Tangney – Australia 2019

LIB 11.1%

Incumbent MP
Ben Morton, since 2016.

Geography
Southern Perth. Tangney includes a number of suburbs on the southern shore of the Swan River and Canning River. Tangney covers most of Melville council area and part of Canning council area. Suburbs include Alfred Cove, Attadale, Melville, Applecross, Mount Pleasant, Winthrop, Leeming, Willetton, Bicton, Willagee, Ferndale, Rossmoyne and Shelley.

History
Tangney was created at the 1974 redistribution. The Liberal Party has dominated the seat, winning Tangney at all but two elections.

Tangney was first won in 1974 by 27-year-old John Dawkins, running for the ALP. Dawkins only held the seat for one term, losing it in 1975. Dawkins later won the seat of Fremantle in 1977 and served as a cabinet minister in the Hawke government and then Treasurer in the Keating government until his retirement in 1993.

The Liberal Party’s Peter Richardson won Tangney in 1975. Richardson left the Liberal Party in 1977 and joined the minor Progress Party, a libertarian pro-market party founded by John Singleton. He ran for the Senate in 1977, but failed to win a seat.

Tangney was won in 1977 by Liberal candidate Peter Shack. He held the seat until 1983, when he lost the seat to the ALP’s George Gear. Gear only held the seat for one term, before transferring to Canning in 1984. He later served as Assistant Treasurer from 1993 to 1996, and lost Canning at the 1996 election.

In 1984, Tangney was won back by Peter Shack, after a major redistribution shifted Tangney into much safer Liberal territory. He held it for the next decade, before retiring in 1993.

Tangney was won in 1993 by barrister Daryl Williams, also from the Liberal Party. Williams was appointed Attorney-General upon the election of the Howard government in 1996. He served in the role until 2003, when he became Minister for Communications. He retired from Parliament in 2004.

In 2004, Tangney was won by Dennis Jensen. He is a prominent climate change skeptic, and was often the loudest voice criticising action on climate change in the Parliament. Dennis Jensen was re-elected three times, but before two of those elections, in 2006 and 2010, the local branch denied him preselection before he was given preselection by the state executive.

Jensen was finally defeated for preselection in 2016, and ran for Tangney as an independent. He came fourth, with Liberal candidate Ben Morton winning comfortably.

Candidates

• Marion Boswell (Labor)
• Scott Rodney Rafferty (One Nation)
• Jillian Horton (Independent)
• Mark Staer (Australian Christians)
• Paul Stephen Waddy (Independent)
• Martin Spencer (Greens)
• Ben Morton (Liberal)
• Chris Fernandez (United Australia)
• Gavin Waugh (Western Australia Party)

Assessment
Tangney is a safe Liberal seat.

2016 result

2016 two-party-preferred result

Booth breakdown

Booths have been divided into three parts. Polling places in Canning council area have been grouped as “east”. The remaining polling places in Melville council area have been split into “central” and “north-west”.

The Liberal Party won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in all three areas, ranging from 56% in the east to 64.5% in the west.

The Greens primary vote ranged from 11.6% in the centre to 13.3% in the west. The primary vote for independent Dennis Jensen was 9.3% in the west and just over 13% in both the centre and the east.

Election results in Tangney at the 2016 federal election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes, Greens primary votes and primary votes for independent Dennis Jensen.

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