Electorate: Kennedy
Margin: Independent 18.3% versus Liberal National
Location: Far North/Interior, Queensland
The candidates (ballot paper order)
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RONALD GEORGE BRAZIER CHESTER GORDON TUXFORD JENNY STIRLING BOB KATTER PAM HECHT DAN VOGLER NOELINE IKIN ANDREW TURNOUR |
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Bob Katter’s seat of Kennedy covers 568,993 square kilometres of northern Queensland, accounting for over 30% of the state’s surface area. It covers two disconnected coastal areas, one being a 250 kilometre stretch of the east coast from the southern suburbs of Cairns through Innisfail to Toomulla 35 kilometres north Townsville, the other being the thinly populated Gulf of Carpentaria coast from the Northern Territory border to the southern part of Cape York Peninsula. The remainder encompasses rural and outback territory including Mount Isa and most of the Northern Territory border.
Kennedy was one of 16 seats out of 75 which were won by Labor at the first federal election in 1901, and it remained with the party until Nationalist candidate Grosvenor Francis was elected unopposed after sitting member Charles McDonald died during the 1925 election campaign (prompting the change to the Electoral Act which provides for the poll in the affected electorate to be cancelled and held at a later time, which most recently had effect in Newcastle at the 1998 election). Francis retained the seat at the 1928 election, but it returned to Labor when Jim Scullin’s government came to power in 1929. The next change came in 1966 when the national anti-Labor swing combined with the loss of retiring veteran William Riordan’s personal vote delivered a narrow victory to the Country Party candidate, Bob Katter Sr.
While the 1969 redistribution strengthened the Country Party by adding Charters Towers and removing Bowen, it was Katter’s personal popularity that saw the Country Party margin increase at each of the next five elections. The 1984 redistribution was less kind to Katter, pushing the seat into the southern reaches of Cape York Peninsula and returning it to the marginal zone. It returned to Labor for one term when Katter retired in 1990, the winning member being Rob Hulls, later to return to politics in Victoria as a senior figure in the Bracks-Brumby government.
Kennedy returned to the National Party and Katter family fold with Hulls’s defeat in 1993 at the hands of Bob Katter Jr, who had represented the local area in state parliament since 1974. Katter cemented his position with a double-digit swing in 1996, and his primary vote increased further after he parted company with the Nationals ahead of the 2001 election. He has comfortably topped the poll at each election since, although he faded from 47.1% to 39.5% before rebounding to 46.7% in 2010. The 2010 election result left him as one of three rural independents holding the balance of power in a hung parliament, and he played a rather more adroit game than his colleagues in unenthusiastically declaring his hand for the Coalition after the determination of the other two to back Labor had rendered it a moot point.
Katter will be opposed at the coming election by Liberal National Party candidate Noeline Ikin, the former chief executive of the Northern Gulf Resource Management Group, and Labor’s Andrew Turnour, a project engineer. Labor’s initial pick, Ken Robertson, was disendorsed early in the campaign after being deemed to have gone overboard in accusing Tony Abbott of being a racist who wanted a return to the White Australian Policy. Preference counts conducted for informational purposes showed the Nationals would have defeated Labor with a 7.5% in 2007 and 11.9% in 2010.
Analysis written by William Bowe. Read William’s blog, The Poll Bludger.