Moore is a safe Liberal seat in northern Perth. Apart from a period in the 1980s, the seat has been dominated by the Liberal Party. The seat has been held by Mal Washer since 1998.
Moore covers most of Joondalup council area and a small part of Wanneroo council area. It is the northermost seat in the Perth area, along the coast.
Curtin is a safe Liberal seat in western Perth. Despite being named after the former Labor prime minister, the seat has never been won by the ALP. The Liberal Party has only lost the seat once, in 1996 when the sitting Liberal MP lost endorsement and won re-election as an independent. The seat was held by prominent Liberal Paul Hasluck from 1949 until his retirement in 1969 when he was appointed Governor-General. It has been held by Julie Bishop since 1998.
The seat covers affluent suburbs along the north shore of the Swan River to the west of the Perth CBD, and along the west coast.
Tangney is a relatively safe Liberal seat in southern Perth. Tangney’s suburbs include Alfred Cove, Attadale, Melville, Applecross, Mount Pleasant, Winthrop, Leeming, Willetton, Canning Vale, Rossmoyne and Shelley.
Tangney has been won by the Liberal Party at all but two elections since its creation in 1974. The seat was held from 1993 to 2004 by Daryl Williams, who served as Attorney-General from 1996 to 2003 and continued to serve in the Howard government’s cabinet until 2004.
The seat has been held since 2004 by former CSIRO research scientist Dennis Jensen. He has developed a reputation as the more ardent climate change sceptic in the Liberal Party. He was defeated for preselection before the 2007 and 2010 elections in ballots of local Liberal members, but both preselections were later overturned by higher authorities.
Perth is a relatively safe seat for the ALP covering the Perth CBD and areas to the northeast. The seat covers the suburbs of Maylands, Mount Lawley, Bayswater, Ashfield, Bedford, Morley and Beechboro, as well as Perth itself.
The seat had a long history of being marginal, but recently has become a reasonably solid Labor seat, having been held by the ALP continuously since 1983. The seat was held from 1983 to 1993 by Olympic hockey player Ric Charlesworth, who competed in his fourth and fifth Olympics while holding the seat of Perth. Charlesworth retired in 1993 at the ripe old age of 41, and was succeeded by Stephen Smith. He has held the seat ever since, and is now Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade in the federal Labor government.
Fremantle is a safe Labor seat in Perth. The seat covers the centre of Fremantle itself, as well as surrounding areas, including Cockburn, Coolbellup, Palmyra, Success, Atwell, Jandakot, Spearwood, Coogee, Beaconsfield and Hamilton.
It has been held continuously by the ALP since 1934. The seat was held by John Curtin from 1929 to 1931 and again from 1934 until his death in 1945. He was replaced in 1945 by Kim Beazley Sr, who served as a senior Labor figure during the long years in opposition in the 1950s and 1960s, and served as a minister in the Whitlam government. He was succeeded in 1977 by John Dawkins, who served as a cabinet minister in the Hawke government and as Paul Keating’s Treasurer until his retirement in 1993. The seat was won in a 1994 by-election by former Premier Carmen Lawrence, who held the seat until her retirement in 2007.
At the last election, the seat was won by former United Nations lawyer Melissa Parke.
Canning is a seat on the southern fringe of Perth, covering Armadale, Mandurah and the Peel region. The seat has been held by Liberal MP Don Randall since 1996, and he holds it with a 4.3% margin. Randall is being challenged by former state Labor minister Allanah MacTiernan, who is state MP for the overlapping seat of Armadale.
Voters in the southern Perth state electorate of Willagee go to the polls today to elect a new state MP to succeed former Labor premier Alan Carpenter, who retired from politics in September after losing government at the 2008 election.
The seat is not being contested by the Liberals and the main two contenders are former military man Peter Tinley running for the ALP and union organiser Hsien Harper running for the Greens. Also running is Henri Chew of the Christian Democratic Party and Gerry Georgatos, a former Greens member running as an independent.
There have been comparisons made with neighbouring Fremantle, where the Greens won the seat off the ALP in a May by-election. Willagee, however, is a much stronger area for the ALP and nowhere near as strong for the Greens as their heartland in Fremantle.
In addition, the party has been damaged in the seat by the candidacy of Gerry Georgatos, who had originally been preselected for the seat when it was expected that a Willagee by-election would be held six months ago in conjunction with the Fremantle by-election. Georgatos allowed a new preselection, which saw Harper win, and Georgatos responded by running as an independent and indeed preference the ALP’s Tinley ahead of the Greens. Georgatos supporters have been fiercely critical of the party on Poll Bludger’s Willagee thread.
Post any comments about tonight’s results here. There will undoubtedly be coverage of tonight’s results elsewhere from Antony Green at ABC Elections and Fremantle local William Bowe at Poll Bludger.
Bizzarely, a regional Labor MP in the WA Parliament, Vince Catania, last night resigned from the Labor Party in order to join the WA Nationals, who are in a governing coalition with the Liberal Party. Catania is a young MP who was first elected as an MLC for Mining and Pastoral in 2005 before moving to the Legislative Assembly seat of North West in 2008.
Catania criticised the Labor Party for being too ‘city-centric’, which is a strange comment from a candidate largely seen as being parachuted into the seat by inner-city forces, including those who supported his father, Nick Catania, who was mayor of the inner-Perth Town of Vincent, and state MP for the Perth seat of Balcatta.
Labor leader Eric Ripper described Catania’s act as “political treachery” and described Catania as “an immature and petulant young man who wants an easy ride in politics”
I’m more interested in the unusual spectacle in Australian politics of a politician crossing between the two major sides of politics. While it is quite common in the UK and Canada for politicians to defect from one party to another, and even appears in the US (think Arlen Specter and Jim Jeffords), it just doesn’t happen in Australia. We’ve had a couple of Labor MPs defect to the Greens, and plenty of MPs on both sides become independents, although in most cases these defections have taken place in the dying days of a political career.
Can anyone name the last time that a politician switched from one major party to another?
Elsewhere: Larvatus Prodeo.
