ALP 5.4%
Incumbent MP
Melissa Parke, since 2007.
Geography
South-western Perth. The seat of Fremantle covers the City of Fremantle and the Town of East Fremantle, as well as most of the City of Cockburn and small parts of the City of Melville. Suburbs include Fremantle itself as well as Cockburn, Coolbellup, Palmyra, Success, Atwell, Jandakot, Spearwood, Coogee, Beaconsfield and Hamilton Hill.
Redistribution
Fremantle lost Bicton and Willagee to Tangney. These changes increased the Labor margin from 4.8% to 5.4%.
History
Fremantle is an original federation electorate. After alternating between parties up to 1934, and since then has always been held by the ALP. From 1934 to 2007 it was held by a series of senior Labor figures.
Fremantle was won in 1901 by Elias Solomon, a Free Trader who had been in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly since 1892.
In 1903, Solomon was defeated by the ALP’s William Carpenter. Carpenter held the seat for one term, before losing in 1906. Carpenter went on to serve in Western Australian state politics.
Carpenter lost in 1906 to William Hedges, elected as the only representative of the Western Australian Party, a party formed from Anti-Socialists and Protectionists, but sat as an independent, before joining the new Commonwealth Liberal Party in 1909. He was re-elected in 1910 but lost in 1913.
He was replaced by the ALP’s Reginald Burchell. He left the ALP over the conscription split and was re-elected as a Nationalist MP, serving as Member for Fremantle until his retirement in 1922.
Fremantle was won in 1922 by independent candidate William Watson. Former Liberal MP Hedges was pushed into third place behind the ALP. Watson held the seat until his retirement in 1928, when the seat was won by the ALP’s John Curtin.
Curtin held the seat for one term, losing in 1931 to Watson, who had returned as the candidate for the United Australia Party. Curtin returned in 1934 after Watson again retired, and the ALP has held the seat ever since.
Curtin was elected leader of the Labor Party in 1935, and became Prime Minister in 1941, leading Australia through the Second World War. Curtin died in July 1945.
The 1945 Fremantle by-election was won by the ALP’s Kim Beazley. Beazley was a prominent figure in the federal ALP through the 1950s and 1960s, and served as Education Minister in the Whitlam government from 1972 to 1975. He retired from Parliament in 1977. His son is Kim Beazley Jr, who served as Leader of the ALP from 1996 to 2001 and from 2005 to 2007.
The younger Beazley contested the ALP preselection for Fremantle in 1977, but lost to John Dawkins, who had previously held the marginal seat of Tangney from 1974 to 1975.
Dawkins joined the Labor frontbench in 1980. He served in the Hawke cabinet from 1983, and was appointed Treasurer in the Keating government in 1991 after Keating replaced Bob Hawke. He served in the role until he resigned in December 1993 after facing opposition within Cabinet to his budget.
The 1994 Fremantle by-election was won by Carmen Lawrence. Lawrence had been a state MP in Western Australia since 1986, and had served as Australia’s first female Premier from 1990 until the ALP lost power in 1993.
Lawrence served as Minister for Health for the last two years of the Keating government. She served as a shadow minister in the Labor opposition from 1996 to 1997 and again from 2000 to 2002, having been forced to step down in 1997 due to allegations of perjury, for which she was later acquitted. She resigned from the frontbench in 2002 in protest at the party’s asylum seeker policy.
Lawrence was elected as the ALP’s first directly-elected National President in 2003, and served in the role in 2004. She retired from Parliament in 2007.
At the 2007 election, Fremantle was won by Labor’s Melissa Parke, a lawyer who worked for the United Nations from 1999 to 2007. Parke was re-elected in 2010 and 2013.
Candidates
Sitting Labor MP Melissa Parke is not running for re-election.
- Mick Connolly (Mature Australia)
- Chris Jenkins (Socialist Alliance)
- Kate Davis (Greens)
- Pierrette Kelly (Liberal)
- Josh Wilson (Labor)
Assessment
Labor’s margin in Fremantle isn’t huge, and the loss of Parke will hurt them, but the overall swing to Labor in Western Australia should protect them from any Liberal threat. The Greens have ambitions to win Fremantle, but they are a long way away from overtaking either major parties. The Greens would need to significantly increase their support to be a threat – while their vote is quite strong in the northern half of the seat, they struggle to crack 10% in many of the booths in the southern half.
2013 result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing | Redist |
| Melissa Parke | Labor | 35,554 | 40.8 | +1.9 | 41.4 |
| Matthew Hanssen | Liberal | 33,219 | 38.1 | -0.4 | 37.4 |
| Jordon Steele-John | Greens | 10,354 | 11.9 | -5.8 | 11.9 |
| Vashil Sharma | Palmer United Party | 3,451 | 4.0 | +4.0 | 4.0 |
| Owen Mulder | Australian Christians | 1,163 | 1.3 | +1.3 | 1.4 |
| Richard McNaught | Katter’s Australian Party | 1,061 | 1.2 | +1.2 | 1.2 |
| Jim McCourt | Family First | 811 | 0.9 | -0.8 | 0.9 |
| Sam Wainwright | Socialist Alliance | 743 | 0.9 | +0.1 | 0.9 |
| Philip Scott | Rise Up Australia | 416 | 0.5 | +0.5 | 0.5 |
| Teresa Van Lieshout | Australian Protectionist Party | 205 | 0.2 | +0.2 | 0.2 |
| Ron Rowlands | Citizens Electoral Council | 131 | 0.2 | +0.2 | 0.1 |
| Informal | 5,916 | 6.8 |
2013 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing | Redist |
| Melissa Parke | Labor | 47,705 | 54.8 | -0.9 | 55.4 |
| Matthew Hanssen | Liberal | 39,403 | 45.2 | +0.9 | 44.6 |
Booth breakdown
Booths have been divided into four areas: central, north, south-east and south-west.
Labor won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in three out of four areas, ranging from 52.6% in the south-east to 64% in the centre. The Liberal Party won 51% in the north.
The Greens vote ranged from 7.5% in the south-west to 17% in the centre.
| Voter group | GRN % | ALP 2PP % | Total votes | % of votes |
| South-East | 8.4 | 52.6 | 21,771 | 27.8 |
| Central | 17.3 | 64.1 | 18,765 | 23.9 |
| South-West | 7.5 | 57.1 | 10,039 | 12.8 |
| North | 14.5 | 49.1 | 6,703 | 8.6 |
| Other votes | 12.0 | 52.1 | 21,089 | 26.9 |
Should be a safe Labor hold, with the departure of Melissa Parke the Greens may increase their vote significantly in and around Fremantle proper. However the rest of the seat is a mixture of established working class areas like Spearwood and newly established mortgage belt areas such as Cockburn/Success where the major parties vastly outpoll the Greens.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-11/labor-candidate-chris-brown-disendorsed-by-alp/7406100
Oh dear, at least Fremantle is a district that Labor have an ample amount of rope to hang themselves….
Morgieb
What i thought was really interesting was that on another link, Di Natale talked about them having a real chance here.
What does he mean by that ??
Is he already banking on lib preferences ??
Has a deal been done ??
Presumably Josh Wilson will be the endorsed ALP candidate now. From the ALP’s perspective, at least this blew up before nominations closed and not after.
Decisions on preferences I understood are made by Greens groups at the local level – is this correct? Last election about three quarters issued preferences for the ALP about a quarter issued open tickets. Anyone have further information on this? (As it happens open tickets make very little difference to what Greens supporters do with their preferences)
Greens preferences are decided in different ways in different states. My understanding is they are local decisions in NSW, QLD, WA and state party decisions in VIC, SA and TAS.
Having said that if the Greens have a chance in Fremantle they’ll need Labor preferences, not Liberal. Same in Richmond.
Ben
You are right. I’d lost track of the high liberal vote here. The Greens really need to win around 13000 votes from labor to be in this. That looks impossible.
I think a lot of people confuse the federal seat of Fremantle with the state seat of Fremantle, and that inflates some expectations of the Greens’ chances here. It makes sense at some level for the Greens to say they are ‘targeting’ it, since it may still be their naturally strongest seat in WA and at the very least maximising their Senate vote there is important, but it’d be strange if they devoted a lot of resources to it. Richmond is far more winnable.
Brown only became the candidate as a result of the MUA flexing in muscle in party preselection. This could well be a repeat of Hotham in 2013 where the replacement candidate was the superior choice.
David
I agree that it could easily be a net positive for Labor here. Josh Wilson won the ALP’s pre selection ballot of local members 155-110 but was easily beaten for pre selection by the vote of the state executive in favour of Chris Brown who is a local MUA representative but a relative unknown in the wider Freo community.
Seems to me though that the ALP are pretty keen to ditch him, from what’s been reported the charges that have been cited to disendorsed him were spent and are 30 years old.
^ What they said. The only part of the federal seat Labor have to worry about (vs the Greens) is Freo itself, and any Freo councillor has to be either a long-term local or some shade of greenish-red if they want to get elected, so Wilson will have less problems from the Greens than other Labor types. Labor should also get more preferences from blue-green East Freo types just in case the Libs come third.
That all said, Brown being publicly sacked for something he did 30 years ago is harsh. Labor are obviously scared of the anti-union attacks from the Libs and the Murdoch press. They can’t really win there; now wait for the “Labor running scared of its past” headlines. It’s a lose-lose situation.
Also, check out that anti-Green swing in 2013. It could be because they ran an 18 yr old, but I bet there was a bit of blowback from the Adele Carles fiasco in there. That should’ve faded into the middle distance by now, and particularly by next year’s election in the redistributed state seat. They’ll do OK, but they won’t win the federal seat for the same reason they won’t win Higgins or Melbourne Ports despite winning Prahran in 2014.
As so often is the case, the cover-up is a worse sin than the original offense.
B of P
Brown was sacked for 2 reasons
1/ lack of disclosure (lies of omission, & fraud)
2/ he was not the popular choice is the first place. Someone on his own side probably did him in
The reality is that he made himself a huge liability. This means he was a complete fool.
The whole point of a spent conviction is that it is not sufficiently serious to require that a person has to disclose it when applying for a job, and in this instance the conviction is decades old.
I think Fremantle now has a Labor candidate that has more community links and may better reflect the political leanings of the area, but it seems a little convenient that a union aligned candidate was so quickly disendorsed on such grounds.
@Malcom They should have backed the candidate with strong community links to begin with.
I’m sure they could already hear the Liberals capitalizing on criminals within unions, as fuel for the fire on their ABCC bill for the remainder of the election. It may seem like a harsh move to parachute the existing candidate out, but not at the expense of political fodder that may see a weakening position in more marginal seats for the ALP. It was probably the right move politically.
RSV
Agreed.
Josh Wilson couldn’t wait to get on the detention centre bandwagon, or did the MSM just remind everybody he never got off ???
Vey impressive !!!!.
Who knows how this might end up now. With Brown being disendorsed in favour of Wilson for Labor’s nomination, the Liberal candidate saying some quite out there stuff, and who knows maybe Brown might run as an independent.
I’d still be expecting a Labor win and a comfortable one at that, maybe 62-38,
The Greens should hope for a result in the low 20s, I’d expect that to be quite achievable.
The Libs on the other hand might expect a larger then normal swing against them, the candidate has said some things which probably won’t go down to well, especially in Freo, being one of the country’s most progressive electorates.
What should be more worrying for the Liberals is that their candidate is apparently refusing media requests for interviews. I would have thought that the first lecture in Campaigning 101 was Free Publicity: How to get it, and why not to turn it down.
Reports saying that the Liberal candidate has now resigned.
Oh dear Fremantle – to lose one candidate may be regarded as unfortunate, to lose two…
Which has been confirmed, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-20/liberal-candidate-for-fremantle-sherry-sufi-resigns/7432644
One would think that both majors losing their candidates might give the Greens a small boost in their vote. Let’s see who replaces both candidates
I guess both parties can be relieved that their candidate stuff ups have been in a safe that won’t have much influence on the final result. The Greens might well get a boost here, but they are unlikely to come close to winning the seat.
It appear that it wasn’t just a matter of falsifying his CV or making statements about same sex marriage & indig. const. recognition – https://twitter.com/rharris334/status/733524111754821633/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I’ve seen a bunch of comments (above) that suggest that the ‘new’ Labor candidate is actually a more viable one than the first who was pre-selected. Also, now the Liberal candidate has pulled out (no replacement yet, at the time I’m writing this). And there’s been confusing reports that this means a) either Greens will ‘bradbury’ the seat (winning by everyone else falling over), or that Labor will retain on the basis of decreased votes for Libs. Can someone give an attempt at an impartial analysis at this point of the race?
wittylama: The existing Labor margin and the statewide swing to them expected in WA should be easily enough for the ALP to hold this seat. The gap from the Greens vote to both the major parties is a bridge too far – they will come third here.
Labor would still be strongly favoured to win, perhaps more so now they have the candidate they should’ve originally selected, and given there’s expected to be a significant swing to Labor in WA overall, which also means the Liberal vote was expected to drop anyway. The Greens vote will go up a bit, possibly into the high teens, partly a correction from recent elections having not been too favourable for them for various reasons mentioned above – carry over from the issues with their short-lived state MP in the area, the choice of a very young candidate in 2013, and another factor I’m personally familiar with as I live in an electorate where a similar thing has affected the Greens vote – the personal popularity of Parke amongst progressive Labor-Greens swinging voters.
It’s still extremely unlikely that the Greens would achieve the swing needed to get ahead of either major party, but obviously it is their strong area in WA so important for the long-term and for the Senate, and they seem to have a strong candidate and it gives them a high-profile campaign to run in WA, so no doubt they’ll keep getting excited about the campaign, even if in reality it’ll just be about getting a strong result but not really being in contention to win.
The Greens vote should increase significantly (20%+)but it’s hard to see them doing a Bradbury. A big local issue is the Perth Freight Link but both the ALP and Greens are opposing this.
Expect a large anti Liberal swing but without their preferences flowing to the Greens the ALP should hold strongly. The Green vote outside of the City of Fremantle is just not strong enough to give them a realistic chance of winning this seat.
Labor should hold this quite easily. Poll Bludger has the swing in WA at 10.4% to Labor and this would pretty much always be their safest seat. The Greens had a rather bad election around last time so I’d expect their vote to rise significantly. Parke was one of the most progressive voices within Labor and she probably would have garnered 5% of the vote that would have otherwise voted Green. My guess of the result would be 45% Labor, 25% Liberal and 20% Green.
Was in Freo yesterday, and it looks like the Greens are taking this seat quite seriously. They’ve taken out a big billboard on Queen Victoria St which is the main road into Freo. Quite a bit of Labor advertising but it’s a bit more informal, doesn’t look like they are spending as much here. In stark contrast to the last election the Liberals seem to have nothing.
Labor, Greens and even the Socialist Alliance candidate took out ads in the local paper but nothing from the Liberal candidate who also pulled out of a candidate debate last week.