Author: William Bowe

The latest semi-monthly Reuters Poll Trend figure, a weighted composite of results from Morgan, Newspoll and ACNielsen, continues the gentle trend back to the Coalition that has been evident since May. On the primary vote, Labor is down from 47.7 per cent to 46.9 per cent and the Coalition up from 39.5 per cent to 40.4 per cent. Kevin Rudd’s preferred prime minister rating is steady on 46.4 per cent, while John Howard’s is down from 40.5 per cent to 40.2 per cent.

Today’s episode of Seat of the Week brings us to the second-most marginal electorate in the country, the southern Adelaide seat of Kingston. Kingston was created when parliament when enlarged in 1949, and has consistently covered the outer coastal reaches of the metropolitan area. This meant Glenelg and Brighton in the early days, the southernmost suburb of Hallett Cove being the only area still in the electorate today. Glenelg was hived off to since-abolished Hawker in 1984, and Brighton went to Boothby in 1993. It now extends from Hallett Cove and industrial Lonsdale south to the outermost beachside suburbs of Moana and Port Willunga, and to the McLaren Vale wine-growing district further inland. Most of the population is in the north of the electorate, around Noarlunga, Reynella and Morphett Vale. As my maps at Crikey demonstrate, this area is divided between a Liberal-leaning north-east and a Labor-leaning south-west. Labor is also strong in the thin strip of coastal suburbs further south, which also record strong support for the Greens, while the McLaren Vale area provides the Liberals with their two strongest booths.

As befits a seat that has moved with the mortgage belt, Kingston has been extremely sensitive to the tides of electoral fortune. Despite having a notional Labor margin of 6.8 per cent upon its creation, it was swept up with the landslide that put the Menzies government in power in 1949. Pat Galvin gained the seat for Labor in 1951, and was re-elected with varying margins until 1966. It was then caught up in the statewide convulsions of 1966 and 1969, which produced double-digit swings first to Liberal and then to Labor in both Kingston and South Australia as a whole. The Liberals thus held the seat for one term before it returned emphatically to Labor. Kingston subsequently changed hands with the next three changes of government, being held by Grant Chapman during the Fraser years (he returned as a Senator in 1987) and Gordon Bilney thereafter. A former Democrats leader, the late Janine Haines, made an audacious bid for the seat in 1990 but failed to beat the Liberal candidate into second place, recording 26.4 per cent to the Liberals’ 33.0 per cent and Labor’s 37.1 per cent. Bilney was edged out in 1996 by a relatively mild 3.4 per cent swing to Liberal candidate Susan Jeanes, who had too little fat on her margin to withstand the GST backlash of 1998. Labor’s David Cox recovered the seat for Labor with a 2.5 per cent swing, prevailing by 763 votes.

A Labor-friendly redistribution followed by a small swing increased the margin from 0.5 per cent to 2.4 per cent in 2001, but the next redistribution went the other way. With South Australia’s representation cut from 12 seats to 11 at the 2004 election, Kingston was made to absorb the McLaren Vale area, giving the Liberals what proved to be a decisive 1.1 per cent boost. Requiring a further 1.4 per cent swing to topple Cox, the Liberals picked up roughly 2 per cent in the northern part of the electorate. However, this was very nearly balanced out by a sharp swing to Labor in wealthy McLaren Vale, consistent with the much-touted “doctors’ wives” effect. Another notable feature of the vote was a strong 5.6 per cent for Family First, who outpolled the Greens and delivered the Liberals a better-than-usual preference flow. Cox held a narrow lead on election night, but this was whittled down and eventually overturned as pre-poll and postal votes gave the Liberals a 119-vote victory.

The incoming Liberal member was Kym Richardson (left), a police officer, former SANFL player and sports manager whose clients included AFL star Byron Pickett and test cricketer Jason Gillespie. The party had initially approached another football identity, Adelaide Crows player Nigel Smart, but he remained committed to playing out the 2004 AFL season (Smart went on to unsuccessfully contest the state seat of Norwood at last year’s state election). According to The Advertiser’s Tom Richardson (presumably no relation), Richardson’s backers included Susan Jeanes and two locally based state members, Bright MP Wayne Matthew (since retired) and Mawson MP Robert Brokenshire (since defeated). Labor’s candidate for the coming election is Amanda Rishworth (right), a psychologist and former organiser for the Right faction Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association. Rishworth was Labor’s candidate for Fisher at the state election, and was preselected unopposed in Kingston as part of a factional arrangement. Contrary to my normal practice, I should also make mention of Greens candidate Bill Weller, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union activist and prolific commenter on this website.

At this stage of the game, the portents for Kym Richardson are not good. In his assessment of the electorate’s demographics, Adam Carr notes a high proportion of manufacturing workers, a relatively low average income and a high proportion of dwellings being purchased, making it prime territory for a backlash over WorkChoices and interest rates. Two electorate-level polls conducted by The Advertiser bear this out: Labor recorded leads of 56-44 in January, before Kevin Rudd had established the national polling ascendancy he has enjoyed since March, and 57-43 late last month.

• It now emerges that respondents to the weekend’s Galaxy poll of voting intention in Bennelong were also asked if their vote would be influenced by the prospect of the Prime Minister departing mid-term should he retain the seat. This is highly significant in light of Malcolm Mackerras‘s conviction that voters will tip him out partly to avoid a “quick, unnecessary and costly by-election”. The poll found 84 per cent of respondents said they would not be influenced by such concerns, which can be read one of two ways: voters are overwhelmingly unconcerned, or a small but decisive minority does in fact consider it a vote-switcher. The SBS Insight program, which commissioned the poll in conjunction with the Daily Telegraph, will tonight be devoted to a forum discussion from a hand-picked sample of Bennelong voters, to screen at 7.30pm.

• Simon Jackman offers a very illuminating pendulum in which the seats from each state are listed in a different column. The lower part of the table marks Labor’s strongest historical result in each state post-1949. Interesting to relate that if Labor matches its best performance in every state, the Coalition will still win almost as many seats as Labor has at present.

• Inform your speculation on the Senate election with this handy results calculator, brought to you by occasional Poll Bludger commenter Dembo. It is set for the 2004 preference tickets at present, but I am advised that these will soon be made adjustable.

The Fairfax papers today carry their monthly ACNielsen poll, which shows a narrowing of Labor’s two-party lead from 58-42 to 55-45. Labor’s primary vote is down from 49 per cent to 46 per cent, while the Coalition is up from 39 per cent to 41 per cent. The movement most likely represents a correction from a somewhat excessive result last time. Now please, for the love of Christ, no more polls until next Tuesday …

The government is not about to face any respite from those bad poll headlines: News Limited papers are today carrying a Galaxy poll which shows the Prime Minister heading for defeat in Bennelong, where he trails Labor’s Maxine McKew 53-47 on two-candidate preferred (a similar poll three months ago had it at 52-48). The Labor primary vote is at 47 per cent, compared with 28 per cent at the previous election (when much of the anti-Howard vote was harvested by Greens candidate Andrew Wilkie), while the Liberal vote is down from 50 per cent to 44 per cent. No quibbling with the sample size this time, either – there were 800 respondents, double the amount Westpoll used to gauge an entire state.

There was a time there when this site sought to stay on top of federal preselection developments, but I became too busy to keep this up just as things got interesting – in Cook, where provisional Liberal nominee Michael Towke was rolled by the party’s state executive, and in Franklin, where Labor’s Kevin Harkins was being dogged by the controversies that led him to pull the plug on Thursday. The shortcoming will now be made good as I pad my election guide entries with detail on preselection stoushes, Franklin being the obvious place to start.

Belying its current margin of 7.6 per cent, Franklin was held for the Liberals by Bruce Goodluck from 1975 to 1993, when Harry Quick won it for Labor it upon Goodluck’s retirement. Just as Goodluck’s maverick ways were seen to have helped keep the seat in Liberal hands, so has Quick’s proclivity for independent behaviour (which saw him turn his guns against consecutive Labor leaders in Mark Latham and Kim Beazley) been recognised as a major factor in Labor’s success here at five successive elections. Quick maintained his Labor endorsement throughout this period despite being factionally unaligned, apart from what Sue Neales of the Mercury calls “a dalliance with the minor Centre Left faction”. Moves were afoot ahead of the 2004 election to have him replaced by the Left’s Nicole Wells, who more recently emerged as one of Harkins’ key backers. He was able to see off the threat partly by threatening to run as an independent if defeated.

Having decided that the current term would be his last, Quick hoped to keep the seat out of factional hands by promoting his staffer Roger Joseph at the preselection vote held last August. This was thwarted when the Left and Right struck a deal in which a candidate of the former would take Franklin, while Bass would go to the Right-backed Steve Reissig. Quick declared he would run as an independent if the nomination went as expected to Harkins, whom he described as a “right thuggish bastard”, “some dropkick who’s going to lose the seat”, “shifty, intimidatory, totally unreliable and untrustworthy”, and – worst of all – “a Victorian interloper”. He also voiced support for a potential Left faction rival to Harkins, state upper house member Allison Ritchie, and claimed she had been intimidated when she announced she was not going to run. This received no support from Ritchie, who said she did not wish to go to Canberra while she had a young child. Labor sources quoted in the Mercury claimed Quick’s boosting of Ritchie was a ploy to split the Left vote to get Joseph up. The factional deal ultimately delivered Harkins a solid bloc of votes from state conference delegates, overcoming the support Quick and Joseph were able to muster in local branches. Reissig was similarly able to win the day in Bass despite local opposition, and he too has since fallen by the wayside.

Quick well and truly maintained the rage following Harkins’ win, first declaring he would vote for the Greens and, last week, attending a community group meeting with Liberal candidate Vanessa Goodwin (also attended by Joe Hockey). This fairly straightforward breach of party rules, along with various other alleged misdeeds, is currently being run through the party’s disputes process. Nonetheless, Quick’s attacks on Harkins began to draw blood as new leader Kevin Rudd sought to distance the party from unsavoury union associations. Harkins was already carrying baggage from the 2003 report of the Cole royal commission into the building and construction industry, which concluded he broke the law by attempting to stop an electrician from entering a building site because he didn’t have a union-endorsed work agreement. It did not help when his colleague from the Victorian branch of the Electrical Trades Union, Dean Mighell, was kicked out of the party in May for undue frankness in addressing workers on a building site. The government expanded its attack on Labor’s ETU ties to encompass its endorsement of Harkins and Mike Symon, candidate for the Melbourne seat of Deakin.

Harkins’ position ultimately became untenable a fortnight ago when civil charges were brought against him by the Australian Building and Construction Commission, relating to an allegedly unlawful strike by Hobart electrical contractors in 2005. Reports that Harkins was being leaned on to stand aside emerged early this week, culminating in his decision to stand aside on Thursday. His selfless sacrifice was greeted with admiration in some circles and suspicion in others. The government has seized on Labor sources quoted in Wednesday’s Mercury who said Harkins was offered “an elevated union position, increased salary and a future Senate seat”, asking the Australian Electoral Commission to investigate whether he was offered inducements amounting to bribery.

With Harkins’ departure, the party’s state executive referred the selection of a new candidate to the national executive, thereby avoiding another untimely preselection spat in the lead-up to an election. It evidently remained agreed that the candidate would come from the Left, with a number of reports naming human rights lawyer Gwynn MacCarrick as the likely nominee. It was instead decided yesterday that the gig would go to party state secretary Julie Collins (right), who polled a respectable 6.0 per cent as a candidate for Denison at the March 2006 state election. Quick is yet to declare that Collins has his support; according to the Mercury, he says he will only do so if plans to expel him are shelved, whereas Harkins was promised the expulsion would proceed when he agreed to go quietly.

The Liberal preselection, while not quite as fraught as Labor’s, was still remarkably eventful for a seat they need a 7.6 per cent swing to win. Interest was piqued when Harry Quick’s reaction to Kevin Harkins’ endorsement prompted talk of a by-election, leading to some fanciful speculation that cricket legend David Boon might be enlisted to win the seat for the Liberals. Another cricketer, former state captain Jamie Cox, said he had been involved in “extremely informal” talks with the party, but he instead took up a job with the Australian Institute of Sport. Also mentioned were Paul Harriss, independent member for the state upper house seat of Huon; Brendan Blomeley, Clarence councillor and Federal Hotels corporate manager with connections to Senator Eric Abetz and the Right faction; Vince Taskunas, staffer to retiring Senator Paul Calvert; and policeman Tony Mulder. In the event, only two candidates nominated: lawyer and criminologist Vanessa Goodwin (left), who narrowly failed to win a Franklin seat at the state election, and 32-year-old technology consultant Daniel Muggeridge. Muggeridge and his supporters in the Right, including the aforementioned Blomeley, raised eyebrows with statements spruiking his more “traditional family values”, apparently calculated to play against Goodwin’s single status and lack of children. Goodwin was also the subject of rumours about “personal liaisons” which were circulated to the media through anonymous phone calls and unsigned letters. She nonetheless defeated Muggeridge in the preselection vote, and went on to national fame last month when the Prime Minister woefully attempted to bluff his way through after forgetting her name in an interview.

The ABC reportedly reports that tomorrow’s Westpoll will show federal Labor has shot to a 54-46 lead in Western Australia, the one state believed to have been holding out against the tide. It should be noted that Westpoll is widely criticised for its small samples, usually 400 respondents. How The West Australian managed to get scooped by the ABC on its own poll results is yet to be explained.

UPDATE: News reports that Westpoll has the Labor primary vote at 43 per cent, up from 36 per cent last month, with the Coalition down from 46 per cent to 38 per cent.

UPDATE 2: Westpoll also conducted a state poll from the same sample, which gives us a chance to assess how roguish this poll is. Answer: very. While it is clear that the Carpenter government has the measure of the opposition under its current leadership, it’s hard to credit the spasm shown in the table below. It would thus be wise to add a 5 per cent discount to the vote recorded for Labor in the federal poll.

Note: The Coalition vote shown for today’s poll assumes a 3 per cent vote for the Nationals, which is an educated guess that might be out by 1 per cent either way. The West Australian has mischievously declined to include this information so it can show a “Liberal” primary vote with a 2 in front of it.

A Roy Morgan phone poll of 589 respondents, conducted over the previous two days, has Labor on 58.5 per cent of the two-party vote, down 0.5 per cent from the previous such poll a fortnight ago. Both major parties are up 1.5 per cent on the primary vote, with the Greens down 2.5 per cent and others down 0.5 per cent. Also featured is yet more polling on whether the country is “headed in the right direction”.

Other news: sadly, independent Calare MP Peter Andren has been diagnosed with cancer, and has abandoned his plans to run for a seat in the Senate.