SOUTH AUSTRALIAN ELECTION 2010

MORIALTA Labor 6.8%
Region: Eastern Suburbs Federal divisions: Sturt/Mayo
	JOHN GARDNER Liberal (bottom) LINDSAY SIMMONS Labor (top) SCOTT ANDREWS Greens ELIZABETH SMIT Family First PETER MADDERN Save RAH
Electoral District Boundaries Commission map

Known as Coles from 1970 to 2002, Morialta contains outer suburbs due east of the city from Auldana north to Athelstone, along with a larger area of lightly populated hinterland extending 10 kilometres east to Cherryville. The redistribution has transferred part of Paradise to Hartley in the west, while a stretch of hills territory from Skye east to Basket Range has been added from Bragg and Heysen. The changes were made partly to reduce the Labor margin from 8.0 per cent to 6.8 per cent, in keeping with the requirement for “fair” electoral boundaries. The Paradise transfer partly reverses a change that had been made at the 2006 election, when the area recorded a massive swing to Labor of over 15 per cent.

Coles started life as a Labor seat and was held by future Premier Des Corcoran until 1977, when an unfavourable redistribution prompted him to seek refuge in Hartley. It was subsequently won for the Liberals by Jennifer Cashmore, who held the seat until her retirement in 1993. Cashmore was succeeded by Joan Hall, a television reporter and wife of former Premier and federal MP Steele Hall. Joan Hall survived determined preselection challenges late in her career but could not withstand the verdict of the 2006 election, at which Morialta delivered Labor particularly emphatic swings of 12.9 per cent on the primary vote and 11.5 per cent on two-party preferred.

The successful Labor candidate was Lindsay Simmons, previously a policy manager and chief-of-staff to Education Minister Trish White. Simmons is linked to the Right faction and had run previously at federal elections in 2001, when she was the Labor candidate for Sturt, and 1998, when she headed a “Vote No GST” Senate ticket which some suspicious folk may have deemed to be a Labor front. She attracted unwelcome publicity in early 2008 when a hairdresser who copped a serve for keeping her waiting said she had “never been humiliated and treated so badly in the whole 32 years of my working life”. The Liberals sought to keep the issue alive by unearthing another episode of sharp behaviour from her days as Blind Welfare Association chief executive in 1997.

The Liberal candidate is John Gardner, a former Young Liberals state president who has more recently worked as a staffer to senior moderates Vickie Chapman and Christopher Pyne.

A week into the campaign, the Sunday Mail published a survey of 574 voters which showed John Gardner with a 52-48 lead, replicates the result of earlier Labor polling which I had heard rumours of. The primary vote figures were 43 per cent for the Liberals (35.2 per cent at the 2006 election), 35 per cent for Labor (47.7 per cent), 4 per cent for the Greens (6.3 per cent) and 3 per cent each for the Democrats (3.0 per cent) and Family First (5.7 per cent).

PREDICTION: LIBERAL GAIN