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THE POLL BLUDGER OXLEY
Likely to be remembered for a long time to come as Pauline Hanson's former electorate, the modern seat of Oxley was created around the satellite city of Ipswich west of Brisbane in 1949 (a seat bearing the name earlier existed in southern Brisbane, before being renamed Griffith in 1934). It was held for the Liberals by Menzies government Health Minister Donald Cameron until 1961, when Bill Hayden won it for Labor with a 9.4 per cent swing. Hayden did extraordinarily well to lift his margin to 19.1 per cent by 1969, but Queensland's reaction to the Whitlam government was enough to cut this to 3.8 per cent in 1975. By the time Hayden resigned to become Governor-General in 1988, the seat was safe enough that Labor's Les Scott was able to survive a sharp swing at the ensuing by-election, holding on by 4.0 per cent. After winning the seat in 1993 by 12.6 per cent, nobody figured Scott to be in trouble going into the 1996 election. However, trouble came in the form of Liberal candidate Pauline Hanson, whose controversial campaign remarks about Aboriginal welfare saw her disendorsed by a party sensitive about its leader's complicated history on racial issues. The voters by contrast rewarded her with an astonishing 48.6 per cent of the primary vote, resulting in a 4.7 per cent win after preferences. Unfortunately for Hanson, the seat was substantially redrawn with the 1998 redistribution, losing its rural areas beyond Ipswich to newly created Blair along with parts of Ipswich itself, while absorbing the very safe Labor urban area of Inala. Rightly or wrongly, Hanson decided the new seat offered her the better prospects and Labor had no trouble regaining Oxley at the election of October 1998. The redistributions of 2004 and 2007 have sent the electorate's remaining share of Ipswich to Blair, compensating it with the Seventeen Mile Rocks area to the north and Algester to the east. | |