SOUTH AUSTRALIAN ELECTION 2010

GILES Labor 15.9%
Region: Whyalla/Outback Federal division: Grey
	ANDREW MELVILLE-SMITH Greens CHERYL KAMINSKI Family First CHAD OLDFIELD Liberal (bottom) LYN BREUER Country Labor (top)
Electoral District Boundaries Commission map

Giles covers the entire western half of South Australia minus a narrow band of Great Australian Bight coastal territory along the Eyre Highway, which was transferred to Flinders at the redistribution before the 2006 election. The industrial town of Whyalla provides the electorate with about 70 per cent of its voters, making it the only non-metropolitan seat held by Labor. In 2006 the Whyalla booths collectively broke 76-24 in favour of Labor, while the balance of the electorate went 57-43 the other way. The redistribution has made two changes: Oodnadatta and William Creek are now entirely within Giles, having previously been split with Stuart, and the District Council of Franklin Harbour and its heavily Liberal-voting booth of Cowell have been transferred to Flinders, reversing a change made at the previous redistribution. The latter is mostly responsible for a 1.4 per cent boost to the Labor margin.

Whyalla was an electorate in its own right until 1993, when population decline required the addition of vast outback areas. The seat had a long history as a Labor stronghold, and was held by Deputy Premier Frank Blevins at the time it was abolished. Blevins narrowly held Giles in the face of the 1993 election landslide, and Labor easily retained it when he retired in 1997. Population decline that has since abated required it to absorb almost 3000 voters in strongly Liberal-leaning areas going into the 2006 election, cutting the margin from 9.8 per cent to 5.3 per cent. Labor nonetheless went entirely untroubled at the election, picking up a 9.1 per cent swing driven by an 11.6 per cent swing in Whyalla.

Labor's member since 1997 has been Lyn Breuer, a former TAFE lecturer in women's studies with links to the SA Education Union. Her effortless combination of country-style straight-talking with political positions more normally associated with the inner-city was best demonstrated during a parliamentary debate on the definition of marriage in May 2004, in which she asked members to spare her “this bullshit about sanctity of marriage”, arguing “a dozen in this place now” were “rooting as hard as they can go wherever they can and as often as they can”. This prompted Isobel Redmond to complain of language “highly inappropriate in a parliamentary context”. Breuer also went against the grain over asylum seekers, a locally important issue given the electorate was home to the now-defunct Woomera detention centre. Her brave call for detainees to be moved from Woomera to Whyalla in 2002 provoked a strong reaction from locals including Whyalla mayor John Smith, who had run against her as an independent three months previously.

The Liberal candidate is Chad Oldfield, a Roxby Downs-based businessman involved in milk distribution, landscape gardening and earth moving.

The government caused an uproar in rural and remote areas in June 2008 when it unveiled its Country Health Plan, under which Mount Gambier, Whyalla, Berri and Port Lincoln would be designated “regional hospitals” and smaller hospitals elsewhere would be downgraded as “community hospitals” or “GP plus centres”. Barely a month later the government agreed to revise the policy, and it ultimately abandoned it altogether. There has also been considerable rural angst over the government's “shared services” scheme, which the opposition claimed would move 550 regional public service jobs to Adelaide. The scheme has fallen well short of the projected $137 million savings over five years, and was found by the Auditor-General to have cost $11.6 million more to implement than the government had budgeted for.

PREDICTION: Labor retain