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Have A Seat: Cook

As support for the Howard Government crumbles in his home state of New South Wales, a bitter factional preselection in the safe seat of Cook is going to ensure a bigger swing against the Liberal Party than the more marginal seats.

There’s the retiring member, Bruce Baird, who carried more clout than the usual backbencher. The former state minister for Transport was due for a frontbench position, but the Costello-backing moderate wasn’t John Howard’s cup of tea.

Despite this, Howard dispatched lapdog/attack dog Bill Heffernan to throw weight behind the more moderate candidates vying for Baird’s seat. Despite the influence of some Liberal heavyweights, right-winger Michael Towke came out with the most votes. Baird was reportedly furious with the outcome.

Michael Towke proves to be a rather divisive character, shunning the idea of party unity by taking his opponents to court during the preselection. Towke changed his name from the less Anglo-Saxon sounding Taouk two months ago. Perhaps a rather cynical attempt to woo the voters of Cronulla, in the centre of the seat?

But the bad blood in Cook is hardly fresh. When Baird was endorsed in 1998, it was at the expense of the right’s Stephen Mutch. To many, the seat was simply being taken back.

Still, it is an inconvenient time for the Libs to have preselection fights. A dispute like this puts the party and the candidate in a bad light, and throws what would otherwise be a safe seat into question.

A New South Wales Landslide

New South Wales has typically been Labor’s strongest state, but it is no more apparent than in the latest Newspoll, which puts the ALP’s Two-Party-Preferred poll for New South Wales at 61%. All other states are rated in the fifties, Victoria on 58 and Western Australia on 50.

With a TPP result like that in the election, the bounty from New South Wales would be enough to put Labor in power, even if all other states remained static. Howard, Turnbull, Abbott, Ruddock and Hockey would all lose their seats. The Liberal Party would be left with four seats, Sydney’s Northern Suburbs seats of McKellar (Bronwyn Bishop), Bradfield (Brendan Nelson) and Mitchell (Alex Hawke), as well as the Murray-Darling seat of Farrer (Sussan Ley).

Have a Seat: Brand

At the moment, the ALP can expect to win a swag of seats in Queensland and South Australia, and pick up a bunch in the South-Eastern states. But they can also expect to lose seats in Western Australia, the only state where the Coalition is still ahead in the polls.

The wafer-thin seats of Swan and Cowan will switch back to the Liberals with little else but a hiccup, but the seat that the ALP cannot afford to ignore is that of Brand.

Brand has been held by Labor since 1984, first by Wendy Fatin, and by Kim Beazley since 1996. Beazley shifted electorates from Swan when the margins were a little too uncomfortable for the then Deputy Prime Minister. Swan is now being held by the ALP by 104 votes, the first to switch if Labor can’t improve polling in WA.

Brand has a margin of 4.7%, but as an Opposition Leader for most of the last decade, Beazley is expected to have a considerable personal vote. His retirement could only send the seat the way of the Liberal Party’s Phil Edman, who had a 15% swing his direction with the 2004 primary vote.

Labor has endorsed former ALP secretary Gary Gray in the seat, who was the centre of Paul Keating’s now infamous attack on Lateline. Perhaps revenge for Gray nicknaming him ‘Captain Wacky’.

Coupled with the disaster that was the Brian Burke scandal, Labor will suffer in Western Australia, and their hold on Brand is particularly tenuous.

Portlandbet's Gamble

Bookmaker Portlandbet is offering seat by seat election betting, and the figures are interesting. Bookmakers always tend to play it safe with predictions on the elections, and thus are taken more seriously by most political commentators than polling results. This habit is especially true this year, as the ALP's constantly high polls are too positive to be taken with anything but a grain of salt. Or a fistful of salt, in Portlandbet's case.

Portlandbet is predicting a Coalition victory with a six-seat buffer from Labor. It's incredibly cautious, considering that the latest Morgan poll would see the ALP sweep in with 117 seats.

At the moment, Portlandbet are looking to lose more than the Coalition.

How The ALP Can Save Face Over Aboriginal Affairs

The ALP has trumped nearly everything that the Coalition has put on the table this year, from broadband to climate change to IR. What’s more, they’ve done it before the Coalition, so that they always seem ahead of the game. This week’s new policy on Indigenous Affairs is bold and volatile, and while it’s also being considered to being a clever wedge tactic, just like 2001’s Tampa, it is politically smart for a simpler reason. It puts the Government back on the front foot.

With no new Indigenous Affairs policies to show, the ALP has made the wise but reactive response to support the measures. This will ensure that their vote won’t plummet like it did in 2001, but some of the soft polling numbers will drift back to Howard over this bold new strategy.

For Rudd and the team to get back on the offensive, they need to be arguing vehemently that the Government offer appropriate services in the NT Aboriginal communities to deal with alcohol addiction. They need to say something like that it will ensure that the vacuum of time and money from the forcibly sober won’t be wasted on drugs, or on going to the white towns to drink. This needs to be done before the Coalition cough up the details of their plans. It will make the ALP out to be not only more compassionate, but also more stable. To work with the compassion angle, they shouldn’t talk about rehab as an election promise, but to lobby the Government to make sure that they happen.

And if NT Chief Minister wants to take one for the team, she should continue to complain about how she wasn’t told about the plans until they were announced to the public. It will paint the Coalition as being brash and impulsive, and reinforce Rudd’s image as being a safe pair of hands.

The ALP should pray that Noel Pearson keeps quiet for a good few news cycles, though it isn’t likely. If the most respected advocate for Aboriginal rights comes out in verbal support of the Government, it will undermine Labor’s position as being the best party to deal with Aboriginal affairs.

Even with this damage control, Labor will take a hit in the polls, but it will soften the blow considerably.