Seat of the week: Jagajaga

Covering the eastern reaches of Melbourne, the electorate of Jagajaga has provided a reasonably secure electoral base for Jenny Macklin’s parliamentary career since 1996.

Jenny Macklin’s electorate of Jagajaga was created with the expansion of parliament in 1984, and covers suburbs in north-eastern Melbourne from Heidelberg and Ivanhoe out to North Warrandyte in the east. Its present area was mostly in the electorate of Bourke from federation until 1926, which accounted for northern Melbourne including Brunswick and Reservoir; Flinders and Indi from 1922 to 1937, which respectively covered its western suburban and eastern interior regions; Deakin from its recreation in 1937 until 1955, at which time Ivanhoe was absorbed by Batman; and Diamond Valley in its eastern parts from 1969 to 1984. When created in 1984, Jagajaga extended north to Bundoora and had the Yarra River as its eastern boundary, with Eltham and its surrounds accommodated by Casey and Menzies. Its present configuration was largely adopted at the redistribution which took effect at the 1996 election.

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

Jagajaga was in part the successor to abolished Diamond Valley, although that seat’s extension into rural areas further to the north made it a marginal seat that went with the government of the day at each election during an existence that ran from 1969 to 1984. Diamond Valley was won narrowly for Labor in 1983 by Peter Staples at the expense of Liberal incumbent Neil Brown, who would return to parliament in 1984 as member for Menzies and later became deputy Liberal leader (and was more recently a contentious appointment to the panel that appoints ABC board directors). Staples secured the considerably more accommodating electoral territory of Jagajaga in 1984, which had a notional Labor margin of 8.4%, and retained the seat until his retirement in 1996, in which time his closest shave was a 2.6% winning margin amid the Victorian anti-Labor backlash of 1990.

Staples was succeeded by Jenny Macklin, a former researcher and state ministerial staffer and member of the Socialist Left. Macklin retained the seat by 2.7% on her electoral debut and secured slightly stronger margins over the the next three elections. After the 2001 election she rose to the position of deputy leader, a position she maintained until Kim Beazley was deposed by Kevin Rudd in December 2006, at which point she made way for Julia Gillard. Macklin also exchanged her education portfolio for family and community services and indigenous affairs, which retained without interruption throughout the six-year saga of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government. The only change to her workload in government was an exchange of housing for disability reform in December 2011. This continuity has been maintained in opposition, albeit that she relinquished indigenous affairs and families and community services was rebadged as families and payments. In the meantime, Macklin secured her hold on Jagajaga with strong successive swings in 2007 and 2010, respectively pushing her margin out to 9.0% and 11.5%, before a forceful 8.1% swing to the Liberals in 2013 pared it back to 3.1%.

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.

1,057 comments on “Seat of the week: Jagajaga”

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  1. WWP:

    I think the next election is there to be won by either side. The govt has over-promised and under-delivered, and what little it will deliver on has blown out significantly on costs.

    That said, I have zero confidence that their attempt to deflect leadership questions from Barnett by turning the same questions onto McGowan will have any effect whatsoever.

  2. [Clever move by LNP to register the domain name abbottlies.com.au and use it direct traffic to their website. ]
    So even “Abbottlies” is a lie 😆

  5. [One can also register abbottlies.net, abbottlies.org, abbottlies.info, etc., etc..]

    IIRC, in the near future the whole domain name thing is going to be opened right up to virtually anything you want. So there is a universe of possibilities awaiting…

    abbottlies.again
    abbottlies.everytime
    abbottlies.andliesandliesandlies
    abbottlies.isthetruth
    abbottlies.australiadies

  7. Insiders this morning was comic gold. Gerard Henderson’s ludicrous attempts to defend the indefensible were clearly getting right up the noses of the other two panelists. Coorey’s body language in particular made quite a picture Finally he could resist no longer and when Henderson stated that “The Project is not a coalition-friendly environment”, he audibly muttered “perhaps you should go on it then” with a strong sense of “perhaps you could piss off from the Insiders and stop annoying me”.

    I’ve had a very busy week and hadn’t fully appreciated until this morning what an absolutely godawful week it has been for the Abbott Government. One feels that something will have to give soon. I note that the tone of some of the Murdoch press is changing a bit (not The Australian: but that’s going to lag behind because it’s not just about Murdoch’s attitudes but the intense personal crusade of Chris Mitchell.)

  8. There was an old song that went in part “I joined the Navy to see the world…but what did I see I saw the sea”

    Abbott’s version

    I joined the Liberals to see the world..and what did I see…I saw the world…and I did all paid for by the Aussie taxpayer

  14. Insiders
    Henderson on a sympathy binge for Hockey insisted that legislation wasn’t being passed because the Senate was ?skewed. Unfair, he said. Gillard was only able to pass lots of legislation because she had all her opposition parties sewn up.

    He didn’t think to go back a step to where Labor had to negotiate to get them all “sewn up”. It wasn’t as easy as that.

    So glad the other panellists showed irritation with him.

  15. What’s the betting that sometime in the next 72 hours or so we’ll see a white coated Abbott also wearing “blood splash” safety glasses, assisting at the body identification centre in the Netherlands.

    Perhaps also with hi-vis vest over his white coat and hard hat too.

  16. [Not coalition friendly?

    the Project has none other than Steve Price as a regular pannelist]

    And what is Henderson actually suggesting? That it’s okay for govt ministers to make patently ridiculous and farcical statements about abortion and not be called on them just because they’re Liberals?

    Steve Price notwithstanding, pretty sure the Project doesn’t want to be thought of as nuff nuff shockjock radio territory!

  21. victoria:

    Piers turned Insiders into a no-go zone by way of his own stupidity, perhaps Henderson will suffer the same fate.

  26. Seems everyone here is on board with the USA’s evil imperialist drones dropping pure, unadulterated justice on the heads of ISIS? At least, no complaints thus far?

    Come on, everyone! USA! USA! USA!:D

  27. confessions
    Posted Sunday, August 10, 2014 at 12:23 pm | PERMALINK
    victoria:

    [Piers turned Insiders into a no-go zone by way of his own stupidity, perhaps Henderson will suffer the same fate.]

    sure looks that way

  28. Well, its pretty obviious by now that the Iraq War 2 was an unmitigated catastrophe.

    Bush, Blair, Howard should hang their heads in shame. A legacy of complete and utter failure.

  31. lefty e

    Some might say weak-kneed politicians falling over themselves to appease the ‘withdraw now’ crowd was the error here. Oh well.

  32. [Cheryl ‏@cheryl_suzette 44m

    @SophiaMcGrane The gift that keeps on giving who is advising them? #LibDomainNames Straya We Love Youse :)]

    The Libs are a multiple stupidity per day proposition.

  33. Team Abbott going for the clean sweep?

    The Netherlands is one of the very nations in the world still somewhat favourably disposed to Australia. I am sure that Mr Abbott did not mean it but in an interview on the TV this morning he called ‘Mr Rutte’ something very, very like ‘Mr Rooter’.

  34. Twaddle

    I rather doubt that air strikes on ISIS will have more than a marginal impact.

    You CANNOT win a war with air superiority although you can slow things down a bit.

    Firstly Iraqis themselves need to unite against ISIS and then they need a well managed and determined ground army.
    Aso you MUST have the hearts and minds of the PEOPLE ie 60-70% absolute support.

    Without these three key elements air strikes are a waste of fuel.

  36. [dtt

    You CANNOT win a war with air superiority although you can slow things down a bit.]

    You can, of course, but one does tend to run into nasty ethical considerations if one does.

  37. [assisting at the body identification centre in the Netherlands.]

    Tones will be telling the Dutch that they should ‘out source’ the DNA testing.

    ‘George’ told him that his P.A. researched the netwebbythingee and found a place in Zululand that will check the samples for $36.95 a throw.

  38. [Fran lied to McEnroe?
    I thought Fran never, ever lies….]

    Maybe. But is OK with being very mischievous.

    Of course, no implied lies are executed.

    😀

  39. Henderson should be happy, not sad.

    He is earning some dinero for his judging stint.

    Abbott is his preferred prime minister.

    The Australian economy is going gangbusters.

    Team Australia is just one big happy family.

    Unemployment is sort of heading south or treading water.

    The youth are being screwed.

    The Indigenous folk have had hundreds of millions screwed out of them.

    Sick people are being screwed.

    Old People are being screwed.

    Students are being screwed.

    Science, that arch enemy of the Faith, is being screwed.

    The climate is back to changing all by itself.

    Real wages are headed south.

    Plus, all those decades of creating jihadis by bombing the crap out of hundreds of thousands of muslims is paying off handsomely for the christians who, with time on their hands, have been itching for a crusade ever since they stopped topping other christians.

    The ABC is being screwed.

    What more does Happy Henderson want?

  49. I guess it depends on what you mean by “pretending not to know”. Did you neglect to tell him you didn’t know or did you work to create the impression?

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