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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.
Apparently A Current Affair also doing another story on welfare bludgers… tonight.
Ferguson asking for evidence on income managrment. No real answer
[Did these people not learn anything over the life of the last parliament?]
That creating an environment of instability doesn’t work?
Lets try that again!
Check out: http://vimeo.com/98926166
20 LNP back benches today signed a petition to increase the electricity cost to virtually the entire nation. A few foreign owned multinational companies will NOT be negatively be affected by their proposed change. In fact, they will be the beneficiaries as it is proposed that they no longer pay their share of the renewal energy target.
Every dollar saved by these multinational companies by this proposal measure will be paid by someone else. Including companies that employ people.
The 20 LNP backbench didn’t mention how many jobs will be lost to the companies paying extra for their electricity.
One backbencher stated that it didn’t really matter how many jobs would be lost by all the other companies because the multinational are bigger supporters of LNP and therefore the few jobs they provide are very much more important to Australia’s economy.
[That creating an environment of instability doesn’t work?]
That demanding an election simply because you don’t like or agree with the actions of the incumbent govt gets you nowhere.
Apparently Macklins office is okaying the two bills regarding social security.
And with that I will never vote ALP again.
zoidlord
Been their stock in trade since forever.
“@martin_hickman: At phone hacking hearing, Andrew Edis QC, for the Crown, describes Rupert Murdoch’s News if the World as “a thoroughly criminal enterprise.””
fess
[That demanding an election simply because you don’t like or agree with the actions of the incumbent govt gets you nowhere.]
Abbott’s supporters did exactly that.
L/Unionist
Thankyou! 🙂
Was well worth a view, beautiful!
Zoid
[Apparently Macklins office is okaying the two bills regarding social security.]
Who said Macklin’s office is giving the go ahead?
@Dee/1012
A poster on another forum, called the office today.
“and they said that they will not be opposing the proposed drop in portability or in fact, anything within the two bills”.
What Labor taught us last term was that no matter what you do the voters are going to give you a second term.
mikeh:
And they were forced to cool their heels until a scheduled general election.
It’ll be the same this time as well.
Seriously, what barrow is the ABC pushing with this:
[The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) turns one on Tuesday but not everyone is happy with the rollout.
Submissions to the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS have raised concerns about money from the scheme being spent on decking, tablet devices, sporting fees and gym memberships.]
Decking – otherwise known a access ramps.
Tablet devices – like the one’s used to run apps like this http://www.aphasia.com/ ?
Sporting fees and gym memberships – wft?? How can you generally criticise that?
Zoid
I’ll believe it when it comes from the ALP.
Darn@978
Just another manifestation of the misandry on this site. 🙁
rummel
[What Labor taught us last term was that no matter what you do the voters are going to give you a second term.]
Eh, Labor didn’t get another term after their last one. They got another term (just barely) after the one prior to that.
@Dee/1017
Considering that ALP gave the green light to Slave Army, and did not oppose anything of major concern, I say it’s likely, but happy to be proven wrong.
And that was coming off a large lead.
Perhaps you could identify what it is that happened in Labor’s first term that qualifies as “no matter what”? The replaced of KR? That’s all of one sample point. Where do you go from that to generalising to “no matter what”?
fess
Agree, but the anticipation of kicking Labor out, the idea that the whole process was overdue surely played into it. I don’t want to drag it out because I get what you’re saying anyhow.
*replacement of
No worries, Dee, happy to share.
When we left school, I went to uni to study physics, he went to TAFE for a photography course and got his dive instructor’s ticket… he always had a plan 😉
[Sporting fees and gym memberships – wft?? How can you generally criticise that?]
You can if you have no understanding of what supports are currently organised for people with disability under current state schemes.
zoidlord@1007
Tell someone who cares about how you will vote.
Morgan opn Vic Fed poll
___________
The 58% for Labor in Vic Fed is quite close to the best figure for the State ALP in the forthcomng state elections,and likewise for the Libs worst figure
This will cause further trouble inside the Vic-Lib Party.. who already blames Abbott …not themselves…for their troubles
@bemused/1026
How about go sit in the corner with that attitude.
[You can if you have no understanding of what supports are currently organised for people with disability under current state schemes.]
Yep, and I’d also add, no desire to come to an understanding either.
[The opposition insists Australia’s welfare system is not out of control and blasted the coalition’s “demonisation” of disability support pensioners.
It was not as easy to get on the payment as the coalition was making it out, Labor said.
“They deserve our support not the way in which the Abbott government has demonised people,” opposition disability spokeswoman Jenny Macklin told ABC radio on Monday.]
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/labor-claims-welfare-not-out-of-control/story-fni0xqi4-1226971776136?nk=7ece91d3217d29e9b69908978090c474
zoid –
Macklin press release from yesterday —
[The Abbott Government’s review into the welfare system must not be used as cover for another round of savage cuts to vulnerable Australians….]
[..while Labor is not against simplification of the welfare system, we will not support further cuts to vulnerable Australians from this cruel government. ..]
[..%abor will not support leaving people on the !P & or any other primary payment & worse off because of this government’s twisted priorities.]
http://www.scribd.com/doc/231778522/Jenny-Macklin-Mp
mikeh:
Barring extraordinary (and they’d have to be truly extraordinary) circumstances, we’ll get our chance at a federal election sometime in 2016.
I didn’t enjoy the Howard years, esp not his first two terms. That didn’t mean I wasn’t prepared to suck it up and recognise that even though he was unpopular, lost the popular vote when going for re-election a second time, that his govt wasn’t a legitimately and democratically elected govt.
zoidlord@1028
I couldn’t care less how you vote.
Sorry, there’s some kind of function on her site which means cutting and pasting changes the spelling and punctuation!
@zoomster/1031
It talks about payments, not specific changes to legislation which effect the number of people on or able to receive DSP.
e.g. Impairment table changes, the 8-15 minimum rule to be able to get DSP etc.
There is also indefinite portability changes which are not listed in Macklin’s press release.
I know what Labor has said, it’s what they haven’t said what concerns me and many others.
LU:
I was at a disability planning workshop last year where caseworkers (mostly state govt employed) admitted they’d organised sex workers for some clients under the social support stream of funding.
As we move to client-centred care, where a person can organise his/her own care package, including purchasing the supports s/he needs rather than being directed by a case worker (ie what the NDIS is about), does the ABC really think we aren’t going to see more unusual items in a person’s funding stream?
@bemused/1033
Why bother replying in the first place? I wasn’t speaking to you.
zoid
Well, Labor hasn’t said it’s going to oppose DSP recipients being shipped to Mars, so you must be concerned about that…
zoom, I believe it’s a pdf and when you cut and paste you are getting the raw encoding.
[As we move to client-centred care, where a person can organise his/her own care package, including purchasing the supports s/he needs rather than being directed by a case worker (ie what the NDIS is about), does the ABC really think we aren’t going to see more unusual items in a person’s funding stream?]
Exactly. It’s about respecting the needs and wishes of the individual.
[I was at a disability planning workshop last year where caseworkers (mostly state govt employed) admitted they’d organised sex workers for some clients under the social support stream of funding.]
For some people, doomed to para or quadriplegia – but who still have normal sex drives and instincts – the only option is a paid sex worker.
Must they suffer a living hell, without normal human interaction, simply because (mostly through no fault of their own) they are unable to crack on to a woman at a dance club for a one night stand?
@Zoomster/1038
Do you know how stupid that sounds? Australia is a technological backwater.
fess@1032
I shut out the Howard years to some extent. Having 3 kids born in the same period was a distraction from the sheer grubness of the politics but it was always there, in the background, the rodent gnawing away at the very things I thought made our country better.
Rummel, come back and give us another chuckle. Well played Zoomster .
Dragons giving the Melbourne cheats a touch up. Lovely!!!!
Ah, so it’s only our lack of technology saving DSP recipients from an interplanetary adventure…
It wasn’t I that said something about flying to Mars.
zoidlord@1037
I wanted to place on record my indifference to your tanties and voting intentions.
William
What is your definition of ‘a rogue poll’?
Four Corners on Murdoch and hacking.