Campbelltown

Margin: Liberal 6.8%
Region: South-Western Sydney
Federal: Macarthur (88%)/Werriwa (12%)

Candidates in ballot paper order

	GREG WARREN Labor (bottom) SARAH RAMSAY Christian Democratic Party BRYAN DOYLE Liberal (top) BEN MORONEY Greens CHRIS STEPHANDELLIS No Land Tax

Among the very worst of Labor’s defeats in 2011 was the loss of Campbelltown, which had been in the party fold since 1971 and was retained in 2007 by a margin of 18.4%. The electorate continues to cover territory on Sydney’s south-western outskirts, but the redistribution has transformed it by transferring over half of its voters to Macquarie Fields, which takes over Ingleburn and Minto at the old electorate’s northern end. About 23,000 voters around Campbelltown itself are retained from the old boundaries, to which are added an approximately equal number around Rosemeadow from Wollondilly in the south-west, together with over 5000 in Eagle Vale and Claymore from Camden to the north-west. The changes have been helpful to the Liberals, boosting their margin from 3.4% to 6.8%.

Prior to 2011, Campbelltown had only ever been won by the Liberals upon its creation at the 1968 election. Olympics Minister Michael Knight held the seat for Labor from 1981 until his mid-term retirement in 2001, when he was succeeded at a by-election by Graham West, a 27-year-old researcher in Knight’s ministerial office. West’s retirement at the 2011 election initiated a typicall fraught Labor preselection, with claims head office was approaching alternative options to the early front-runner, Laotian-born local councillor Anoulack Chanthivong, due to concern voters would reject him because of his ethnicity. The matter was ultimately resolved by the party’s national executive, which gave the nod to Nick Bleasdale, a local carpenter who stood unsuccessfully for the marginal federal seat of Macarthur in 2007 and 2010. Bleasdale went on to lose the seat to Liberal candidate Bryan Doyle, a local police inspector.

Campbelltown was among the five seats Labor earmarked for a trial of its community preselection process, in which half the vote was determined by a ballot of local party members and the other half by a “community” vote open to anyone enrolled in the electorate who was willing to sign on as a party supporter. This resulted in the selection of Greg Warren, a former solider and director of the local Chamber of Commerce, who won 61% of the branch vote and 57% of the community vote. The other candidates were Ian Fulton, a small business owner, and Brendan Whitehouse, a nurse.