The Poll Bludger - Australian State and Federal Elections

SOLOMON Country Liberal 2.8%
Darwin and Palmerston, Northern Territory Click here for Solomon discussion forum
	DAMIAN HALE Labor (bottom left) TRUDY CAMPBELL Citizens Electoral Council JACQUES CHESTER Liberty and Democracy Party DAVID TOLLNER Country Liberal Party (top left) MAURICE FOLEY Independent DEBBIE HUDSON Greens


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.

Created with the division of the Northern Territory into two electorates in 2001, Solomon covers Darwin and its satellite town of Palmerston, with the vast remainder of the territory taken up by Lingiari. It has been held since its creation by David Tollner of the Country Liberal Party, who survived a 2.3 per cent swing to Labor to win by just 88 votes in 2001, before picking up 6.9 per cent on the primary vote and 2.7 per cent on two-party preferred in 2004. Solomon's distinguishing demographic characteristics are a high proportion of indigenous persons (10.3 per cent compared to a national figure of 2.3 per cent) and a low number of persons aged over 65 (5.3 per cent against 13.3 per cent). Darwin is divided between newer Labor-leaning suburbs in the north, including Nightcliff, Casuarina, Jingili and Sanderson, and the town centre and its surrounds south of the airport, an area marked by higher incomes, fewer families and greater support for the CLP. Even stronger for the CLP is Palmerston, a satellite town established 20 kilometres south-east of Darwin in the 1980s, which accounts for just over a quarter of the electorate's voters. Palmerston is less multicultural than Darwin and has a high proportion of mortgage-paying young families, no doubt explaining a particularly pronounced swing here in 2004.

The Northern Territory gained its first member of federal parliament in 1922, but the member did not get full voting rights until 1968. Perhaps not coincidentally, the seat had recently fallen to Sam Calder of the Country Party after a long period of Labor control. With Calder's retirement in 1980, the seat transferred to the Country Liberal Party, established as a local alliance of Liberals and Nationals to contest elections in the newly established Northern Territory parliament. The seat fell to Labor with the election of the Hawke government in 1983, defeated CLP member Grant Tambling returning to the Senate four years later. It subsequently changed hands with great frequency: future Chief Minister Paul Everingham recovered the seat for the CLP in 1984, Warren Snowdon won it back for Labor in 1987, Nick Dondas held it for the CLP for one term from 1996, and Snowdon recovered it in 1998. At the time of the 2001 election, Solomon had a notional CLP margin of 2.3 per cent while Lingiari had a notional Labor margin of 3.7 per cent. Warren Snowdon naturally opted for the safer option of Lingiari, and Solomon emerged as an extremely tight contest between Labor's Laurene Hull and David Tollner of the CLP. Tollner suffered a 2.2 per cent swing against the national trend, but was able to hang on by just 88 votes.

The division of the Northern Territory into two electorates looked set to be reversed at the 2004 election, when it was found to be 295 residents short of the number required to maintain its second seat. Since both major parties felt they could win them both (a more sound judgment in Labor's case), the second seat was essentially legislated back into existence. This was done through the expedient of adding “two standard errors” to the official calculation of the territory's population, which is known to be underestimated in census counts, thereby boosting its quota determination from 1.498 to 1.517. The raw figures ahead of the current election had the population still further below the decisive 1.5 mark, but the second seat was again preserved when the standard error adjustment lifted it from 1.471 to 1.505. This has left the two Northern Territory electorates with by far the lowest enrolments in the country: at the time of the 2004 election, Solomon had 54,725 voters and Lingiari 58,205, compared with a little under 70,000 for Tasmanian seats and a national average of around 87,000.

Close margins and territorial over-representation are not the only reasons Tollner is lucky to be in parliament. Party colleagues had been gunning for his disendorsement in 2001, and failed to secure it only because party rules would not allow it so close to an election. At issue was a drink driving charge and an earlier cannabis conviction, which exacerbated ongoing hostility over his attempt to win the territory seat of Nelson as an independent in 1997. Running on opposition to gun control, Tollner had come within 41 votes of defeating the CLP's Chris Lugg. Two significant figures in the CLP cited Tollner's preselection as a factor contributing to their decision to quit the party – Nick Dondas, the member for the Northern Territory electorate from 1996 to 1998, and Maisie Austin, who went so far as to run against Tollner as an independent, but managed only 5 per cent of the vote. Austin later returned to the party and ran as its candidate for Lingiari in 2004. Tollner has continued to cut a colourful figure since entering parliament. In early 2004 he was forced to apologise for misbehaviour on a Qantas flight: he had reportedly “annoyed” Liberal colleague Christopher Pyne by “ruffling his hair”, and had to be told to sit down three times as the plane came in to land. In August, just weeks after the government announced its intervention in remote communities, Tollner was one of a number of party functionaries seen on a boat on which alcohol was consumed very near a dry Tiwi Islands community. As police investigated the discovery of empty beer bottles at the community's airport, Warren Snowdon used parliamentary privilege to accuse Tollner and Senator Nigel Scullion of illegally taking alcohol on to the land.

Labor's candidate is Damian Hale, who coached the Northern Territory Football League club St Marys to three successive premierships from 2003 to 2005. Hale made national news in June after an incident in a Darwin nightclub involving wayward AFL star Chris Tarrant. Hale says he expressed his “disappointment” with Tarrant after he “pulled down his trousers and bared his backside” at a female companion, to which Tarrant responded by punching Hale in the face. Tarrant copped a three-match suspension for his efforts, but Hale declined to press charge

Damian Hale was preselected in February ahead of Darwin lawyer and rugby coach Wayne Connop, marine scientist Stuart Fitch, and two candidates associated with the territory branch of the Australian Nursing Federation: former president Denis Blackford, and organiser Matthew Gardiner. Darwin sports broadcaster Charlie King had earlier been named as the front-runner, having also contested preselection for the 2001 election (hats off to the Northern Territory News sub who came up with the headline “King: Solomon's mine”). However, he withdrew from the race after what the Northern Territory News described as “pressure from ABC management”.

On September 30, Dennis Shanahan of The Australian reported that internal party polling had both major parties believing that Solomon was “gone” as far as the Coalition was concerned. Tollner himself was sounding less than optimistic about his chances as early as May, warning that his electorate “could be looking down the barrel of an all-Labor Territory”. Nonetheless, Rod Cameron wrote in The Age during the first week of the campaign that Solomon was among the marginals Labor couldn't take for granted. This view won backing from a “senior ALP source” quoted in the Northern Territory News during the fifth week in the campaign, who said party polling had Damian Hale “just ahead”. The source further noted that such polls did not factor in the Defence vote at Robertson Barracks, suggesting the race was actually “neck and neck”.