The Poll Bludger

Red and blue numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Labor and Liberal. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

The north-eastern Adelaide seat of Makin extends from Pooraka near the city to Tea Tree Gully and Greenwith at the limits of the metropolitan area. Labor is especially strong in the areas nearer the city, from Walkley Heights north to Salibsury East, beyond which are generally newer suburbs with more mortgage payers and families, who have helped keep the Liberals competitive or better for most of the seat’s history. Together with Kingston in the south of the city and Wakefield in its outer north, Makin is one of three Adelaide seats which the Liberals held in the final term of the Howard government before blowing out to double-digit Labor margins at the 2010 election, and which remain securely in the Labor fold despite the 2013 election defeat. In Makin’s case the Labor margin reached 12.0% in 2010, before the 2013 swing reduced it to 5.1%.

Makin was created with the expansion of parliament in 1984 from an area that had mostly formed the southern end of the safe Labor seat of Bonython, the majority of which was in turn absorbed by Wakefield when it was abolished in 2004. It was held for Labor by uncomfortable margins from 1984 to 1996 by Peter Duncan, a former Attorney-General in Don Dunstan’s state government. A 4.8% swing put Duncan on the Keating government casualty list in 1996, and he returned to the headlines in 2007 after being charged with fraudulently obtaining government grants for his plastics recycling company. The seat was then held for the Liberals by Trish Draper, who emerged as a prime ministerial favourite after strong performances at the next two elections. A swing against Draper of 0.2% in 1998 compared with a statewide swing of 4.2%, and she consolidated her margin by 3.0% in 2001. Draper hit trouble in the lead-up to the 2004 election when it emerged she had breached parliamentary rules by taking a boyfriend on a study trip to Europe at taxpayers’ expense, but she survived by 0.9% in the face of a swing that was not reflected in neighbouring seats. Draper retired at the 2007 election citing an illness in the family, before unsuccessfully attempting a comeback in the state seat of Newland at the March 2010 election.

The seat was then won for Labor on the second attempt by Tony Zappia, who had been the mayor of Salisbury since 1997, a councillor for many years beforehand, and was at one time a weightlifting champion. Zappia was widely thought to have been a victim of his factional non-alignment when the Right’s Julie Woodman defeated him for preselection in 2001, and a repeat performance appeared on the cards when a deal ahead of the 2004 election reserved the seat for Dana Wortley of the “hard Left”. The arrangement displeased local branches as well as party hard-heads concerned that a crucial marginal seat should be contested by the most appealing candidate, and Premier Mike Rann successfully prevailed upon Wortley’s backers to throw their weight behind Zappia. The move appeared a dead end for Zappia in the short term as he proved unable to win the seat, whereas Wortley was elected from the number three Senate position she was offered as consolation. However, Zappia performed considerably better with the electoral breeze at his back in 2007, demolishing the 0.9% Liberal margin with a swing of 8.6%. This was achieved in the face of a high-impact publicity campaign by Liberal candidate Bob Day, housing tycoon and national president of the Housing Industry Association who has since been elected as a Senator for Family First.

The once non-aligned Zappia is now a member of the Left, and is believed to have been a backer of Kevin Rudd’s leadership challenges, and of Anthony Albanese over Bill Shorten in the post-election leadership contest. After spending the period in government on the back bench, he won promotion after the election defeat to shadow parliamentary secretary for manufacturing.

Held since the 2010 election by independent Andrew Wilkie, Denison encompasses Hobart along the western shore of the Derwent River and the hinterland beyond, with the eastern shore Hobart suburbs and southern outskirts township of Kingston accommodated by Franklin. Like all of Tasmania’s electorates, Denison has been little changed since Tasmania was divided into single-member electorates in 1903, with the state’s representation consistently set at the constitutional minimum of five electorates per state.

Grey and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Andrew Wilkie and Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

Prior to 2010 the seat was presumed to be safe for Labor, notwithstanding the local strength of the Greens. Labor’s first win in Denison came with their first parliamentary majority at the 1910 election, but the seat was lost to the 1917 split when incumbent William Laird Smith joined Billy Hughes in the Nationalist Party. Over subsequent decades it was fiercely contested, changing hands in 1922, 1925, 1928, 1931, 1934, 1940 and 1943. It thereafter went with the winning party until 1983, changing hands in 1949, 1972 and 1975.

Denison was held through the Fraser years by former state MP Michael Hodgman, who joined his four Tasmanian Liberal colleagues in picking up a swing against the trend of the 1983 election due to local anger over the Franklin dam issue. However, Hodgman’s margin wore away over the next two elections, and he was defeated in 1987 by Labor’s Duncan Kerr. Hodgman returned as a state member for Denison in 1992 before eventually bowing out due to poor health in 2010 (he died in June 2013). His son, Will Hodgman, is the state’s current Liberal Opposition Leader.

The drift to Labor evident in 1984 and 1987 was maintained during Kerr’s tenure, giving him consistent double-digit margins starting from 1993. In this he was substantially assisted by preferences from the emerging Greens. The preselection which followed Kerr’s retirement in 2010 kept the endorsement in the Left faction with the nomination of Jonathan Jackson, a chartered accountant and the son of former state Attorney-General Judy Jackson.

What was presumed to be a safe passage to parliament for Jackson was instead thwarted by Andrew Wilkie, who had come to national attention in 2003 when he resigned as an intelligence officer with the Office of National Assessments officer in protest over the Iraq war. Wilkie ran against John Howard as the Greens candidate for Bennelong in 2004, and as the second candidate on the Greens’ Tasmanian Senate ticket in 2007. He then broke ranks with the party to run as an independent candidate for Denison at the state election in 2010, falling narrowly short of winning one of the five seats with 9.0% of the vote.

Wilkie acheived his win in 2010 with just 21.2% of the primary vote, crucially giving him a lead over the Greens candidate who polled 19.0%. The distribution of Greens preferences put Wilkie well clear of the Liberal candidate, who polled 22.6% of the primary vote, and Liberal preferences in turn favoured Wilkie over Labor by a factor of nearly four to one. Wilkie emerged at the final count 1.2% ahead of Labor, which had lost the personal vote of its long-term sitting member Duncan Kerr. This left Wilkie among a cross bench of five members in the first hung parliament since World War II.

Wilkie declared himself open to negotiation with both parties as they sought to piece together a majority, which the Liberals took seriously enough to offer $1 billion for the rebuilding of Royal Hobart Hospital. In becoming the first of the independents to declare his hand for Labor, Wilkie criticised the promise as “almost reckless”, prompting suggestions from the Liberals that his approach was insincere.

The deal Wilkie reached with Labor included $340 million for the hospital and what proved to be a politically troublesome promise to legislate for mandatory pre-commitment for poker machines. When the government’s numbers improved slightly after Peter Slipper took the Speaker’s chair, the government retreated from the commitment. Wilkie responded by withdrawing his formal support for the government, although it never appeared likely that he would use his vote to bring it down.

Wilkie was comfortably re-elected at the 2013 election with 38.1% of the primary vote, despite an aggressive Labor campaign that included putting him behind the Liberals on how-to-vote cards. Both Labor (down from 35.8% to 24.8%) and the Greens (down from 19.0% to 7.9%) recorded double-digit drops, and most of the northern suburbs booths which had stayed with Labor in 2010 were won by Wilkie. His final margin over Labor after preferences was up from 1.2% to 15.5%, while the Labor-versus-Liberal two-party preferred count recorded a 6.9% swing to the Liberals and a Labor margin of 8.9%.

Blue and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Liberal and Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

Barker encompasses South Australia along the Victorian border from Mount Gambier north to the Riverland and its population centres of Renmark, Loxton, Berri and Waikerie, extending westwards to the mouth of the Murray River and the towns of Angaston and Murray Bridge 75 kilometres to the east of Adelaide. It has existed since South Australia was first divided into single-member electorates in 1903, at all times encompassing the state’s south-eastern corner including Mount Gambier, Bordertown and Keith. From there it has generally extended either westwards to the Fleurieu Peninsula and Kangaroo Island or, as at present, northwards to the Riverland. The former territories were lost when Mayo was created with the expansion of parliament in 1984, but recovered from 1993 to 2004 as Mayo was drawn into Adelaide’s outskirts. The Riverland was accommodated by Angas prior to its abolition in 1977, and by Wakefield from 1993 to 2004. Barker’s present dimensions were established when South Australia’s representation was cut from twelve seats to eleven at the 2004 election, causing Barker to take back the Riverland from a radically redrawn Wakefield, while Mayo recovered the Fleurieu Peninsula and Kangaroo Island.

The areas covered by Barker presently and in the past have long been safe for the conservatives, the Riverland last having had Labor representation when Albert Smith held Wakefield for a term after the 1943 landslide. Barker has never been in Labor hands, nor come close to doing so since territory in southern Adelaide was ceded to the new seat of Kingston in 1949. Archie Cameron held the seat for the Country Party from 1934 to 1940, having been effectively granted it after helping facilitate a merger of the state’s conservative forces as the Liberal Country League while serving as the Country Party’s state parliamentary leader. Cameron succeeded Earle Page as federal parliamentary leader in 1939 but was deposed after the election the following year, causing him to quit the party and align himself with the United Australia Party and then the Liberal Party, which has held Barker ever since. He was succeeded in Barker on his retirement in 1956 by Jim Forbes, who was in turn succeeded in 1975 by James Porter.

Porter was defeated for preselection in 1990 by Ian McLachlan, a former high-profile National Farmers Federation president whom some were touting as a future prime minister. He would instead serve only a single term as a cabinet minister, holding the defence portfolio in the first term of the Howard government, before retiring at the 1998 election. McLachlan’s successor was Patrick Secker, who led a generally low-profile parliamentary career before being unseated for preselection before the 2013 election. Despite endorsement from Tony Abbott and moderate factional powerbroker Christopher Pyne, Secker reportedly lost a local ballot to Mount Gambier lawyer Tony Pasin by 164 votes to 78, with a further 40 recorded for Millicent real estate agent and Wattle Range councillor Ben Treloar. Pasin picked up a 3.5% swing at the election and holds the seat with a margin of 16.5%.

McMillan extends through West Gippsland from Pakenham in Melbourne’s eastern outskirts to the western reaches of the Latrobe Valley, and along the coast from Wonthaggi through Wilsons Promontory to Welshpool. It covered broadly similar territory on its creation in 1949, the area having previously been covered by Gippsland and to a smaller extent by Flinders. The redistribution following the expansion of parliament in 1984 caused it to lose its coastal territory while extending further eastwards along the Princes Highway to Traralgon, which was eventually reversed by the redistribution of 2004. The transfer of Traralgon and neighbouring Latrobe Valley towns to Gippsland on the latter occasion substantially weakened Labor, and the seat has been held by the Liberals ever since.

Conservative strength in the rural areas kept McMillan in Liberal hands from 1949 until 1980, barring a National/Country Party interruption from 1972 to 1975 when it was won and then lost by Arthur Hewson. However, post-war growth in the Latrobe Valley strengthened Labor over time, leading to a close result in 1974, a relatively mild anti-Labor swing in 1975, and finally a win for Labor candidate Barry Cunningham in 1980. Cunningham was swept out a decade later with the statewide backlash that cost Labor nine Victorian seats at the 1990 election, but he recovered the seat by a 0.4% margin in 1993. This was not enough to save him from even the relatively modest swing Labor suffered in Victoria at the 1996 election, when Russell Broadbent gained the seat for the Liberals with a swing of 2.5%.

Broadbent first came to parliament in 1990 as member for Corinella, a seat to the immediate west of McMillan which existed from 1990 to 1996. He was defeated at the 1993 election by Labor’s Alan Griffin, who moved to his present home of Bruce with the abolition of Corinella. Broadbent returned as member for McMillan three years later, before again experiencing the sharp end of life in a marginal seat with his defeat 25-year-old Labor candidate Christian Zahra in 1998. Zahra added 2.3% to his margin against the trend of the 2001 election, before emerging a big loser when his electorate traded Morwell and Traralgon for conservative farming and coastal areas around Leongatha and Wonthaggi. Zahra was left needing a 2.9% to retain his seat in 2004, but a 2.1% swing the other way saw it change hands for the fifth time in six elections.

Thus began a remarkable third stint in parliament for Broadbent, who went on to perform very strongly in limiting the swings against him to 0.2% in 2007 and 0.4% in 2010, before securing his hold with a swing of 7.6% in 2013. He has been assisted by a trend against Labor in the Latrobe Valley and surrounding areas, which has been equally evident at state level. Broadbent has failed to win promotion, but has generated headlines on a number of occasions with his liberal positions on asylum seekers.