The Poll Bludger - Australian State and Federal Elections

BASS Liberal 2.6%
Launceston/North-Western Tasmania Click here for Bass discussion forum
	SVEN WIENER Independent ADRIAN RONALD WATTS Citizens Electoral Council JODIE CAMPBELL Labor (bottom left) TOM MILLEN Greens IXA DE HAAN Family First SHEM BENNETT Liberty and Democracy Party MICHAEL FERGUSON Liberal (top left)


Booth results at the 2004 election, with size of numbers varying to reflect number of votes cast. Click on image to toggle between two-party vote and swing.

Bass has been little changed since it was created with Tasmania's division into single-member electorates in 1903, 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 east to west 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.

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, whose candidate Michael Ferguson overhauled the 2.0 per cent margin with a 4.5 per cent swing. 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).

Ferguson 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, who first came to prominence as an Australian Services Union official when the 2001 Ansett collapse caused a Launceston call centre to close. She was elected to council the following year and became deputy mayor in October 2005. 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”.

Jodie 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 for the seat; 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.

The electorate became the centre of national attention in early October when Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull gave conditional approval to Gunns Limited's proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill, to be located at the Bell Bay industrial precinct north of Launceston. Geoffrey Cousins, a Telstra board member and friend to the Prime Minister, had sought to embarrass Turnbull into blocking the project by funding local newspaper advertisements in his environmentally sensitive electorate of Wentworth. Local opinion in Bass has been divided between hopes of job creation and fears over the effect on the water supply. Also of local interest has been a predictable targeting of the electorate with government largesse in the May 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.

At the end of the first weekend of the campaign, a Newspoll survey of 500 voters in Bass gave Labor a lead of 57-43, compared with just 51-49 in neighbouring Braddon. Tasmanian market research firm EMRS has published four surveys of 200 voters in each of the state's five electorates, in June, in August, on November 7 and on November 15. The first had Labor leading in Bass 54 per cent to 32 per cent on the primary vote and 65-35 on two-party preferred; the second had Labor's leads at 52 per cent to 36 per cent and 59-41; the third showed a further narrowing to 55-45 with the parties tied on 40 per cent of the primary vote, the Greens vote spiking to 19 per cent compared with 8.1 per cent at the 2004 election; and the final week poll had the Labor lead at 52-48. Shortly before Malcolm Turnbull's pulp mill announcement, the Wilderness Society commissioned a poll of 492 voters in Bass and Braddon which showed Labor with leads of 61-39 in both seats. It also showed 27 per cent of Bass voters would be more likely to vote Liberal if the mill was rejected, while only 6 per cent said they would be more likely to do so if it was approved. Dennis Shanahan of The Australian also reported at this time that the seat was “assumed to be gone”. However, there were others who argued that the pulp mill, and in particular the perception that well-heeled Sydneysiders were seeking to impose their will on the electorate, would work in the government's favour. Glenn Milne in The Australian pointed to the apparent reversal of a polling trend to the Liberals in neighbouring Lyons, where Liberal candidate Ben Quin had been vocal in his opposition to the mill (he went on to quit the party and is running as an independent).