Recently someone raved to me about the member for Denison, Duncan Kerr, and his popularity in Hobart.
Denison was the first Tasmanian seat to return to Labor after the Whitlam experience. It did this in 1987, when Kerr defeated Michael ‘mouth from the south’ Hodgeman.
Today all five seats in the state are Labor-held.
Graph below shows Labor two party preferred votes for all of them since 1974. They are adjusted back from the 2007 results for redistributions, so for example Labor didn’t really win Lyons in 1980 (and also the seat was then called Wilmot). Click for better quality.
Note the big swings against Labor in 1975 and 1983. The state wasn’t alone the first time, but the second time it was.
The Green line is Denison, and you would expect the urban seat to be most pro-Labor, but whether it’s due to Kerr, demographic changes or something else, it has hit the stratosphere over the years.
Maybe we have to wait for Duncan’s retirement to find out how much is his personal vote.
Well done Peter, your first post on the new site is on Tassie!
Looks very swish. Will give it a good look over.
Peter T.
Welcome to the latter part of the first decade of the 21st Century, Peter. It’ll be good to actually link to things you write.
Looks swishy and good luck with it, Peter.
Part of Kerr’s appeal in my view is that he is liked by many Green-leaning (and even many diehard Green) voters in a very Green-leaning seat. He is capable of coming across to them as something like a Euro-Green (which at heart I suspect he actually is, or has become) while also coming across to the northern suburbs battlers as a charismatic Labor figure concerned about grocery prices and other such everyday issues. This is part of the reason why Bob Brown’s run against him many years ago, although never remotely likely to succeed, fell way short of most expectations.
Thanks all. Don’t look too closely yet Peter, it’s in early design stages.
How does the Labor vote in Denison federally compare to their vote at state level (esp vs the Greens)?
From memory, Duncan Kerr was going to chuck it in a couple of elections ago and was told in no uncertain terms by his party that if he did, they would be stuffed in Tassie. Tasmania seems to have had a tradition of producing some really good pollies (and I’d put Kerr in with this group), and some really bad ones (we know who they are).
OpEd: I think that was after the Cunningham by-election. Simon Crean didn’t want any more by-elections, which is understandable… if Labor could lose a Wollongong-area seat to the Greens, they could’ve certainly lost Denison at the time, especially without Kerr’s personal vote.
Denison’s probably the seat with the highest Green vote that doesn’t get Green partisans all excited (online at least)… the ALP-Lib-Grn split last federal election was 48-30-19. Compare to Sydney: 49-27-21, where some Greens folk get quite excited at the idea of knocking off Tanya Plibersek. The seat could be interesting once Kerr goes. (Also, the Greens outpolled the Liberals in the 2002 state election, although that was more the Libs’ disaster than anything.)
At one stage Kerr was going to resign and contest the state Lower House, but the state party definitely didn’t want such a big fish in its talent pool, and closed ranks to block his attempt to be preselected. I don’t recall the timing or the exact details of how his attempt was given the raspberry. Various Labor electorate staffers were in the running to replace him, none of whom had any profile to speak of.
Denison 2006 at state level was 47-26.5-24. The slight difference between that and the 2007 federal Labor vote doesn’t tell the whole story, which is that Duncan Kerr rakes in truckloads of Green prefs as well, which is why his 2PP is stratospheric.
Bird of Paradox: That’s probably because the Greens’ first hurdle is to overtake the Liberal candidate, so the Lib-Green gap of 11 in Denison makes it look a fair bit further off than the 6 point gap in Sydney.
[...] follows from Duncan Kerr post. The AEC gives every seat one of four geographic classifications: inner metropolitan, outer [...]
Kerr stepping down at next election, according to the ABC News tonight.
Bring on the preselection bloodbath! Last hack standing wins.