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THE POLL BLUDGER HOLT
Created in 1969 around Dandenong, Holt was a marginal seat until Michael Duffy won it for Labor with an 8.7 per cent swing in 1980. Demographic changes had pushed the margin into double figures by the time Gareth Evans used the seat to transfer from the Senate in 1996. Evans pulled the plug immediately after the 1998 election defeat, and while this ruffled feathers it did not cause trouble for new candidate Anthony Byrne, who won the ensuing by-election in the absence of a Liberal candidate. The seat's present slender margin was acquired in 2004 following a substantial redistribution, which moved the seat's traditional focal point of Dandenong to Isaacs and Bruce and added the satellite town of Cranbourne, and a particularly savage case of the swing that hit Labor in mortgage belts across the land. These respectively cut the Labor margin by 5.4 per cent and 6.4 per cent. | |