Marginal Seats

Apart from where to get a good pie in Braidwood, how to woo a room full of pensioners if you look like you’re 14 years old, and that tropical diseases are an issue for voters in FNQ – the Punch’s five-week adventure through some of the campaign’s most hotly contested seats has thrown up some consistent themes.

The ten Labor-held seats the Punch spent time in during this election campaign weren’t necessarily the most marginal. We just thought they were the most interesting.

Factors that decide what happens in seats like the following are many. But troublingly for the Coalition, the one thing we found almost everywhere was a niggling sense among voters Tony Abbott is just not how they imagined the Prime Minister.

Continue reading "The seats: what The Punch learned on the campaign trail" »

Life on the hustings in a highly marginal seat can be a surreal experience. One minute you’re part of a forum with the other candidates and 26 locals in an airless room at the local RSL – the next the Prime Minister or Opposition Leader has swooped into town, press pack in tow, to say your name out aloud three times and gaze in wonderment at some sort of machinery.

Then they’re off again, leaving just a whiff of jet fuel and funding for a new convention centre behind them, and it’s back to shaking every hand you can and hunting down people prepared to wear T-shirts with your slogan on them.

The journos on the Julia Gillard plane have touched down at the RAAF base in Townsville in Far North Queensland so many times this election campaign they’ve started referring to the electorate of Herbert as simply “Herb”.

Continue reading "Hunting the elusive Rudd factor in Herbert" »

The battle of Longman is being fought by a grumpy old bearded man who appears irritated by everything, and a ridiculously younger man – 39 years younger to be precise - who looks so juvenile that he might celebrate his victory by getting his Ps or buying a six-pack with a fake ID.

Longman is held by a couple of thousand votes by Labor’s Jon Sullivan, 59, a veteran politician who spent nine years in state politics before knocking off former Aboriginal Affairs Minister Mal Brough in the 2007 Queensland Ruddslide.

Sullivan faces the galling and very real prospect of losing this 1.9 per cent marginal seat to 20-year-old Wyatt Roy, a baby-faced political assassin who has the frame of a jockey, who only recently finished his HSC, and was working on Mum and Dad’s strawberry farm until winning preselection for Queensland’s rebranded Liberal-National Party.

Continue reading "Doogie Howser and Captain Cranky punch on in paradise" »

You know Labor is in trouble if people like Clare Mattern have their doubts. Clare has two jobs – one in a skateboarding streetwear store in Launceston – is undecided about her vote, and thinks the Prime Minister shouldn’t have declared herself an atheist.

“I work in a Catholic primary school so I know what a big deal [religion] is to a lot of people,” she said. The assessment of Abbott started similarly cynically: “He seems like a funny personality,” she said, but added: “I don’t know if you call it just being normal and human. But I’m not keen on hearing [Gillard] at all… I thought Kevin Rudd would have done a better job.”

Bagging the guvmint is a national pastime, but it should set the bomb sirens wailing in the Labor party when a Metallica-loving twenty-something lists the Prime Minister’s atheism as a political negative, thinks Kevin Rudd should be leading the party, and then says Tony Abbott seems like a knockabout bloke.

Continue reading "Bass, where the lesson of history is to ignore it" »

Signs in the window of an adventure tours store on Scotchmer Street in North Fitzroy urge passersby to do two things: climb Mount Everest, and put a member of the Greens in the House of Representatives.

In most electorates these tasks would be of roughly equal difficulty. But not here in the federal seat of Melbourne, where Greens candidate Adam Bandt is the firm bookies’ favourite to win on August 21. With a well-organised campaign and an established electorate profile, Bandt’s challenge looks less like climbing a mountain and more like a sprint down Swanston Street.

“Make history Melbourne” is the campaign slogan, with the general buzz being about making Bandt the first Green elected to the House of Representatives – which would be truly historic, except that it rests on the following qualifying technicality. He would only be the first Green to win in a general election.

Continue reading "Looking for history-makers on Melbourne’s Green streets" »

The seat of Eden Monaro displays freakish predictive powers that make Paul the Octopus look like your average drunken cephalopod punter.

Since the 1972 election Eden Monaro - which takes in a huge slice of south-east NSW – has been won by the party that went on to win Government. It has become a truism of federal politics that Eden-Monaro is the bellwether seat.

But more interesting is what it is about the people of this seat that gives rise to this odd phenomenon?

Continue reading "Searching for salvation in the garden of Eden-Monaro" »

One day last week Climate Change Minister Penny Wong found herself in a rather awkward position during a visit to the highly marginal seat of Robertson on the NSW Central Coast.

The minister made a whirlwind stop at a Million Women lunch at the Gosford RSL where she found herself on the top table, two seats from deposed ALP MP Belinda Neal.

The new ALP candidate, Deb O’Neill, was relegated to another table, out of the reflected glow of the visiting Cabinet inhabitant. Thus is the excellent weirdness of Robertson, one of the most hotly contested seats in the country come August 21.

Continue reading "Here’s to the battle between Mr and Mrs Robertson" »