THE POLL BLUDGER
New South Wales Legislative Assembly Election 2007

CAMDEN
Labor 8.7%

The electorate of Camden is located in Sydney's south-western outskirts, from Camden itself north to Bringelly and east to Claymore. It has been substantially redrawn by the redistribution following the creation of the new seat of Wollondilly to the south-west, to which it loses nearly 20,000 voters from Silverdale south to Mount Hunter. A further 3300 voters north of Bringelly Creek and Bringelly Road have been moved to Mulgoa. In exchange, the electorate's eastern boundary has been extended to the Hume Highway, adding more than 10,000 new voters from Campbelltown (from Eagle Vale south to Blairmont) and 1600 from Macquarie Fields (at Raby). These changes have added a handy 3.3 per cent to the Labor margin.

Camden was created in its modern incarnation at the 1981 election when it was won for Labor by Ralph Brading, who was defeated in 1984 by future Liberal Premier John Fahey. Fahey moved to the new seat of Southern Highlands after new boundaries eliminated his margin, allowing Labor's Peter Primrose to secure the narrowest of wins against the trend of the 1988 election. The redistribution at the 1991 election sent it back the other way, and Primrose was defeated by Liberal candidate Liz Kernohan. The Liberals dispiritingly failed to carry the seat when Kernohan took her personal vote into retirement with her at the 2003 election, with Labor's Geoff Corrigan (left) charging to victory on an 8.9 per cent swing. Corrigan had previously been mayor of Camden, and worked as a state public servant and with a mortgage broking business. The Liberals have nominated the current mayor, Chris Patterson (right), who manages a local tavern.

On the Monday before the election, the Sydney Morning Herald carried an ACNielsen poll from an impressive sample of 952 voters, which showed a relatively encouraging result for the Liberals: a 53-47 two-party split in Labor’s favour, or a swing of nearly 6 per cent. The primary vote figures were Labor 47 per cent, Liberal 41 per cent, Greens 5 per cent, independents 3 per cent and other parties 5 per cent. However, the poll was conducted a full week earlier – before the politically bewildering double whammy of the Liberals' transport policy failure and the public transport fiasco the previous Thursday. This followed a report from Caitlin O'Toole of the Financial Review that "polls" showed the Liberals were in fact ahead: none had been published, so this presumably referred to party polling.

ASSESSMENT: LIBERAL GAIN