The Poll Bludger

Regular reader and one-time Labor candidate for Sturt Phil Robins got rather carried away recently when dropping a line to point out a factual error in the federal election guide entry for the Adelaide seat of Boothby. In so doing he constructed a commendably thorough outline of the electorate’s history that deserves better than to rot in the Poll Bludger’s inbox forever.

Labor’s Egerton Lee Batchelor was elected the first member for Boothby in 1903. Batchelor had been the only Labor MHR elected in South Australia in the nation’s first federal election in 1901, when the whole state was one multi-member electorate. Before entering federal politics, Batchelor, a former railway engineer, had established his reputation as Minister of Education and Minister of Agriculture in the Holder government from December 1899 to 15 May 1901. The Labor Party supported his serving in that Liberal government so that the public could see that a Labor man could do the job. In 1903 Batchelor was offered the safe Labor seat of Hindmarsh but in the interests of the party opted for the riskier seat of Boothby, where he polled 55 per cent to defeat former premier and fellow foundation MHR Vaiben Solomon. In 1904, Prime Minister John Christian (Chris) Watson selected Batchelor as Minister for Home Affairs in the world’s first national Labor government. Batchelor was unopposed in Boothby in 1906 and served as Minister for External Affairs in the Fisher Labor government from 1908-10. He was easily re-elected in 1910 but died suddenly in 1911 and Boothby fell to the Liberals in a by-election that year.

Another Labor man, the German-born butcher George Dankel, won Boothby back in 1913 and retained it in 1914 but naturally, given his heritage, did not contest the wartime election of 1917, when the seat fell to the Nationalists.

Labor’s next victory in Boothby was in 1928 when the stone-mason John Lloyd Price scraped home by 84 votes. He boosted his margin in 1929 but then got caught up in the big Labor split over how to deal with the Great Depression. He joined the Independent Australia Party and held Boothby in 1931 as a candidate for the anti-Labor Emergency Committee. He was re-elected under the Liberal and Country League banner in 1934 and 1937 and as a United Australia Party member in 1940, dying in office in 1941.

Sir Archibald Price (no relation to J.L.Price) won the 1941 Boothby by-election for the UAP but was turfed out by Labor’s Tom Sheehy in the general election of 1943. Sheehy, a building contractor, trailed on primary votes but got over the line largely on the preferences of the popular Communist candidate, Dr Alan Finger. Sheehy improved his winning margin in 1946 but apparently did not like the subsequent redistribution and switched to the new seat of Kingston, which he lost narrowly in 1949. The Liberals won Boothby in 1949 and have not been seriously challenged there ever since.

A recent burst of speculation surrounding a September 18 poll has prompted a revision to the Poll Bludger’s federal election calendar, which had given the date short shrift on the grounds that it coincides with school holidays in three states. However strong performances for the Coalition in Tuesday’s Newspoll (up 2 per cent to 45, with Labor steady on 40) and last Friday’s Roy Morgan poll (Labor down 4 per cent to 42 but the Coalition somehow stuck on 41.5) prompted excited talk that the Prime Minister would call an election at the earliest opportunity after the current session of parliament. This time though speculators had the sense to qualify their comments thus: "Federal Parliament resumes on Tuesday and Mr Howard will use the fortnight of sittings to put the political blowtorch to Mr Latham and then weigh up whether to call an election for September 18" (Phillip Hudson in The Age), and "the Prime Minister will use these two weeks of Parliament to assess whether to call an election at their conclusion – for September 18" (Louise Dodson in the Sydney Morning Herald).

At the end of the first week of the parliamentary session, the Government has worked itself into a surprising muddle through its rejection of Labor’s proposed Free Trade Agreement legislation amendment concerning pharmaceuticals patents, which it went from describing as merely unnecessary on Tuesday to disastrous on Wednesday. While the Government had calculated that a take-it-or-leave-it approach would prompt a Labor backdown reinforcing perceptions of the party as vacillating and anti-American, the effect has been to give oxygen to the Opposition Leader’s effective soundbites about cheap drugs played off against the Government’s arcane technicalities about patent law. Dennis Shanahan of The Australian, the only journalist to debunk the August 7 hypothesis well in advance and a man renowned for the quality of his Coalition sources, concluded yesterday that "as each day passes with drugs on the agenda, the likelihood of a September 18 election recedes".

Recognising its difficulty the Government is reportedly working towards a compromise measure that will clear the issue from the headlines at the cost of a short-term political victory for the Opposition. A week being a long time in politics, the Prime Minister may still be keeping open the option of a September 18 election announced next weekend, but the more likely scenario is another session of parliament from August 30 to September 9 followed by the announcement of an election for October 16, 23 or 30.

The Poll Bludger will be lying low for the following week – he trusts the Prime Minister will do the right thing and not call an election in his absence. Until then, all you opinion poll fans out there can play a game of compare and contrast with the headlines accompanying this effort from The Advertiser and this one from the Herald Sun.

A noted feature of recent opinion polling has been a continuing softening of support for Mark Latham among those old enough to know better. Last week’s ACNielsen poll showed Labor’s vote slumping from 41 to 33 per cent among the over-55s in the space of one month, and while this is from a sample too small to take entirely seriously, it backs up a trend indicated in the Newspoll’s recent geographic and demographic analysis survey which showed support for the Coalition among voters aged 50 and over increasing in the second quarter by 2 per cent directly at Labor’s expense.

Latham’s brash and somewhat erratic political style is no doubt one reason for this, as is his explicit identification with Gough Whitlam, something Bob Hawke went out of his way to avoid as he strung together Labor’s rare succession of victories in the 1980s. A new generation of young voters galvanised by opposition to the Iraq war might well be up for a bit of spirit of 1972, but the upper age brackets contain those who remember what happened afterwards. They delivered massive victories to the Coalition in 1975 and 1977 and haven’t changed their minds since. Another factor worth noting is the Federal Government’s delightful Medicare advertisements which have warmed hearts the nation over to the tune of $11 million. It has been widely reported that Labor is exasperated by the campaign’s effectiveness and a swing to the Coalition among older voters is a logical symptom of this.

A saving grace for Labor in this respect is that the crucial seats the Coalition holds by margins of less than 6 per cent tend to have a younger demographic profile. Compared with a national average of 13.9 per cent of the population aged 65 and over, the list contains a large number of outer urban seats where young families dominate such as Canning (WA, held for the Liberals by 0.4 per cent) on 9.2 per cent, Dickson (Queensland, 6 per cent) on 6.4 per cent, La Trobe (Victoria, 3.7 per cent) on 8.9 per cent, Lindsay (New South Wales, 5.5 per cent) on 7.3 per cent and Makin (South Australia, 3.8 per cent) on 9.9 per cent. Also weighing down the average are Solomon (Northern Territory, 0.1 per cent) on 5.2 per cent and Kalgoorlie (Western Australia, 4.4 per cent) on 7.7 per cent, where people are lucky to make it to adulthood, never mind old age. For the most part though, these seats are in mortgage belt territory and have been carefully targeted by the Government’s pre-election largesse.

One problem area for Labor is on the New South Wales north coast where residents of retirement villages make up an ever growing proportion of the voting pool. Among these are Paterson (a 1.5 per cent margin, with 16.9 per cent of the population over 65), Page (2.8 per cent and 16.3 per cent) and Cowper (4.8 per cent and 17.8 per cent). The Coalition will also be heartened by the knowledge that the nation’s oldest electorate is the important Adelaide marginal of Hindmarsh (1.1 per cent and 20.2 per cent).

Because the Poll Bludger does not like to wade out of his depth, the obvious electoral law issues raised by the Seven Sunrise program’s "Vote for Me" contest were not canvassed in this earlier posting. Graham Orr, senior lecturer in Law at Griffith University, has kindly offered the following thoughts.

The show may implicate electoral bribery rules. Section 326 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act says: "A person shall not … receive … or agree to … receive, any property or benefit of any kind … on an understanding that any candidature [of that] person … will in any manner be influenced or affected". There’s a mirror offence for offering or paying such a benefit.

The AEC has chosen not to look into this closely as a criminal issue, and the parties have backed off, for fear of sounding like party-poopers. But if one of the ‘Pollstars’ were elected, gloves might be off. And on an election petition, bribery does not have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, but if proven, it leads to automatic unseating.

Of course as regards Hetty Johnston, there’s a clear defence in that she was already pledged to stand, as you point out. Other candidates might be viewed differently.

Seven’s lawyers have been only half-clever. The ‘rules’, which form a virtual contract between Seven and the applicants, state: "Each State Finalist who successfully nominates … will be provided with the following reasonable costs of participating in Stage Three: … a donation of $10 000 (inclusive of GST) towards campaign expenses’".

They’ve sought to legally portray the payment as just another campaign donation to a candidate, rather than an incentive to induce a candidature. To be on safer ground Seven should have made payment only by way of reimbursement for actual campaign expenses. All it would take is one candid contestant to say: ‘A key reason I stood was the $10 000 offered’. Backed up by proof that some of the money was not spent on campaigning but pocketed, and Seven might be in trouble with section 326.

The broader question is why Seven is inducing candidates in the first place – for fun? ratings?? because they are such good corporate democrats???

A couple of entries in the federal election guide have needed substantial revisions recently, the obvious example being the Liberal vacancy created in the Melbourne seat of Goldstein by the retirement of David Kemp. The names of former federal director Andrew Robb and former state president Michael Kroger were immediately floated, but Kroger has allowed it to be added to the long list of opprtunities he has knocked back owing to business and family interests. The formalities are still in progress but it appears likely that Robb will emerge uncontested when nominations close on Friday.

Robb had long been spoken of in relation to safe seats in New South Wales, his home for the past two decades, but he originally hails from Victoria where he was raised in a large working-class Catholic family that supported the Democratic Labor Party. Like Peter Costello, Robb moved in influential New Right circles after establishing himself in student politics, leading a crusade against the campus left’s dominance of the La Trobe University student council. Robb moved into a job at the newly established and soon-to-be hugely influential National Farmers Federation, becoming executive director in 1985. At around that time the NFF was creating industrial relations history by bank-rolling the Mudginberri abattoir and Dollar Sweets during their landmark legal actions against militant unions.

After leaving the NFF in 1988 Robb worked on the Liberal secretariat, as chief-of-staff to Andrew Peacock leading into the 1990 election, and then as federal party director. The 1990 and 1993 elections didn’t do his reputation many favours but most laid the blame elsewhere. In 1994 however many in the party held him responsible for a leak of party polling with which Kerry O’Brien was able to embarrass John Hewson during an appearance on the 7:30 Report, which led directly to Hewson’s demise as leader. In her book on the 1996 federal election campaign, The Victory, Pamela Williams recounted that when John Howard assumed the Liberal leadership in 1995 he had to be talked out of dumping him (by, among others, Michael Kroger, who "declared that he would bet his life on Robb’s trustworthiness"). The 1996 election result was seen to vindicate all concerned and Robb moved on, launching Conservatives for an Australian Head of State before the 1999 republic referendum and a business career that proved rather more successful, setting up the direct marketing company Acxiom for Kerry Packer.

Robb’s predecessor and mentor at the National Farmers Federation was Ian McLachlan, who would go on to federal politics as the Liberal member for the South Australian seat of Barker, which brings us in a roundabout way to the other federal election guide entry overtaken by recent events. Since McLachlan’s retirement in 1998 Barker has been held by Patrick Secker, who won preselection that year as the favoured candidate of Senator Nick Minchin’s Right faction. Despite holding his seat with a 17 per cent margin, Secker has had a number of occasions in the past year to think that his career might be in jeopardy. Like many South Australian electorates Barker was substantially remodelled in the redistribution that cost the state one of its 12 existing seats, extending north to take the Murray Valley/Riverland from Wakefield which now provides it with about a third of its voters. This area was the electoral heartland of Wakefield MP and House of Representatives Speaker Neil Andrew, who felt that Barker rather than the now unrecognisable semi-urban seat of Wakefield was his natural territory. Andrew averted a brawl by instead opting to retire, but Secker’s widespread reputation as a non-achiever had others in the party thinking they could do better. Crikey nominated three party figures (Ashley Jared, Draz Baric and Nick McBride) as having their eyes on the seat, but the Prime Minister’s insistence that sitting members not be challenged was apparently enough to dissuade them.

Then came widespread reports that the only National Party MP in the state parliament, Karlene Maywald, was planning to take a challenge to Secker directly to the voters after having toyed with nominating for Liberal preselection. Maywald’s popularity locally was indicated by her success in winning a seat as a Nationals candidate in a state where the party’s base is almost non-existent (their candidate for Barker in 1998 polled 2.2 per cent). As talk of her candidacy gained momentum, Secker made the courageous decision to stand by a recommendation of a parliamentary committee on which he sat that would have deprived South Australia of 500 gigalitres of Murray River flows. This provoked a sharp response from South Australian Liberals up to and including Alexander Downer – and, less surprisingly, from Karlene Maywald. In June 2004 Secker belatedly changed his mind.

All the elements for a fascinating contest were in place, but Maywald’s ambitions were also proving of concern to a state Labor Government who had the gumption to do something about it. With the effectively independent Maywald having proved a fairly agreeable cross-bencher in the view of Mike Rann’s minority government, Labor did not want the Liberals recovering her seat of Chaffey at the by-election that would follow a move to federal parliament. Showing the craftiness that has characterised his government, Mike Rann offered Maywald a cabinet position as Minister for the River Murray, Regional Development, Small Business and Consumer Affairs (hiving the first of these off the Environment portfolio being an added twist of genius), which she duly accepted. Rann now sits at the head of South Australia’s first majority government since 1997, and Secker can again breathe easy.

At first the "Vote for Me" contest being conducted by Channel Seven’s Sunrise program seemed vaguely distasteful but too trivial to warrant comment. Contestants were required to submit a three-minute policy speech on VHS from which a panel of "political" equivalents of Mark, Marsha and Dicko were to select 18 finalists. One winner would be chosen for each state after a series of Idol-type public auditions and staged media appearances, to be rewarded with $10,000 on the understanding that they would go on to run for the Senate. Shannon Noll may have been able to top the pop charts with a cover of Moving Pictures’ What About Me, but surely the public weren’t silly enough to fall for this one, at least not in numbers sufficient to put Channel Seven candidates in contention for a Senate quota. The impact seemed likely to be further subdued by the fact that these would be "ungrouped" candidates for whom voters could not place a single number above the line, thereby providing wholesale transfusions of preferences to whichever parties or candidates they happened to strike a deal with (as discussed by Antony Green yesterday on ABC Radio’s PM program).

However, all of that changed this week with the news that a high-profile independent who was already campaigning and already a chance of winning a seat in her own right had been nominated as one of the three Queensland finalists. Hetty Johnston is a former Cheryl Kernot staffer and one-time Australian Democrats candidate who came to national fame as the zealous child sex abuse victim advocate who pursued former Governor-General Peter Hollingworth over his failure to act over abuse in church institutions during his time as Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane. During her crusade Johnston showed a conviction that the rightness of her cause justified her in levelling shocking charges against public figures on the basis of easily discredited evidence, specifically when she helped publicise flimsy rape allegations against Hollingworth. It does not require too much of an imagination to think what an MP with such a record might produce with the protection of parliamentary privilege.

With the decline of One Nation, Queensland has a substantial population of voters who remain cynical about the political process and susceptible to conspiracy theories about rogues in high places, particularly if those promoting them receive enough exposure on television. Even if Johnston does not succeed she will dramatically affect the dynamics of the Queensland Senate election, as she unlike her other competition hopefuls is almost certain to run at the head of a multiple candidate grouped ticket with an above-the-line voting option. With Labor, Liberal, the Nationals, the Greens and the Democrats all manoeuvring for the state’s final two Senate seats, all will be sorely tempted by the prospect of getting a piece of the action through a preference deal. If she does succeed, the Senate will have a member in a crucial balance of power position who will face all sorts of questions about her partiality when voting on media legislation.

Contemporary readers have no doubt heard already, but for the benefit of future generations, let it be recorded here that polls released yesterday by Newspoll and ACNielsen produced similar results indicating a continuing drift away from Labor. The focus of the newspaper reporting is the failure of Kim Beazley’s return to the front bench to produce a Labor bounce, which seems fair enough for once. The stumble in Mark Latham’s approval rating suggests that any Beazley effect was cancelled out by disquiet over Latham’s emotional performance during the short-lived rumour frenzy two weekends ago, comparing unfavourably in the public mind with the Prime Minister’s steady hand and stiff upper lip (compare with the tone of earlier reports declaring "Emotional Latham plea wins support", as discussed in the post below). Both polls had Labor at 40 per cent (down 1 per cent in Newspoll, 2 per cent in ACNielsen) with the Coalition on 43 per cent by Newspoll’s reckoning and 45 per cent by ACNielsen’s. However ACNielsen somehow managed to conclude that Labor was on 52 per cent two-party preferred, the same result they produced with primary vote figures of 43 and 42 per cent in their last poll and 1 per cent higher than that recorded in Newspoll. Since ACNielsen’s result is at the extreme high end of the range recorded for the Coalition across all polls this year, Newspoll feels more accurate in any case.

This suggests a theoretically winnable position for the Coalition, who won comfortably with 43 per cent of the primary vote in 2001, but with One Nation no longer forming a substantial part of the minor party preference pool the Government has no reason to feel relaxed or comfortable about a primary vote in the low forties. The trend however is clearly moving in their direction, suggesting the Prime Minister did well to hold off from an August 7 election, and that those who rubbished him for doing so would do well to take care when querying his political judgement.

UPDATE (22/7/04): Thanks to reader David J. Lees for alerting me to ACNielsen’s belated realisation that the percentages for its poll added up to 101. The Coalition were in fact on 44 per cent (43.7 to be precise, as the Fairfax reporting unusually saw fit to reveal) rather than the published 45 per cent, which fits very nicely with a number of the above assertions.