With the scent of the government’s blood in the water, the nation’s newspapers have gone mad with opinion polling. For reasons unexplained, The Australian published Newspoll results last Tuesday (57-43), on Saturday (55-45) and today (60-40). The Fairfax papers yesterday conjured a front page story by adding together the last six months’ worth of ACNielsen polling. Like Newspoll’s quarterly aggregates, these produced state-by-state figures from believable samples. The thrust of the South Australian and Western Australian figures is supported by two sets of local polls: in the Sunday Mail, a survey of 601 South Australian voters had Labor leading 59-41, while in last Saturday’s West Australian, a Westpoll survey of 409 voters had the Coalition leading 51-49. Also:

• Jackie Kelly has announced she will not contest the election, depriving the Liberals of her considerable personal vote in the outer western Sydney seat of Lindsay. The redistribution has cut the Liberal margin in the seat from 5.3 per cent to 2.9 per cent. Penrith councillor Mark Davies has been named as Kelly’s most likely successor as Liberal candidate, and reportedly has her backing. Labor has again nominated the twice-unsuccessful David Bradbury, former Penrith mayor.

• The South Australian Liberal party has selected Mary Jo Fisher to fill Amanda Vanstone’s Senate vacancy, the term of which will expire in 2011. In what would appear to be another win for the state party’s ascendant Right faction, Fisher was chosen ahead of the moderate-backed Maria Kourtesis, who earlier contentiously failed to secure a winnable position on this year’s Senate ticket.

• Labor provoked another round of debate over the merits of celebrity candidates last week when it preselected ABC weatherman Mike Bailey to run against Joe Hockey in North Sydney. Also widely noted was the number of ABC personnel turning up as Labor candidates.

• Labor’s Sharon Grierson has effortlessly survived a preselection challenge in Newcastle. The ABC reports that a rank-and-file ballot delivered her more than 80 per cent of the vote over her challenger, Merewether West branch secretary David March.

The latest episode in the increasingly mis-named Seat of the Week series begins with good news (for me) and bad news (for you). The good news is that an online media entity is paying me actual money to provide them with my world-famous electorate results maps (seen in earlier posts on Stirling and Bonner). The bad news is that this inevitably involves an exclusivity arrangement, so that I will no longer be able to include the feature in this and future instalments.

Today we turn our attention to the apple isle and its famously marginal seat of Bass, one of two Tasmanian seats that switched from Labor to Liberal at the 2004 election. Bass has had a relatively straightforward history, having been frozen into the state’s north-eastern corner by the constitutional requirement that Tasmania have no fewer than five seats regardless of its population. Launceston provides it with about 70 per cent of its 70,000 enrolled voters; other centres include George Town, a Labor-voting coastal town at the mouth of the Tamar River, and the more conservative Scottsdale, a hub of surrounding timber and farming communities noted as the focal point of the Exclusive Brethren movement. The past two elections show little distinction in voting behaviour between Launceston and the remainder, with respective two-party support for the Liberals at 52.4 per cent and 53.6 per cent in 2004, and swings of 4.6 per cent and 4.7 per cent. Within Launceston, the North Esk River that runs through the city from west to east serves as a boundary between strong Labor territory in the north, where its two-party vote remained in the high-fifties in 2004, and the more conservative suburbs in the south and west.

Bass came into existence at the second federal election in 1903, after Tasmania voted as a single electorate in 1901. Labor first won the seat when the 1910 election delivered it its first-ever parliamentary majority, and lost it six years later when member Jens Jensen followed Billy Hughes into the Nationalist Party during the 1916 Labor split. Jensen retained the seat as a Nationalist at the 1917 election, and it remained with the party after he lost endorsement in 1919. Labor’s next win came with the election of Jim Scullin’s government in 1929, but it was again lost to a party split when member Allan Guy followed Joseph Lyons into the United Australia Party in 1931. Guy was re-elected as the UAP candidate at that year’s election, but was defeated by Labor’s Claude Barnard in 1934. The next change came with the election of the Menzies government in 1949, when Barnard lost to Liberal candidate Bruce Kekwick. It returned to the Barnard family fold when Claude’s son Lance defeated Kekwick in 1954, going on to serve as deputy prime minister in the Whitlam government from 1972 to 1974. The seat is still best remembered for the 1975 by-election that followed Barnard’s mid-term resignation – ostensibly on grounds of ill health, but following a year after he lost the deputy position to Jim Cairns. Kevin Newman won the seat for the Liberals as the Labor vote plunged from 54.0 per cent to 36.5 per cent, emboldening the Coalition to pursue an early election at all costs.

Bass remained in the Liberal fold for 18 years, with Tasmania bucking the national trend to Labor in 1983 due to the Franklin dam controversy. Kevin Newman retired in 1984; his wife Jocelyn became a Senator in 1986 and served for four years as a minister in the Howard government, and their son Campbell is now the lord mayor of Brisbane. Kevin Newman was succeeded by Warwick Smith, whose promising career progress was twice stymied by the vagaries of electoral fortune. In 1993 he lost the seat to Labor’s Sylvia Smith by just 40 votes, part of a statewide swing to Labor that gave the first indication on election night that things were not going according to script. Warwick Smith recovered the seat in 1996 and served as Family Services Minister in the first term of the Howard government, while Sylvia Smith returned to politics a year later as an independent member in the state upper house. The 1998 election produced a second GST backlash and another painfully narrow defeat for Warwick Smith, this time by 78 votes at the hands of 30-year-old Miscellaneous Workers Union official Michelle O’Byrne.

Labor repeated its 1998 clean sweep of Tasmania in 2001, but came disastrously unstuck in 2004 after Mark Latham’s policy on logging of old-growth forests provoked the wrath of the CFMEU, Premier Paul Lennon and Lyons MP Dick Adams. Vision of the Prime Minister receiving a euphoric reception from timber workers at Launceston’s Albert Hall provided one of the main talking points of the decisive final days of the campaign. Both Bass and its still more logging-dependent neighbour Braddon fell to the Liberals, with respective swings of 4.7 per cent and 7.1 per cent. Eighteen months after her defeat, O’Byrne entered state politics at the March 2006 election; under the Tasmanian system where candidates from all parties compete for five seats in each division, O’Byrne scored by far the highest personal vote of any candidate in Bass (23.4 per cent of the primary vote).

Successful Liberal candidate Michael Ferguson (left) came to parliament with a reputation for social conservatism, having been director of the Tasmanian Family Institute and a vigorous opponent of the Tasmanian government’s gay adoption laws. He had also worked as a staffer to Senator Guy Barnett, a key player in the state party’s ascendant Right faction. The Prime Minister was at first unimpressed that the Right proposed to install a potentially contentious candidate in so sensitive a seat, and reportedly encouraged independent MLC Ivan Dean to nominate against him for preselection. Ferguson has since demonstrated his conservative credentials by accusing abortion advocates who opposed the death penalty of “breathtaking hypocrisy”, and moving restrictive amendments to legislation on stem cell research. He also earned the nickname “Sir Michael” from Labor after his website suggested he had received “the Order of the British Empire Award for Community Service”, in reference to an award he received from monarchist group the Tasmanian Association of the Order of the British Empire.

Labor’s candidate is Launceston alderman Jodie Campbell (right), who first came to prominence as an Australian Services Union official when a Launceston call centre closed upon the collapse of Ansett in 2001. She was elected to council the following year and became deputy mayor in October 2005. Campbell is associated with a breakaway sub-faction of the Left called the Progressive Policy Forum, along with Michelle O’Byrne and her brother David, state secretary of the LHMWU and until last year the state president of the ALP. She had not been the party’s first choice; an initial preselection vote held last August saw her defeated by Steve Reissig, a Scottsdale school principal and former coach of Australian rules football club Glenorchy. Reissig had been head-hunted by the party to stand at the March 2006 state election in an effort to find a high-profile replacement for retiring incumbent Kathryn Hay; it was reported that he had also considered joining the Liberal Party. His election bid failed by just 136 votes, after late counting delivered a decisive surge to Greens incumbent Kim Booth.

Campbell’s nomination for federal preselection had greater support than Reissig’s among local party branches, but this was outweighed by backing for Reissig from the state executive, which determines 50 per cent of the vote. This resulted from a deal in which the Left backed Reissig in exchange for Right faction support for Kevin Harkins, assistant state secretary of the Left faction Electrical Trades Union, in his bid to succeed Harry Quick in Franklin. According to Matthew Denholm of The Australian, Reissig’s backers deemed him a “more mainstream” candidate than Campbell with greater appeal to swinging voters. His opponents sought to have his nomination blocked on the grounds that he had not met party rules requiring regular branch meeting attendance, having only joined the party the previous January. This requirement was waived by the state executive, despite threats from the Progressive Policy Forum that it would upset a deal securing Senate seats for incumbents Carol Brown of the Left and Nick Sherry of the Centre if Campbell did not prevail.

Reissig announced his withdrawal last October saying he had “too much on his plate”, although there was also talk of a smear campaign involving letters sent to Reissig’s wife and the Hobart Mercury newspaper. Campbell quickly emerged as the front-runner for the second round preselection, despite the upset this would cause to the factional arrangement that installed Reissig. This prompted Nick Sherry and Right faction Senator Helen Polley to encourage a challenge from Bill Bothilo, an official of the Right faction National Union of Workers and Reissig’s campaign manager (Bolitho was Labor’s candidate for the Victorian seat of Gippsland at the 2001 federal election, and had earlier been a member of the Nationals). Harry Quick’s take on this was that Bothilo had nominated to be a “pain in the arse”, inspired by animosity over the treatment given to Reissig. The dispute was settled by a deal in which both Right and Left agreed to back Campbell.

With Kevin Rudd having officially abandoned the forestry policy his party took into the 2004 election, Bass and its neighbour Braddon would appear ripe for a correction in Labor’s favour. However, the mood may have again been soured in January when a company half-owned by the state government decided it would no longer supply pine logs to sawmills in Scottsdale, threatening 300 local jobs. This occurred against the backdrop of Gunns Limited’s contentious proposal for a pulp mill at Bell Bay just south of George Town, on which local opinion has been divided between hopes of job creation and fears over the effect on the water supply. The likely tone of the Liberal campaign against Campbell was indicated by Senator Eric Abetz’s description of her as an “urban greenie” and “yet another left-wing unionist”. The seat was predictably targeted with a generous serving of government largesse at the recent budget, which included $13 million to upgrade Launceston’s flood levee system, $10 million to protect jobs in Scottsdale, and an upgrade of Royal Flying Doctor Service coverage of islands in the Bass Strait.

The following should be old news for the type of person who visits this site, but I will reiterate it for the record. The post-budget Newspoll has produced a surprise 2 per cent two-party shift in Labor’s favour, despite strong support for the budget itself, while another post-budget poll from Galaxy has Labor leading 57-43. There is slightly better news for the Coalition from a Galaxy poll of 800 voters in the Prime Minister’s electorate of Bennelong, which puts Labor’s lead at a not-insurmountable 52-48. Other developments of the past week:

• Gerard McManus of the Herald Sun gives some background to ALP state secretary Mark Arbib’s bid for Senate preselection in New South Wales:

Arbib reportedly wants to take over from Victorian senator Stephen Conroy as Labor’s Senate deputy leader – a contest that will cause serious internal ructions. However, under the original plan Arbib was to have taken the place of Michael Forshaw, a senator since 1994, who had himself taken the spot of another Labor head office chief, Graham Richardson. Senator Forshaw is not up for re-election and therefore his resignation would have created a casual vacancy for Arbib to step in. The problem was Senator Forshaw refused to go, demanding a promise in writing that he would be “looked after” in a similar way to the way Senator Amanda Vanstone was recently taken care of when she quit the Senate. But when the NSW powerbrokers declined to oblige, Forshaw decided to stay put, forcing the party to tip another woman, Senator Ursula Stevens (sic - should be Stephens - PB), down to the precarious third spot on the Senate ticket at the coming election. Senator Stevens is a former party president and possibly the only Labor senator who did not come straight from a union or an MP’s office into parliament.

• Don Farrell, the powerful state secretary of the Right faction Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, has announced he will run for Labor Senate preselection in South Australia. It would appear that he is set to take the faction’s reserved position from incumbent Linda Kirk, who fell from favour after backing Kevin Rudd’s leadership bid in December and defying the conservative union’s opposition to the RU486 abortion pill. Farrell had earlier denied having designs on the seat, leading to a consensus that Kirk would be replaced by Adelaide lawyer Tim Stanley. According to Greg Kelton of The Advertiser, “Mr Farrell last ran for Parliament 20 years ago in the seat of Adelaide but was defeated after a particularly vicious campaign with racist overtones”. This refers to a 1988 by-election held upon the resignation of Chris Hurford, at which Labor lost a seat it had held since 1943; perhaps this site’s South Australian readers can provide further detail on the nature of the campaign.

• John Watson, a Tasmanian Liberal Senator since 1977, was dumped from the party ticket in Saturday’s preselection vote. The ticket will be headed by incumbent Richard Colbeck, followed by two political staffers, David Bushby and Don Morris.

• Colourful Melbourne libertarian Prodos Marinakis, whose endorsement as Liberal candidate for the state seat of Richmond was overturned by the party on the grounds that he was too interesting, has withdrawn his nomination for the Melbourne preselection citing “personal reasons”.

None of this actually has anything to do with the budget, but you know how it is …

• The ALP’s national executive, which was empowered by the recent national conference to select candidates for 25 New South Wales seats, announced the candidates for 10 seats on Saturday. In the western Sydney seat of Blaxland, sitting member Michael Hatton has been dumped in favour of another member of the Right, Transurban executive and former Bob Carr staffer Jason Claire. Hatton has held the seat since replacing Paul Keating at a by-election held in the wake of the 1996 election defeat. Others who had designs on Blaxland included constitutional expert George Williams, Bankstown mayor Tania Mihailuk and Electrical Trades Union chief Bernie Riordan. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Mihailuk had been “likely” to win, possibly explaining Hatton’s decision to lodge disciplinary charges against her for “failing to properly manage her branch affairs”.

• The national executive has also chosen Penrith mayor David Bradbury (said by Brad Norington of The Australian to have “historical links” to the Transport Workers Union) to make his third successive run against Jackie Kelly in Lindsay. Joe Hildebrand of the Daily Telegraph reports that Bradbury’s win has greatly displeased the National Union of Workers, which had thrown its weight behind 23-year-old school teacher May Hayek. Others to get the nod in Coalition-held seats included human rights lawyer George Newhouse, who will run against Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth (where the redistribution has cut Turnbull’s margin from 5.6 per cent to 2.6 per cent); former ministerial staffer Greg Holland, who will make his second run against Danna Vale in the long-lost seat of Hughes (which fell in 1996, and now has a post-redistribution margin of 8.8 per cent); Belinda Neal, former Senator and wife of state Industrial Relations Minister John Della Bosca, who will attempt to unseat Jim Lloyd in Robertson (margin now 6.9 per cent); and ambulance officer Tim Arneman, who suffered a 68-vote defeat in Port Stephens at the state election, and now faces Bob Baldwin in Paterson (6.8 per cent).

• Two incumbents have emerged from the national executive process unscathed: Julia Irwin in Fowler and Jennie George in Throsby. A highly fancied bid by former national party president Warren Mundine to unseat Irwin fell foul of the party’s affirmative action targets, after a number of defeats by female candidates in other seats. The irony of an indigenous candidate being squeezed out on affirmative action grounds was widely noted. The Australian Jewish News reports that both Rudd’s office and Melbourne Ports MP Michael Danby told the paper to keep quiet about the challenge to Irwin, a vocal critic of Israel, the former saying that “the best way to ensure her survival is for you guys to cover it”. According to Kerry-Anne Walsh of the Sun-Herald, Jennie George’s endorsement followed a “faction deal made between the Left and Right” that would “raise eyebrows”.

• Mark Davis of the Sydney Morning Herald reports that affirmative action supporters in the New South Wales ALP’s Left have revolted against the factional leadership’s decision to deliver the number two Senate position to Doug Cameron, former national secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union. Seven women have nominated against Cameron for the factional ballot, including management consultant and 2003 state election candidate Imogen Wareing. The first and third positions on the ticket are reserved for the Right; it is anticipated that Ursula Stephens will be demoted from her number one position in 2001 to number three, making way for state party secretary Mark Arbib.

• A factional row has erupted in the New South Wales Liberal Party after its nomination review panel rejected country vice-president Scott McDonald’s Senate preselection nomination. The move safeguarded Left faction member Marise Payne’s third position on the Coalition ticket, behind Helen Coonan and the Nationals’ John Williams (who replaces the retiring Sandy Macdonald). Background to the dispute was provided by Imre Salusinszky of The Australian:

As part of its general reassertion of authority following the years in exile that began under former premier Nick Greiner, the Right has had its eye on the spot occupied by Marise Payne, who hails from the Left faction. Desperate to avoid predictably bad headlines in the Fairfax newspapers and on the ABC about right-wing “extremists” controlling the party, Howard told Heffernan to work the numbers for Payne. Heffernan went at the task the only way he knows: like a bull at a gate. At a fiery meeting last month, he tried to curtail the preselection process entirely and moved that the state executive simply re-endorse the sitting team. When this failed, Heffernan took the fight to the party’s nominations review committee, of which he is one of three members. The committee threw out the nomination of the Right’s challenger to Payne, state vice-president Scott McDonald. Designed to vet candidates on the grounds of character or ethics, or because their candidacy could damage the party, the committee operates as a “black box” and does not give reasons for its decisions. But it is understood the issue was a conflict of interest, McDonald having already spoken against Heffernan’s motion on the executive. The move has upset the NSW Right like nothing else done in the name of its Dear Leader. Meanwhile, the Left, for once, finds itself supporting Howard and Heffernan.

• Controversial Right faction powerbroker Alex Hawke has thrown his hat in the ring to contest Liberal preselection for Mitchell, where incumbent Alan Cadman proposes to run again despite a universal perception he is past his use-by date. Also in the running are Australian Hotels Association deputy chief executive officer David Elliot and state party vice-president Nick Campbell, described by Irfan Yusuf at Crikey as “the NSW Right’s main number-cruncher”.

• Western Australian Liberal Senator Ian Campbell, who lost his cabinet position in March on the flimsy basis that he had been at a meeting with Brian Burke, has announced he will quit politics in the coming weeks. The party moved quickly to fill the vacancy with Mathias Cormann, who last week defeated incumbent Ross Lightfoot to take the number three position on the ticket for this year’s election. Since the position filled by Cormann does not expire until 2011, the number three position is again up for grabs. According to Robert Taylor of The West Australian, “party insiders said it made sense to shift Mr Cormann into the Senate immediately and search for a strong number three given that Mr Cormann’s dominant presence in the last preselection discouraged many people from nominating”. Names of potential aspirants have yet to surface in the media; however, Campbell last month dismissed speculation that he might be about to resign as “wishful thinking” from those hoping to fill a vacancy, naming Cormann and Nick Bruining, a financial journalist who ran unsuccessfully for the state upper house in 2001.

• The ABC reports a field of nine candidates will seek preselection for the Liberals’ Tasmanian Senate ticket, which will be held “next month in Launceston”. They include two incumbents, John Watson and Richard Colbeck (who were number two and number three in 2001), along with “former state MHA David Fry, former Liberal staffer David Bushby, former political staffer Guilia Jones and Don Morris, the chief of staff to Senate Preisdent Paul Calvert”. The number one candidate from 2001, Senate President Paul Calvert, is retiring.

• In the seat of Newcastle, Labor member Sharon Grierson will face a challenge from David March, president of the party’s Merewether West branch, at a preselection vote to be held on May 26.

• In South Australia, Labor has announced candidates for the Liberal-held seats of Barker (Karen Lock), Grey (Karin Bolton) and Mayo (Mary Brewerton).

As anyone with a passing interest in Australian electoral matters can tell you, Queensland looms as the key battleground for this year’s federal election. Labor holds just six of the state’s 28 seats, and will be more than half way to a parliamentary majority if only it can even the ledger. The most marginal of the Coalition-held seats is Bonner, which extends from the bayside Wynnum-Manly area in the north-east to Mount Gravatt in the south-west. Bonner was created at the 2004 election from territory which had previously been in the Labor seats of Griffith (providing about 38,000 voters) and Bowman (28,000), and the Liberal-held seat of Moreton (18,000 voters); also included is the lightly populated area south of Tingalpa Reservoir, formerly in Fadden.

Historically, this area was part of Oxley until 1922 in Mount Gravatt’s case, and 1934 in Wynnum-Manly’s; both areas were absorbed by Moreton until 1955, when Wynnum-Manly was taken over by Bowman. Bowman covered the entire area from 1969 until 1977, when Mount Gravatt went back to Moreton. Griffith first poked its nose in at the 1996 election, first absorbing Mount Gravatt and then assuming an area between the two main centres in 1998. Moreton was a conservative seat until 1990, notwithstanding Jim Killen’s famous 120-vote victory when the Menzies government had its brush with death in 1961. It was henceforth held for two terms by Labor’s Garrie Gibson before being won by the present Liberal member, Gary Hardgrave, in 1996. Bowman has traditionally leaned towards Labor, but was held for the Liberals through the period of the Fraser government by David Jull (who returned as member for Fadden in 1984). It was thereafter won by the Liberals only at the 1996 election, at which Labor was reduced to two seats in Queensland. Another casualty on that occasion was Griffith, which had been fairly safe for Labor since a redistribution in 1977. The losing candidate was Kevin Rudd, who had better luck on his second attempt in 1998.

Labor’s unsuccessful candidate in Bonner at the 2004 election was Con Sciacca, a Keating government minister who held Bowman from 1987 to 1996 and again from 1998 to 2004. With a notional Labor margin of 1.9 per cent, Bonner was a greatly more attractive option for Sciacca than the redrawn Bowman, where the loss of Wynnum-Manly and the gain of the Redland Bay area from Fadden produced a notional Liberal margin of 3.1 per cent. Nonetheless, Sciacca was unable to hold the new seat, suffering a 2.4 per cent swing and losing by 795 votes. The successful Liberal candidate was Ross Vasta (left), a former restaurant owner and staffer to Senator Brett Mason who ran unsuccessfully against Kevin Rudd in Griffith in 2001. The following map shows the two-party preferred results for localities containing one or more polling booths; as with my earlier maps for Stirling, red indicates a Labor majority and blue a Liberal majority, and the size of the numbers varies as a rough indicator of the number of the votes cast.

This is broadly instructive in demonstrating Labor’s strength at the northern end of the electorate; however, its limitations are indicated by the following map showing the remarkable inconsistency of the swing. Most striking is the degree to which the variations correspond with the old boundaries, suggesting a greater influence of personal support for sitting members than urban electorates are normally credited with.

In particular, Labor suffered a mass exodus of support among Griffith voters who had lost the opportunity to vote for Kevin Rudd. By contrast, Con Sciacca was able to pick up a small swing from his existing constituents in the area that had been in Bowman, and in the Moreton area where Gary Hardgrave also appeared to enjoy strong personal support. The strength of these variations can only partly be explained by demographic factors, specifically the greater concentration of voters in mortgage-paying households in the Griffith area (32.8 per cent on 2001 census figures, compared with 28.0 per cent in the Bowman area, 23.9 per cent in the Moreton area and 26.5 per cent nationally).

Ross Vasta’s main source of publicity since entering parliament has been his involvement in the scandal surrounding misuse of electoral printing allowances, which resulted in his office being searched by the Australian Federal Police in March. However, the printing job which was the subject of the investigation was reportedly not ordered by Vasta, and the main principals of the affair were his Brisbane Liberal colleagues Gary Hardgrave and Andrew Laming (the member for Bowman). The Prime Minister’s public backing of Vasta last month was seen to indicate that he would escape charges. His Labor opponent is Kerry Rea (left), who has been on Brisbane City Council since 1991. Rea’s Holland Park ward coincides with Bonner around Mount Gravatt, the remainder being in Griffith and Moreton. A member of the Left faction, Rea reportedly won preselection “comfortably” ahead of school teacher Chris Forrester. Forrester was Labor’s unsuccessful candidate at the by-election for the state seat of Chatsworth in August 2005, and initially aspired to run again at last September’s election. He was persuaded to withdraw in favour of Channel Nine sports commentator Chris Bombolas, who went on to defeat Liberal member Michael Caltabiano, as part of a deal that gave him factional backing in Bonner. Matthew Franklin of The Australian reported that this deal unravelled following a rebellion in local party ranks, where Rea had overwhelming support.

7.53pm. All booths in from Nelson; Wilkinson’s lead widened in late counting, to 10,019 to 6391.

7.50pm. The final booth from Pembroke, Bellerive, has taken a small amount of gloss of Allison Ritchie’s performance with a 17.8 per cent drop in the Labor primary vote.

7.37pm. Lindisfarne in; Labor primary vote down 15.8 per cent.

7.31pm. Four more Pembroke booths make for little change to the overall trend.

7.25pm. Big round of applause for the Tasmanian Electoral Commission. Booth results have been coming in one booth at a time; mainland commissions usually think it good enough to supply results in three or four spurts.

7.24pm. All but two booths in from Nelson; Wilkinson leads 6225 to 4658.

7.21pm. Montagu Bay and Wentworth Street now in; Labor primary vote respectively down 10.1 per cent and 17.8 per cent.

7.19pm. Good result for Labor at the very large Howrah booth, their primary vote down only 3.5 per cent. We can definitely call it for them now. Richard James still clear in second place; I have promoted him on the table.

7.14pm. The second substantial booth from Pembroke, Risdon Vale, is now in. Labor’s primary vote down a relatively mild 7.8 per cent. Independent Richard James looking the best-performing of the others.

7.11pm. Lots of booths now in from Nelson; Wilkinson’s lead of 5711 to 4096 is a bit narrower than I expected, but he’s still home and hosed.

7.10pm. Sixty-four votes in from the Hobart booth. For what it’s worth, Labor’s vote here is down 23.1 per cent from 2001.

7.08pm. Perhaps I spoke too soon with the no-boilover remark; Ritchie was down 10.1 per cent on the primary vote in Warrane. That’s still not enough to put her in real danger, but I should probably await a few more booths before calling it.

7.05pm. Also 199 votes from mobile booths.

7.03pm. The Warrane booth is in; only 6 per cent counted overall, but I think it’s already apparent we’re not looking at a boilover here.

7.01pm. Kevin Bonham notes in comments that the Agfest booth is comparable to the “Northern” booth in 2001, which I had written out of my equations. If so, Allison Ritchie is on track for a primary vote of 50 per cent – bearing in mind that this is from a tiny sample.

6.50pm. The first booth from Pembroke is the booth at Agfest; as there was no comparable booth in 2001, I do not have two-candidate calculations. Only 152 votes.

6.31pm. The first booth from Nelson, Sandfly, gives 47 votes to Wilkinson and 35 to Nilsson. I will move the Pembroke table to the top of the post when real figures come in - the ones there now are purely for test purposes.

5.30pm. Welcome to the Poll Bludger’s live coverage of today’s Tasmanian Legislative Council periodical elections for the seats of Pembroke and Nelson. Since Nelson is a foregone conclusion, independent incumbent Jim Wilkinson facing opposition only from Greens candidate Tom Nilsson, the focus of attention will be on Pembroke, where Labor’s Allison Ritchie faces at least a theoretical chance of defeat at the hands of either the Greens candidate, Neil Smith, or one of four independents: Marti Zucco, David Jackson, Richard James and John Peers. The accompanying table will show the primary vote in both numbers of votes and percentages, and an estimate of two-candidate preferred results based on comparison with equivalent booth results from 2001. These assume that preferences will split 57/33 in Labor’s favour if the Greens run second, or 33/55 if an independent runs second; a 10 per cent exhaustion rate is predicted, as voters are only compelled to fill three boxes. This is fairly arbitrary, and better informed readers (you there, Kevin?) are invited to suggest alternatives in comments. I will start with the assumption that the Greens will run second; two-candidate figures are also provided for the others in the event that I am wrong. If so, subtract the total from 100 to get the result for Labor. The first figures should be in at around 6.30pm – any figures you see before then will just be a test.

The Coalition has again narrowed the gap in this fortnight’s Newspoll, although it remains at a daunting 57-43. Lateline reports that Kevin Rudd’s preferred prime minister rating is down two points to 46 per cent, with John Howard’s up three points to 39 per cent. The Australian’s report is not online yet, but will be by the time most of you read this. In other developments from the past week:

• Labor’s national executive has acted quickly on the authority it received from the national conference to preselect candidates for 25 New South Wales seats, nominating military lawyer Colonel Mike Kelly to run against Liberal member Gary Nairn in Eden-Monaro. In his role with the coalition provisional authority after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Kelly is credited with efforts to blow the whistle on mistreatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and AWB’s payment of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime. David Humphries and Andrew Clennell of the Sydney Morning Herald assess the state of play elsewhere as follows:

Greg Combet, the ACTU secretary, will be candidate for the Hunter seat of Charlton, replacing Kelly Hoare, who replaced her father, the former minister Bob Brown, in 1998. The right wing will decide replacements for Michael Hatton, who filled Paul Keating’s vacancy in Blaxland in 1996, and Julia Irwin, the MP for Fowler, also in Sydney’s south-west, since 1998. If Mr Rudd got his way, the likely candidate in Blaxland would be the University of NSW constitutional lawyer George Williams. But speculation is that the contest will be between Tania Mihailuk, the Mayor of Bankstown, and Bernie Riordan, the Electrical Trades Union boss. The favourite in Fowler, Warren Mundine, the former ALP president, may be overlooked because of demands to strengthen the number of women candidates.

• Following Senator Amanda Vanstone’s appointment as ambassador to Rome, the South Australian Liberal Party will hold its preselection to replace her on May 25, with nominations to close on Thursday. This is the third South Australian Liberal Senate vacancy in little over a year, following Robert Hill’s departure last March and Jeannie Ferris’s death earlier this month. As was the case with Santo Santoro’s vacancy in Queensland, the party administration has opted for a new ballot rather than promote an existing candidate for the coming federal election. The position would otherwise have gone to Maria Kourtesis, head of the nursing agency Prime Medical Placements. Kourtesis has been preselected for the unwinnable fourth position on the Senate ticket (which she also filled at the 1996 election), behind Cory Bernardi (who replaced Hill), Simon Birmingham (who will replace Ferris) and Grant Chapman, a Senator since 1987. Kourtesis’s defeat at the hands of the long-serving but little-known Chapman caused considerable angst due to the state party’s poor record on female representation. It was also a defeat for the beleagured moderates faction; Vanstone, also a moderate, is among those who have called for the balance to be redressed by having Kourtesis take her spot. Kourtesis will instead face opposition from the Right’s Mary Jo Fisher, workplace relations lawyer and manager at Business SA. The winner will not face election later this year, as Vanstone’s term does not expire until 2011.

• Also in South Australia, Labor has endorsed Nicole Cornes, columnist for the Sunday Mail newspaper and wife of football identity Graham Cornes, to run against Liberal member Andrew Southcott in the Adelaide seat of Boothby. Cornes admits to having voted Liberal in the past, and wrote in her column in 2004 that John Howard had “proved himself to be a fine PM”. In the other normally safe Liberal seat in Adelaide, Sturt, Labor has nominated Mia Handshin – a former Young South Australian of the Year and “founder of inspirational speaking and consultancy group Mana of Speaking” – to run against Christopher Pyne.

• Western Australian Liberal Senator Ross Lightfoot announced he would retire from politics on Friday after it became clear he would lose the number three position to Mathias Corman, state party senior vice-president. Corman is linked with fellow WA Senators Chris Ellison and Ian Campbell in a pro-Howard camp opposed by forces aligned with indestructible powerbroker Noel Crichton-Browne. Last year, Lightfoot said he would have “no honourable course” but to quit the Liberal Party and serve out his term as an independent if he was dumped in an “undignified” manner. The Prime Minister reportedly instructed the state party to hold off on its preselection for as long as possible to minimise the effect of such an eventuality. However, despite Lightfoot’s complaint that the party should have chosen someone “more appropriate with respect to family values”, it does not appear that he plans to do so. The other incumbents, Alan Eggleston and David Johnston, have been re-nominated.

• New South Wales Labor Senator George Campbell has announced he will retire from politics when his term expires in mid-2008, rather than face an inevitable preselection defeat. Campbell’s seat will go to his successor as national secretary of the Left faction Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, Doug Cameron, who by all accounts had stitched up the numbers to depose the 65-year-old Campbell long before. The other NSW Labor Senator up for re-election, Ursula Stephens, is reportedly at risk of being demoted in favour of the party’s high profile state secretary, Mark Arbib, who it was earlier believed had his eyes on Michael Hatton’s seat of Blaxland.

• The Northern News reports that the Liberal preselection for the safe northern Sydney seat of Mitchell will be held on an “unspecified date in May”. Under-achieving sitting member Alan Cadman, now 69, is apparently set on contesting again, despite having survived a challenge ahead of the 2004 election 58 votes to 55. Andrew Clennell of the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the party’s state vice-president, Nick Campbell, has been “encouraged” by two federal ministers to nominate. Others mentioned as contenders are Australian Hotels Association deputy chief executive David Elliott and solicitor Mark Blanche.

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