THE POLL BLUDGER
New South Wales Legislative Assembly Election 2007

SWANSEA
Labor 17.1%

Swansea includes the thin strip of land between Lake Macquarie and the ocean, which includes Swansea itself and the southern outskirts of Newcastle, and further territory to the south as far as Lake Budgewoi. The redistribution has altered the northern boundary with Charlestown so that it loses 6000 voters at Eleebana and Tingira Heights on the Lake Macquarie shore, while gaining 2500 at Redhead on the coast. In the south, Buff Point on Budgewoi Lake has been assumed from Wyong, adding more than 6000 voters, while San Remo on the north shore of Lake Budgewoi has been transferred to Wyong for the loss of 2500 voters.

The seat has been without a member since Milton Orkopoulos resigned on November 13 after being charged with offences including sex with boys aged between 10 and 18, sexual assault and supplying illegal drugs. Orkopoulos came to the seat in 1999, having previously been a nurse, BHP steelworker, Lake Macquarie mayor and electorate officer to his predecessor, Jill Hall. Hall was elected in 1995 and departed three years later to successfully contest the seat of Shortland at the October 1998 federal election. Her predecessor was Don Bowman, who had held the seat from its creation in 1981 until 1988, and again after 1991. Labor lost the seat for the first and only time with the defeat of the Unsworth government in 1988, when independent candidate Ivan Welsh benefited from a regional backlash against Labor and the government's unpopular opposition to a second bridge over the entrance to Lake Macquarie.

In the media frenzy that followed the charges against Orkopoulos, other Labor members in the region came under the spotlight as reports emerged that his activities were the subject of widespread rumour in local party circles. Fearing that a local rank-and-file ballot might produce a candidate with links to Orkopoulos, Morris Iemma and party state secretary Mark Arbib enlisted the ALP national executive to impose an outsider, Maritime Union of Australia national president Robert Coombs (right). The most widely mentioned local aspirant had been Kay Fraser, but party figureheads were reportedly concerned by her common background with Orkopoulos as a Lake Macquarie councillor and electorate officer to Jill Hall.

ASSESSMENT: Labor retain