I’ve now finished seat profiles for 56 out of 150 House of Representatives seats. I’ve now finished profiles for all seats under a 4% margin as well as fifteen with higher margins. I’m continuing to work on them as quickly as possible but I probably will run out of time at some point and need to do the rest very quickly without maps or other added information which takes a while to produce.
So I’ve been prioritising those seats that I have the most interest in them. I have been doing those seats that are the most marginal, and right at the moment I am doing seats within Sydney, as I’m particularly interested in Sydney and it is quicker and easier to make maps for urban seats.
Since I may not get every seat covered with the same quality, I thought I should start taking requests from readers about which seats they think I should profile first. I am planning to at least finish all seats under a 6% margin, but it’s not necessarily the case that a seat’s significance correlates to the margin.
So what seats do you think I should prioritise? Please post any ideas in the comments thread, along with an explanation for why a particular seat is particularly interesting (“because I live there” might be enough, but then again it might not).
Canning looks to be a hot seat in WA at the moment, a high profile state MP and ex minister running against a Liberal that has lost preselection twice only to have it overturned.
Adam, aren’t you talking about about Dennis Jensen there (MP for Tangney)? Jensen and Don Randall might be cut from the same cloth, but they are different people. 😉
Canning is definitely the seat to watch in WA, due to Alannah MacTiernan. If you’re putting on your Green-coloured glasses, Perth and Fremantle would be interesting. The Greens won’t win either of them, but do have strong areas. (Perth also gets the “because I live there” excuse. 😛 ) As for the rest, they’re either marginals that you’ve already covered or safe seats that won’t change, although the Nationals might give Wilson Tuckey a shake in O’Connor if they knock Labor down to third place.
Other interesting seats over east could be Mayo (since the Greens came so close in the by-election there) and Melbourne Ports (that should have an interesting map – if it’s anything like the Vic state seat of Prahran, it’d have a wide range of results.)
Seats of all the ministers and shadow ministers. If a particular policy is unpopular (on either side) these would show disproportionate responses (the negative effect of being high profile). Eg, the intervention policy under Howard.
Hi Ben – I’m particularly interested in Liberal seats which I believe will be vulnerable to the Greens in the future. You’ve already done North Sydney (thankyou again), can you have a look at Kooyong in Melbourne and Mayo in South Australia? As well as any others you know of where the electorate is more liberal than conservative.
One other I am interested in is Petrie in the north of Brisbane. This used to be something of a bell-weather seat.
Hmmm, maybe just work your way through the seats up to 8% – thats another 27 seats and covers most of those likely to show swings big enough to change – then work your way through ones you find personally interesting (big Green vote, colourful candidates or preselection stoushes maybe). Places like Lynn, Kennedy, Tangney, O’Connor or Newcastle (maybe even Perth at 8.1%!!)
It may be a tricky one, but I’d be interested in Wright. Canning may also be one to watch.
Great work by the way Ben.
O’Connor! We want to hear that Wilson Tuckey won’t be back in Canberra next year.
Bird of paradox – all these crazy lib backbenchers…who can keep up!
ALP-held seats with 15% margin or greater would be great as they are likely the ones that will have the biggest growth in the Greens vote.
I’m probably a bit biased – but I’m interested in whether the Greens will poll better in Holt now that they have a local government councillor on Casey council. Holt is a safe ALP seat, though (although the ALP did get a fright there in 2004), so it’s not going to be that interesting overall – it’s just a seat that I think the Greens should be doing better in (I mean it’s always been a bit tough – but the Green reps and senate vote is particularly low there, and I think if the Greens tweaked their campaign material a bit better and had better booth coverage they could be getting 6-7% instead of low 4s, and it’s improvements like that in these outer suburban areas that would see them win senate seats at half-senate elections). I’d love it if you did a profile for Chisholm (I live in Chisholm, so once again I’m biased). It used to be marginal, but after the last election it would be considered fairly safe for the ALP.
I think Richmond will be a three-cornered contest, which you may find interesting to look into.
I vote for Parramatta – a low-profile sitting MP, radically redrawn boundaries, rapidly changing demographics, a “crossover” between inner and outer-suburban electorates given the high proportion of city commuters, was a notional Liberal seat until the 2007 election, willingness to switch to Liberals exemplified by Lib/Independent-run Council.
Oh, and because I live there 🙂
I agree with Hamish,
Richmond and Wright are two seats worth looking at
Go for Casey. I’d like to see what you think ALP’s chances are there.
I think the new seats of Wright and Durack, the liberals have an interesting candidate in Wright with Hajnal Ban, the Liberal turned Nationals turned Liberal again. Durack is interesting due to the fact the Nationals have a very strong candidate there and they are popular with rural people in WA. i Also think Melbourne Ports in Victoria as Michael Danby is a nobody MP who only cares about St Kilda in his electorate and attempting to appear as Jewish as possible (don’t worry i can say that i’m jewish) and the greens have polled quite hight there in the past elections.
Ryan,
I seriously doubt Melbourne Ports is under threat this year. Although I agree it probably is moving in the Liberal direction.
Admittedly, I live in Aston, but it’s pretty interesting too. The Libs have a 5% margin but it swung nearly 8% last election and the standing Liberal member, Chris Pearce, has quit, with a generic advisor type from out of the electorate replacing him. Should be mighty close.
MDMConnell,
I didn’t mean to say that it was under threat, but that it’s interesting because Liberal, Labor and the Greens all poll quite high there, sorry if my meaning was misunderstood.
Wright would be a good one.
Re seats on a greater than 6% margin – the ones I’d probably have to say are most interesting would be, firstly, seats like Wakefield and Moreton, which have a history as swinging seats, O’Connor and Durack, since the WA Nats might make those contests interesting (although they’ll be hard seats to do I guess, maps probably have to be given a miss), and Batman, since the Greens will presumably do well there.
Melbourne Ports would be interesting, not that it’s likely to change hands, but the maps would be fascinating.
I don’t want to push Richmond too much, because it’s my part of the world, but you won’t find a politically savy person in the region who doesn’t think that 8.9% margin seems ridiculously inflated. I still don’t see how Labor could lose it given the size of the margin, and the fact that Green voters will invariably still preference Elliot anyway (especially since the two Coalition candidates seem to be in a battle to see which can be the biggest climate change skeptic), unless something else happens such as the entry of an independent who makes a significant impact (and I know people working on that, but I’m unaware of any actual candidates at this stage who would make that sort of impact). The three-way contest, at the moment, is starting to attract a fair bit of media coverage, and then it’s also quite likely that the Greens will outpoll one of the Coalition candidates.
One other bit of news relating to Richmond that’s come out in the last couple of weeks is the reported fall from grace of the Nats’ answer to Malcolm Tucker, local party official and campaign mastermind Murray Lees, who was reportedly forced to resign from the party after his fourth drink-driving conviction:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/21/2798059.htm
Though the report doesn’t say if he’s also quit his political consultancy business:
http://www.voteright.com.au/
Is it Richmond or Page that contains Nimbin?
Richmond now, formerley Page.
Maybe O’Connor? I understand that Clive Palmer is throwing money at Nats in that area to try to win it.
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