The Poll Bludger

In assessing the leadership ambitions of the member for Wentworth, Michelle Grattan provides the following intelligence:

Before any post-election events, Turnbull has the challenge of holding Wentworth. It’s on 2.6 per cent – although in practice rather more, because in 2004 then incumbent Peter King ran as an independent. Turnbull is locked in battle with lawyer and Waverley mayor George Newhouse. Liberals say Turnbull’s polling is good. Labor polling a few weeks ago had Turnbull on 47 per cent, Newhouse 42 per cent and Greens 11 per cent.

On those figures, Newhouse would still win the seat if he received 73 per cent of Greens preferences. Labor was shown to have received 74.8 per cent of Greens preferences at the 2001 election in a study by the Parliamentary Library.

In an effort to keep the previous thread at least partly on topic, I hereby open a new one for purposes of general chatter. Perhaps you might like to take a shot at guessing Tuesday’s Newspoll result, which seems to be an increasingly popular parlour game among the leisured classes. Ever so much water has passed under the bridge since the 56-44 result of last fortnight: an interest rate increase, a new round of Liberal leadership tension and last week’s stock market dive. Newspoll is conducted from Friday through to Sunday, so Kevin Rudd’s New York misadventure is unlikely to be much of a factor.

This series will hopefully be picking up the pace in the next few weeks, hence the change of name (though it won’t quite be daily). Today we visit the inner southern Brisbane electorate of Moreton, held for the Liberals by Gary Hardgrave on a margin of 2.8 per cent. Moreton extends from the wealthy riverside suburbs of Sherwood, Chelmer and Yeronga southwards through Labor-leaning Moorooka and Archerfield, and on to Liberal-leaning Runcorn and Calamvale (see my 2004 booth result maps for Crikey here). The redistribution has produced a 1.4 per cent shift in Labor’s favour through an extension into the Labor-voting inner city at Annerley, along with a less consequential exchange of Algester for Karawatha in the south. This adds to the 1.7 per cent turn in Labor’s favour when the seat was substantially redrawn in 2004, ceding Mount Gravatt to newly created Bonner and acquring the area from Sunnybank to Calamvale in the south. In between came a 1.6 per cent swing to the Liberals at the 2004 election, an extremely modest result by Brisbane standards that can be attributed to a pro-Labor swing in the north, consistent with a national trend in inner-city areas.

Moreton has existed in name since federation, but it was based on the Gold Coast and Brisbane’s southern outskirts until McPherson was created in 1949. It then began its long drift north into the inner suburbs, a process that made the once safe conservative seat marginal. Labor’s first near-miss came with Jim Killen’s famous 130-vote win in 1961, achieved with help from Communist Party preference leakage, which allowed the Menzies government to survive with a two-seat majority. Labor would not get over the line until 1990, when Liberal veteran Don Cameron was defeated by Garrie Gibson. Gibson held on in 1993 before succumbing to the Queensland Labor bloodbath of 1996, when Gary Hardgrave won the seat with a 4.9 per cent swing.

Hardgrave (right) came to parliament after a spell as media adviser to Senator David MacGibbon, having earlier been a disk jockey and reporter on the Channel Seven children’s program Wombat in the 1980s (those in the Poll Bludger’s thirty-something age cohort will better remember the puppet Agro, especially if they were privy to the outtakes videos compiled for Channel Seven’s staff Christmas parties). After surviving a 4.2 per cent swing in 1998 and consolidating by 1.9 per cent in 2001, Hardgrave was rewarded with the job of Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, to which he added Minister Assisting the Prime Minister in 2003. The earlier portfolios were exchanged for vocational and technical training after the 2004 election, but he was not reckoned a great success as a minister and was demoted to the back-bench in January, ostensibly so he could devote his energies to retaining his seat.

Hardgrave’s bad year continued when the Australian Federal Police raided his office in March, as part of an investigation into claims taxpayer-funded printing allowances were rorted to assist the Liberals’ state election campaign. Also targeted were two other members for dicey Brisbane seats, Bowman MP Andrew Laming and Bonner MP Ross Vasta. The AFP also interviewed Hardgrave’s electorate office manager, Peter Catanzariti, over the creation of a “phantom” staff position for a niece of Hardgrave’s partner Lorraine Ralph (who was herself contentiously given a job in Hardgrave’s office), which was funded from Laming’s payroll. According to The Australian, Catanzariti said in a statement that the worker told him she had never spoken to Laming, who nonetheless maintained she legitimately worked briefly in Hardgrave’s office on his own direction. Catanzariti was sacked two months later “without explanation”, although Hardgrave denied this was related to the AFP interview. After much criticism about the slow pace of the investigation, it was reported last fortnight that the AFP was finalising its brief for the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider whether charges would be laid.

Labor has again nominated its candidate from 2004, Graham Perrett (left), an adviser to the Queensland Resources Council who had earlier worked as a ministerial staffer and official with the Queensland Independent Education Union. Perrett won a preselection vote over Paul Crowther, who was backed by the Old Guard/Unity sub-faction of the Right, by 131 votes to 49. Crowther subsequently escaped expulsion from the party after going public with concerns over the preselection process, which saw six members disqualified from participating on the day before the vote. The six included Russell Carr, state secretary of the Left faction Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union and husband of state Environment Minister Lindy Nelson-Carr, who had participated in a preselection vote in another electorate five months previously. Crowther professed himself unconvinced by Carr’s insistence that he was not planning on lodging a vote.

Morgan’s fortnightly face-to-face survey of 1667 voters has Labor significantly widening its two-party lead, from 55-45 to 58.5-41.5. The Coalition primary vote is down from 40.5 per cent to 36.5 per cent, while Labor’s is up from 47 per cent to 49.5 per cent. In all respects, this represents a return to the state of play from the early part of the year after two relatively good results for the Coalition in July, when their primary vote topped 40 per cent for the first time since November.

The latest semi-monthly Reuters Poll Trend figure, a weighted composite of results from Morgan, Newspoll and ACNielsen, continues the gentle trend back to the Coalition that has been evident since May. On the primary vote, Labor is down from 47.7 per cent to 46.9 per cent and the Coalition up from 39.5 per cent to 40.4 per cent. Kevin Rudd’s preferred prime minister rating is steady on 46.4 per cent, while John Howard’s is down from 40.5 per cent to 40.2 per cent.

Today’s episode of Seat of the Week brings us to the second-most marginal electorate in the country, the southern Adelaide seat of Kingston. Kingston was created when parliament when enlarged in 1949, and has consistently covered the outer coastal reaches of the metropolitan area. This meant Glenelg and Brighton in the early days, the southernmost suburb of Hallett Cove being the only area still in the electorate today. Glenelg was hived off to since-abolished Hawker in 1984, and Brighton went to Boothby in 1993. It now extends from Hallett Cove and industrial Lonsdale south to the outermost beachside suburbs of Moana and Port Willunga, and to the McLaren Vale wine-growing district further inland. Most of the population is in the north of the electorate, around Noarlunga, Reynella and Morphett Vale. As my maps at Crikey demonstrate, this area is divided between a Liberal-leaning north-east and a Labor-leaning south-west. Labor is also strong in the thin strip of coastal suburbs further south, which also record strong support for the Greens, while the McLaren Vale area provides the Liberals with their two strongest booths.

As befits a seat that has moved with the mortgage belt, Kingston has been extremely sensitive to the tides of electoral fortune. Despite having a notional Labor margin of 6.8 per cent upon its creation, it was swept up with the landslide that put the Menzies government in power in 1949. Pat Galvin gained the seat for Labor in 1951, and was re-elected with varying margins until 1966. It was then caught up in the statewide convulsions of 1966 and 1969, which produced double-digit swings first to Liberal and then to Labor in both Kingston and South Australia as a whole. The Liberals thus held the seat for one term before it returned emphatically to Labor. Kingston subsequently changed hands with the next three changes of government, being held by Grant Chapman during the Fraser years (he returned as a Senator in 1987) and Gordon Bilney thereafter. A former Democrats leader, the late Janine Haines, made an audacious bid for the seat in 1990 but failed to beat the Liberal candidate into second place, recording 26.4 per cent to the Liberals’ 33.0 per cent and Labor’s 37.1 per cent. Bilney was edged out in 1996 by a relatively mild 3.4 per cent swing to Liberal candidate Susan Jeanes, who had too little fat on her margin to withstand the GST backlash of 1998. Labor’s David Cox recovered the seat for Labor with a 2.5 per cent swing, prevailing by 763 votes.

A Labor-friendly redistribution followed by a small swing increased the margin from 0.5 per cent to 2.4 per cent in 2001, but the next redistribution went the other way. With South Australia’s representation cut from 12 seats to 11 at the 2004 election, Kingston was made to absorb the McLaren Vale area, giving the Liberals what proved to be a decisive 1.1 per cent boost. Requiring a further 1.4 per cent swing to topple Cox, the Liberals picked up roughly 2 per cent in the northern part of the electorate. However, this was very nearly balanced out by a sharp swing to Labor in wealthy McLaren Vale, consistent with the much-touted “doctors’ wives” effect. Another notable feature of the vote was a strong 5.6 per cent for Family First, who outpolled the Greens and delivered the Liberals a better-than-usual preference flow. Cox held a narrow lead on election night, but this was whittled down and eventually overturned as pre-poll and postal votes gave the Liberals a 119-vote victory.

The incoming Liberal member was Kym Richardson (left), a police officer, former SANFL player and sports manager whose clients included AFL star Byron Pickett and test cricketer Jason Gillespie. The party had initially approached another football identity, Adelaide Crows player Nigel Smart, but he remained committed to playing out the 2004 AFL season (Smart went on to unsuccessfully contest the state seat of Norwood at last year’s state election). According to The Advertiser’s Tom Richardson (presumably no relation), Richardson’s backers included Susan Jeanes and two locally based state members, Bright MP Wayne Matthew (since retired) and Mawson MP Robert Brokenshire (since defeated). Labor’s candidate for the coming election is Amanda Rishworth (right), a psychologist and former organiser for the Right faction Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association. Rishworth was Labor’s candidate for Fisher at the state election, and was preselected unopposed in Kingston as part of a factional arrangement. Contrary to my normal practice, I should also make mention of Greens candidate Bill Weller, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union activist and prolific commenter on this website.

At this stage of the game, the portents for Kym Richardson are not good. In his assessment of the electorate’s demographics, Adam Carr notes a high proportion of manufacturing workers, a relatively low average income and a high proportion of dwellings being purchased, making it prime territory for a backlash over WorkChoices and interest rates. Two electorate-level polls conducted by The Advertiser bear this out: Labor recorded leads of 56-44 in January, before Kevin Rudd had established the national polling ascendancy he has enjoyed since March, and 57-43 late last month.

• It now emerges that respondents to the weekend’s Galaxy poll of voting intention in Bennelong were also asked if their vote would be influenced by the prospect of the Prime Minister departing mid-term should he retain the seat. This is highly significant in light of Malcolm Mackerras‘s conviction that voters will tip him out partly to avoid a “quick, unnecessary and costly by-election”. The poll found 84 per cent of respondents said they would not be influenced by such concerns, which can be read one of two ways: voters are overwhelmingly unconcerned, or a small but decisive minority does in fact consider it a vote-switcher. The SBS Insight program, which commissioned the poll in conjunction with the Daily Telegraph, will tonight be devoted to a forum discussion from a hand-picked sample of Bennelong voters, to screen at 7.30pm.

• Simon Jackman offers a very illuminating pendulum in which the seats from each state are listed in a different column. The lower part of the table marks Labor’s strongest historical result in each state post-1949. Interesting to relate that if Labor matches its best performance in every state, the Coalition will still win almost as many seats as Labor has at present.

• Inform your speculation on the Senate election with this handy results calculator, brought to you by occasional Poll Bludger commenter Dembo. It is set for the 2004 preference tickets at present, but I am advised that these will soon be made adjustable.

The Fairfax papers today carry their monthly ACNielsen poll, which shows a narrowing of Labor’s two-party lead from 58-42 to 55-45. Labor’s primary vote is down from 49 per cent to 46 per cent, while the Coalition is up from 39 per cent to 41 per cent. The movement most likely represents a correction from a somewhat excessive result last time. Now please, for the love of Christ, no more polls until next Tuesday …