Electorate: Ramsay

Margin: Labor 17.8%
Region: Northern Suburbs
Federal: Port Adelaide/Wakefield
Click here for electoral boundaries map

The candidates

Held until recently by Mike Rann, the extremely safe Labor seat of Ramsay covers a block of suburbs in central northern Adelaide dominated by Salisbury, from which it extends southwards to Parafield Gardens. The redistribution has effected only one minor change, adding 550 voters in a part of Parafield Gardens from Port Adelaide. The electorate was created as Salisbury at the time of the electoral reform of 1970, the name change occurring in 1985. Mike Rann was the second successive Labor Premier to represent the seat, Lynn Arnold having held first Salisbury and then Ramsay from 1979 to 1993. With the redistribution before the 1993 election, Arnold moved to the new seat of Taylor, and Rann moved to Ramsay from the abolished seat of Briggs.

When the factionally unaligned Rann eventually agreed to relinquish the premiership and quit politics in October 2011, a factional arrangement delivered Ramsay to the Right on the understanding that the southern Adelaide seat of Kaurna, which is being vacated at the election by the retirement of John Hill, would go to the Left. The Ramsay preselection duly went to Zoe Bettison, the state director of Labor-linked lobbying firm Hawker Britton and a former secretary of the ALP’s Northern Territory branch, who had emerged through the Right faction Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association. Bettison went untroubled at the by-election in the absence of a Liberal candidate, recording 54.6% of the primary vote (down 3.3% from the 2010 election) and prevailing over an independent candidate by a 16.7% margin after preferences.

Liberal candidate Anthony Antoniadis went to ground early in the campaign following the emergence of Facebook posts in which he made unflattering reflections on residents in the area he aspires to represent. The comments generally related to his experiences as manager of a news agency at the Parabanks Shopping Centre, a typical example reading: “Welcome to Salisbury. A mother speaking to her 6-year-old son: ‘Get out of my f*@%ing way and sit down. I want to play Keno.’”

All post-redistribution margins are as calculated by Jenni Newton-Farrelly of the South Australian Parliamentary Library. Corrections, complaints and feedback to William Bowe at pollbludger-at-bigpond-dot-com. Read William’s blog, The Poll Bludger.

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