWaP #auspol #ausbiz
Madame Speaker just buggered up the naming of the motion.
The obvious benefit of a surplus is you can spend your interest repayments on something worthwhile. Whether its worth taking an axe to everyone to do it is a lot more problematic.
[Shorten leads pref PM, 37 to Abbott 36. Abbott has -20 point approval rating]
Bwahahahahahahaha
It’s starting to look like Shorten’s tactic of doing and saying very littl, while his opponent is spraying industrial class bullshit everywhere, is paying dividends.
“@AdamBandt: Joe Hockey’s first Budget: the end of the age of egalitarianism.”
Diog,
Back when I used to attend Labor Party Branch meetings (during the Punic Wars) we used to discuss what sort of “society” Australia had then become and might become.
Lynchpin@1458
In my view, surpluses are overrated as a goal for Federal Governments. They are far more important for State governments, which – given their relatively limited taxing powers – much be very careful to avoid building up long-term debt problems: however, the good news here is that credit ratings agencies generally keep the states pretty honest.
At the moment, the Federal Government has an enormous potential upside in terms of its ability to increase taxes, and IMO this significantly reduces the extent to which there is any urgency for a return to surplus in any given year.
The current Government intends to abolish the carbon tax and the mining tax and to restore the FBT for novated lease vehicles. It also is committed to doing nothing about the rising quantity of superannuation pension payments excluded from tax. And they are about to spend billions on roads and, it would seem, a lot of money on a paid PPL scheme which would not appear to be especially urgent.
If there was truly a fiscal crisis, none of these policy positions would be viable. So the fact that they are means that the fiscal position is fundamentally sound, and I’m pretty sure the credit ratings agencies would agree with me about this.
There are major emerging fiscal problems over the longer term and the Commission of Audit does a pretty good job at identifying these and a reasonable job at identifying solutions.
These are the more or less same problems as were identified – and better and more lucidly expressed – in the Howard Government’s 1996 Commission of Audit. In short, they are that the ageing of the baby boomers means that we are coming to the end of a phase lasting several decades in which the proportion of the population which is participating in the labour force has steadily grown over time.
This stabilising (or potentially slight decline) of the proportion of the population in the labour force will have a downward influence on the rate of economic growth and therefore of taxation receipts. It will also put upward pressure on Federal Government outlays in areas such as social security and health.
This problem will need to be addressed, and getting the size of the overall government debt burden is one of the best ways of doing this. And getting older people to pay for more of their health and living costs is another one: I think it is inevitable that the savings of retirees that are tied up in family homes will somehow have to be accessed sooner or later.
So – unless the fundamentals change dramatically as they did for Howard after 1998 – the Federal Government is going to have to make cuts and raise taxes to eventually get the budget back to surplus and keep it there for a couple of decades.
But the opportunity remains for these changes to be made gradually rather than drastically. In the end, Howard didn’t do all that much about them, other than to run a series of moderate surpluses that could have (and, I would suggest, should have) been much larger.
But, taking a longer term perspective, things are still not all that bad. But we are going to need surpluses fairly soon.
Adam Bandt @AdamBandt 1m
Joe Hockey’s first Budget: the end of the age of egalitarianism.
sortius @sortius 2m
Some Telekom Austria vectored VDSL2 results: http://cdn1.telekomaustria.com/final/en/media/pdf/Vectoring.pdf … #NBN pic.twitter.com/yWI3xnsZAC
sortius @sortius 1m
That graph essentially means: no ADSL2, so customers will have to upgrade or lose internet access in FTTN areas #NBN
A surplus in strong economic times makes sense – because the cost of everything is higher in the boom – so you would spend the first half of a boom reducing the previous downturns deficits and the secondhalf saving for and planning infrastructure projects to debottleneck the economy soak up labor as it is she’d by private enterprise etc etc
Of course you need a nice symmetrical economic cycle to get it right.
As I understand it the biggest problem swan hit was revenue not recovering – I think most of the other estimates were reasonable even though optimistic (which feeds consumer confidence and helps anyway)
“@AustralianLabor: What do Canada, Sweden & Oz all have in common? We all have AAA credit ratings. That’s not a budget emergency #budget2014 #auspol”
BB,
You’re probably accurate about Shorten’s strategy up until now, but surely the Reply to Hockey’s fanatical driving of Australia into a “precariate”, as Chomsky calls the USA, requires a fair amount of Bushfire Bill’s style sharp-edged language.
PS: Dio@1470: far more important than current year interest payments is level of the cumulative debt over the longer term. As other nations have shown, if this gets too big, then it starts to become unmanageable without drastic changes such as governments having to renege on promised pension and superannuation entitlements for workers.
Australia is a long, long way from this sort of situation, but we need to remain alert to the risks.
[1447
zoidlord
@1446
Indeed, and this is the situation that the LNP want to create here, with their shock jocks, jamming down the hatred that Disabled rip off tax payers.]
With a little help from their friends:
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ne…t-welfare-reform/story-fni0cx12-1226912358132
[The Saturday Telegraph has learned a nationwide audit of the bloated Disability Support Pension…]
“bloated”
http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/We-must-crack-down-on-the-disability-support-pension/
[There are now more than 800,000 people – around one in 20 working-age Australians – on a disability pension. Many thousands are profoundly disabled, but around two-thirds have moderate or mild disabilities.]
“two-thirds”
Bullshit. You evil fuckers.
[1455
theintellectualbogan]
The UK has gone to shit. You got out at the right time. Can’t be a nice feeling seeing that filth now arrive here, on the other side of the world.
Some internecine cannibalism is now emerging at ICAC as Mr Carter protects himself.
meher @1481
These other nations are experiencing problems because of two reasons.
1) They have ceded their monetary sovereignty.
and 2) They have entered into obligations which severely limit their ability to influence their own fiscal policy.
As we have control of the Australian dollar, 1) is not a problem for us. As we have removed our debt limit, 2) is not a problem for us.
“@Kate_McClymont: Six months ago Hartcher asked his ex staff Ray Carter to take the fall for the $4k that Hartcher laundered thru a trust account #icac”
BK
Indeed
[Six months ago Hartcher asked his ex staff Ray Carter to take the fall for the $4k that Hartcher laundered thru a trust account #icac]
Please elucidate on the cannibalism, thanks, BK.
Atticus
Follow Kate McClymont’s tewitter stream direct from ICAC.
https://twitter.com/Kate_McClymont
Some further thoughts re Budget surpluses. When the Hawke Government delivered the first one of these for a long, long while, it was generally seen as a bit of a novelty, but not a huge deal.
Then – largely as a result of the China boom – Howard was able to deliver a series of these in the 1990s and 2000s and dump all over Beazley about his “black hole”. For the Libs in general surpluses were then elevated to an iconic status, a sort of macho indicator of overall government potency. Rudd, to his credit (and I’m one of the last people to give him credit for anything), seemed to try to hose this idea down a bit (eg, in his unreadable and largely incorrect dissertation about economics in The Monthly).
But then (as Dio has rightly pointed out) Gillard and Swan, thrashing around looking for credibility under enormous political pressure, put the concept of surpluses as the primary measure of economic competence right back in the forefront of the public debate.
Anyway, I am suspecting that tonight we will see that the Coalition will be canny enough to have delayed any move towards surplus until at least the last year of the current forward estimates. I’m actually suspecting that there won’t be any more bad news in the Budget than we have already been told: there’s a rather surprising rumour going around today that there won’t be any further drastic cuts to the public service: perhaps just an extra 1% on the efficiency dividend or something like that. We’ll have to wait and see.
Cheers, BK
That Essential is a good poll for Labor on Budget Eve. From what Hockey and Abbott have been saying we can expect polls to go down further.
The question with this expected strategy is will the polls fall to such as degree for long enough for Abbott to be a one termer PM.
We get a clue from Mr Shorten in QT today and will know after his reply next week.
If people do not stop listening to Abbott then he will not be a one term PM.
“@HillbillySkill: Could a journo with nads ask @joehockey what specific ‘heavy lifting’ Gina Reinhart will be forced to do in #Budget2014 ???”
@1489
I think you are being mistaken about “any further drastic cuts”, The budget won’t be a war with the public service, but the public itself.
[ “@AdamBandt: Joe Hockey’s first Budget: the end of the age of egalitarianism.” ]
Joe Hockey’s first Budget: the end of the fair go.
“@political_alert: NSW Premier Mike Baird will make an announcement about lobbying, 1:15pm, NSW Parliament #nswpol”
I was watching Shorten a few weeks back talking about the economy, and he seemed to stop himself short of stating that Labor would commit to a budget surplus.
It’d be great if it was no longer a platform for the ALP, especially given that the requirements are fundamentally incompatible with their core values. (I may be reading to hard into it, but a boy can dream.)
Guytaur, I tend to think that:
[If people do stop listening to Abbott then he will not be a one term PM.]
Re the Disability Support Pension: I think some of the anti-Government rhetoric I am hearing on this is a bit unfair.
In particular, it doesn’t seem to me that the Government can fairly be accused of “mounting an attack on the disabled”. I’m sure what they think they are doing is putting pressure on the arguably non-disabled (or “not very disabled”) who are on the DSP to make some effort to return to the labour force.
The numbers of DSP recipients is large has been rising rather rapidly in recent years: even when we adjust the numbers for the ageing of the population, the number of DSP recipients is rising more rapidly than the labour force as a whole.
Anecdotal evidence has always been that – as with medical certificates for sick leave – your average GP is a bit reluctant to overrule patients who consider that they should be eligible to receive a DSP. And there are lots of GPs around, so doctor shopping is a simple matter.
While I doubt that there are many people receiving DSP who – if forced off it – would immediately become overwhelmed by job offers, it’s probably worthwhile putting a bit of pressure on younger recipients.
The nature of the Australian labour market is one in which people with low skills and low motivation tend to be discarded completely by the time they reach their mid-30s. There is virtually no point in trying too hard to do anything much for people beyond that age, other than to have an open door to a range of return-to-work support services for those who suddenly gain some motivation. But those under 35 are worth shoving a bit harder, especially if their disabilities are of the sort that are shared by many people who are in gainful employment.
So I think that a bit of tough love is warranted in this area. But I really don’t expect it to save bucketloads of money.
@1498
You are being sympathetic to the Coalition Government.
There is no need to attack the Disabled, focus on job creation, and employment benefits (including things like training).
Supporting the Disabled via Training, Costs and so forth.
What this government is doing, is the opposite of that.
You are being ignorant.
You really need to research on the whole subject of the Disability Pension, including the Impairment Tables.
Zoidland #1499
It all comes down to motive.
The Abbotteers motive is to target anyone except their mates.
If they were fair dinkum empathic with those with disabilities they’d be adding money, programs etc to allow each one to go forth into society at whatever level their capability allows.
Instead they frame their policy with distrust, suspicion, and a monetary rather than caring perspective, to those who are the most vulnerable.