THE POLL BLUDGER
Queensland Legislative Assembly Election 2006
NOOSA
Labor 8.7%
| Region | Sunshine Coast |
| Federal | Fairfax |
| Candidates | John Burton Chapman (Family First) Jennie Harvie (Greens) John O'Connor (Labor) John Philip Rivett (Independent) Cate Molloy (Independent) Glen Elmes (Liberal) |
| Click here for PDF map at Parliament House site | |
Noosa extends southwards along the coast for 20 kilometres from Noosa Heads to Coolum, and across less developed areas for 30 kilometres to north. There is a marked disparity in voting patterns around Noosaville and Tewantin, which lean heavily to the Liberals, and Labor-voting Coolum. The electorate came into existence at the 1992 election following the one-vote one-value redistribution, created mostly from the urbanised part of abolished Cooroora, which was a National/Country Party seat from the time of the party's creation in 1922 until its defeat at the 1989 election. Liberal candidate Bruce Davidson won the seat upon its creation with a 2.4 per cent two-party margin over Labor. The National Party were a distant third and have not contested the seat since. Noosa was the jewel in Labor's Sunshine Coast crown at the 2001 and 2004 elections, Cate Molloy first winning the seat from Davidson by a narrow margin with an 11.3 per cent swing, then adding a surprise 7.8 per cent swing on her re-election. Molloy was recently disendorsed by Labor over her opposition to the proposed Traveston dam and will run as an independent.
For a member who never rose to the junior ministry, Cate Molloy (right) has generated more than her fair share of column inches. Her enthusiasm for nude beaches and Sexpo won her a certain type of attention during the first term, but her claim to national fame came during the 2004 federal election when she declared: "I hold the Liberal sitting members accountable for the bombing in Bali and the death of the Balinese and the death of Australians, and I also hold our sitting Liberal MPs accountable for the bombing of the Australian embassy, and there is no walking away from that shocking track record". This was the first of two campaign incidents that brought attention to her husband Ivan Molloy, the Labor candidate for Fairfax. The second came less than a week later when a photo emerged of him posing with a machine gun in the company of members of the Moro National Liberation Front, whose Islamic faction continues to wage a low-intensity war in the southern Philippines. A different kind of low-intensity war led to Ivan and Cate Molloy having their memberships of the Sunshine Beach Surf Life Saving Club suspended in early 2006, after Ivan Molloy failed to take kindly to the club's removal of a nude painting he had commissioned in his capacity as its deputy president.
Cate Molloy's break with Labor came in June when she was disendorsed due to her public opposition to the government's dam-building proposals, which extended to leading protest marches and threatening to introduce a private member's bill. Molloy promptly announced that she would run as an independent, and held off until the campaign before delivering an angrily worded letter of resignation from the Labor Party (from which she was soon to be expelled in any case for running against an endorsed candidate). The preselection initiated by Molloy's disendorsement was won by John O'Connor (left), who operates a local catering company. For the second successive election, the Liberals have nominated Glen Elmes (right), general manager of local radio stations Heat FM and 4GY.
A TNS poll of 200 voters published in the Sunday Mail on August 20 backed suggestions that Cate Molloy would split the Labor vote and open the door for a Liberal win. After distribution of the undecided, the Liberal vote was 40 per cent compared with 26 per cent for Molloy and 25 per cent for Labor. The final two-candidate figure was a 55-45 split between Liberal and Molloy. Dennis Atkins of the Courier-Mail reported in the second week of the campaign that a "Labor insider" had described the Sunshine Coast as a "wipe-out" for Labor, with Noosa returning "quite strongly" to its traditional Liberal-voting ways. The only other Labor-held seat on the Sunshine Coast is Kawana, where the government has been having ongoing troubles over the location of a new hospital. Atkins also noted that "deep antagonism to the Mary River dam" was damaging Labor in the region.
ASSESSMENT: LIBERAL GAIN