Politics
Taylor clear favourite in Elwick
Voters in the Glenorchy-based seat of Elwick go to the polls this Saturday to elect a new Legislative Councillor. At least, they do if they remember, and we suspect the turnout will be low. This three-candidate contest is the only regular Legislative Council election to go to a vote this year, Tania Rattray-Wagner having been returned unopposed as member for Apsley. We previewed the contest here and this second part of a two-part series discusses the campaign and comments on the possible outcomes.
Elwick (nee Buckingham) has a recent Labor tradition. Terry Martin won it as a Labor candidate in 2004 with 60% of the vote to 20% for local businessman Steven King (later elected to Glenorchy Council on a recount when Steve Mav resigned), 14.7% for endorsed Green Helen Burnet (now Hobart Deputy Mayor) and 5.2% for Kamala Emanuel of the Democratic Socialist Party (since merged into the Socialist Alliance). Prior to that the seat was held by David Crean, who won it fairly comfortably despite a low primary vote in a field of eight in 1992 and then retained it with 62.5% against a single opponent in 1998. However, it was not always Labor ground. In 1968 Glenorchy Mayor Ken Lowrie won the seat, very narrowly defeating a 26 year old upstart called Doug Lowe. Lowrie held the seat for eighteen years, the last four as Leader for the Gray Government, but in 1986 Lowe (by that stage a former Labor Premier) decided it was time for a rematch, and thrashed Lowrie almost three to one.
The landscape of the 2010 election is different to all these previous contests and indeed rather unusual. In 2004 a hugely popular local mayor ran as the endorsed Labor candidate, but now the hugely popular local mayor runs against the endorsed Labor candidate, despite herself being a recent Labor party member and the endorsed successor as mayor of the previous incumbent. Confused? It gets even more confusing if you view the election signage – the candidate in more or less traditional (if somewhat bolder than normal) Labor red and blue is the Independent, while the endorsed Labor candidate appears framed in fine Liberal Democratic yellow. Taylor’s pamphlet is also red and blue, employs the word “independent” nine times, attacks the “interests of party politics” and runs the time-honoured line that the Legislative Council must stay independent in the form of an endorsement from … Ken Lowrie!
Whatever Taylor’s actual reasons for running as an Independent, it is not hard to find sound strategic reasons for doing so. Her mayoral predecessor Terry Martin joined the party before being elected in 2004, mainly inspired by his friend Jim Bacon, who died only weeks after Martin’s election. But Martin’s time in the post-Bacon party was ultimately an unhappy one, culminating in his expulsion from the PLP for crossing the floor. Also, the party’s brand is in much sorrier shape in 2010 than it was in 2004. At the time Taylor confirmed her candidacy it was far from clear that the party would even continue in government.
To the extent that there has been campaigning in Elwick at all, it has consisted of the candidates each independently pushing their merits with little apparent interaction between their campaigns. Furthermore, with state politics still dominating the picture, there has been little media coverage; Google News has not yet picked up on a single report of a press release by any candidate. Candidates have mostly been active via the traditional routes of posters (in relatively modest quantities), pamphlets, other advertising and doorknocking and the less traditional routes of Facebook, Twitter and WordPress. In a sign of where the Elwick campaign really sits on the Tasmanian politics pecking ladder right now, the Jacobson and Franks’ Facebook campaign pages have attracted almost as many followers between them as Don’t Poison Ulverstone’s Galahs.
Issues canvassed by Franks have included the Northern Suburbs rail project and disability services. Taylor’s blog has thus far pushed climate change issues, representation for local government and Taylor’s proposals for repairing the bungled Tasmania Tomorrow education reforms. Jacobson’s campaign, based around the slogan “Fresh Energy for Elwick” has mainly pressed the candidate’s credentials in his area of greatest experience, health and community services. All up, Elwick has not been a particularly policy-focussed campaign, as Legislative Council campaigns often aren’t.
As noted above, the Greens are coming off a 14.7% result in this seat at the previous election six long years ago. The 5.2% received by the Socialist candidate last time and the Socialist Alliance’s endorsement of the Greens this time should not fool anyone into adding the two together, since at the recent State election the SA vote in Elwick booths ranged from literally zero in a couple of booths to a little over one percent in two. The SA has no serious influence in Elwick and the vote the Socialist candidate attracted last time would have been mostly personal votes, donkey votes, and the standard few percent that a candidate in a small field will get no matter what their party.
The Green vote in the 2010 state election at Elwick booths was typically in the low to mid teens, with generally positive but modest swings to the party in spite of competition from Andrew Wilkie. Had Wilkie not stood, the party may have picked up swings of four to five percent on average in the Elwick booths compared to the 2006 state election. If the Greens are still on that state election high, they should therefore expect to poll in the high teens in Elwick, though the cross-party appeal of the frontrunner Taylor could cancel that out. All up, a result significantly below that one would be a disappointment, while anything above, say, 22 would be impressive. The Greens can’t win this seat, and it will be difficult to read too many Lower House political implications into their vote whatever it is. The best they can hope for is that the vote for the local mayor is so high that the Greens embarrass Labor by closely competing for second. Even with the Taylor factor, in a seat which votes so strongly Labor at Lower House elections it’s unlikely this will happen.
The endorsed Labor candidate, who won the endorsement with Left faction support ahead of Julian Amos, believes that it is first place he’ll be fighting for and says, as they do, that he is the underdog but it is “going to be very tight”. It does seem that Jacobson has been freer to campaign actively while Taylor’s time has been somewhat divided because of mayoral duties. As a Health and Community Services unionist and spokesman, Jacobson has a reasonable media profile, but one that is only a fraction of that of his main opponent. And any look at Taylor’s electoral track record shows why so few opponents have bothered to contest this seat. Since winning the mayoralty by a reasonably close margin after Terry Martin vacated it, Taylor has polled results (72% and 68% in two-person contests, and over three quotas as an alderman) that are very similar to those polled by Martin.
Obviously, in a straight fight between Taylor and Jacobson for this seat, Taylor would win overwhelmingly, and the main thing that makes things less than straightforward is Jacobson having Labor Party endorsement while Taylor does not. But even though most booths in this seat still returned 50+% votes for Labor in March, these Lower House results simply do not translate into reliable Upper House Labor votes, because many Labor voters will at least think about voting for suitable Independents. David Crean’s primary result in 1992 (20.6% – yes it was in a field of eight, but none of those had the stature of an incumbent and popular mayor) firmly demonstrates this. A Labor-ish Independent like Taylor with extremely strong local connections is especially well placed to harvest these votes. On this basis, Terry Martin’s result in 2004, in which he went close to replicating the Lower House Labor vote, was not business as normal for Labor in Elwick but an anomaly created by the convergence of three factors: Terry Martin’s strengths as a candidate, the lack of strong Independent opposition, and the high public goodwill for the Labor Party at the time, especially following the emotional Bacon to Lennon transition.
This time around, the very strong local candidate is the Independent not the Labor candidate, and the party has just copped a double-digit flogging (off a very high base) in the area in the State election. Furthermore, if anything would make Glenorchy voters suspicious of a new Labor government and wanting to subject it to independent review, the events of the last month would certainly be it. Thus, Labor’s result cannot possibly fall anywhere near the 60% polled by Terry Martin and indeed anything much over half that will be a bonus. Ignore all media or Opposition talk about “swings” against the Labor Party in Elwick from 2004 to 2010 as the circumstances are so different that comparisons will be meaningless.
Because of the novel nature of the contest, it is hard to predict the voting accurately but we strongly expect Taylor to win and we do not think it will be close. Indeed, it is about as likely as not that Taylor will win this on primaries, and if she is taken to preferences it may only be to a token degree. For Labor, a primary vote above 40% would be an excellent result whatever the outcome, while below 30 would be at best mediocre and, in this working-class traditional-Labor area, would be portrayed (rightly or wrongly) as a backlash to the inclusion of Greens in the Cabinet, among other Bartlett departures from the days of Bacon/Lennon. For Taylor, it doesn’t matter what the margin is so long as she wins – and if it does go to Green preferences, these should favour her anyway.
A curious footnote has been a complaint from the frontrunner that the ballot paper design unfairly advantages political parties. When parties field registered candidates in Legislative Council elections, the party name appears below the candidate name on the ballot paper, while for candidates like Taylor who are not formally endorsed by parties, there is nothing written below the candidate name. This situation has certainly assisted the Greens, whose voters are as happy to vote for them in the Upper House as in the Lower House, so long as they know who the Green candidate actually is. This has meant that the Greens have polled some surprisingly good LC results with low-profile and seemingly mediocre candidates. But far from it being a disadvantage to Taylor to be the only candidate with no party listing under her name, it could even help her. It certainly didn’t hurt recent Denison Liberal aspirant Jenny Branch as a very tokenly independent candidate for Derwent last year – she polled rather well, especially in traditional Labor areas that were on her municipal patch, which describes the whole of Elwick as far as Taylor is concerned.
The first results from Elwick should start coming in around 6:30 on Saturday night. There are typically live update threads on LC elections on Poll Bludger
PS [KB]: Just after this article was written the Tim Cox Elwick candidates forum was held and you can listen to all three candidates HERE. This mostly covers similar issues ground to the campaign as mentioned above, with the candidates exploring views on health, infrastructure and community services in more depth. It’s all rather amicable but Taylor is put on the spot by a listener question and gets in a bit of a tangle explaining how she will have time to serve both as mayor and Legislative Councillor given that she hasn’t had time to fully campaign while serving as mayor. In one of the few other mildly contentious moments, Taylor expresses a view that Elwick would have been better served over the last five years by more “independent choices” and Tim Cox interprets this as a criticism of Terry Martin and suggests that it would be “a brave person” who would run for Elwick and take such a shot. Maybe once Tim, but not at the moment. On the whole Taylor comes across as on top of her game across a wide range of issues, while Jacobson seems a bit too single-issue focussed.