THE POLL BLUDGER
Victorian Legislative Assembly Election 2006

SOUTH-WEST COAST
Liberal 0.8%

South-West Coast extends from the South Australian border east along the coast through Portland and Warrnambool, and inland to Macarthur. It was created at the 2002 election upon the abolition of Portland, a seat that had been in Liberal hands since 1973. The new electorate had a notional Liberal margin of 4.7 per cent, and Denis Napthine (right) did well under the circumstances to hold it against a relatively mild 4.3 per cent swing. Napthine entered parliament in 1988 and did not achieve great seniority in the government, serving as Youth and Community Services Minister in the second term, until he served as Treasurer for two weeks in the period between the 1999 election and the fall of the Kennett government. He subsequently emerged as Leader of the Opposition following Jeff Kennett's resignation, but deposed by Robert Doyle three months before the November 2002 election. He has since held portfolios including state, rural and regional development, and more recently agriculture and water. It was reported in early 2003 he was considering challenging the preselection of David Hawker in the corresponding federal seat of Wannon, but nothing became of it.

On the last weekend of the campaign, Denis Napthine described Labor’s promise to create a new national park in his electorate at Cobboboonee as "an outrageously bare-faced grab for votes among the latte-swilling, chardonnay socialist, crystal-gazing, new-age tree-huggers of inner-suburban Melbourne". The comment appeared to go against the party’s support for the proposal as outlined on the Liberal website; however, Baillieu told The Age there was in fact no difference of opinion, and that Napthine was "indicating what I indicated, which is that we want to know there is local support for those proposals" (though there is nothing about this in the party’s policy statement). Duncan Hughes of the Australian Financial Review reports that Napthine has also been at odds with Baillieu over the prospect of a coalition government after the election and the status of the party’s plan for a dam on the Maribyrnong River.

ASSESSMENT: LABOR GAIN