The Poll Bludger

Today the Poll Bludger commemorates Anzac Day with the first in what will be a regular series drawing together the major events of the preceding week as momentum builds towards the coming federal election.

• Prime Minister John Howard gave little away when probed by Neil Mitchell of Melbourne’s 3AW on Wednesday about the likely election date, but hypothetical mentions of late October and mid-November proved enough to provoke a flurry of nebulous speculation regardless. He at least ruled out the "sacred" weekends at the end of September and the start of October, which is very mildly interesting given that the 1998 election was in fact held on October 3.

• Roy Morgan yesterday released a poll taken over the two previous weekends showing Labor and the Coalition each gaining 1.5 per cent on the primary vote at the expense of independents and Greens. With Labor recovering from a dip a fortnight earlier, Morgan has shown little fluctuation for Labor this year around its current level of 45 per cent. The Coalition however has reached its highest level for the year at 41 per cent primary and 45.5 per cent two-party preferred, although this doesn’t represent a major breakout from the 38-40 and 44-45 per cent bands in which they have been operating throughout this year. The poll also shows the Coalition recovering a lead on the question of who voters expect to win, which they had surrendered at the two previous polls.

• As discussed in my previous post, Tuesday’s Newspoll had the Coalition up from 40 to 43 per cent with Labor fading from 44 to 42. This represents the Coalition’s best showing since December 12-14, in the second week of Latham’s leadership. Confusingly, Labor’s two-party preferred rating is steady at 53 per cent. Mark Latham recovered exactly half of the 14 per cent he lost from his satisfaction rating in the previous poll, bouncing back to 59 per cent (historical perspective: Alexander Downer recovered 3 per cent in the poll following his record 17 per cent belly-flop at the poll of 5-7 August 1994), while John Howard’s rose from 51 to 53 per cent.

• The Geelong Advertiser reported on Friday that Labor’s polling has them ahead in the Colac/Great Ocean Road electorate of Corangamite. Such an outcome would be a tremendous result for Labor, with Liberal member Stewart McArthur currently sitting on a margin of 5.4 per cent after a redistribution that cost him 0.3 per cent. The poll reportedly involved 2000 respondents and had Labor with 51 per cent of the primary vote, confirming a similar poll the party conducted three weeks earlier showing them on 50.5 per cent. Internal polling results are normally top secret party information, and no source is disclosed by the Advertiser. One can’t help noting that their release to the local media would have been helpful in encouraging cynicism over the Prime Minister’s motives in visiting the electorate twice this month.

• Former Australian Medical Association state president Dr Ingrid Tall won preselection for Labor’s most marginal seat, Brisbane, held by Arch Bevis with a margin of 0.9 per cent. Tall defeated unsuccessful 2001 candidate Sebastian Monsour 55 votes to 43. Monsour, a brother-in-law of Brisbane Mayor Campbell Newman, was at the centre of the "Brisbane Water-gate&quot incident on council election night which excited the Courier Mail but not the Crime and Misconduct Commission.

Opinion poll watchers are currently trying to work out how Newspoll was able to conclude this week that although Labor’s 4 per cent primary vote lead from a fortnight before had turned into a 1 per cent deficit, they had maintained their 53-47 lead on two-party preferred. The Poll Bludger will leave the number-crunching to others (Peter Brent at Mumble is always a good place start) as the broad lessons from recent polls are clear – Labor’s apparently election-winning momentum of a month ago has stalled, and the prospects of Mark Latham sweeping all before him are substanially diminished. Thus does our attention return to the seats that could have swung either way from last time, and in which a small nudge towards Labor will be enough for a change of government.

The consensus is that those located in Queensland and South Australia are the most important, and with good reason. In Victoria, Labor polled well enough last time that they have less room for improvement than elsewhere, even if they did emerge with only one new seat to show for it. Newspoll’s geographical voting analysis for the January-March period showed Labor’s primary vote had improved 5 per cent in New South Wales and 7.3 per cent in Queensland since the 2001 election, but only 1.4 per cent in Victoria. Furthermore the Victorian redistribution has tended to boost Liberal margins, such that the state has only one of the 11 most marginal seats that would give Labor victory. Combine that with the fact that the state Labor administration is a great deal less popular today than it was in November 2001 and it may be concluded that Victoria will be less instrumental in deciding the outcome than it is used to.

New South Wales may also present Labor with some collateral damage from a state government for which the love has long since died, but the Coalition’s historically strong performances in the last three elections mean that for them the only way is down, and there are plenty of seats in the firing line should the local boy come good. However it’s in Queensland and South Australia that Labor has serious room for improvement, and here the state governments are respectively still popular and basking in the peak of their honeymoon phase. Today the Poll Bludger will focus his attention on South Australia, where the last election saw the Liberal Party win nine seats out of 12 from a primary vote of 45.9 per cent (against 43.1 per cent nationally for the Coalition) with Labor winning the remaining three from 33.7 per cent (against 37.8 per cent nationally).

The first complication to be noted is that those 12 seats are now 11, this being the second occasion that the state has had its representation cut through relative population decline since the House of Representatives assumed its current size in 1984. Essentially the existing electorates of Bonython and Wakefield – respectively held safely for Labor by Martyn Evans and Liberal by Neil Andrew, who circumvented a post-redistribution preselection brawl by choosing to retire – have been abolished. Wakefield lives on in name, but bears little resemblance to the existing seat in its new form. Where it once awkwardly took in the Yorke Peninsula before stretching up the Murray Valley all the way to the Victorian border, Wakefield now retains a sliver of its former territory around Gawler as the base for a move into the suburbs taking in more than half of the electors formerly in Bonython. The AEC chose to stick with the name Wakefield for essentially sentimental reasons, Edward Gibbon Wakefield having been a fascinating and much underrated figure (of Sir John Langdon Bonython, the Poll Bludger knows very little). The new seat, with which Martyn Evans will have to make do, has a notional Labor majority of 1.5 per cent, although this was in the context of a historically poor performance for Labor in South Australia at the last election.

The three most marginal Liberal seats in the state, Adelaide, Hindmarsh and Makin, have also undergone small but potentially significant changes which represent a mixed bag for the incumbents. Adelaide and Hindmarsh, held by the Liberals in 2001 with respective margins of 0.2 and 1.9 per cent, have both lost territory from the northward expansion of the safe Liberal southern suburbs seat of Boothby. Adelaide has been compensated with extra territory in the east from safe Liberal Sturt, improving Trish Worth’s margin from 0.2 to 0.6 per cent, while Hindmarsh has moved north along the coast to take a chunk out of safe Labor Port Adelaide, cutting the Liberal margin from 1.9 to 1.1 per cent. Makin, located to the immediate north-east of Adelaide, has gained Salisbury East and Salisbury Heights with the abolition of Bonython, but its margin remains unaltered on 3.8 per cent.

Hindmarsh has been held since 1993 by Chris Gallus, whose success in winning first the now-abolished Hawker and then Hindmarsh – each for the first time in the Liberal party’s history – has earned her a reputation as something of a vote-winner. Samantha Maiden of The Australian reports that it "is understood" that the Prime Minister "hit the roof" when Gallus made her unexpected decision to retire at the coming election, since party polling showed her to be worth an extra 6 to 7 per cent to the Liberal vote. "Political observers" cited by Craig Bildstien of The Advertiser were more conservative, putting it at 3 or 4 per cent, but both sets of figures are easily the difference between victory and defeat. Significantly replacement candidates were reluctant to step forward, with Adelaide Crows player Nigel Smart among those declining to take the field in order to hold out for a safer seat. The preselection instead became a contest between Gallus-backed Simon Birmingham and the right faction’s Stavroula Raptis, with Crikey reporting that Birmingham won on the second ballot with "50 per cent plus three votes". For the third election running, Labor’s candidate is Steve Georganas, a former taxi driver who got the gig as the "soft left" faction’s nominee in a deal that saw the right’s Kate Ellis take Adelaide (more on that below). Georganas did extremely well to almost unseat Gallus with a 6.9 per cent swing in 1998, but in 2001 he performed no better or worse than the state average in dropping 1 per cent. He has been keeping off the streets lately thanks to a job as adviser to SA Urban Development Minister Jay Weatherill.

Ellis, an adviser to state Industry Minister Rory McEwen, will attempt to break a humiliating 11-year Liberal grip on what ought to be another safe Labor inner-city seat. Between World War II and 1988, Labor only ever lost Adelaide with the 1966 Harold Holt landslide. An embarrassing by-election defeat for the Hawke Government was corrected at the 1990 election (Andrew Peacock having since taken over as Liberal leader from John Howard), but a strong statewide swing against the national trend helped Trish Worth pick the seat up in 1993. Since then she has had a nervous but remarkably stable time of it, her closest shave coming with a 343-vote victory in 2001. Worth’s political future appeared in doubt when she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, but she apparently remains in good health and is again taking the field. The redistribution has tripled her margin, but most observers will be surprised if it’s enough.

Labor are in big trouble if they don’t reel in Adelaide and Hindmarsh, but Makin could be the one that decides the outcome if the result comes down to the wire. Member Trish Draper was named by the Prime Minister in 1998 as one of three Liberal "heroes" (along with Jackie Kelly in Lindsay and Danna Vale in Hughes) whose success in maintaining their seats in traditional enemy territory had helped the government cling to power at that year’s election. Draper had just limited her Labor opponent to a flimsy 0.2 per cent swing against a statewide average of 4.8 per cent, and her performance in 2001 was scarcely less impressive, her 3 per cent swing comparing with a state average of 1 per cent.

However, Draper’s Labor opponent at this election is a strong candidate in more ways than one. Tony Zappia is the only Australian weightlifter ever to win 10 national titles, and has managed to hold the mayoralty of Salisbury aloft for seven hamstring-straining years, with a further 20 years on council before that. He was widely seen to have been hard done by in losing the 2001 nomination to Gail Gago, former nursing union leader and current MLC, essentially due to his factional non-alignment. A repeat performance appeared to be on the cards when the deal over Adelaide and Hindmarsh referred to earlier reserved Makin for Dana Wortley, Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance state secretary and nominee for a faction described by Paul Starick of The Advertiser as a "coalition of the Hard Left and remnants of the Centre". The deal was of use to the major left faction centred around Nick Bolkus as the preselection of a female candidate would have allowed the party to achieve its affirmative action quota without costing Bolkus his spot in the Senate. Local party members however were not pleased, which led state member Frances Bedford to throw her hat into the ring in what Rebecca DiGirolamo of The Australian described a "tactical move to get Mr Zappia up", despite Bedford being a factional colleague of Wortley. In the event Premier Mike Rann managed to persuade Wortley’s key union backers to shift their support to Zappia, in what would appear to have been an electorally sensible decision.

On top of Liberal Party internal polling reportedly showing Labor ahead in Hindmarsh, the Sunday Mail helpfully shed light on the matter with an impressive opinion poll sampling 500 voters from each of the three electorates currently under our microscope. The poll found Labor ahead 42 per cent to 35 in Hindmarsh (compared with 38.3-46.0 in 2001), 40-37 in Adelaide (37.1-44.2 in 2001) and 41-39 in Makin (36.7-45.9). This however was published on February 22, at the very peak of pendulum’s swing towards Labor. The correction that has followed in a very short time frame since suggests that none of these seats is about to get any less interesting between now and polling day.

UPDATE: By a chilling concidence Peter Brent at Mumble has chosen today to publish extensive ruminations on the situation in South Australia submitted to him by one-time Labor candidate for Sturt Phil Robins. It draws attention to one conspicuous omission from above – the possibility that the very popular Karlene Maywald, the only National Party MP in state parliament and thus effectively an independent, will run against the no-profile Liberal member for Barker, Patrick Secker. The Riverland is Barker’s focal point now that it has gained the area following Wakefield’s reconstruction (see above), and this is Maywald’s home territory. The smart money would be on her to prevail if this were to eventuate.

After 13 months spent living in terror at the prospect of reduced federal parliamentary representation, Northern Territorians can again breathe easy. Last Thursday parliament legislated to overturn the Australian Electoral Commission’s determination that the Territory had 295 people too few to warrant a second seat in the House of Representatives. This had earlier led Territory Country Liberal MHR David Tollner to introduce a private member’s bill seeking a guaranteed two seats for the Northern Territory and three for the Australian Capital Territory (reverting to the state of affairs it enjoyed between 1996 and 1998), which proved too much for MPs from the states who may have had their own representation cut to keep the House’s numbers within the constitutional limit. The matter was referred to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters and the government eventually accepted its recommendation that the AEC ruling be overturned for the coming election, and that technical amendments be made to improve the territories’ chances of making it over the line in future.

This is hardly the first time that representation of the Northern Territory has presented challenges to those framing electoral laws. Between 1922 and 1968 the territory’s solitary member in the House did not have full voting rights (the same being true of the Australian Capital Territory from 1949 to 1968), and Senate representation for the territories was not secured until the Whitlam Government’s electoral reform bill passed at the historic joint sitting following the 1974 double dissolution election. As the territories’ share of the national population has grown there has emerged the present difficulty, wherein representation proportionate to population leaves the Northern Territory warranting about 1.5 seats and the Australian Capital Territory about 2.5. This means that for the foreseeable future they still face the prospect of swinging back and forth between one and two and two and three, meaning under-representation in the former case and over-representation in the latter.

However, the parliament’s decision to overrule the abolition of a Northern Territory seat could well set a precedent, even if that decision was ostensibly based on concerns surrounding the accuracy of statistics used to reach the determination. It is doubtful that such concerns would have troubled the key actors had they not decided that the maintenance of two seats was in their interests, but it appears that Labor and Liberal are both confident of winning Tollner’s Darwin-based seat of Solomon at the coming poll. The Poll Bludger has not been able to track down the calculations indicating precisely how unlucky the Australian Capital Territory was to lose its third seat in 1997 (it scored 2.4209 at the 2003 calculation) but has little doubt that the Howard Government would have scotched any move by Parliament to overturn it since the outcome was unambiguously damaging to Labor.

In the shorter term the maintenance of the second Northern Territory seat has major implications for the coming election as the seat of Solomon is the most marginal in the country. Tollner’s 88 vote margin over Labor’s Laurene Hull in 2001 is not the only reason he is lucky to be in parliament. Elements within the Country Liberal Party were gunning for his disendorsement prior to the 2001 election for a series of misdemeanours including an earlier conviction for cannabis possession, an undisclosed drink driving conviction, and a campaign observation that "the CLP is family-focused – Labor is focused on women who have six kids by six different fathers". The first transgression might be pushing it a little, but on the whole it’s not an intolerable rap sheet by the standards of Darwin politics (even after he further added to it shortly following the election when he was again done for drink driving, and also for driving an unregistered vehicle). More troubling was the fact that Tollner had run in the 1997 Territory election as an independent against endorsed CLP candidate Chris Lugg, coming within 41 votes of victory. Two significant figures in the party cited Tollner’s preselection as a factor contributing to their decision to quit – Nick Dondas, who held the Northern Territory electorate for a term after the 1996 election, and Maisie Austin, who went so far as to run against Tollner as an independent, but could only manage 5 per cent of the primary vote. Not only is Austin now back in the party fold, she has been preselected as candidate for the Territory’s other electorate of Lingiari, held by Labor’s Warren Snowdon on a comfortable margin of 5.3 per cent.

Since his drink driving conviction Tollner has made headlines mostly for the right reasons, and appears to have silenced doubters in the party enough to have avoided facing a challenge to his preselection for the coming election. As one might expect from a candidate of the right representing Darwin, Tollner has continued to call it like he sees it, describing Territory legislation to lower the gay age of consent from 18 to 16 as "rent-boy legislation". He also took a rugby match against French parliamentarians during the 2003 World Cup more seriously than the occasion demanded, boasting of having given one of his opponents a "friendly facial" during which he "spilt some French blood". Joining in the scrum at the coming election is Labor’s Jim Davidson, about whom little is known (by me at least). Paul Dyer of the Northern Territory News reported on February 16 that Davidson was a 50 year old civil engineer who "has been NT Business and Industry Minister Paul Henderson’s business adviser since January 2002". The state of Henderson’s finances is also not known. The report goes on to say that Davidson "oversaw the construction of Dick Ward Dve in Darwin, the construction of Robertson Barracks and all civil works at the Darwin Naval Base".

The Poll Bludger is currently beavering away at his seat-by-seat federal election guide, to be launched in its full glory whenever the campaign commences. To maximise my visibility in the meantime I will exhibit the fruits of my labours with occasional postings on key seats, starting here with Parramatta. It’s arguably an unfortunate place to begin, as it has been paid too much attention in recent years due to a perception that John Howard’s success in holding it since 1996 has been a paradigm for his government’s electoral achievement. In particular it has contributed to a perception that Howard owes much of his success to a durable turnaround in Labor’s former heartland in western Sydney. Peter Brent at Mumble has much to say about this particular item of conventional wisdom, pointing out that Labor still holds 13 of the 16 western Sydney seats and that while Parramatta the suburb may fit this Labor-friendly mould, the electorate as a whole does not. Nevertheless, the seat has maintained a conspicuous place at the rounded end of the Mackerras pendulum since 1998 and if Labor don’t pick it up they are unlikely to win government.

A quick look at the history of the electorate makes it hard understand why such a fuss is being made of Labor’s failure to carry the seat. Prior to 1977 Labor’s only win here was at the 1929 election that brought Jim Scullin to power. At other times the seat was held by a non-Labor Prime Minister (Joseph Cook, member from federation until 1922 and PM from 1913-14) and by two members who had served as both Attorney-General and External Affairs Minister (Garfield Barwick, 1958-1964, and Nigel Bowen, 1964-1973). When Bowen opted to resume his legal career six months after the Coalition’s defeat in 1972, a young Philip Ruddock inflicted an early humiliation on the Whitlam Government by holding the seat with a 7 per cent swing at the ensuing by-election. All that changed with the redistribution that preceded the 1977 election, when the electorate moved so far to the west that Ruddock’s 9.2 per cent buffer from 1975 became a notional Labor majority of 2.5 per cent. Ruddock jumped ship to since-abolished Dundas, made up in large part of what had been the Liberal-leaning eastern end of Parramatta, which can now be found in John Howard’s electorate of Bennelong. The seat was won for Labor in 1977 by John Brown, who would later become one of the more colourful members of Bob Hawke’s cabinet. Further boundary changes over the years favoured the Liberals, with areas being lost to the prize Labor western suburbs electorates of Reid and Greenway, and by the time of Brown’s retirement in 1990 the seat was marginal again.

Since then Parramatta’s behaviour has not been wildly out of the ordinary as far as New South Wales goes, which along with its position in the upper income-earning quartile should put an end to any talk that "Howard’s battlers" have been deciding the outcome. It is indeed true that the 1996 election saw particularly savage swings against the Keating Government in western Sydney, but these swings were worse in unloseable seats like Blaxland (Paul Keating down 9.1 per cent) and Werriwa (Mark Latham down 9.3 per cent) than in Parramatta (7.1 per cent). Cumulative swings over the next two elections were 1.5 per cent more favourable for the Liberals than the state average, although this is as likely due to the advantages of incumbency as demographic shifts or enthusiasm for the local member, Ross Cameron. In 2001 Cameron mirrored the state average by holding on with the same 1.1 per cent margin he won by in 1998, his swing cancelling out a redistribution that favoured Labor by 3.4 per cent.

Cameron has had an outwardly successful term, being appointed parliamentary secretary first to Larry Anthony immediately after the election, and then to Peter Costello in the October 2003 reshuffle. There have nevertheless been occasions in his career when colleagues may have had cause to doubt his political judgement. He has raised eyebrows on the left by calling for the ABC to be scrapped on the grounds that public broadcasting is out of date, and on the right by conceding that many saw mandatory detention as "primitive and barbaric" and calling on Australians to quit banging on about the Anzacs. He also told HQ magazine he regarded Mark Latham as "very intelligent, insightful and unorthodox", "a person of real intellect and political courage" and "a genuine leader figure". Here he has changed his tune somewhat recently, this week declaring that "Osama bin Laden is stroking his beard and celebrating the advent of Mark Latham".

Last year Cameron was involved in the cash-for-visas scandal, having lobbied extensively on behalf of Dante Tan, the Philippine fugitive businessman granted citizenship by the Immigration Department. It was established that Tan had donated $10,000 to Ruddock’s 2001 election campaign and that his lawyer had made a $2000 campaign donation to Cameron. Tan was also present at a Sydney Harbour fund-raising cruise for Cameron organised by immigration fixer Karim Kisrwani, though all concerned swear that he neglected to cough up when the hat was passed around.

It seems so long ago now, but at the time of Labor’s Parramatta preselection vote in November last year the position would have been regarded as no great prize, given the then-universal expectation that Labor faced disaster at the next election. This no doubt explains the party’s failure to pull any unduly big names out of the hat, with the left’s Julie Owens defeating independent Desmond Netto by 166 votes to 32. The right’s Pierre Esber, a Parramatta Councillor who scored an unwinnable spot on Labor’s list for the 2003 Legislative Council election, initially threw his hat into the ring but withdrew for reasons unclear to the Poll Bludger. Owens is the chief executive of the Association of Independent Record Labels, a worthy enough lobby group but one hardly likely to strike terror into the heart of the governing establishment. Her electoral apprenticeship was served with the thankless job of Labor candidate for North Sydney at the 1996 and 1998 federal elections, at which she predictably failed to cause Joe Hockey any trouble.