Electorate: Macquarie
Margin: Liberal 1.3%
Location: Outer Western Sydney, New South Wales
In a nutshell: After being bashed around by redistributions over recent years, this outer Sydney seat has recovered its usual orientation as a marginal Liberal seat, in which member Louise Markus is unlikely to be troubled this time out.
The candidates (ballot paper order)
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TONY PIPER LOUISE MARKUS SUSAN TEMPLEMAN TERESA ELARO PHILIP DANIEL MAXWELL MATT HODGSON DANIELLE WHEELER MARK LITTLEJOHN |
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Located on the western fringes of Sydney, Macquarie combines the solidly Liberal-voting Hawkesbury River area around Richmond and Windsor and Labor-voting communities on the Great Western Highway through the Blue Mountains. The seat has existed in name since federation but has changed substantially over its history, having originally been concentrated on Bathurst and Lithgow. Those areas came to be accommodated by Calare after the 1977 and 1984 redistributions, the latter effecting further change by transferring Penrith and St Marys to the new seat of Lindsay. Macquarie briefly resumed its former dimensions between 2007 and 2010, when Calare moved deep into the state’s interior to cover the abolition of Gwydir and Macquarie lost the Hawkesbury area to Greenway. This resulted in an interruption to a Liberal hold on the seat going back to 1996, which was resumed in 2010 when Louise Markus succeeding in transferring to the seat from unfavourably redistributed Greenway.
Macquarie’s most famous former member is Ben Chifley, who was born and raised in Bathurst and first elected to the seat in 1928. Chifley was voted out in the 1931 landslide, twice failing to recover the seat before finally breaking through in 1940. Labor thereafter held the seat without interruption until the dark days of 1975 and 1977, with Ross Free recovering the seat with Labor’s improved performance in 1980. Free jumped to the new seat of Lindsay when parliament was enlarged in 1984, which took in the strong Labor areas of Penrith and St Marys. The slender margin left to Labor in Macquarie was erased by a slight swing at the 1984 election, and the seat held for the Liberals for the next three terms by Alasdair Webster. Maggie Deahm won the seat for Labor in 1993 by 164 votes, a margin that was easily accounted for by a 6.5% swing to Liberal candidate Kerry Bartlett when the Keating government was dumped in 1996. Bartlett’s margin progressed from 4.1% at the 1998 election to 8.9% at the 2004 election, at which point the aforementioned redistribution pulled the rug from under his feet.
Macquarie now had a notional Labor margin of 0.5%, to which the locally familiar Bob Debus added another 6.6% as Kevin Rudd led Labor to office. The Hawkesbury area meanwhile came to be represented Louise Markus, a former Hillsong Church community worker who in 2004 won the seat of Greenway for the Liberals for the first time since it was created in 1984. The redistribution then inflated her margin in Greenway from 0.6% to 11.0%, of which 4.5% remained after the 2007 election. The effect of the 2010 redistribution was even more pronounced, producing a 10.2% shift to Labor in Greenway while all but eliminating Labor’s margin in Macquarie. Upon jumping ship for Macquarie, where her task was aided by Debus’s retirement, Markus picked up a relatively mild swing of 1.5% that was nonetheless sufficient to secure her a margin of 1.2%. Markus meanwhile was promoted to the outer shadow ministry portfolio of veterans affairs in September 2008, but dropped after the 2010 election.
Labor’s election for the second successive elections is Susan Templeman, principal of Templeman Consulting, who promotes herself as one of the country’s leading media trainers and coaches.
On August 10, Heath Aston of the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Liberal internal polling had the party gravely concerned about Louise Markus’s outer Sydney seat. As the report noted, Labor candidate Susan Templeman has been “conspicuous in Mr Rudd’s western Sydney campaign events”. A JWS Research poll with a sample of approximately 600 conducted the end of the second week of the campaign provided no evidence that Louise Markus had anything to fear, giving her a 55.1-44.9 lead on two-party preferred and a primary vote of 51% against 35% for Templeman.
Analysis written by William Bowe. Read William’s blog, The Poll Bludger.