Kooyong
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| Blue and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Liberal and Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room. |
Presently covering Melbourne’s affluent inner east from Kew and Hawthorn eastwards to Balwyn North and Camberwell, Kooyong has been held by the prevailing conservative forces of the day without interruption since its creation at federation, including by Robert Menzies throughout his 31-year career in federal parliament. The seat has had only seven members in its long history, of whom the first two were William Knox and Robert Best, the latter succeeding the former in 1910. Best was defeated as Nationalist candidate at the 1922 election by conservative independent John Latham, who ran in opposition to the prime ministership of Billy Hughes. With that end accomplished by an election that left the anti-Hughes Country Party holding the balance of power, Latham in time joined the Nationalists and served as Attorney-General in Stanley Bruce’s government from 1925 until its defeat in 1929. Bruce’s loss of his seat of Flinders at that election saw Latham emerge as Opposition Leader, but the defeat of the Labor government two years later was effected when Joseph Lyons led Labor defectors into a merger with conservative forces as the United Australia Party, with Latham agreeing to serve as Lyons’s deputy. Latham served as Attorney-General and External Affairs Minister in the Lyons government from 1931 until his retirement at the 1934 election, and a year later was appointed Chief Justice of the High Court.
Latham’s successor as both member for Kooyong and Attorney-General was Robert Menzies, who had been a state parliamentarian since 1928 and Deputy Premier since 1932. Menzies ascended to the prime minister after Joseph Lyons’ death in April 1939, serving for two years as the nation’s wartime leader before resigning in August 1941 after losing the support of his cabinet colleagues. Following Labor’s landslide win at the 1943 election, Menzies returned to the leadership of the United Australia Party which had been held in the interim by Billy Hughes, and brought fragmented conservative forces together a year later under the new banner of the Liberal Party. Two elections later he led the party to a resounding victory, commencing an epic 16-year tenure as prime minister from December 1949 until his retirement in January 1966.
Menzies was succeeded in Kooyong at an April 1966 by-election by Andrew Peacock, who went on to serve as a senior minister in Malcolm Fraser’s government from 1975 until April 1981, when he unsuccessfully challenged Fraser for the leadership. He briefly returned to the ministry from November 1982 until the election defeat the following March, after which he defeated John Howard in the ballot for the party leadership. Despite leading the party to an honourable defeat at the December 1984 election, he was obliged to surrender the leadership the following September after a bungled attempt to force Howard out as deputy. A party room coup returned him to the leadership in May 1989, but he failed to win the March 1990 election despite securing for the Coalition a narrow majority of the two-party preferred vote. He then relinquished the leadership to John Hewson, and served in the shadow ministry until his retirement from politics in November 1994.
The seat’s next member for Petro Georgiou, who as member for so prestigious a seat was generally assumed to have a career as a heavy-hitter ahead of him. However, he instead emerged as a permanent back-bencher and a thorn in the side of the Howard government, particularly in relation to his liberal views on asylum seekers. Georgiou retired at the 2010 election and was succeeded by Josh Frydenberg, a banker and former adviser to Alexander Downer and John Howard who had earlier challenged Georgiou for preselection in 2007. Frydenberg won the 2010 preselection with the backing of the Michael Kroger faction, while rivals associated with the then state Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu initially backed John Roskam, the director of the Institute of Public Affairs. However, Roskam declined to run and instead threw his weight behind industrial relations lawyer John Pesutto, whom Frydenberg defeated in the final round by 283 votes to 239. Frydenberg was promoted to parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister after the September 2013 election victory.
Higgins
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| Blue and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Liberal and Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room. |
Held by the Liberals since its creation in 1949, Higgins owes its blue-ribbon status to the affluence of Toorak and suburbs further to the east, including Glen Iris and Malvern. Prahran in the electorate’s west provides a strong basis of support for Labor and the Greens, while Carnegie and Ashburton in the south-east are naturally marginal. At the time of the electorate’s creation the Toorak end was accommodated by Fawkner, which prior to 1949 had boundaries resembling those of Higgins today. Higgins assumed its present character when Fawkner was abolished at the 1969 election. The seat’s inaugural member was Harold Holt, who had previously been member for Fawkner since 1935. Holt remained in the seat until his disappearance in December 1967, at which point it was used to parachute Senator John Gorton into the the lower house to enable him to assume the prime ministership. Gorton stayed on for two elections after being deposed as Prime Minister in March 1971, before indulging in a quixotic bid to win one of the Australian Capital Territory’s newly acquired Senate seats as an independent in 1975. Roger Shipton subsequently held the seat until 1990, achieving prominence only in 1988 when he stood firm against maverick businessman John Elliott’s designs on his seat. Shipton stared down Elliott only to lose preselection to Peter Costello, who was at no stage troubled in Higgins through his 11 frustrating years as Treasurer and Liberal deputy.
On the morning after the November 2007 election defeat, Costello made the surprise announcement that he would not assume the leadership. Speculation that he might later do so lingered until October 2009, when he announced his resignation from parliament. The Liberals had at this time just completed their preselection for the following election, which was won by Kelly O’Dwyer, a National Australia Bank executive who had earlier spent four years as an adviser to Costello. O’Dwyer was chosen ahead of Toorak businessman Andrew Abercrombie by 222 votes to 112, with candidates earlier falling by the wayside including Tim Wilson, then a policy director at the Institute of Public Affairs and now a Human Rights Commissioner, and the IPA’s executive director John Roskam, whose bid reportedly suffered from an article he wrote for The Punch which had put Costello’s nose out of joint. Tony Abbott said in April 2011 that O’Dwyer was “knocking hard on the door of that Shadow Cabinet”, but she is nonetheless yet to have won promotion.
@1500
The motive is clear, they want to get rid of the Disability Pension entirely.
Lynch
Hehhehe 🙂
zoidloid@1499
I am familiar with the Impairment Tables. They are well-designed but, like all of these sorts of things (eg, work and transportation compensation claims), they depend critically on how an individual medical practitioner interprets them.
Insurers who pay compensation claims stopped moved a long time ago beyond relying solely on advice from people’s personal treating doctor(s). It seems reasonable to me to try something similar with DSP.
Cost is going to be a major impediment to how far this approach can be extended, so it seems to me that some sort of a targeted strategy is warranted here.
It’s got to be worth trying out. There are currently around 800,000 DSP recipients: more than the number of unemployed people and equivalent to around 7 per cent of the total labour force. And the numbers are apparently growing by around 1,000 per week. Quite a lot, you’d surely agree.
meher baba@1498
The flaw in this entire argument is that the number of unemployed already greatly exceeds the number of job vacancies so forcing such people back into the labour market just puts them onto the dole.
OTOH, if the economy was boosted so that there was a greater demand for labour, such people might start discovering opportunities to re-enter the labour market and actually get a job.
@1503
It is not worth trying out.
No I do not agree.
Jobs first for those who need it first, that is those on Newstart.
Meher babar @ 1998
It would be nice if you could present some hard facts to support this assertion rather than repeating Daily Telegraph scuttlebutt
The time will come when the conservative MM, knowing how much their chosen side in politics has gone down the gurgler, will stop actively barracking by starting to demand Labor outline what their “solution” will be.
We have not got to this stage yet, but maybe after the next budget and things are looking bleak for the LNP, there will be a realization that the Abbott government could well be in line for just one term.
Two terms for a new government is just history waiting to be rewritten.
However, the fact that Abbott in Opposition either ignored or was never pressed on what his policies would be (other than four or five generalities) will be forgotten by these self-same guardians of free speech – come the time.
Shorten really doesn’t have to be anything near specific now, or in two years time about policies.
Let the damage do its political work. Mind you, if the economy does pick up, this is a bet the LNP has had with the Oz electorate it might win.
On the other hand………..
There are 550,000 Newstart recipients as of June 2012.
Why are DSP being targeted?
If say 400,000 people get moved of DSP and onto Newstart, 400,000 + 550,000 is nearly a million people looking for a job.
Together with that, the strain from Centerlink staff, the system will explode.
Classy stuff from the Libs
https://twitter.com/NatashaGriggsMP/status/466025328184262656/photo/1
Diogenes@1456
The argument for Labor is very clear – How you do so.
Albo on Capital Hill
Diogenes@1470
The other side to this is – the Government are able to borrow at the lowest rates in many years and should do so for important infrastructure etc as borrowings made now are locked in at current low rates.
Of course, on seeing those posters, I immediately started humming the theme tune from The Bill to myself.
Sir Mad.
Spin Doctor not thinking. Swinging voters like pensioners have fond memories of The Bill. Those not watching the repeats on 7Two
Albo came close to calling Abbott yellow then,
[
Spin Doctor not thinking. Swinging voters like pensioners have fond memories of The Bill. Those not watching the repeats on 7Two
]
guytaur,
I’m now expecting to see Jolly Joe grab Bill Shorten by the collar in the chamber tonight and declare, “You’re nicked, toerag!”.
[…surely the Reply to Hockey’s fanatical driving of Australia into a “precariate”, as Chomsky calls the USA, requires a fair amount of Bushfire Bill’s style sharp-edged language.]
I think he has half an hour.
If I wrote his speech he wouldn’t have gotten past the warm-up by then.
@daveyk317: About Time: Labor may reconsider Offshore Processing http://t.co/rBdPMrjWcs #Auspol
“@GrahamPerrettMP: Halls of Parliament House filled with attack ads in LNP office windows. The Tory’s vision begins & ends with the blame game.Sad. #auspol”
@1519
I would consider that brainwashing.
Besides, I like The Bill. Well at least the episodes from the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Twas a fine show back then.
“@mpesce: If the core promise were to bring the budget back into surplus, there would be no tax cuts until that happened.”
“@mpesce: It’s not any more complicated than that. Despite all the doubled-speak and repeat of lies until they sound truthy.”
meher, there is a difference between saying
“here is how people are currently assessed, we think it’s too generous in the way of X, Y and Z”
and
“There are X% disabled people? Doesn’t that sound too high? Are there really that many disabled people around?”
The former targets the process, the latter targets the people.
Essential says it all. The arse has fallen out of Abbott’s leadership ratings. Give it a couple of months and the prism will form around his leadership where he won’t be able to say anything without it negatively impacting the government
Or to put it another way, the former says “any issues arising from how people are assessed is our fault” the latter says “the problem is all these moochers”.
[Swinging voters like pensioners have fond memories of The Bill. Those not watching the repeats on 7Two]
That’s actually a pretty good line…
SHORTEN:
“The geniuses the Liberals have dreaming up their slogans have decided to call me ‘The Bill’. The Bill’s a TV show. I used to watch it from time to time. I enjoyed The Bill. So let me borrow a line from The Bill and use it in this debate on the Budget. After all the lies, broken promises and weasel words behind this fabricated hodge-podge, Treasurer… YOU’RE NICKED!”.
Retweeted by sortius
Kenneth Tsang @jxeeno 3m
still no answers for questions on notice from Additional Estimates from comms http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Senate_Estimates/ecctte/estimates/add1314/communications/index … #NBN
SMC:
[Of course, on seeing those posters, I immediately started humming the theme tune from The Bill to myself.]
Thanks, I now have the theme tune in my head now. You’re a horrible person SMC, I hope you know that.
[Insurers who pay compensation claims stopped moved a long time ago beyond relying solely on advice from people’s personal treating doctor(s). It seems reasonable to me to try something similar with DSP.]
FFS, it already happens, and has for many, many years.
I was assessed for the DSP over 25 years ago, and for that I had to see two independent doctors chosen by Centrelink, in addition to the assessments from my GP and the (world renowned) professor who diagnosed me. I have had a number of re-assessments since (average every 5-6 years), usually involving an independent (ie Centrelink chosen) reviewer.
Furthermore, the requirements for DSP have been tightened up a lot since I first applied.
So, it wasn’t easy to get 25 years ago, and is even harder to get (and keep) now.
Exactly where is the problem?
briefly @1323
[And the Greens should oppose the excise measures on the same basis.]
I disagree. The excises measures are different, in that they were arbitrarily abolished when Howard saw petrol prices as “a barbecue stopper”. Along with many others, we have persistently called for indexation to be restored.
Consider:
a) Australia is a net importer of petroleum (IIRC the balance is 2:1)
b) Oil is a scarce resource
c) It’s a fossil fuel, which should have been priced when we priced carbon.
If Australia accelerated the drift to EVs, the air would be cleaner our progress on climate change better and the BOP better also.
These are adequate reasons not to make it a concessionally priced commodity — quite the reverse.
It’s a political bonus that Abbott’s rightwing fringe is calling this “a backdoor carbon tax”. IMO, if Abbott wants to bring back full indexation we ought to back this one while calling him out for his hypocrisy and inconsistency.
FTTP architect has been sacked, aka “redundant”:
http://delimiter.com.au/2014/05/13/nbn-co-made-fttp-architect-ferris-redundant/
MB 1498 is right, under the right policy settings many disabled people are able to work, the only people that can’t are those with a severe disabilities which thankfully isn’t anywhere near 800,000.
I suspect a third too a quarter could work and that is pushing it!
[
Thanks, I now have the theme tune in my head now. You’re a horrible person SMC, I hope you know that.
]
lol
Blame the Libs! They came up with the posters that made me think of The Bill. Another crime against humanity from our wonderful government.
Besides, I like the tune. lol
What’s the bet Abbott gets asked a dixer on the Unions Royal Commission?
@MB/1532
There is no right policy under this gov, that is the problem.
It seems the money already announced (say for example $10,000 to Employers to keep someone on) is to benefit them, not the person looking for the job.
Zommster
[other Greens MPs oppose Milne {on the “deficit” levy}, and Bandt has said that the issue isn’t settled.
It’ll be interesting to see how this one pans out.]
It will be, but I doubt that Milne will be rolled on it. I’d be backing strongly the current position. If we are goping to back the levy, then rather than an explicit policy quid pro quo (it’s not raising enough to do that), I’d want some express political acknowledgment by the regime that the levy is poor process — a demand they surely couldn’t resist, if there’s “an emergency” and they are “just being honest”.
BB, is that Shorten’s riposte to the pathetic name calling?
If so, it is brilliant.
Zoidy that grant to the employer isn’t even a new policy, it didn’t achieve much the first time around and more than likely wont the second time around.
As I have said before many disabled people would be better off sacking the disability sector and doing it themselves.
Bushfire Bill
Posted Tuesday, May 13, 2014 at 1:33 pm | PERMALINK
Swinging voters like pensioners have fond memories of The Bill. Those not watching the repeats on 7Two
That’s actually a pretty good line…
SHORTEN:
“The geniuses the Liberals have dreaming up their slogans have decided to call me ‘The Bill’. The Bill’s a TV show. I used to watch it from time to time. I enjoyed The Bill. So let me borrow a line from The Bill and use it in this debate on the Budget. After all the lies, broken promises and weasel words behind this fabricated hodge-podge, Treasurer… YOU’RE NICKED!”.
Classic
@1538
Not if their payments get cut off.
Speaking of house prices
http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/house-prices-rise-17-in-march-20140513-386th.html
Zoidy
Centerlink wont cut their payments off
They know their system doesn’t work
@1542
I didn’t say Centerlink, I said the government policy is to cut DSP off, entirely.
They complained about the DSP since day 1.
Zoidy
Actually the government has been muddled since day 1 but that doesn’t stop the mildly disabled seeking more mainstream educational and employment opportunities.
@1544
What your forgetting that’s already happened, and failed, thus the participation rate is so damn low.
Forcing people off, doesn’t fix the situation.
Once again, both of you have been bought into this mentality that this fixes the situation.
MB #1503
“Insurers who pay compensation claims stopped moved a long time ago beyond relying solely on advice from people’s personal treating doctor(s)”
Yeah! That’s a rort by insurers. God help the disabled if that became widespread.
I don’t know what industry you’re from, but the medicos who work for insurers are spurned by other medicos, and considered to be the shit of the medico earth.
I know a number of them ….. they earn big bucks doing one hour assessments and the more they reject the better the insurer likes them and floods work at them. Big dollars, no preparation, template reports, using old, invalidated by research, tick and flick tests and measures. They never treat patients and work full time in the case rejection industry.
As I said last week I’ve taken great pleasure in the past tearing down these assessments and sending the insurers back to square one with their tails between their legs.
Sadly, many of the victims have not got the strength, initiative or insights to take them on. Quite often the insurer’s decision to reject a case (as malingering) is easily overturned at the very first level of appeal, ie by the insurers own formal internal appeals committee.
In one case I know the insurer sent the victim to 7 medicos in 2 years. Two of them were professional insurers’ medicos …. they rejected the case. The other 5 were real doctors ie who spend most of their time treating patients ….. they all supported the victim. (In the particular area their was a shortage of insurers’ medicos in the required specialty area, so the insurer was forced to use real practising doctors).
The victim was then rejected on the basis of the 2 shonks’ reports and the 5 supportive reports were totally ignored. But the appeal process requires that all assessments be considered, and disclosed to the victim.
The appeal committee took about 30 seconds to overturn the decision.
Insurance companies, aided and abetted by shonk medicos who never actually treat patients will use any means, lawful or not, moral or not, just or not, to save dollars.
Just like the Abbotteers.
[Anecdotal evidence has always been that – as with medical certificates for sick leave – your average GP is a bit reluctant to overrule patients who consider that they should be eligible to receive a DSP. And there are lots of GPs around, so doctor shopping is a simple matter.]
Shame one fact blows this crap away. Centrelink Doctors evaluate every DSP claim. Requiring GP reports, specialists reports, pathology test, X-rays etc to make their decision.
When will people stop parroting simplistic crap?
Thanks Victoria and Guytaur for good wishes.
KO7 yes everywhere you see tHem being given away, only reason it is still around is because it wa rupe’s baby, the moment he goes so will The OZ
what a glorious day in Sydney just been on part of the Bondi walk, should have taken my swimmers with me, so lovely
Blewitt says he has Diabetes Type 2 and high blood pressure and may not be able to give full evidence today – but will battle through – poor didums.
Giving himself an out.
Zoidy
It does work, the disability sector isn’t designed to help the mildly disabled but rather the more severe disabled.
Its the same with the Job Services system which isn’t designed for the recent unemployed but rather for the longer term unemployed.
There are many disabled people in the workforce and there is no reason why a larger number cannot join the workforce even if it is too flick Andrews the bird.