With the Poll Bludger’s threadbare federal election guide nearing completion (to be fleshed out further in coming months as much as time permits), the time has come to reactivate the dormant Seat of the Week series. We return with the seat of Parramatta, where Labor member Julie Owens’ 0.8 per cent margin has turned into a notional Liberal margin of 1.1 per cent following the redistribution. The electorate now covers an elongated strip from Carlingford and Dundas west to Kings Langley and Blacktown, with the southern boundary running just south of the Parramatta town centre.

A quarter of this territory consists of an area gained from Greenway to the west, from Grantham and Prospect north through Seven Hills and eastern Blacktown to Kings Langley. The new area follows the rest of the electorate in that the northern part is strongly Liberal (as are Winston Hills and Carlingford to the east), while the remainder leans to Labor (as does Wentworthville and Parramatta itself). Similarly, the North Rocks area gained from northern neighbour Mitchell went 62-38 the Liberals’ way in 2004. Elizabeth Wynhausen of The Australian writes of a “faultline” through the electorate which separates Sydney’s poorer south-west, including Lebanese and Iranian enclaves at Harris Park and North Parramatta, from “stolid Winston Hills in the north”. Much of the former area, including 29,000 voters in Westmead, Harris Park, Rosehill, Rydalmere and Dundas, has now been tranferred to the electorate’s southern neighbour, Reid.

Parramatta was created at federation, shrinking over time from Sydney’s broad north-western outskirts into the immediate area of the town itself. A conservative stronghold until 1929, it was held for the first 20 years by Joseph Cook, who served as Liberal prime minister from June 1913 to September 1914. Labor’s only win prior to 1977 came with the election of Jim Scullin’s government in 1929, when their candidate Albert Rowe picked up a 13.4 per cent swing. This was undone with a vengeance when the Scullin government was defeated in 1931, when the seat swung 19.5 per cent to the newly founded United Australia Party. Subsequent members included Sir Frederick Stewart, who served as External Affairs Minister for one highly eventful year from 1940 to 1941; Sir Garfield Barwick, Menzies government External Affairs Minister and Attorney-General, and later controversial Chief Justice of the High Court; and Philip Ruddock, who began his parliamentary career when he won the seat at a by-election in September 1973, adding 7.0 per cent to what had been an extremely narrow margin in 1972.

The watershed in the seat’s history came with a 1977 redistribution that effectively changed the existing seat’s name to Dundas, of which Philip Ruddock became the inaugural member, while creating a new seat of Parramatta that extended deep into Sydney’s Labor-voting west. The newly safe Labor seat was won by John Brown, the koala-hating Hawke government Tourism Minister who is remembered for inappropriate use of his ministerial desk. Brown resigned as minister in 1987 after misleading parliament and quit politics in 1990, when he was succeeded in Parramatta by Paul Elliott. Redistributions in 1984 and 1993 returned the seat to the marginal column by pulling it back to the east, reducing the margin to 1.0 per cent ahead of the 1993 election. Elliott was able to increase his margin on that occasion, but the 1996 election proved a bridge too far, with Liberal candidate Ross Cameron picking up the seat with a 7.1 per cent swing.

Despite sometimes making the news for the wrong reasons, Cameron held Parramatta against the 1998 GST swing (a relatively mild 1.1 per cent) and a highly unfavourable redistribution in 2001, which added much of the area now being returned to Reid. He was rewarded for the latter success with a parliamentary secretary position, and looked for all the world like a promising up-and-comer. Unfortunately, his career went into meltdown two months out from the 2004 election, when he felt compelled to tell Fairfax’s Good Weekend magazine that he had committed numerous infidelities throughout his married life, including a present affair which was under way while his wife was pregnant. Cameron became one of only three Coalition MPs to lose his seat (the others being Trish Worth in Adelaide and Larry Anthony in Richmond), suffering a small but decisive 1.9 per cent swing.

Labor’s winning candidate was Julie Owens (right), classically trained pianist, chief executive of the Association of Independent Record Labels and owner of an unspecified small business. Owens is associated with the Left faction, having won preselection with support from factional chieftain Laurie Ferguson. When speculation emerged that Ferguson’s neighbouring seat of Reid might be the one for the chop when New South Wales was cut from 50 seats to 49, Ferguson openly mused that he might have to fall back on Parramatta. While that was not to be, Owens was done a poor turn of a different kind by the redistribution, and must now pick up another swing in order to retain her seat. After much speculation that former navy officer Tim Bolitho was the front-runner, the Liberals have preselected another former navy man in Colin Robinson, who now works as an electrician and is a member of the Electrical Trades Union. A certainly lack of urgency surrounding the Liberals’ search for a new candidate was noted, prompting suggestions that the party is not wildly optimistic about its chances.

See Crikey’s marginal seat guide for my precision-tooled electorate maps marking 2004 two-party and swing results in each individual booth.

As reported in various News Limited papers, a Galaxy poll conducted over the weekend shows Labor suffering a 2 per cent drop in the primary vote since the previous poll four weeks ago, and a slight narrowing of their two-party lead. Curiously, Galaxy’s figure of 10 per cent for the Greens is at least double what Newspoll has given them in the past four months. Also included are figures on Liberal leadership preference which indicate voters are least unlikely to vote Coalition if John Howard remains Prime Minister. The following table shows two-party and primary vote results from Galaxy’s national federal polls this year:

7.44pm. Sadadeen booth now in, and CLP candidate Matt Conlan is home and hosed with 53.6 per cent of the primary vote. Paul Herrick now leads the Labor candidate 20.3 per cent to 16.5 per cent, while the Greens got a boost from Sadadeen to finish on 9.6 per cent, still down on 10.7 per cent in 2005. Only declaration votes and some more postals to come, which shouldn’t make much difference.

7.05pm. We’ve now got mobile, pre-poll, postal and the small Windmill booth, leaving only the large Sadadeen both (about two-thirds of the total) and declarations (a small handful). Barring something unexpected in Sadadeen, the CLP are looking very good - 62.4 per cent compared with an equivalent 51.4 per cent in 2005. Herrick (17.1 per cent) should finish clear of Labor (13.6 per cent), but it probably won’t be enough. Greens down from 8.7 per cent to 7.0 per cent.

7.00pm. Comparison of pre-poll votes from the 2005 election: the CLP are up from 55.0 per cent to 59.3 per cent, Labor are down from 37.6 per cent to 16.9 per cent and the Greens are up from 7.4 per cent to 7.6 per cent. Filling the gap from Labor’s decline is independent Paul Herrick, on 16.3 per cent. So the swing on pre-polls is not so big you would say the CLP is out of the woods yet.

6.53pm. Pre-poll votes are in, and they suggest a comfortable ride for the CLP candidate, who has 211 of 356 votes (59.3 per cent).

The Adelaide Advertiser has published a poll of federal voting intention in the marginal seats of Kingston and Wakefield, showing Labor with respective leads of 57-43 and 58-42. A similar poll published in January had Labor’s lead in Kingston at 56-44. Labor lost both Kingston and Wakefield at the 2004 election: Kingston by 119 votes following an unfavourable redistribution and a small swing against sitting member David Cox, and Wakefield by 0.7 per cent despite a redistribution that turned a safe Liberal rural seat into a semi-urban seat with a notional Labor margin of 1.5 per cent. The Advertiser’s article is very light on details, such as sample sizes and primary votes. Perhaps some community-spirited South Australian reader might care to send a scan of a table, if there is one.

A black swan day in Victorian politics, with the wholly unheralded news that Premier Steve Bracks and Deputy Premier John Thwaites are calling it a day. Whither the Victorian government? Not my concern (not until 2010, anyway). What matters here is that two by-elections will soon be upon us. The Liberals could be forgiven for taking a pass in Bracks’s seat of Williamstown, as they did in the happier times of 1994 when Bracks replaced Joan Kirner. Thwaites’s seat of Albert Park is quite a different matter. Labor recorded some fairly modest margins in the seat last decade – 5.8 per cent in 1992, 6.4 per cent in 1999. The margin was back inside 10 per cent at last November’s election, which surely counts as striking distance for a by-election involving a third-term government. With the government continuing to travel reasonably well, the reality is that the Liberals will not be at all confident, but shirking this contest is simply not an option.

The previous thread on Tuesday’s Newspoll result took a turn to matters constitutional. What’s it all about? Beats the hell out of me. The important thing is that esteemed constitutional authority George Williams has put his two cents in, and anything he has to say deserves a better fate than delayed moderation and position 484 in a thread that should have been put out of its misery days ago. So here it is:

In answer to Fulvio’s question re State taxing powers, the Constitution was meant to secure the States’ financial position and independence. At federation in 1901, it was the States and not the Commonwealth that levied income tax. However, the demands of two world wars and changes to the economy, as well as some canny manoeuvring by the Commonwealth, have left the States with no revenue from income taxation.

The High Court decisions in the Uniform Tax Cases of 1942 and 1957 upheld a Commonwealth takeover of the income tax system. Not only that, the decisions also gave a wide interpretation to the ability of the Commonwealth to attach conditions to money granted to the States. Section 96 of the Constitution allows the Commonwealth to make grants on “such terms and conditions” as it thinks fit.

The States today could levy income tax, but it would be in addition to federal tax and so it would mean taxing people twice. The Commonwealth could even insist that its share is collected first. As a result, the States have turned to new sources of taxation, such as on gambling. Hence the rise of casinos …

Today’s Roy Morgan phone poll of 572 voters has Labor leading 59-41 – a 1.5 per cent shift in Labor’s favour from the last phone poll two weeks ago, which complicates the picture presented by last week’s face-to-face poll showing a shift back to the Coalition. Respondents were asked how they would vote if alternative leaders were in place, which provides good news for Malcolm Turnbull and bad news for Peter Costello. Morgan’s report includes a quote from our friend Possum Comitatus, who a few weeks ago put in a rare good word for the agency’s recent record.

The tea leaves will not be easy to read, but tomorrow’s Northern Territory by-election for the Alice Springs seat of Greatorex might be of broader interest as a test of the federal government’s intervention into Aboriginal communities. Here as elsewhere in Alice Springs, voters who were happy to back Labor at federal level have traditionally refused to touch the territory party with a barge pole, and there is little question that racial issues have played a role here. Labor nonetheless made a concerted bid to defeat sitting member Richard Lim at the 2005 election, fielding an extremely high-profile candidate in Alice Springs mayor Fran Kilgariff. They succeeded in narrowing the margin from 9.0 per cent to 1.5 per cent, but Lim nonetheless emerged as one of only four surviving Country Liberal Party members in a chamber of 25. After 13 years in parliament, Lim announced late last month that he was standing aside due to ill health in his family.

In Kilgariff’s absence, a correction in the CLP’s favour should have been expected even without taking into account the Martin government’s recent humiliation at the hands of the feds. With the party’s stocks further boosted by a high-profile candidate, the stage appeared set for a swing to the CLP that would no doubt have been over-interpreted as a pointer to the federal election. However, the waters may have been muddied by the emergence of an independent candidate whom local observers reckon to be in with a real chance. Should that come off, the parliament will have three CLP members and three independents. This will make it possible for the independents to band together and demand half the public funding available to the official opposition for “parliamentary running costs”, said by the Northern Territory News to total $900,000 a year.

The candidates in ballot paper order:

Jo Nixon (Labor). An audiologist by trade, Nixon is apparently known locally as “organiser of the annual Beanie Festival”, which the ABC describes as “increasingly famous”.

Paul Herrick (Independent). Until he quit the job to focus on his campaign, Herrick was the territory’s deputy chief fire officer with specific responsibility for the “southern region”. He has lived in the electorate for 16 years, competed in four Sydney to Hobart and two Melbourne to Hobart yacht races, and can boast involvement with “AFL Central Australia, Centralian Senior Secondary College Council, Rugby League Referees Association and the Alice Springs Cycling Club” (list compiled by the Centralian Advocate). Herrick is being heavily backed by Loraine Braham, the independent member for the north-western Alice Springs seat of Braitling.

Matt Conlan (CLP). Conlan is described by the Northern Territory News as “the Centralian John Laws”, which if accurate would surely make him a hard man to beat. He has nonetheless been targeted over the short term of his residence in Alice Springs. Nick Calacouras of the Northern Territory News describes him as a “radio shock jock”, while contentious Poll Bludger commenter Isabella calls him a “vocal critic of Labor’s soft touch when it comes to out of control Aboriginal crime in the town”. Conlan nonetheless describes his radio program as “non-political”. The Northern Territory News reports he won preselection unopposed after two unidentified rivals withdrew. Those mentioned as potential nominees had included Alice Springs alderman David Koch, former CLP president Jenny Mostran and Alice Springs businessman David Douglas.

Jane Clark (Greens). An Alice Springs alderman, Clark initially sought Labor preselection, seeking and receiving Greens endorsement when this fell through. It had earlier been reported that the Greens were not planning on running.

Tune into the Poll Bludger from early tomorrow evening for half-arsed live commentary.