THE POLL BLUDGER
House of Representatives Election 2007

LYONS
Labor 3.7%

Lyons covers a wide area of Tasmania's least populous territory across the centre of the state, its name changing from Wilmot in 1984. The seat was first won for Labor in 1929 by Joseph Lyons, whose minority state government had been defeated at the previous year's election. Lyons assumed the senior position of Postmaster-General in the Jim Scullin's new Labor government but fell out with his colleagues over economic policy, defecting to the opposition in March 1931 and emerging as the head of the new conservative United Australia Party. The Lyons-led UAP enjoyed a landslide win at the election of December 1931, and he remained Prime Minister until his death in 1939. Labor briefly recovered his seat at the ensuing by-election, by Allan Guy won it back for the UAP in 1940 before losing to Labor's Gil Duthie in 1946. Duthie built up a solid margin over time, but fell victim to Tasmania's reaction against the Whitlam government with successive swings of 9.9 per cent and 8.0 per cent in 1975 and 1977. With help from the Franklin dam issue, Max Burr maintained the seat for the Liberals until his retirement in 1993, when the loss of his personal vote combined with a particularly pronounced reaction to John Hewson's proposed GST to deliver a decisive 5.6 per cent swing to Labor's Dick Adams, a former state government minister who had lost his seat in 1982. Adams survived a swing in 1996 before piling 9.3 per cent on to his margin in 1998, enough of a buffer to survive a small swing in 2001 and a large one in 2004 when northern Tasmania reacted against Mark Latham's forest policies, which had been bitterly opposed by Adams.

The Liberals initially nominated their candidate from 2004, Ben Quin, but he quit the party in early October in protest over the government's green light for the Tamar Valley pulp mill and announced his intention to run as an independent. Matthew Denholm of The Australian reported concurrence among the major parties that he would “attract only a handful of votes”. Quin was once a member of the Greens, which he later explained as a principled reaction to the joint Labor and Liberal effort in 1998 to shaft the party through changes to the state electoral system. The Liberal Party acted quickly to install a new candidate, “transport company businessman” Geoff Page, whose father Graeme was a state MP of 20 years.

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. These respectively had Labor's leads in Lyons at 59-41, 61-39, 58-42 and 56-44. The trend to Labor from the first poll to the second, which was reversed in the other four electorates, was thought to be significant by Glenn Milne, who wrote in The Australian that Quin had “badly misjudged the mood of Tasmanians” in opposing the pulp mill. Milne also quoted Liberal internal polling of 300 voters conducted on September 14 and 15, which showed the Liberal primary vote in Lyons slumping to 30 per cent from 42 per cent in 2004. Not everyone was convinced, with polling conducted for the Wilderness Society showing voters in Bass were likely to react negatively to government support for the mill.