Woodridge

Margin: Labor 5.8%
Region: Logan City
Federal: Rankin
Outgoing member: Desley Scott (Labor)

Candidates in ballot paper order

	TREVOR PALMER Independent CAMERON DICK Labor (top) DAVE BEARD Independent STEVE VILIAMU Liberal National (bottom) SCOTT THOMSON Greens

The outer southern Brisbane seat of Woodridge was among the seven seats Labor managed to retain in 2012, having gone into the election as the party’s safest seat with a margin of 25.4%, and come out of it as its second safest with a margin of 5.8%. The electorate extends from Logan Central northwards to the South East Freeway and Underwood, and southwards across Logan Motorway to Crestmead. Its demographic distinctions include the state’s largest concentration of one-parent families, second highest proportion of Muslims, equal second youngest median age, fourth highest proportion of public housing dwellings and largest share of the workforce employed in labouring.

Woodridge has existed as an electorate in some form since 1977, but the 1986 redistribution substantially altered it by excising its semi-rural areas. The Labor member throughout this period was Bill D’Arcy, who was forced to retire in 1999 to fight child sex charges for which he was later imprisoned. D’Arcy was succeeded by state party secretary Mike Kaiser, who in turn resigned in 2001 after his vote rorting activities were exposed at the Shepherdson inquiry. This did not cause any noticeable electoral damage to his successor, Desley Scott, who went on to enjoy the biggest margin of any Labor member at both the 2006 and 2009 elections.

With Scott to retire at the coming election, Woodridge has a high-profile new Labor candidate in Cameron Dick, who held the seat of Greenslopes from 2009 until he joined the casualty list in 2012. A member of the Labor Forum/AWU faction, Dick was immediately elevated to cabinet as Attorney-General and Industrial Relations Minister, exchanging the former portfolio for education in February 2011. Prior to entering parliament he had been a barrister and ministerial staffer to Beattie government Tourism Minister Merri Rose, and had an earlier brush with government when he served for a year in the mid-1990s as acting Attorney-General in the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. He is now seeking a return to parliament via a safer seat in pursuit of ambitions generally recognised as extending to the party leadership.

Corrections, complaints and feedback to William Bowe at pollbludger-at-bigpond-dot-com. Read William’s blog, The Poll Bludger.

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