THE POLL BLUDGER
House of Representatives Election 2007

FOWLER
Labor 13.5%

Fowler is based around Liverpool in Labor's low-income south-eastern Sydney heartland. It has been dramatically affected by the current redistribution, losing Cabramatta in the east and gaining semi-rural Badgerys Creek and Warragamba in the west. This has cleaved a no-doubt harmless 7.9 per cent from the Labor margin. The seat has been held by Labor with solid double-digit margins since its creation in 1984, first by Ted Grace, and then by Julia Irwin after 1998. Irwin had been a staffer to various Labor MPs before winning endorsement with the backing of the old guard of the New South Wales Right, including Laurie Brereton and Leo McLeay. The Left had conceded the seat in a deal made to avert a brawl over the Illawarra seat of Throsby. Despite remaining a player in Right factional games, Irwin has twice needed protection to secure her preselection: in 2001, when the state executive intervened to protect her from a branch-stacking campaign, and at the current election, when the party's former federal president Warren Mundine was persuaded to abandon his designs on the seat so that the party's affirmative action quota could be met. Irwin is otherwise best known for her hostile attitude towards Israel, being forced to apologise to Jewish groups in 2005 for “offensive” remarks in parliament.

In the third week of the campaign, reports emerged that Labor had abandoned an idea to help shore up its budget bottom line through the sale of the Badgerys Creek site, earmarked as the possible location of a second Sydney international airport. The site is in Fowler, but its sale would also have been popular in the more electorally significant neighbouring seats of Lindsay and Macarthur.