Category: Federal Election 2016

Melbourne Ports covers bayside inner Melbourne from the mouth of the Yarra through Port Melbourne and Albert Park to St Kilda, further jutting inland in the south to take in Elsternwick. Labor’s lengthy tenure belies the electorate’s complexity, with wealthy Liberal-voting elements making their presence felt near the city and around South Yarra and Caulfield at the eastern end, and the Greens looming as a threat to Labor over the long term. The Greens are particularly strong in and around St Kilda, and will have drawn encouragement from their victory in the partially corresponding seat of Prahran at the 2014 state election. The electorate has the nation’s highest proportion of Jewish residents, at 12.8% of the total according to the 2011 census, and ranks at or near the top for numbers of Poles, Russians and Hungarians. It also has the second lowest proportion of Christians after its northern neighbour, Melbourne.

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The electorate has existed in name since federation, and been held by Labor without interruption until 1906. It extended west beyond the mouth of the Yarra River to encompass Williamstown and surrounding suburbs until the Gellibrand electorate was created with the expansion of parliament in 1949, and only in 1969 did its bayside frontage extend far enough to the south-east to take in all of St Kilda and Elwood. Despite a demographic transformation since that time that has made the electorate the tenth wealthiest in the country, Labor’s two-party vote has remained fairly stable. The seat has had only five members during its long period of Labor control: James Matthews until 1931; Ted Holloway, a Curtin-Chifley government minister who moved to Melbourne Ports after unseating Prime Minister Stanley Bruce in Flinders two years earlier, until 1951; Frank Crean, Whitlam government Treasurer and father of Simon, until 1977; Clyde Holding, who came to the seat after a long and unproductive spell as state Opposition Leader, until 1998; and thereafter by the incumbent, Michael Danby.

Michael Danby is a member of the Right sub-faction associated with Stephen Conroy and Bill Shorten, and his pre-parliamentary career included stints as editor of the Australia-Israel Review, staffer to Hawke government minister Barry Cohen, and industrial officer for the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association. His most senior ranking has been as parliamentary secretary in the arts portfolio, both in government from March 2013 and opposition after September 2013, but he has frequently been in the news as a supportive voice for Israel.

The electorate of Melbourne hasnorth been the showpiece of the Greens’ electoral revolution over the last decade, owing to Adam Bandt’s successive victories in 2010 and 2013. Bandt’s win in 2010 was the second achieved by the party in a House of Representatives seat, after a by-election victory in the New South Wales seat of Cunningham in 2002, and the first at a general election. He remained the only Greens member in the House after his re-election in 2013, when a 7.0% increase in the primary vote cancelled out the effect of the Liberals’ decision to direct preferences against him. Prior to the election of Bandt, Melbourne was held by Labor without interruption since 1904, its members including Arthur Calwell from 1940 to 1972, Hawke government Immigration Minister Gerry Hand from 1983 to 1993, and Rudd government Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner from 1993 to 2010.

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Melbourne extends from the central business district to Carlton North in the north and Richmond in the east, and is distinguished demographically by the second lowest median age in the country (first being the strongly indigenous Northern Territory seat of Lingiari), substantial student populations associated with the University of Melbourne and RMIT University campuses, and the nation’s highest “no religion” response in the 2011 census. Other demographic features include substantial Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean populations. The Greens are strongest in Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond, excluding some local-level concentrations of migrant populations that remain strong for Labor. They are weakest in and around the central business district and at Ascot Vale at the seat’s north-western edge, which are respectively strong for Liberal and Labor.

The Greens’ first breakthrough in Melbourne came in 2001, when displeasure at Labor’s acquiescence in the Howard government’s asylum seeker policies helped fuel an increase in the primary vote from 6.2% to 15.8%. The party was further boosted by the collapse in support for the Australian Democrats, which aided a further increase to 19.0% in 2004. Adam Bandt first contested the seat in 2007, and broke new ground by recording 22.8% of the primary vote and overtaking the Liberal candidate during the preference count, ultimately falling 4.7% short of unseating Lindsay Tanner after preferences. Bandt’s big opportunity came in 2010, when Tanner dropped a bombshell just hours after the coup against Kevin Rudd by announcing he would not contest the next election, a decision he insisted was unrelated to events earlier in the day. The Labor vote subsequently fell 11.4% while the Greens were up 13.4%, panning out to a comfortable 6.0% margin for Bandt at the final count.

Prior to his entering parliament, Adam Bandt was an industrial and public interest lawyer whose career had brought him to a partnership at Slater and Gordon. He achieved an instant national profile upon his election as a member of the cross-bench in a hung parliament, which the events of Labor’s second term only served to enhance. Nonetheless, Bandt’s re-election prospects looked to be under a cloud following the Victorian state election in November 2010, at which the Liberals made a politically productive decision to direct preferences to Labor ahead of the Greens. Few were surprised when the Liberals announced they would repeat the tactic during the 2013 federal campaign, which caused the flow of Liberal preferences to the Greens ahead of Labor to fall from 80.0% in 2010 to just 33.7%. However, this was negated by a further 11.5% slump in Labor’s primary vote, and the swing against Bandt after preferences amounted to only 0.6%.

Labor’s candidate at the coming election is Sophie Ismail, a Victorian Education Department lawyer and member of the Socialist Left faction.

Batman covers Melbourne’s inner north-east, extending northwards from the deep green inner-city environs of Northcote through Thornbury and Preston to the Labor-voting middle suburbia around Reservoir. While it recorded the lowest primary vote for the Liberal Party of any electorate in 2013, the seat is becoming of increasing interest electorally due to the growing strength of the Greens. The Greens overtook the Liberals to reach the final preference count in 2010 and 2013, although the final margin was narrower on the former occasion (7.6%) than the latter (10.6%). The electorate has existed in name since 1906, but at first it was centred on Fitzroy, with the Bourke electorate continuing to cover what were then Melbourne’s northern outskirts. Batman’s boundaries were broadly similar to those of today from 1922 until the expansion of parliament in 1949, when the northern end became part of the new seat of Darebin, which was renamed Scullin in 1969. When parliament next expanded in 1984, Ivanhoe and Heidelberg went to the new seat of Jagajaga, Scullin was pushed further out into the northern suburbs, and Batman returned broadly to its pre-1949 dimensions.

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Labor won both Batman and Bourke for the first time as part of its historic triumph of 1910, and retained them up to the reordering of the boundaries in 1922. Labor’s grip on Batman loosened only twice thereafter: when it fell to the United Australia Party for a term in the 1931 landslide, and when Sam Benson was expelled from the party in 1966 over his support for the Vietnam war. Benson was re-elected as an independent in 1966 on Democratic Labor Party and Liberal preferences, and the seat reverted to Labor when he retired in 1969. Darebin and then Scullin were likewise safe for Labor throughout this period.

The last close result in Batman was in 1977, when future Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe retained the seat by 3.4% upon his debut. Big swings to Labor followed at the next two elections, and the changes to the boundaries in 1984 boosted the margin a further 7.8%. Howe was succeeded in 1996 by Martin Ferguson, a former ACTU president who together with his brother Laurie dominated a major sub-faction of the Left. Ferguson was at first a factional ally of Julia Gillard, but he emerged as a key backer of Kevin Rudd during her prime ministership. In the wake of Rudd’s abortive second leadership bid in February 2013, Ferguson resigned from cabinet and announced he would bow out at the election.

Ferguson was succeeded by David Feeney, who was elected to the Senate in 2007 and served as parliamentary secretary for defence in Labor’s second term in office. Despite his influence as a Right faction powerbroker, Feeney had been struggling to find a winnable seat going into the 2013 election, as his third position on the Senate ticket had become a hopeless proposition by 2013. The Batman vacancy was immediately seen by the party hierarchy as a chance to accommodate him, but there was resistance to the idea from the local Left, including Brian Howe, and those who thought the seat should go to a woman after Tim Watts succeeded Nicola Roxon in Gellibrand. Left support coalesced behind local party member Mary-Anne Thomas, executive manager of Plan International, but Feeney emerged victorious in the local party ballot by 383 votes to 247. Feeney was promoted from parliamentary secretary to the outer shadow ministry after the 2013 election, taking on the justice and assistant for defence portfolios.

For the third election in a row, the Greens have preselected Alex Bhatal, a social worker from Preston.

Held prior to the 2013 election by Rob Oakeshott, one of the two country independents who used their balance of power position to decide the 2010 election in favour of Labor, the naturally safe Nationals seat of Lyne has undergone radical changes in the redistribution, owing to the abolition of the Hunter region electorate of Charlton. This has pulled Lyne’s southern neighbour, Paterson, into the Hunter region, and caused Lyne to absorb the northern parts of Paterson. This area includes the major population centre of Foster-Tuncurry, and accounts for around 45,000 voters. In turn, 37,000 voters in and around Port Macquarie, which had long been Lyne’s focal point, have been lost to its northern neighbour, Cowper, to counterbalance the gains from Lyne. The electorate now extends northwards along the coast from Tea Gardens, on the north shore of Port Stephens, through Foster-Toncurry to Lake Cathie, just south of Port Macquarie. Its main population centre further inland is Taree, and it also encompasses Wauchope and Laurieton just outside Port Macquarie.

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Lyne was created with the expansion of parliament in 1949, and for most of that time it has been centred on Port Macquarie, although its new boundaries are broadly similar to those that applied between 1977 and 1993. The National/Country Party held the seat without interruption until the election of Rob Oakeshott until 2008, although the Liberals nearly gained the seat on the retirement of Bruce Cowan in 1993. It was held subsequently by Mark Vaile, who rose to cabinet in 1997 and the Nationals leadership and deputy prime ministership in July 2005. Vaile quit politics nine months after the defeat of the Howard government in 2007, initiating the September 2008 by-election that elected Rob Oakeshott.

Oakeshott was elected for the Nationals as the state member for Port Macquarie in 1996, and went on to quit the party in March 2002, complaining that local branches were controlled by property developers and questioning its relevance in an electorate transformed by tourism and demographic change. He would later say he had also been offended by a racist remark made at a party function about his wife, who is of Aboriginal and South Sea Islander descent. Oakeshott had been re-elected with big margins in 2003 and 2007, and few doubted Lyne was his for the taking when Vaile resigned. This he duly achieved with 63.8% of the primary vote against 22.9% for his Nationals opponent, translating into a 23.9% margin after preferences. With a Labor candidate in the field at the 2010 election, his primary vote was down to 47.2%, and his two-candidate preferred margin fell to 12.7%.

Oakeshott’s decision to support a Labor minority government after the indecisive result of the 2010 election was not favourably received in his electorate, with a Newspoll survey conducted a year later finding only 26% of respondents intending to vote for him compared with 47.1% for a yet-to-be-determined Nationals candidate. That turned out to be David Gillespie, a local gastroenterologist who was best man at Tony Abbott’s wedding, and who also ran in the seat in 2010. Shortly after Julia Gillard was dumped by her party in June 2013, both Oakeshott and the other country independent who had sustained her government, New England MP Tony Windsor, announced they would not recontest their seats.

Gillespie duly had an effortless run for re-election, the Liberals having declined to field a candidate under the terms of the state Coalition agreement, polling 53.2% of the primary vote and securing a 14.8% margin over Labor after preferences. After the new boundaries for the redistribution were unveiled, it was reported that Bob Baldwin, whose had lost all of his healthy margin in Paterson, was considering quitting the Liberal Party to run against Gillespie as an independent in Lyne, but he shortly ruled out the idea, declaring himself “completely loyal” to the Liberal Party.

The western Sydney seat of Blaxland has been held by Labor without interruption since its creation in 1949, and provided Paul Keating with a seat throughout a parliamentary career lasting from 1969 to 1996. The electorate encompasses central Bankstown in the south-east, extending northwards through Chester Hill to eastern Guildford. The area is marked by a strong Arabic presence, especially around Guildford, together with a large Turkish community around Auburn and a concentration of Chinese and Vietnamese at Regents Park. The Liberals’ strongest area is Bass Hill and Georges Hall at the southern end, which is middle-income and contains the electorate’s highest proportion of English speakers. The redistribution has added most of Auburn in the north-east, encompassing around 20,000 voters formerly in Reid, and extended the southern boundary from Milperra Road and Canterbury Road to the South-Western Motorway, adding 3200 voters at Milperra from Hughes and 1300 in a part of Revesby from Banks. This is balanced by the loss of north-western territory beyond Woodville Road, where 7000 voters around Fairfield East are transferred to Fowler, and 15,000 around western Guildford go to McMahon. The changes have boosted the Labor margin from 11.4% to 12.4%.

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Blaxland has been held for Labor since 2007 by Jason Clare, a former Transurban executive and adviser to NSW Premier Bob Carr, whose preselection opponents included high-profile constitutional law expert George Williams. With backing from the Right, Clare was progressively promoted to parliamentary secretary in 2009, the outer ministry after the 2010 election, and then to cabinet as cabinet secretary in February 2013. He was a late convert to the Kevin Rudd cause before his successful leadership challenge in June 2013, but was nonetheless dumped from cabinet in the ensuing reshuffle. Rudd reportedly considered Clare had “over-egged” the drugs in sport issue when he famously spoke of the “blackest day in sport” when the Australian Crime Commission released a report into the matter earlier in the year. Since the 2013 election defeat he has held a shadow cabinet position in the communications portfolio.

Prior to Clare, Blaxland was held by Michael Hatton, who succeeded Paul Keating at a by-election in 1996. Hatton had a rather less illustrious career than his predecessor, and was ultimately dumped by the party’s national executive ahead of the 2007 election. The seat’s greatest moment of electoral interest was at its inaugural election in 1949, when Jack Lang attempted to move to it after winning Reid as a Labor renegade in 1946. He failed, and Labor has never since held the seat by a margin of less than 8.8%. Most recently, the seat has recorded what by Sydney standards were modest swings to the Liberals of 4.4% in 2010 and 0.8% in 2013.

The safe Labor seat of Shortland covers the southern part of the Newcastle metropolitan area between Lake Macquarie and the coast. It includes Charlestown and surrounding suburbs at the northern end, and extends south through Swansea to Budgewoi. The redistribution adds new territory at the northern end, absorbing 18,000 voters around Cardiff to the west of Charlestown from the abolished seat of Charlton, and removes territory in the south, with 8000 voters around Toukley and Lake Haven transferred to Dobell. The changes have had no impact on Labor’s 7.2% margin.

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Shortland was created when parliament was enlarged in 1949, but it covered western rather than southern Newcastle, around New Lambton and Wallsend, until its boundary with Hunter was reordered in 1955. It has had only three members through that time, the most recent being Jill Hall, who began her political career as state member for Swansea in 1995, moved to the federal seat in 1998, and is now to retire at the coming election. Hall’s predecessor in Shortland was Peter Morris, who in turn succeeded the seat’s inaugural member, Charles Griffiths, in 1972. She spent the entirety of her parliamentary career on the back bench, but held the party whip position without interruption from the 2004 election onwards.

Jill Hall’s retirement announcement in February resolved a potential headache for Labor caused by the abolition of Charlton, which had left four sitting members chasing three safe Hunter region seats. Shortland will now be contested for Labor by the member for Charlton, Pat Conroy. Conroy came to the seat at the 2013 election, filling the vacancy created when Greg Combet ended his two-term parliamentary and ministerial career in the wake of Kevin Rudd’s successful leadership challenge. Conroy had been Combet’s deputy chief-of-staff, and was earlier an official with two blue-collar Left faction unions, the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union and Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.

The resolution to the Shortland preselection formed part of a deal in which the seat remained with the Left, while Joel Fitzgibbon kept Hunter for the Right and the Left was compensated for the loss of Charlton with deputy state leader Linda Burney’s preselection in the Sydney seat of Barton. In the absence of the Shortland vacancy, Conroy would very likely have had the support of the Left-dominated local party membership to take Hunter from Joel Fitzgibbon, who would have been displaced to the newly marginal Liberal-held seat of Paterson. Notwithstanding the factional deal, Conroy resolved that he would contest a rank-and-file ballot in Shortland rather than have his preselection enforced by the national executive, but in the event nobody nominated against him.

The only House of Representatives seat to have been held by Labor without interruption since federation has undergone major changes in the redistribution, following the abolition of neighbouring Charlton. A gain of 26,000 voters around Wallsend at the eastern end from Charlton has been balanced by the loss of territory beyond the city’s northern limits, where 14,000 voters in and around eastern Maitland have been transferred to Paterson, to the great benefit of Labor in that seat. The Newcastle electorate continues to encompass the city’s centre and inner suburbs, including the coast south to Merewether. The changes have had little impact on the Labor margin, which increases from 8.8% to 9.1%.

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Newcastle has had only six members in its long history: David Watkins until 1935, his son David Oliver Watkins until 1958, Charles Jones until 1983, Allan Morris until 2001, Sharon Grierson until 2013, and Sharon Claydon thereafter. A supplementary election was required in the seat seven weeks after the 1998 election following the death of the Australian Democrats candidate two days before polling day, which the Liberals did not contest. Sharon Grierson succeeded Allan Morris at the subsequent election in 2001, and spent her 12 year parliamentary career on the back bench. Her 7.0% winning margin on debut was the smallest for Labor in the seat’s history, but she subsequently pushed it well into double figures with swings of 3.0% in 2004 and 6.8% in 2007, before suffering a 3.4% swing in 2010.

With Grierson’s retirement at the 2013 election, the seat passed on to her long-standing electorate officer Sharon Claydon, who had been a Newcastle councillor from 2008 to 2012 and shared Grierson’s alignment with the Left. Claydon retained the seat in 2013 by an 8.8% margin after a swing to the Liberals of 3.2%, which was well in line with the statewide result.

The most radical changes to emerge from the redistribution in New South Wales have occurred in the Hunter region, as the need to reduce the state’s parliamentary representation by a seat has been met by merging the seats of Hunter and Charlton. While the resulting electorate carries over slightly more voters from Charlton (58,000 voters in urban territory on the western bank of Lake Macquarie) than Hunter (52,000 voters in and around the Hunter Valley centres of Cessnock, Singleton and Muswellbrook further to the north), it is the former name that has been put out of commission, thereby sustaining the Hunter electorate through a history that goes back to federation. From the old electorate of Hunter, around 40,000 voters in Kurri Kurri and western Maitland have been transferred to Paterson – an important development, since it turns the 9.8% Liberal margin there into a notional Labor margin of 1.3% – while 9500 voters at rural areas in the north are ceded to New England. At the Newcastle end of Charlton, 26,000 voters around Wallsend have been transferred to the Newcastle electorate, and 18,000 around Cardiff and the northern shore of Lake Macquarie have gone to Shortland. The redrawn Hunter has a notional Labor margin of 6.2%, roughly splitting the difference between the 3.7% margin in Hunter and the 9.2% margin in Charlton at the 2013 election.

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Hunter was held for the first term after federation by Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, and became a safe Labor seat from 1910 onwards on the strength of the area’s mining and industrial base. It was held from 1910 to 1928 by Matthew Charlton, who had a fruitless spell as Opposition Leader in his last six years in parliament, and from 1958 to 1960 by another Labor leader in Bert “Doc” Evatt, who sought refuge in the seat after repeatedly being run close in his Sydney seat of Barton. Cessnock was the mainstay of the electorate as boundaries shifted over the years, from which it variously extended north into the Hunter Valley, east into Newcastle, or south to Lake Macquarie. The former orientation prevailed after 1984, when Charlton was created to accommodate the Lake Macquarie region. The more rural orientation of Hunter at that point caused the Labor margin to be slashed from 22.6% to 5.0%, but it remained in the fold by generally increasing margins over the decades that followed, before a hefty swing pared it back to 3.7% in 2013. Charlton was also consistently safe for Labor, providing a home for senior Rudd-Gillard government minister and former ACTU secretary Greg Combet through his two terms in parliament from 2007 to 2013.

Labor’s member for Hunter since 1996 has been Joel Fitzgibbon, who came to the seat in succession to his father, Eric Fitzgibbon, the member since 1984. Joel Fitzibbon survived the stigma of his close association with Mark Latham to emerge as Defence Minister when the Rudd government was elected in November 2007, but he resigned in June 2009 over a code of conduct breach relating to meetings between Defence Department officials and his brother, NIB Health Funds managing director Mark Fitzgibbon. He had earlier received adverse publicity after it was learned Defence Department officials had security concerns over his and his father’s dealings with a Chinese-Australian businesswoman. During Labor’s second term, Fitzgibbon became notable as one of the most public advocates for Kevin Rudd’s return to the leadership. When this was accomplished in June 2013, he returned to cabinet as Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Minister, a portfolio he has retained in shadow cabinet.

When the redistribution left Labor’s three Hunter region MPs chasing two remaining safe seats, the difficulty for Fitzgibbon was rendered particularly acute by his own alignment with the Right, and the Left’s dominance in the party’s Newcastle branches. There were suggestions he might be obliged to take on Liberal MP Bob Baldwin in Paterson, so that Hunter could go to the Left-aligned member for Charlton, Pat Conroy. However, Fitzgibbon’s difficulty was resolved by the retirement of Jill Hall in the southern Newcastle seat of Shortland, which provided a haven for Conroy, and a factional arrangement that secured Hunter for Fitzgibbon in exchange for the Right’s acquiescence to state deputy leader Linda Burney’s claim on the Sydney seat of Barton. Both the Hunter and Barton preselections were enforced by the national executive, foregoing a vote by the local party membership.