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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.

Have a Seat: Mitchell

It’s going to be near impossible to tell what the safest Liberal seat after the election will be, but it certainly won’t be Mitchell. The North-West Sydney seat is the safest Liberal seat in New South Wales, and their safest urban seat in the whole of Australia. But the seat will have a swing to the ALP disproportionate to the rest of the country.

Alan Cadman is currently the second-longest serving member of the House, behind Phillip Ruddock and tying with John Howard. But while Ruddock has served as MP for both Parramatta and Berowra, Cadman has been in Mitchell for the length of his parliamentary career, dating back to 1974.

Redistributions since 1974 have made the seat safer and safer for the Liberals, but the last sitting member for Mitchell was the ALP’s Alf Ashley-Brown. A lot changes over thirty years, but it’s difficult to determine how much of a personal vote Cadman holds over the general electorate.

Presumably a lot more than among the Liberal Party branches. The incumbent found that he was so low on votes for the preselection that the only option was to retire to save face. In his place came 29-year-old Alex Hawke, protégé of right-wing powerbroker David Clarke, engineer of NSW Opposition Leader John Brogden’s downfall, and former president of the Young Liberals. Hawke is considered such a vicious right-winger that Howard sent Bill Heffernan to the seat to back a more moderate candidate. Howard’s old Chief of Staff Arthur Sinodinos and former Premier Nick Greiner also opposed Hawke’s preselection.

Considering how the resignation of Brogden seriously undermined the Liberal Party’s efforts in the New South Wales election, it’s hard to think that Hawke will be embraced by the electorate with open arms. Hawke claims to be a practicing Christian himself, but it’s hard to think that the dirty tricks he has been so rigorous involved in will appeal to Sydney’s Bible Belt, including Mitchell’s own Hillsong.

There’s no candidate for Labor in the seat yet, but if they had any brains they would endorse somebody nothing short of being honourable and decent. The Bible belt aren’t as rusted-on Liberals as Alex Hawke would hope, and while it is still highly unlikely that the Libs will lose this seat, they are due for a massive backlash.

Have a Seat: Gilmore

Any person working in advertising and marketing will tell you with confidence that nobody uses the expression ‘to the max’ any more. Correction: Not only will one person in advertising tell you that, but they will use it themselves when quoted in a newspaper. It brings down any confidence that the ALP candidate for Gilmore, Neil Reilly, is more in touch than the incumbent of eleven years, Joanna Gash.

In the front page story of the local paper, the South Coast Register, they talked about how Joanna Gash had put an anti-nuclear power petition on her website, and in the interests of balance, a pro-nuclear petition as well. Neil Reilly said she was “indecisive to the max”. Even the independent candidate quoted in the paper who changed his name by deed poll to ‘None of the Above’ sounded more credible.

Reilly also conceded in the article that Gash had her finger on the pulse and knew every pothole in her electorate.

His ALP biography page talks of Reilly’s history in the advertising industry, his two years in the army and his support for Meals on Wheels. It neglects to mention the long history he has in amateur acting, including a number of starring roles in the Arts Theatre in Cronulla. It’s all well and good to keep some things about a candidate quiet, but there’s not much point if the amateur theatre webpages found on Google outnumber all the others.

It would take an annihilation of today’s AC Nielsen poll’s proportions (57-43) to put Reilly into Gilmore, but with what seems to be a dud candidate, it might not be so.

Is this the best candidate the ALP can field in a seat occupied by Labor as recently as 1996?

The Downturn

It turns out that the Galaxy poll at the start of this month was more than just a statistical anomaly. The 53 to 47 two-party preferred result was the lowest Labor have had since the promotion of Golden Boy Kevin. Surely a glitch, an error. Perhaps the 1000 or so people called in the poll were all AWA-holding, 200-grand a year Western Australian miners? Newspoll’s 60-40? That’s more like it.

We were spoiled for Newspolls in May, and the fortnight or so that we’ve done without it has forced the newspapers to dwell on the results from Galaxy. And then one from Morgan. Were an election held today, Labor would still win, albeit narrowly, and despite losing seats in WA. But the results of this month have taken the wind out of their sails, and allowed Howard to avoid a suggested tap-on-the-shoulder, or from another perspective, allowed Costello to avoid a hospital pass.

Save for the Keating interview on Lateline, there hasn’t really been anything lately to bring Labor down in the polls. So why the bad results?

The only argument I can think of is that perhaps the ‘union bosses’ campaign of the Coalition is beginning to stick. It isn’t much of a valid concern. Kevin Rudd has less of an union affiliation than Paul Keating did. Much, much less than Hawke. When interviewed on Insiders during the ALP National Conference, a look of fear crossed Rudd’s face when questioned about his own union membership. The implication was that he was unsure about whether he was still a member of the union that he used to be a part of.

If Latham was unappealing because he was volatile, then Rudd may become unappealing because he is nice. The way Joe Hockey has been talking about union bosses implies that they would be far too brutish for little Kevin Rudd to handle. All of a sudden voters do mind that Rudd is calm, bookish and mild-mannered.

Polls from AC Nielsen and Newspoll will come out in the next few days. We’ll get a better impression on June’s results once we get a consensus from all the pollsters. In the next few weeks, Rudd and the unions need to have a dispute, and Rudd needs to come out triumphant.

A Comparison

I am yet to speak to somebody who finds Speaker of the House David Hawker fair. Sometimes I wonder if the Prime Minister could be hitting Anthony Albanese over the head with a golf club, and still be considered to be in order. Below is a YouTube clip of Albanese trying to raise a point of order, and being denied. Regrettably the entire incident, which took place two weeks ago, wasn't there.



And here's a comparison with the Speaker in 1995, Stephen Martin, who puts up with being told he 'ought to be ashamed of himself' by the then Opposition Leader.

Have a Seat: Adelaide

Being a backbencher immediately behind the lectern is not dissimilar to being in the front row at the Oscars. You must always appear to be paying attention to the person speaking, rather than catching up with reading, correspondence or heckling, as most backbenchers do. This is because you are practically always on camera. And while the front row at the Academy Awards is usually filled with the best known and regarded people in the industry, the lectern-adjacent backbench position seems to be reserved for those most in need of public attention.

There are four ALP members in direct camera view during Parliamentary Question Time, and all are in very marginal seats. All the candidates defeated sitting Coalition members in 2004, despite the Mark Latham factor, and all hold their seats with less than 1.5%. Julie Owens defeated the disgraced Ross Cameron in the seat of Parramatta, but a redistribution has made the seat notionally Liberal, with Owens needing a swing of 1.1% to retain it. Steve Georganas won on preferences in the Adelaide seat of Hindmarsh by only 108 votes, while Richmond’s Justine Elliot beat Doug Anthony in the NSW North Coast seat by a margin of 1.5%.

Pride of place in the lectern-adjacent backbench is given to Kate Ellis, from the 1.3% marginal seat of Adelaide. Ellis is the youngest member of the House of Representatives, and according to a report by Andrew Leigh and Amy King, is the best looking ALP member in the caucus.

And while the current polls are indicating that none of the lecture-adjacent backbenchers on the ALP side have anything to worry about, it certainly doesn’t hurt to imply on the television news that three-quarters of Labor backbenchers are women. In truth, the figure is only 36.6%.

The marginal seat tactic isn’t used on the Coalition side, and for good reason. There are no marginal seats on the Coalition side that are currently held by women, save for two from retiring MPs Trish Draper and Jackie Kelly. Instead, the seats are three-quarters filled by women candidates. After the promotion of Christopher Pyne several months ago, the positions have been filled by Sussan Ley, from the ultra-safe seat of Farrer, Louise Markus, whose seat’s recent redistribution gave her an extra 10.4% buffer, Teresa Gamboro, from the safe-ish North Brisbane seat of Petrie, and the sole male in the pack, Kym Richardson, from the ultra-marginal seat of Kingston.

Ultimately, it seems that the Coalition value the appearance of gender balance more than they do promoting their marginal members. Women in the Coalition in the House of Representatives make up only 19.5% of the total, not a good statistic for the party that got in last time round because of the female vote. But Kevin Rudd has greater appeal to women than Mark Latham, and it is reflecting in the polls. Women making up three-quarters of the Coalition’s lectern-adjacent backbench is a wise statistic, but it doesn’t help that those three backbenchers outnumber the women in cabinet.

Correction

It turns out that the Socialist Alliance candidates I listed were the candidates from the 2004 election. That pretty much undermines my argument.

What on Earth is holding up Liberal Party preselections?

ALP preselections have been all but completed, with only the safest Liberal seats as yet unfilled. Union bigwigs in the safe seats and atop the Senate tickets, celebrity candidates in the marginal and not so marginal Liberal seats and high profile ALP movers and shakers left unallocated because of the sheer amount of talent wanting to join the Labor juggernaut. Frontbench material (Combet in Charlton and Shorten in Maribyrnong) has been parachuted into the blue collar seats and famous distractions (Bailey in North Sydney, McKew in Bennelong) dropped into the blue ribbon seats. Not that Bennelong is as blue ribbon as it used to be.

But there’s 63 seats up for grabs for the Coalition, and though they would be lucky to win any of them (save for the vacant and completely redistributed Calare), they have only endorsed 15 candidates in seats that they don’t already occupy. These positions belong to the ultra-marginal Labor seats, especially in Western Australia, where the Coalition is still ahead in the polls.

But nobody’s been endorsed in ALP frontbench seats like Griffith, Lalor and Lilley. It seems that the Coalition isn’t even going to try to distract the Rudd dream team from their nationwide duties.

Meanwhile, the Socialist Alliance has endorsed candidates for 25 seats across the country already. Sure, none of the candidates stand any chance at all, but if one of the smallest political parties in the country can preselect 25 candidates (not including their Senate hopefuls), then why can’t the biggest?

On a brief note, Socialist Alliance’s top-of-the-ticket Senate candidate Ray Hayes, who scored a total of 536 votes in 2004, looks nothing short of homeless in the photo on the party’s website.

The Attack Dog

As far as the Liberal Party is concerned, Bill Heffernan is a necessary evil.

He has no major following of constituents, no portfolio to attend to, and doesn’t have to worry about re-election to the Senate until 2010. What’s more, his connections in the NSW Liberal Party, including a close friendship with John Howard, will ensure that he’ll get in on the top of the NSW Senate ticket. And no matter how unpopular a major party is, the person on top of each state’s Senate ticket gets elected.

With his place secure, Bill Heffernan has nothing to do but political dirty work. With Barnaby Joyce stalling on the sale of Telstra last year, it was Heffernan who brought him back into line, no doubt at the suggestion of the Prime Minister. But with the need for an united front this election year, Howard’s beloved attack dog has decided to focus his aggression on the other side of the Parliamentary chamber, specifically, Julia Gillard.

So in an interview with PBL’s The Bulletin, nominally about agriculture in the Top End, Senator Heffernan made a comment about Gillard that was little more than an aside.

He was picking off flaws in the Labor Party’s frontbench, and his comment about Julia Gillard was one that was little else but sexist. He stated that Gillard’s decision to remain “deliberately barren” made her unfit for leadership.

"One of the great understandings in a community is family, and the relationship between mum, dad and a bucket of nappies,” Heffernan said.

As shocking as it was to most of the population, Heffernan’s comment may well have been rather shrewd. Heffernan is rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things, being little more than a loud-mouthed backbencher, and his comments won’t sabotage the Coalition’s bid for re-election. But what it did manage to do was activate some deep down levels of chauvinism in some sections of the Australian population.

The comments were condemned by the media, the newspaper letter-writers and the Opposition, but not by everybody. A silent segment of the community may forget about the economy, education and climate change and decide on voting Liberal so that they don’t have a woman as Deputy Prime Minister. Heffernan’s comments may galvanise the chauvinists like Pauline Hanson did the racists.

The argument that a childless woman is unfit to be Deputy Prime Minister will hold no water in political circles, but Heffernan was appealing to the talkback radio crowd rather than the academics. In a Labor Government Julia Gillard would hold the same position as Mark Vaile does now. Does the average Australian know if Mark Vaile has children? Would the average Australian be able to select Mark Vaile from a line-up?

The most successful thing about Heffernan’s comments was not the effect they will directly have on the voters, but the way they diverted attention away from the ALP National Conference. The other big politics story of the week was all about Kevin and his dream team, and the Coalition seemed powerless to stop it. All it took was for a pig-headed backbencher who doesn’t have to worry about re-election to take the spotlight away from the conference and point it somewhere completely trivial.

The Coalition has been throwing plenty of mud at the Opposition this year, but little of it has stuck. Senator Heffernan certainly doesn’t seem averse to doing some of the Government’s dirty work. After all, a bit of political dirt pales in comparison to a bucket of nappies.

Have a Seat: North Sydney

According to Mike Bailey, it’s a ‘huge challenge’ and an ‘uphill battle’, but the weatherman must be kidding himself if he thinks he will come close to winning. Sure, the polling suggests nothing less than a Coalition annihilation, but Joe Hockey remains in one of the safest Liberal seats in Sydney, and there’s a couple of dozen seats that would fall before North Sydney.

As far as the ALP is concerned, Mike Bailey is doing a rather noble thing for his side of politics. Mike Bailey is either genuinely hopeful of winning the seat, taking one for the team, or devising a rather noble way to retire for the ABC. Regardless, this whole notion of dropping celebrity candidates in seats held by frontbenchers seems to be one of the cleverest political strategies that the ALP has come up with. This is no parachuting Garrett into Kingsford-Smith plot. It’s something more significant.

Who knows whether Bailey would make a good parliamentary MP? He’s been doing the weather for longer than Joe Hockey’s been doing politics, so he’s a familiar face to Sydneysiders, especially those on the North Shore more inclined to be watching the ABC. But aside from anticipating cold fronts and reporting on rainfall, what more is he good for? Tony Abbott remarked that journalists don’t necessarily make good politicians, and I think the same applies to weathermen. Predicting Bailey’s political talent would be like predicting the weather for this day next year.

But if Labor wanted Bailey as a MP, they would have put him someplace safer. They don’t want Bailey as an MP specifically. They just want him as a candidate. Somebody to threaten Joe Hockey enough so the big man is overstretched between spruiking IR laws he didn’t put together, and trying to present himself as a good local member. North Sydney is merely a miniature Bennelong, the odds and the stakes are much lower.

Back to you, Juanita.

Attack Ads

When the Coalition failed to win back the NSW Government after the disaster that was Iemma’s first term, they steadfastly put the blame on the Labor Party’s “attack ads”. It was a convenient way to divert attention away from the Opposition’s shortcomings, and that of Liberal leader Peter Debnam. And while the ALP would still be in office in New South Wales without the ads, it certainly took the sting out of the electorate’s swing.

Television has been involved with the political process for half a century, and attack ads in the United States have been around nearly as long. They are usually nasty, often untrue and tap into the fears of the undecided voters. But forty-five years of attack ads have shown that they work.

Attack ads work best for incumbents, simply because the incumbent is better known than the opposition in most cases. The incumbent will have faced such scrutiny before their election, so the dirty laundry has usually already been washed and hung out to dry. Since the opposition is usually less known, the attack ads directed at them can expose skeletons in closets, reiterate uncertainties and in some cases, mislead the public. The 2004 ‘Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth’ ad campaign did critical damage to presidential candidate John Kerry’s campaign, despite being downright incorrect. The Bush/Cheney team expressed public disapproval at the advertisement, but the ad still stuck in voters’ minds.

Attack ads are not as vicious in Australia, nor as popular, but the L-plate campaign against Mark Latham did the ALP’s campaign considerable damage.

Every attack from the Coalition against Kevin Rudd this year has backfired, but in the desperation of fighting a losing battle, the incumbents will try to tear strips off the ALP as the election looms. It bears less of a chance at backfiring simply because attack ads are never voiced by the candidates. They are voiced by sinister-voiced and faceless baritones and presented in such a way that it seems the Government has nothing to do with it. But the electorate will see through it if the ALP don’t fight fire with fire.

Labor has been running successful advertisements all through the year. When they started back in January it was unusually early, but the opinion polls showed that it really worked. The ads were positive and optimistic about the future. They were also contained, focused on the personality of Rudd and of his fiscal conservatism. It was simply to inform voters that Rudd was a safe and friendly option. The Coalition couldn’t have a go at him for it, also The Chaser managed quite well.



The moment the ALP tries out an attack ad against the Howard Government, it will make the medium open slather. If the ALP tries such an attack it will justify a retaliatory response from the Coalition to the electorate.

In order to maintain their position in the polls during the actual election campaign, the ALP need to counter any of the Coalition’s attack ads with the positive ones they’ve been running this year. It allows them the moral high ground, and makes the Coalition seem desperate, vicious and struggling to maintain a sense of dignity and order.

Annihilation?

When John Howard told his parliamentary colleagues that the Coalition faced annihilation at the election, he wasn’t kidding. Howard was aware of the truths behind the polling, and while most commentators were taking the Labor Party’s popularity with a grain of salt, Howard couldn’t afford to.

Two opinion polls came out this week, one from Newspoll and the other from Morgan. Newspoll put Labor at its lowest two party preferred poll since February, 55 to 45, when the Rudd and Gillard team were still new and were yet to really get their message out. The Morgan poll showed Labor in an improved position from last time, 60 to 40.

While Labor may be viewing the Newspoll result as being bad news (the awaited budget bounce perhaps?), so will the Coalition. An election with a TPP of 55 to the Opposition would be the biggest swing since Malcolm Fraser’s victory in 1975. If the swing was uniform across the country, it would see Howard lose his seat, as well as frontbenchers Peter McGauran, Fran Bailey, Malcolm Turnbull, Mal Brough and Jim Lloyd. Presumed Opposition Leader Peter Costello would be retaining his seat with a buffer of 1.1%.

Going off Morgan’s results, the situation would near wipe the Coalition off the face of the planet. The Labor Party could pick up an additional 61 seats, and presuming the swing is uniform (though it never really is), would take out Costello, Abbott, Ruddock, and Hockey, as well as the aforementioned frontbenchers. The Liberals would be left with Brendan Nelson, Julie Bishop and Alexander Downer, as well as scarcely two dozen seats. The good news is that the vacancies give a chance for Wilson Tuckey to re-enter the cabinet at long last.

Have a Seat: Macquarie

John Howard visited both Bathurst and Lithgow yesterday for the first time as Prime Minister. Why Howard is wasting his time campaigning in the seat of Macquarie is nothing short of a mystery. The Coalition would need a TPP vote of 53.3% their way to retain the seat, and it would take nothing short of a miracle for that to happen. The fundraising lunch at the Carrington wine bar in Bathurst was the location for the announcement of an audacious but sly election promise.

A promise of $10 million for a feasibility study into the Bells Line Expressway, a significant local concern for Macquarie voters, was met with cheers of approval at the fundraiser. The catch? Well, aside from the fact that the study does not carry any obligation to actual road improvements, was that the State Government would have to match the price. Something that Howard knew wasn’t going to happen.

The Bells Line of Road was one of the biggest election issues for the people of the seats of Bathurst and the Blue Mountains in March’s State Election, yet there were no such election promises made there. The NSW Government is running at a deficit, and the incredibly costly project was just too big to deal with. Howard’s promise yesterday makes him out to be the hero, and the NSW Government out to be the bad guys.

The electorate won’t fall for it. The redistribution of seats has seen the Liberal-voting areas of Macquarie shorn off in favour of the hardcore Labor towns of Bathurst and Lithgow. What’s more, Labor is running former state minister Bob Debus in the seat. If I were sitting member Kerry Bartlett, I would be actively looking for a job somewhere else, because he stands no chance of keeping is seat. Ben Chifley’s seat is heading back to Labor for the first time in 11 years.