Creed is good

News has just emerged that the two WA Cabinet positions formerly occupied by Geoff Gallop and Environment Minister Judy Edwards will be filled by Peel MP Norm Marlborough, of the long-spurned Old Right, and Mandurah MP David Templeman. Peter Kennedy of the ABC reports that the previous favourite, Wanneroo MP Dianne Guise, fell from favour after discussing her aspirations in public last week. He also says the election of two male candidates means the other big prize, preselection for Gallop’s old seat of Victoria Park, is certain to go to a woman when a formal decision is made this evening. Since the notion of Education Minister Ljiljanna Ravlich parachuting in from the upper house has dropped off the radar, this would appear to make it a lay-down misere for Helen Creed, the national president of the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union.

UPDATE (1/2/06): Robert Taylor of The West Australian sees things very differently, reporting today that "because of the Left’s disintegration, neither the Missos’ Helen Creed nor Metalworkers’ Jackie Ormsby has much chance against the Right’s Ben Wyatt or New Right’s Simon Ward". The paper’s Graham Mason reports that the Metalworkers sub-faction did not participate in a meeting of the Left last night that endorsed Creed. This is the first the Poll Bludger has heard of Jackie Ormsby being in the mix – she is best remembered for her union-backed preselection win over Pilbara MP Larry Graham ahead of the 2001 election, and her subsequent defeat by him when he stood as an independent. She was also Labor’s candidate for the reasonably safe Liberal seat of Murdoch at last year’s election. Speaking on ABC TV last night, Peter Kennedy declared the race to be wide open between Creed, Wyatt and Ward, and tipped the by-election to be held on March 11. The ALP’s administrative committee will vote on the preselection this evening.

Match of the round at Victoria Park

The Western Australian ALP’s factional chieftains have been kept busy lately, their silly season interrupted by the surprise resignation of Geoff Gallop as both Premier and member for the lucrative seat of Victoria Park. This was followed by Environment Minister Judy Edwards’ decision to return to the back-bench, which left four crucially important positions (the premiership, two cabinet posts and a safe seat preselection) suddenly up for grabs.

As we now know, the first and most important of these has gone to Alan Carpenter. A former presenter of the WA edition of The 7.30 Report, Carpenter was head-hunted in the mid-1990s by far-sighted elements of the state ALP hierarchy who felt the parliamentary party lacked a telegenic next-generation leadership figure. Carpenter’s ministerial appointments in the education, energy and state development portfolios were chosen with a view to preparing him for the top job, and while it would have been hard to bungle the latter two in the state’s current economic environment, he was reckoned to have navigated all three without embarrassment. Nevertheless, Carpenter’s background meant he did not have a factional base, and he was not wanting for ambitious rivals who did (although his status did make him a logical successor to fellow independent Geoff Gallop).

Here a step into the abyss of ALP factional politics cannot be avoided, much as one would like to. Broadly speaking, the party has Left, Centre and Right factions, but this is complicated by the existence of sub-factions in both the Left and the Right and the dominance (until now at least) of a "strategic alliance" consisting of elements from either side. The three factions respectively claim 16, 10 and 15 members in caucus, with six independents left over. The Centre is dominated by the Transport Workers Union and its senior member in parliament is Deputy Premier Eric Ripper. On the Left, Jim McGinty’s LHMWU grouping (six votes) is estranged from Jock Ferguson’s AMWU (nine or 10 members) – as Robert Taylor of The West Australian puts it, "the Missos and the Metallies (LMHWU and AMWU) haven’t got on since Mr McGinty tried to parachute protege South Metro MLC Sue Ellery into the safe seat of Bayswater (I believe he means Bassendean – PB) before the last election".

The divide in the Right is a legacy of preselection clashes for the state seats of Girrawheen and Ballajura ahead of the 2001 election, in which candidates aligned with Brian Burke and the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) – the "Old Right" – were defeated by a grouping headed by federal Perth MP Stephen Smith and premiership aspirant Michelle Roberts, who naturally became known as the "New Right". The rivalries between the two intensified before last year’s state election when the Old Right sought to recover Girrawheen by deposing member Margaret Quirk in favour of Wanneroo Mayor Jon Kelly, which had a lot to do with the national executive’s intervention to protect the preselection of all sitting members. The two Right factions are respectively worth seven and eight votes in caucus.

To prevent Carpenter from emerging as a consensus candidate, McGinty and Roberts needed to heal the rifts in the Left and Right respectively, while Roberts needed to simultaneously keep intact the strategic alliance between her New Right and the LHMWU Left. McGinty’s efforts may have been half-hearted; it is generally believed that he plans to retire at the next election, and he may only have entered the fray to strengthen his faction’s bargaining position. Roberts was obviously more keen, and by Friday morning a view was developing that her bid was building decisive momentum due to alleged deals (disputed in each case) with the Old Right and the Centre. That left the AMWU Left looking the crucial player, and some observers were predicting on Friday morning that it too would fall in behind Roberts.

It is not clear if this was merely speculation, or whether the faction became spooked by various poll results showing overwhelming public opposition to Roberts, or indeed by her amateurish performance at a doorstop interview during the day. Whatever the reason, the faction’s announcement late in the afternoon (which involved Jock Ferguson standing before AMWU Left MPs to announce how they would all be voting) that they would back Carpenter put the bandwagon effect into motion. Decisively, McGinty announced he would not run and declared his support for Carpenter, and talk of a deal between Roberts and the Old Right became undone. The Centre also backed Carpenter, and significantly its senior parliamentary figure Eric Ripper has kept the deputy leadership despite earlier reports to the contrary.

Inevitably, this contest is impossible to disentangle from those for the two cabinet posts and the preselection. It is widely expected that the cabinet positions will be filled by Wanneroo MP Dianne Guise, a member of the AMWU Left who threw her weight behind Carpenter, and Peel MP Norm Marlborough, a veteran who has forever carried the burden of his loyalty to Burke and the Old Right. Marlborough was deprived of a cabinet post last year due to a veto applied by Geoff Gallop, who went so far in his resistance to the Burke faction as to ban ministers from associating with Burke or his fellow lobbyist, former Deputy Premier Julian Grill. Carpenter is now signalling a softer line, which according to today’s Australian is the culmination of a confusing sequence of events – if I understand the report correctly, Burke first convinced Roberts she could win with his support, apparently in order to spur McGinty into action, and then persuaded the AMWU Left to detach themselves from the McGinty camp to deliver the job to Carpenter. Marlborough’s elevation would suggest that the episode has marginalised the New Right and strengthened the hand of the Old, which was under-represented relative to its factional weight for as long as Gallop was in power.

The contest for Victoria Park is more complicated still and cannot be neatly explained in terms of existing factional rivalries, although Jessica Strutt reported in Tuesday’s West Australian that "it is understood there has been a guarantee from the New Right that it will not support any candidates from the Left". Those named as potential candidates who to my knowledge have not specifically ruled themselves out:

Bill Johnston. The ALP state secretary and Poll Bludger fan is said to be interested, but Jessica Strutt reported in The West on Tuesday that his faction was urging him not to run, as he only recently saw off a challenge to his state secretary position from Helen Creed of the LHMWU (see below). Johnston is a former state secretary of the SDA, the backbone of the faction associated with Brian Burke. Reports of his interest in the seat are intriguing given that another rumoured contender is …

Kate Doust. Mentioned as a potential candidate by Jessica Strutt of The West Australian, the South Metropolitan MLC is married to the aforementioned Bill Johnston and shares his background in the SDA.

Helen Creed. Creed has risen from state to federal leadership of the LHMWU, which was the dominant faction in the Left until the schism with the AMWU group. Late last year she challenged Bill Johnston for the state secretary position and was loudly critical of his performance (arguing that he rather than Mark Latham was to blame for the loss of Stirling and Hasluck), although she ultimately agreed to withdraw. Helpfully, she has lived in Victoria Park for 30 years.

Tony Cooke. Now a social policy professor at Curtin University, Cooke was formerly president of Unions WA and has been a major figure in the WA union movement since the 1980s. He has always been forthcoming about the delicate matter of his father, Eric Edgar Cooke, a serial killer who in 1964 became the last man to be executed in Western Australia.

Ljiljanna Ravlich. Graham Mason of The West Australian reports that the New Right are keen for the high-profile Education Minister to use Victoria Park to switch to the lower house. This would allow McGinty Left favourite Sue Ellery to assume one of the two cabinet posts vacated by Gallop and Edwards without overloading Cabinet with MLCs, and create an upper house vacancy that could be filled by the New Right’s Batong Pham, a "rising star" of the Vietnamese community.

Ben Wyatt. A director of Indigenous Business Australia, Wyatt has lately emerged as a fancied contender, with The West Australian reporting he has support from the Right.

Simon Ward. The West Australian reports that Ward is a policy officer who has the backing of the New Right.

John Hammond. The high-profile lawyer and Mayor of Cottesloe (a high-income beachside area in safe Liberal territory) has expressed interest, although he is not currently a member of the party.

Among those who have ended speculation by ruling themselves out:

Jock Ferguson. The AMWU Left factional chief was originally rated the favourite to take the seat, and it was presumed that his aspirations featured in negotiations for his union bloc’s leadership votes. But on Tuesday, Jessica Strutt of The West Australian reported he had "ruled himself out of the preselection battle, saying his loyalty was to the AMWU and he never had any real political ambition".

Peter Bell. Talk that the Fremantle Dockers captain had been head-hunted (he is also a lawyer and president of the AFL Players Association, a distinction he shares with Victorian Sports Minister Justin Madden) attracted predictably intense media scrutiny in Perth, but he declared himself unwilling to finish his AFL career at this time.

Sarah Burke. The Right factional player and daughter of Brian Burke has long been known to harbour political aspirations, with some suggestions she might succeed factional ally Graham Edwards as the federal member for Cowan. Possibly for this reason, she has dismissed speculation that she might be interested in Victoria Park. UPDATE (26/1/06): Well, what do you know – Graham Edwards has just announced he will quit politics at the next election.

Sue Ellery. Ellery’s ambitions for a lower house seat are plain enough, in light of the factional brawl that followed her efforts to succeed Clive Brown as member for Bassendean at last year’s election. So her announcement last week that she did not plan to run might be seen to support the Ljiljanna Ravlich theory outlined above.

Surprisingly, the Liberal Party have also seen fit to nominate a candidate for this unwinnable seat. Perhaps they were conscious of the unbecoming name-calling the New South Wales Liberal Party suffered when it declined to contest two of the three seats up for grabs at last September’s "triple M" by-elections. But there are plenty of worse things that can happen in politics than being called names, some of which were outlined in yesterday’s Crikey email by legendary WA Liberal factional warlord Noel Crichton-Browne:

The inmates have really taken control in the Western Australian Liberal Party. The State Council of the Party met last night and unanimously resolved to contest the State seat of Victoria Park recently vacated by Geoff Gallop. The meeting also endorsed 59-year-old Bruce Stevenson, a teacher and more recently a real estate agent (interestingly, NCB fails to mention that he is also the local deputy mayor – PB). The by-election is expected to be held on 25 February.

The obvious arguments against the Liberal Party running a candidate are: The swing required is an impossible 16%; there will be an enormous wave of transferred sympathy for the Labor candidate given the circumstances of the by-election; Gallop whose support in the community is now greater than at any time during his parliamentary career will publicly endorse and embrace the Labor candidate; it will be the first election contested by new Premier Alan Carpenter who comes to office with enormous goodwill and who will be at the pinnacle of first flush popularity; the Government is about to announce an enormous budget surplus, unemployment is at a record low and Labor is well ahead in the polls.

The Opposition does not have one detailed policy in any portfolio; Opposition Leader Matt Birney who is presently embroiled in a controversy about his public register disclosure is currently recording his lowest approval ratings since his election to the position; this will be Birney’s first election campaign; the Liberal Party has a debt of a million dollars and has recently been embarrassed by being unable to pay its operating costs and the Party organisation in the seat is non-existent …

Senior office bearers of the Party breathlessly informed the meeting behind closed doors that the Party expected to win the seat. This was no canter around the track to give the Liberal punters someone to vote for; this was no flag showing exercise, this was a seat the Party seriously believed it could win. What must be terrifying to those tortured Liberal souls in Western Australia who have all but given up on the State Party winning an election in the foreseeable future but still hope for a credible Opposition is that those running the Party really do believe that the State seat of Victoria Park is going to be won by the Liberal Party on 25 February.

Matt Birney could not have been given a worse battle ground upon which to fight his first election. In many respects the outcome will define his leadership. Were the folly of this campaign not just transparent stupidity by those who now claim ownership of the Western Australian Liberal Party, others could be forgiven for suspecting it to be a devious plot to destroy him.

You doity rat

Victorian Senator Julian McGauran’s defection from the Nationals to the Liberals has attracted widespread criticism on talk radio and blogs (here and here and here and here), much of which has echoed Nationals leader Mark Vaile’s critique – that "the honourable thing for Julian to do would be to step down from that position and allow the National Party to fill the position", since Victorian voters "elected a National Party senator and they expect to see one there now".

Did they though? McGauran owes his position to an arrangement in which the Coalition parties run a joint Senate ticket in Victoria, depriving above-the-line voters of a choice between the two. The Nationals take second and fourth place on the Coalition ticket at alternating elections, which means certain re-election for McGauran at the end of his six-year term, and certain defeat for the filler candidate who comes in between. It also means that a Coalition vote in Melbourne is as much a vote for the National Party as a Coalition vote in Gippsland, such that it makes no sense for either critics of McGauran or McGauran himself to talk in terms of his "role of representing country people".

By way of comparison, the Coalition parties in Queensland have not run a joint ticket since 1977, and the Nationals have won at least one seat on their own strength at every election since – with the exception of 1998, when Bill O’Chee lost his seat to One Nation (interestingly enough, there has been talk over the years that O’Chee might return to politics as a Liberal). In Victoria, nobody quite knows how the Nationals would go if left to their own devices. The last time voters across the state had an opportunity to vote for the party was after the 1987 double dissolution, when they scored 5.7 per cent. Given that their goal is to out-score the Liberal Party’s surplus over 28.6 per cent (the total required to elect two Senators), this would leave them struggling to win a seat at their expense – and there is little doubt that their vote has fallen since.

There may be details of the Coalition agreement that I am missing here, but surely the National Party would opt out if they thought they stood a better than 50 per cent chance of winning at a half-Senate election. As for the Liberal Party, they have apparently suffered the arrangement largely because McGauran delivers preferences from the Democratic Labor Party – not legally the same party that came out of the 1950s Labor split, but a new group that refused to accept its eventual demise in 1976. The DLP owes its continuing existence to support from the McGauran family during a legal challenge against the Australian Electoral Commission, which sought to deregister it because it refused to prove it had 500 members (the party sought an activist ruling invoking implied constitutional rights, of a type that would not normally win favour among conservatives).

There have been times when the McGauran-DLP link has come in handy. At the aforementioned 1987 double dissolution election, the DLP gave the young McGauran a valuable 2.0 per cent boost that helped secure him the eleventh out of the available 12 seats. The party’s support since has proved remarkably resilient, hitting a peak in 2001 (for some reason) of 2.2 per cent – which helped a struggling Coalition to a third seat, without which it would not hold its current majority. In 2004, their 1.9 per cent was higher than the vote for Family First, from which Steve Fielding achieved a remarkable victory.

Nevertheless, many in the Liberal Party have taken the understandable view that a Senate seat was a big-money sacrifice for a small-change preference deal, and one which seemed likely to decline in value with the passage of time. McGauran’s decision to jump ship is very likely a signal that the Liberals were about to pull the plug on the arrangement, and that Liberal preselection seemed a more likely prospect than Nationals victory from a separate ticket.

UPDATE (25/1/06): A link from Crikey (always good for a midday hit-counter spike) draws attention to this analogy regarding the National Party from commenter Hudson: "They are like a pig being swallowed by a constrictor, but being pigs they will not remove themselves from the trough long enough to extricate themselves from the snake". The Poll Bludger is not sure that the National Party is as doomed as many are saying and might get around to explaining why some time. Also in comments, this interesting explanation from Stephen L for why the DLP did so well in Victoria in 2001:

Many DLP voters are not actually looking for a conservative Catholic party – a quick look at their preferences in lower house seats shows that. Instead they attract a large number of people whose eyesight is poor and see the word ‘labor’ and think that this is the ALP column. The DLP vote rises when they have a position on the left of the Senate ballot paper, particularly when they are well to the left of the ALP. This occured in both 2001 and 2004. They did slightly worse in 2004, probably because the presence of Family First meant that some of the people who really did mean ot vote for them in 2001 found a new home. If the next election draw sees the DLP placed to the right of the ALP on the ballot I predict their vote will plummet.

Nothing succeeds like succession

The first word to reach the Poll Bludger on the matter of Geoff Gallop’s likely successor as WA Premier comes from the inimitable Andrew Landeryou, whose sources tell him that "Labor moderate State Development Minister and tough guy Alan Carpenter is likely to prevail". That would have been my tip if anyone had told me this morning that Gallop was about to pull the plug, which I would never have believed. The rest of Landeryou’s analysis sounds similarly on the money:

Deputy Premier and harmless Treasurer Eric Ripper seems much less likely, with the Left’s cunning powerbroker Health Minister Jim McGinty also a distant prospect (at least in his own mind) if there’s a split in the Right which seems unlikely. Carpenter has a comfortable lead in early caucus head-counting, largely on factional grounds. Right leader and Steve Smith ally in the New Right part of the Right, Police Minister Michelle Roberts is also a prospect and is reportedly testing her support, while Carpenter is unfortunately stuck in London and is presumably at Heathrow right now showing a degree of passenger anxiety that would normally see one detained.

As they say in the classics: Game on …

Geoff Gallop to resign?

Perth radio is suddenly abuzz with rumours that WA Premier Geoff Gallop is about to announce his resignation on health grounds. Developing …

UPDATE (12.48pm WST): NineMSN reports "BREAKING NEWS: Gallop to resign as WA Premier due to illness".

UPDATE (1.04pm WST): Gallop has delivered a press conference announcing he has decided to quit politics as he has been battling depression. This means a by-election will be held for his safe south-of-the-river seat of Victoria Park. Treasurer Eric Ripper will become Acting Premier but the Poll Bludger’s understanding is that he has never been considered a likely successor. Those who have been include State Development Minister Alan Carpenter and Police Minister Michelle Roberts.

UPDATE (1.10pm WST): Reports at ABC Online and NineMSN (thanks Chris).

UPDATE (1.22pm WST): Gallop’s media statement now online here.

Just say when

Saturday’s Mercury informs us that speculation about an early Tasmanian election has not gone away, with little change in the dates under discussion – late February or early March still being the popular tip. Crikey is reading significance into an appearance by Paul Lennon and wife Margaret in the Australian Women’s Weekly issue scheduled to hit newsstands on January 23, noting that Bob and Helena Carr featured in a "paid puff piece" in the magazine shortly before the 2003 election in New South Wales.

For my part, I’m still sorting my way through the sewers of South Australian politics to prepare my intricately detailed guide for their election on March 17, which is still about two weeks away from completion. Antony Green’s effort is currently up and running a ABC Online, complete with attractive turquoise colour scheme.

UPDATE (12/1/06): Looks like that early Tasmanian election is now off the menu.

UPDATE (13/1/06): Or maybe not. Professor Richard Herr of the University of Tasmania tells today’s Mercury that the need for Lennon to avoid parliamentary scrutiny over the Betfair issue might make an early election more likely (tip of the hat here to Christian Kerr at Crikey).

Compelling arguments

Derek Chong, Sinclair Davidson and Tim Fry go in hard against compulsory voting in a paper for the Centre for Independent Studies’ Policy journal, entitled "It’s an evil thing to oblige people to vote". Good economists all, the authors characterise compulsory voting as "a wealth transfer from those individuals who would not vote, and from the Australian Electoral Commission, which expends substantial sums of money tracking down individuals in order to enrol them to vote, to political parties". They also cite various legal precedents to muddy the waters for pedants who argue that Australia has "compulsory attendance at a polling booth" rather than "compulsory voting". In partisan terms, the study concludes that compulsion is bad for the Coalition, broadly neutral for Labor (except insofar as what’s good for the Coalition is bad for Labor), good for the Greens and independents and a disaster for the Australian Democrats.

Tip of the hat here to Andrew Leigh at Imagining Australia.

Miscellany

The Poll Bludger has been taking it a bit easy lately, so the following developments had passed unremarked:

  • As predicted, the Australian Electoral Commission’s calculation of the states’ representation entitlements will see New South Wales lose a House of Representatives seat and Queensland gain one (its second gain at successive redistributions). Antony Green suggests that the most likely outcome in New South Wales is that Riverina will be abolished, with all electorates up the Hume Highway through to south-western Sydney sucked south-westwards to fill the vacuum. Other rearrangements will be required by stagnation in Labor’s south Sydney heartland, which could pull the Prime Minister’s already precarious electorate of Bennelong into Labor’s orbit. A respondent to Antony in Crikey argues that the shortfall in south Sydney is greater than that in the outer west, and that the AEC will be compelled to wield the knife here instead.

  • Special Minister of State Eric Abetz has issued a press release announcing a package of electoral law amendments to be introduced to Federal Parliament. They include the contentious proposal to close the electoral rolls on the evening the writs are issued; a requirement for authorisation of electoral advertising on the internet that will expressly "not extend to ‘blogs’"; proof of identity requirements for enrolment and lodgement of declaration votes; and various measures regarding donations to political parties and their disclosure.

  • South Australian Premier Mike Rann has come out for the abolition of the State’s upper house, announcing that it will be one of three options put to voters at a referendum in conjunction with the 2010 election. The other two will be maintenance of the status quo, and reform to shorten MLCs’ generous eight-year terms. In one of the dopier editorials of recent memory, The Advertiser endorsed abolition by arguing that advocates of "checks and balances" suffer a "fundamental misunderstanding of the strength of our democratic system", namely that there are – wait for it – elections held every four years. The editorial acknowledged "the infamous excesses of Queensland’s system over the years" (which occurred under three year terms), then said nothing further about them.

  • Speaking of South Australia, their election is fixed for March 18 and the Poll Bludger’s seat-by-seat guide should be up and running in a few weeks. Life could get complicated if there is substance to mounting speculation of an early election in Tasmania, widely tipped to be called for one of the three Saturdays between February 25 and March 11.
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