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| Red and blue numbers respectively indicate size of two-party majority for Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room. |
Bill Shorten’s electorate of Maribyrnong has covered a shifting area around Essendon in Melbourne’s inner north-west since its creation in 1906. It presently extends westwards from Essendon through Niddrie and Avondale Heights to St Albans. Labor has held the seat without interruption since 1969, prior to which it was held for the Liberals for 14 years by Philip Stokes. Stokes had emerged a beneficiary of the Labor split ahead of the 1955 election, at which preferences from the ALP (Anti-Communist) candidate enabled him to unseat Labor’s Arthur Drakeford by 114 votes, in what was only Labor’s second defeat since 1910. The seat finally returned to the Labor fold at the 1969 election when it was won by Moss Cass, who secured enough of a buffer through successive swings in 1972 and 1974 to survive Labor’s electoral winter of 1975 and 1977. In 1983 he bequeathed a double-digit margin to his successor Alan Griffiths, who enjoyed a 7.4% boost when the 1990 redistribution added St Albans, which remains a particularly strong area for Labor. Griffiths was succeeded in 1996 by Bob Sercombe, who chose to bow out at the 2007 election rather than face preselection defeat at the hands of Australian Workers Union national secretary Bill Shorten.
Shorten came to parliament with a national reputation after positioning himself as the public face of the Beaconsfield mine disaster rescue effort in April-May 2006, and wielded great influence in the Victorian party factional system as a chieftain of the Right. However, Shorten was known to be hostile to Kevin Rudd, and rose no higher than parliamentary secretary for disabilities and children’s services during Rudd’s first term as Prime Minister. Shorten then emerged as one of the initiators of the June 2010 leadership coup, together with Victorian Right colleague David Feeney, and interstate factional allies Mark Arbib in New South Wales and Don Farrell in South Australia. After the 2010 election he was promoted to the outer ministry as Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services and Superannuation, and he then won promotion to an expanded cabinet by further taking on the employment and workplace relations portfolio in December 2011. Nonetheless, Shorten’s political stocks were generally thought to have been depleted by the political travails of Julia Gillard, whom he crucially abandoned in June 2013 to facilitate Kevin Rudd’s return. For this he was rewarded with a portfolio swap of financial services and superannuation for education.
After the 2013 election defeat, Shorten and Anthony Albanese of the Left emerged as the two candidates for the first leadership ballot held under the party’s new rules, in which the vote was divided evenly between the party membership and caucus. Albanese proved the clear favourite of the membership, in part reflecting the taint Shorten was perceived as carrying from his involvement in successive leadership coups against sitting prime ministers. However, Shorten’s 55-31 victory in the caucus vote was just sufficient to outweigh his 59.92%-40.08% deficit in the ballot of approximately 30,000 party members, the combined result being 52.02% for Shorten and 47.98% for Albanese.
Interestingly:
Oxford University @UniofOxford 9m
Shaming people won’t get them off welfare, concludes new research in forthcoming book by Oxford prof Robert Walker:http://tinyurl.com/n8cvmf3
Puffy
Therte are women in the Labor Party who support Abbott, Morrison, Hockey and Andrews.
Give me a break, women are not perfect, they’re just as bad as men!
Its going to be hard for Abbott to ignore calls for the Child Abuse RC to be funded and extended as Lateline regards its creation as a result of their stories and will keep pursuing it if Abbott tries to derail it.
Typo
Should read: There are women in the Liberal Party who support Abbott, Morrison, Hockey and Andrews @ 1102.
Morrison being given the immolated Tamil as his own responsibility by a friend of the dead man. Pick the bones out of that
PTMD @ 1099: Mrs Thatcher and the Falklands?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/abbott-government-continues-to-struggle-newspoll-figures-show/story-fn59niix-1226972945884
[Abbott government continues to struggle, Newspoll figures show
The Australian June 30, 2014 10:49PM
Phillip Hudson
Bureau Chief
Canberra
SUPPORT for the Abbott government is now 10 points below its election-winning vote nearly 300 days ago, with the Coalition not making any headway since the budget in selling its tough fiscal message.
The latest Newspoll, conducted exclusively for The Australian, shows voters have shifted to the Greens, Labor and independents.
For the fifth consecutive Newspoll, Labor is ahead of the Coalition in two-party terms and would comfortably win if an election were held today.
Based on preference flows from the last election, Labor has a 10-point lead in two-party terms to be ahead 55 to 45 per cent, the same result as in the first poll after the May budget. It marks a 7.5 percentage point swing since the election and the Coalition’s equal worst result in four years.]
“@GhostWhoVotes: #Newspoll 2 Party Preferred: L/NP 45 (-2) ALP 55 (+2) #auspol”
s
GhostWhoVotes @GhostWhoVotes 59s
#Newspoll 2 Party Preferred: L/NP 45 (-2) ALP 55 (+2) #auspol
GhostWhoVotes @GhostWhoVotes 10s
#Newspoll Abbott: Approve 31 (+1) Disapprove 62 (+1) #auspol
Puff – I appreciate your input and mostly agree, including the debate on Gillard. Letting certain posters get under your skin though is not a good idea. The volume of talking is well recognised to be unrelated to the quality of contribution – some contributors need to be mostly passed by to avoid giving them oxygen.
@abcnews: From @qanda: One-time @LiberalAus candidate challenges @SHendersonMP over Government’s mandate on welfare changes http://t.co/f6euxlOvIz
Centre
You sound like those people who say all politicians are as bad as each other.
You did not address my claim that women are responsible for the wars that have plagued this planet since groups of humans met each other around a waterhole. In this modern times they are not responsible for the way the world’s resources are used because they don’t bloody well control them. Nor do we control the decisions men make have wars.
Refute it if you can. And stop hiding behind the equivalency argument.
LL @ 1107: If Newspoll is favouring the ALP in the TTPV 55:45, that represents an 8.5% swing since the election, not 7.5% as stated by Mr Hudson.
typo
“women are not responsible for the wars”
55/45
Not bad.
Describing the Abbott Hockey budget as tough fiscal action is way off the mark. The wealthy will contribute little if anything. The battlers are being targetted. Nasty fiscal action is the correct description. And it is going down a treat with the recipients.
Puff
If nothing else woman are responsible for raising the men and giving them values that means they go and start wars.
Most of the time you are spot on but on this one I think you are not as I think the values that start wars are an equal opportunity fault. Its just seems like men because they are the ones generally in power in patriarchal societies
[Now if misandry is the abuse i have to cop every time I make a criticism of any male or males as a group, this sociologist is going to leave this site for somewhere else. I already cut back my visits here because I find every time I mention Julia Gillard I am targeted. ]
Puffy:
Do as I do and just breeze through it. I take the view that if there are commenters who want to pitch a fit about my views on Old White Men or JG, then they can go fuck themselves.
Hello Puff…well said
As a long term unpaid carer for a person on a disability pension I find it difficult to restrain myself from wishing similar misfortune on the likes of Andrews and his cronies. So I then give myself a lecture on not wishing misfortune on their family members – who may not all agree with their views anyway. Doesn’t stop me from visualising 1792 era justice for Andrews and his mates. This really is heading (yeah no pun) close to 1930’s stuff and it is going to make life just about unbearable for a lot of people.
This is policy that comes from people with black hearts, whose souls are dead.
Puffy
Oh don’t worry, if they had equal power in the past they would have been just as bad, believe me, and you probably know it.
Pedant and Centre,
When the overwhelming majority of the world’s violent crimes are no longer committed by men, you will have a point. Women are not as bad as men. They are not even close.
As for 1118 – FMD.
guytaur @ 1112: Mr Palmer should be on the phone to him straight away to get him as a PUP candidate for the Victorian election.
pedant
I would not be surprised if Palmer was on the phone to him as we speak
Oh and ABC finally reports polling too btw, but only on QLD:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-30/qld-government-trails-labor-in-newspoll/5558682
55:45 I’ll take that at this stage of the electoral cycle.
Ratchets up the pressure on the LNP nicely … Its plea for fiscal austerity is clearly falling on deaf ears …
[If nothing else woman are responsible for raising the men and giving them values that means they go and start wars.]
Jesus guytaur, whose arse did you pluck that shit from?
confessions
You think mothers do not give ethics and values to their children?
New thread.
Why is it necessary to categorise between men and women?
Sheesh, if Gillard was a Liberal PM she would have been crowned Saint Mother Thatcher The 2nd by Rupe and his butt cleansers.
I’m moving on!
FarQU @ 1123: As it happens, I agree with your statement, which is slightly more measured than PTMD’s. I simply make the point that Mrs Thatcher led the UK during the Falklands War. (And of course Golda Meir led Israel during the Yom Kippur war.)
guytaur:
Yeah, but not on a scale that says men who fuck up can lay blame with their mothers.
You might be onto something Guytaur. It would certainly explain a lot, behaving like children, incapable of control, self-centred. Good reason to keep them away from pointy things and things that go bang.
confessions
I am not claiming that. The whole post makes it plain I see it as equal opportunity.
Its just males have more opportunity to be in power.
Moving on to next thread.
So Abbott net approval -31.
Perhaps the 7 percent undecided are not as we might suspect all fluffyheads, but could plausibly include some respondents who were so speechless with rage at the interviewers question that they became catatonic.
45:55 trending away from abbott – a beautiful set of numbers. I wonder how long he’ll be able to convince the party room than switching the elected leader is electoral suicide. my guess is the powers in charge of him will use his unpopularity to ram through a hard right agenda and booby-trap the budget for the returning labor government in 2016, or ditch abbott six months out from the election know that anybody will be more popular. the neutered and spineless turnbull might even be given the job just so he can get the ‘PM’ title in history books – he might even win an election, but would face the same hurdles placed by abbott – I imagine a large and unsustainable tax break/dodge being introduced a few months out from the election – making ti hard for any alternative Pm to ‘increase’ tax (take it back to where it was). Abbott’s a one termer, but he will drag us as far as he can to the lunar right before he is done.
[Puff, the Magic Dragon.
Posted Monday, June 30, 2014 at 10:58 pm | PERMALINK
Centre
You sound like those people who say all politicians are as bad as each other.
You did not address my claim that women are responsible for the wars that have plagued this planet since groups of humans met each other around a waterhole. In this modern times they are not responsible for the way the world’s resources are used because they don’t bloody well control them. Nor do we control the decisions men make have wars.
Refute it if you can. And stop hiding behind the equivalency argument.]
Puff
First, please don’t consider not posting here. You are a valued contributor and that would be a real pity.
Second, every woman who leads her nation, as Hilary Clinton is likely to do in a couple of years, does control the military resources of that country – and a number of them have been just as willing as their male counterparts to send (mainly) young men off to fight and die in wars.
Third
Interesting to learn that you are a sociologist. That was one of my dual majors at uni.
zoidlord@1093
One capable of forming a government and actually doing stuff. N.B. Not the Greens.
Puff, the Magic Dragon.@1099
There you go again Puff. Can’t help yourself. 😛
Bemused defined ‘effective opposition’ as follows
[One capable of forming a government and actually doing stuff. N.B. Not the Greens.]
I’d say that an effective opposition was one that could manage to prevent things getting done. The opposition to the 43rd parliament met your test, but failed mine.
We Greens are obviously not yet an effective opposition but that’s not to say we won’t be one day. Sometime after that, we may even get to lead a government. Whatever we do though, we will do the most important thing — stand four-square alongside those fighting for social justice and fair dealing, for environmental sustainability and social inclusion. Neither of the current ruling parties can make that claim, and I doubt they’d even try.