Weekend miscellany: federal preselection news (open thread)

The race for the new WA seat of Bullwinkel takes shape, five Liberal candidates line up to succeed a retiring member in the SA seat of Grey, plus more Victorian redistribution aftermath.

Federal polls may be coming down the line shortly from Resolve Strategic in the Age/Herald and Freshwater Strategy in the Financial Review. Until then:

The West Australian reports three potential contenders for Liberal preselection in the new seat of Bullwinkel in Perth’s eastern hinterland, which by my reckoning has a notional Labor margin of 2.9%: Matt Moran, an Afghanistan veteran and former Ten Network reporter who ran unsuccessfully for the Curtin preselection in February; Holly Ludeman, a veterinarian and activist in the campaign against a ban on live sheep exports; and Jonathan Crabtree, a commercial and estate planning lawyer who led the Senate ticket of Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives in 2019. The paper earlier reported that Labor preselection would be contested by Kyle McGinn, a former Maritime Union of Australia organiser who has served in the state Legislative Council for Mining and Pastoral region since 2017, and there are suggestions the Nationals candidate will be former state party leader Mia Davies.

InDaily reports five candidates for Liberal preselection in the regional South Australian seat of Grey, which will be vacated with the retirement of Rowan Ramsey, its member since 2007: Dean Johnson, mayor of Kimba and president of the Local Government Association; Tom Venning, Barunga Grains farming manager; Rikki Lambert, former chief-of-staff to Family First senator Bob Day; Matt Sampson, a Whyalla police officer; and Suzanne Waters, who ran in the seat for the United Australia Party in 2022.

Nine Newspapers reports on expectations that Michelle Ananda-Rajah will run in Liberal-held Deakin or Menzies with the proposed abolition of her existing seat of Higgins, which she gained for Labor from the Liberals for the first time in the seat’s history in 2022.

• Labor has announced candidates in its Coalition-held targets in Brisbane: disability advocate Ali France in Peter Dutton’s seat of Dickson, where she also ran in 2019 and 2022; Rebecca Hack, a former school principal now of the Queensland Teachers Union, in the Greens-held seat of Ryan; and Rowan Holzberger, electorate officer to Senator Murray Watt and candidate from 2022, again to run in Forde.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,035 comments on “Weekend miscellany: federal preselection news (open thread)”

Comments Page 7 of 21
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  1. OC

    Yeah. I can’t help thinking of RBG every time I see Biden and of Hannibal Lecter, a wonderful man, every time I see Trump.

    Power is a powerful drug.

  2. Boerwar @ #297 Sunday, July 14th, 2024 – 2:46 pm

    OC
    Is there evidence that Hitler’s resort to various medications was in any way a reflection of his fears of being assassinated?

    You mean that he spent much of the war on Crystal Meth?
    That probably would make you think you were indestructible and not mind surrendering 600K soldiers at Stalingrad. We all owe a debt to Dr Theodor Morrell, his dealer.

  3. Trump is the most accomplished con artist to ever live.

    The connection he has created to his associates and supporters is a work of art.

    He is an incredibly smart operator.

    But, death being so close, can do things to the thinking of even people like him.

  4. ‘Oakeshott Country says:
    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 2:55 pm

    Boerwar @ #297 Sunday, July 14th, 2024 – 2:46 pm

    OC
    Is there evidence that Hitler’s resort to various medications was in any way a reflection of his fears of being assassinated?

    You mean that he spent much of the war on Crystal Meth?
    That probably would make you think you were indestructible and not mind surrendering 600K soldiers at Stalingrad. We all owe a debt to Dr Theodor Morrell, his dealer.’
    ——————
    haha. I am curious to see whether there will be step change in the progression of Trump’s dementia. I am not expecting such.

  5. 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks

    Both christian names very Christian. Surname of northern European origin, from the Norse. Common English surname from Yorkshire region of England. Probably suggests paternal line ancestor was a shepherd?

  6. ‘Entropy says:
    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 2:59 pm

    20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks

    Both christian names very Christian. Surname of northern European origin, from the Norse. Common English surname from Yorkshire region of England. Probably suggests ancestors were shepherds.’
    ————————
    Or Liberals?

  7. For once I’m with Rex.

    Everyone here expects Trump to gain sympathy. But who knows how he’ll react to this? Will he get even crazier? Will he retreat and hide in Mar-a-lago?

    He has the convention this week and his big speech.

  8. As far as I can tell, there really isn’t a great deal of actual evidence that either Biden or Trump actually have dementia beyond armchair diagnoses made on places like this. Both or either of them could definitely be afflicted by some form of dementia, but there are plenty of other plausible explanations for their behaviour too. Without an actual diagnosis by a professional that has examined them in person, none of us are really in any position to say so one way or the other.

    The big problem is that the difference between the Biden of 2024 and the Biden of 2020 is becoming increasingly stark and leaves him seriously vulnerable to such accusations, whereas Trump is, well… Trump. Sure, he’s weirder and nuttier now than he was four years ago, but his devotees are too braindead to give a shit and it’s really easy for the average disengaged voter to just write that off as just classic Trump being Trump rather than a sign of cognitive decline.

    It’s about voter perceptions, not the actual realities of either man’s medical situations. It doesn’t matter whether Biden actually has dementia or is just exhausted and stumbling over his words more than normal, each time he calls somebody by the wrong name or seems like he’s about to fall asleep it just reinforces the perception in the public eye and gives the Republican further fodder for their attack ads.

    But if Trump does the same – like that rally a little while back when his autocue broke and he started rambling absolute nonsense about sharks being killed by electric cars – well, we’re talking about a guy that wanted to nuke a hurricane and suggesting injecting bleach into people with COVID back when he was allegedly still all there mentally (insofar as that descriptor can ever really be used for a person like Trump), after all.

  9. Boerwar:

    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 2:36 pm

    Yes, it was a rosy retrospection, though it was suggested that Flinders probably died of gonorrhoea, contracted in Tahiti, which I thought was superfluous. I have a soft for him given my naval background. He did achieve a massive feat, second only to Cook.

  10. 20 year old!! Way too young!!

    Trump doesn’t have dementia. He has narcissistic personality disorder. Full blown.

  11. ‘Mavis says:
    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 3:07 pm

    Boerwar:

    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 2:36 pm

    Yes, it was a rosy retrospection, though it was suggested that Flinders probably died of gonorrhoea, contracted in Tahiti, which I thought was superfluous. I have a soft for him given my naval background. He did achieve a massive feat, second only to Cook.’
    ———————————————-
    The details of the reasons for his sustained stint in Mauritius were good historical detail, IMO. It could have added that his cantakerous behaviour there hardly helped his cause.

  12. Trump is in his late seventies and borderline obese, yet completely avoids any kind of exercise (because he believes that exercise drains the body’s finite reserve of energy) and apparently lives of junk food and fizzy drinks. During the pandemic he would regularly hang out at super spreader events despite being the very image of someone at risk of COVID… and then proved lucky enough to make a full recovery when he did catch it.

    I don’t think his mortality is something he thinks too hard about. He’s probably too narcissistic to even consider that he might die one way, and while the shooting could potentially be the thing that causes him to reassess that complacency, it also might just lead him to believe that he is immortal.

  13. Trump is in late seventies and borderline obese, yet completely avoids any kind of exercise (because he believes that exercise drains the body’s finite reserve of energy) and apparently lives of junk food and fizzy drinks. During the pandemic he would regularly hang out at super spreader events despite being the very image of someone at risk of COVID… and then proved lucky enough to make a full recovery when he did catch it.

    And stared at an eclipse.

  14. Rex:

    Trump has a savant-like ability to grift certain personality types, but doesn’t doesn’t mean he is remotely clever. We’re talking about a guy who had to get all his presidential briefing summarised for him because he couldn’t handle reading them, for Christ’s sake.

    He’s a moron. A moron with a particular skillset that has served him very well, but a moron nonetheless.

  15. Boerwarsays:
    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 3:00 pm
    ‘Entropy says:
    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 2:59 pm

    20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks

    Both christian names very Christian. Surname of northern European origin, from the Norse. Common English surname from Yorkshire region of England. Probably suggests ancestors were shepherds.’
    ————————
    Or Liberals?
    ================================================

    Don’t know about that. Name suggests either Anglo White ancestry or African American. As African Americans also often took on Anglo type surnames and christian names.

  16. “Are we good?” one of the officers said, audible from the podium microphone.

    “Shooter’s down,” another answered.

    “We’re good to move.”

    “Are we clear?”

    “We’re clear!”

    “Let me get my shoes on,” Trump said, as the agents lifted him.

    “I got you, sir.”

    “Hold on, your head is bloody.”

    “Let me get my shoes on,” he said again, as the agents formed a ring around him.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/07/13/trump-shooting-rally-witness-account/

    I wonder why his shoes were off?

  17. There have been linguistic analyses of Donald Trump’s utterances during his public appearances over the decades. It is clear that his abilities to use complex sentence structures, state the relationships between ideas, make points that are relevant to the topic at hand, recall details, use logic, and express nuance have diminished considerably.

  18. Trump’s dementia symptoms include:

    1. Frequent and increasing phonemic paraphasia.
    2. Confusion about reality.
    3. Beginning a sentence, forgetting what the start was about, and finishing it with something unrelated.
    4. Falling asleep in court.
    5. Progressive deterioration in memory.
    6. Forward lean.
    7. Deterioration in gross and fine motor skills.
    8. Confusion about who people are.
    9. Confusion about when stuff happened or happens.
    10. Balance
    11. Simplified language
    12. Simplified logic structures
    13. Use of superlatives (although he has always done this).
    14. Repetitive language.
    15. Standing around wondering what is happening around him.

  19. Trump got dogpiled by this detail; chances are someone stepped on a shoe, or it came of at an angle.

    Its to be expected

  20. Boerwar @ #325 Sunday, July 14th, 2024 – 3:20 pm

    confessions
    Were his shoes really off?

    Who knows? But it’s odd that he’s demanding to be allowed to put his shoes back on before being dragged to the car.

    When he was dragged standing his hair was seriously askance. Perhaps ‘shoes’ is code for wig. 😆

  21. Confessionssays:
    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 3:30 pm
    Boerwar @ #325 Sunday, July 14th, 2024 – 3:20 pm

    confessions
    Were his shoes really off?

    Who knows? But it’s odd that he’s demanding to be allowed to put his shoes back on before being dragged to the car.

    When he was dragged standing his hair was seriously askance. Perhaps ‘shoes’ is code for wig.
    ===============================================

    Probably just his vanity. His shoes are elevated to make him look taller. Probably didn’t want to risk getting photographed showing his actual height.

  22. The NRA speaks…

    NRA@NRA
    ·
    6h
    We pray for the safety and well-being of President Trump and the brave men and women protecting him and all in attendance in PA.

  23. Both Trump and Biden’s deficiencies need to be discussed in reference to each other because the forthcoming election will be a choice of the least bad candidate. It’s a difficult choice every American must make.

  24. Boerwarsays:
    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 3:20 pm
    confessions
    Were his shoes really off?
    _____________________
    Does it really matter?
    Did he get shot because he had his shoes off.

  25. Luigi Smith @ #339 Sunday, July 14th, 2024 – 3:41 pm

    Both Trump and Biden’s deficiencies need to be discussed in reference to each other because the forthcoming election will be a choice of the least bad candidate. It’s a difficult choice every American must make.

    The election is no longer a choice of Biden v Trump. It is a choice between Biden v The Couch, and has been for some time, accelerated by that debate on 27 June.

    It isn’t the time to discuss this now, but you can bet the Trump campaign will weaponise today’s events in their favour.

  26. BSA Bobsays:
    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 3:40 pm
    Shooter a registered Republican!
    Doesn’t count.
    =============================================

    Badthinker doesn’t do mea cupla’s anyway. Just moves on to new garbage.

  27. Entropy
    I was thinking of asking if anyone had any predictions as to what the night’s marauders will do. So I’ll ask it now.
    Ps got your civil war post.

  28. ‘Taylormade says:
    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 3:42 pm

    Boerwarsays:
    Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 3:20 pm
    confessions
    Were his shoes really off?
    _____________________
    Does it really matter?
    Did he get shot because he had his shoes off.’
    ====================
    It must matter. Remember the thundering herd of MSM floozies gushing over Gillard’s coat and her shoe? It was really important stuff when the MSM was trying its best to tear Gillard down. Don’t you remember that sort of important stuff?

    The real question here is whether the shoes were actually off. Trump may have been having yet another delusional episode. He is certainly willing to risk the lives of his minders in order to get his shoes right. Whatever ‘right’ might mean.

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