Kororoit

Margin: Labor 17.5%
Region: Western Metropolitan
Federal: Gorton

Candidates in ballot paper order

	MARGARET GIUDICE Independent PHILIP HILL Greens GORAN KESIC Liberal (bottom) SHASHI TURNER Voice for the West MARLENE KAIROUZ Labor (top)

Kororoit covers Labor-voting suburbs at Melbourne’s north-western edge about 20 kilometres from the city centre, from Cairnlea and Kings Park west to newly developed Caroline Springs and semi-rural territory beyond. The eastern end of the electorate contains a large Vietnamese community, giving way further west to newer developments around Caroline Springs, which are higher income, less ethnically diverse and dominated by young families, but nonetheless still strong for Labor. It has undergone substantial change in the redistribution, which adds 9,500 voters in Derrimut, Cairnlea, and eastern Deer Park, formerly in abolished Derrimut, together with 1300 voters beyond the metropolitan fringe from Melton. To the north-east, 11,700 voters at St Albans have been lost to the new electorate of that name. The combined effect of the changes is to shave 1.1% from the Labor margin.

The electorate was created at the 2002 election from territory that had formerly been in abolished Sunshine and redrawn Melton and Keilor. Its inaugural member was Andre Haermeyer, who had previously held the electorally dicey seat of Yan Yean on Melbourne’s northern fringe. Haermeyer won preselection for the seat ahead of Tim Pallas, then Steve Bracks’ chief-of-staff and now the member for Tarneit. After serving in cabinet from the election of the Bracks government in 1999 until his demotion after the 2006 election, Haermeyer resigned from parliament in May 2008, initiating a by-election held the following June 28.

The resulting preselection was described by Rick Wallace of The Australian as a “proxy war” within the Right between the Bill Shorten-Stephen Conroy forces, who backed former Brimbank mayor Natalie Suleyman, and an alliance of the Health Services Union and Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, which favoured former Darebin mayor Marlene Kairouz. The latter group succeeded in having the Right’s executive resolved to have Kairouz installed as candidate by the party’s national executive, but Shorten and Conroy were then able to have the decision overturned by the national executive, ensuring a normal preselection process with votes split between local branches and the state party’s Public Office Selection Committee. However, Kairouz pulled off a surprise 125-123 vote win in the local ballot, and went on to prevail in the POSC vote by 38 votes to 29.

Kairouz then faced opposition at the by-election from independent candidate Les Twentyman, who had achieved a level of celebrity throughout Melbourne through his efforts as a social worker, and was named Victorian of the Year in 2006. Twentyman’s campaign won support from the Electrical Trades Union and Phil Cleary, who held the Bob Hawke’s hold federal seat of Wills as an independent from 1992 to 1996. Kairouz nonetheless enjoyed a fairly comfortable victory with 48.5% of the primary vote, and went wholly untroubled at the 2010 election despite a 7.0% two-party swing to the Liberals.