THE POLL BLUDGER
Western Australian Legislative Assembly Election 2008

MANDURAH
Labor 8.5%
Upper house region: South West
Federal divisions: Brand/Canning
MICHELLE SHAVE
Christian Democratic Party

DAVID TEMPLEMAN
Labor (top)

RHONDA HAMERSLEY
Family First

CLARE NUNAN
Greens

LES ATKINS
Liberal

KEITH HALLAM
Citizens Electoral Council

One of the anomalies of the outgoing electoral regime was the “rural” vote weighting given to Mandurah by virtue of its situation outside the metropolitan area (73 kilometres to the south of the city), despite its urbanisation and identity as a commuter town even before the opening of the Perth to Mandurah railway in December 2007. The introduction of one-vote one-value has forced it to expand into northern suburbs which had previously been in Murray (which has been superseded by Murray-Wellington), while the Dudley Park area along the Mandurah Estuary and Peel Inlet has been transferred to the southern Mandurah seat of Dawesville.

The electorate of Mandurah was created at the 1983 election when it was carved out of Murray, the inaugural member being Labor's John Read. In 1989 Read was defeated by Liberal candidate Roger Nicholls, who served as Community Development Minister in the Court government before falling victim to the 2001 election defeat. The seat then passed to Labor's David Templeman, whose 7.9 per cent swing was assisted in no small part by preferences from a strongly performing One Nation (12.6 per cent). Templeman's margin was boosted from 4.9 per cent to 7.7 per cent by the redistribution ahead of the 2005 election and then by a 4.6 per cent swing at the election itself, perhaps aided by the government's commitment to the $2 billion rail project. The current redistribution has brought the margin back down from 12.3 per cent to 8.5 per cent.

A member of the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union sub-faction of the Left, Templeman was appointed to the front-bench after its numbers helped deliver the premiership to Alan Carpenter in January 2006. He initially took on the same community development portfolio occupied by his predecessor (the name of which was changed to child protection in December 2006), before winning further promotion to environment and climate change following the demise of Tony McRae and John Bowler in March 2007.

ASSESSMENT: Labor retain