Advertisement

Carving up the seat that holds the Govt’s fortunes

The independent-held regional seat of Frome was created in 1991 to be a bellwether electorate that would likely hand the Liberals power in the event of a close election, a leading electoral analyst has told InDaily.

Jun 02, 2016, updated Jun 02, 2016
Local Government Minister Geoff Brock. Photo: Nat Rogers, InDaily.

Local Government Minister Geoff Brock. Photo: Nat Rogers, InDaily.

The fate of Geoff Brock’s mid-north stronghold is up in the air as an independent review of the state’s electoral boundaries considers dramatic changes to a raft of rural seats, including the one that ultimately handed Labor power in the aftermath of the last election.

And key to the significance of any change is to which party the seat naturally belongs.

Brock insists if he had never stood, “it’s a Liberal seat”. But its long-time Liberal incumbent, former Premier Rob Kerin, says there was no guarantee the Liberals would have held it if he had served out his term instead of retiring in 2009, forcing a by-election that saw Brock snare the seat in a shock result with far-reaching ramifications.

If you couldn’t win at a by-election, I don’t know how the hell we were going to win in an election

And psephologist Malcolm Mackerras, who gave evidence to the 1991 parliamentary review and subsequent redistribution that saw Frome created as a regional electorate centred around the nominal Labor stronghold of Port Pirie, says the seat was engineered to help meet the contentious “fairness criteria” that would hand power to the party with a statewide majority.

“The main thing I remember about it was that Frome became the median seat,” he said.

“Frome was deliberately designed to be the median seat and meet the fairness criteria, because the constructed seat included Port Pirie and lot of [conservative-leaning] rural areas.

“It was designed to be marginal, because the Labor vote in Pirie was counteracted by the rural farming vote.”

Mackerras says his modelling after recent redistributions has seen Frome jump around the pendulum from being nominally marginal Labor to strongly Liberal.

The impact of its intent as a bellwether marginal seat may have been curtailed over subsequent redistributions, but it’s arguable the vote in Frome has always been skewed by irregular circumstances. In 1993, its nominal marginal status was undermined by the post-State Bank Liberal landslide. When the Liberals narrowly lost power (despite a statewide majority) in 2002, and remained in Opposition in the 2006 “Rannslide”, Kerin’s vote in Frome was arguably bolstered by his high profile as then-Liberal leader.

And the presence of Brock has complicated any two-party reading of the electorate ever since.

“It’s always been a Liberal seat since its inception,” Brock told InDaily.

“Obviously if they’re voting for me as an independent they’re not voting for either of the major parties… obviously they didn’t have any belief in either party [but] if it hadn’t have been me it would have been a Liberal seat now, that’s the way I read it.

He argued: “Labor have never held it in its new format, have they?”

“I still think it’s a Liberal seat.”

Kerin said he recalled it being a bellwether seat in its earliest incarnation.

“I remember someone saying at some stage ‘the chances are whoever wins Frome will be in Government’,” he told InDaily.

“But the relevance of Frome as it was has probably disappeared in following distributions – and especially if they do a real mix-up this time.”

One private submission to the boundaries commission, by electoral analyst Mark Mulcair, suggests “abolishing the District of Frome and creating a new District in Adelaide’s northern suburbs”.

Whether or not this is under serious consideration, a map posted by the boundaries commission on its website suggests the review is considering a fundamental redrafting of Brock’s electorate, placing Port Pirie (which is nominally pro-Labor) at the southern-most edge of a sprawling mid-north seat, instead of at the northern tip, where it currently resides.

mapfrome

The Commission has posted suggested new regional boundaries for consideration.

Brock said if any such proposal was adopted “you just do the best you can and accept the boundaries… but certainly I don’t think it would be wise to completely abolish it”.

“If they’re going to change it, that’s up to the boundaries commission,” he said.

“It’s a big area, you’ve got to make sure you can represent those people [so] if you’re going to redraw it so you can’t get out and represent the community as best you can, the ones who will be suffering would be the constituents out there.”

He is adamant that Pirie should not be split between electorates, as it was historically.

“I just think each of the Upper Spencer Gulf cities have their own identity [and] they really should be individual seats,” he said.

“I wouldn’t like to see Port Pirie split in two, I wouldn’t like to see Clare split in two.”

He said he was “trying to rearrange my busy itinerary” to attend – and give evidence to – a regional hearing of the Boundaries Commission in the next month.

Kerin – asked if he had regrets about his decision to retire mid-term, sparking the fateful by-election that helped keep the Liberals out of Government in 2014 – replied: “Not really – that’s history.”

“There were mistakes made, we should have won,” he said.

But he added: “If you couldn’t win at a by-election, I don’t know how the hell we were going to win in an election, because at a by-election you could put all your resources towards it.”

“It [being a by-election] didn’t give Brock any more resources,” he said.

“It was the only seat we had to concentrate on, so don’t assume we were going to win it at [the subsequent] general election… if we couldn’t win it when it was the only seat we had to concentrate on, I don’t know how people assume we would have won it at a general election.”

Kerin’s memory of the seat was that the strongly Liberal rural pockets were balanced by the Labor hub of Pirie.

“That locked away quite a few Labor votes… that was Tiger Country, so to speak,” he said.

He said the seat had since lost Liberal strongholds such as Peterborough, Jamestown and Burra, and “basically swapped that for the Clare Valley”, which he argued was still pro-Liberal but not as strongly so.

He said he would “certainly support [the boundaries commission] doing something, because for too long it’s been a bit lopsided”, but he argued: “It’s going to take a hell of a bloody redraw.”

“When you look at a map and start sorting numbers out, it’s a bit hard to see how they’re going to do it… there’ll always be adjustments in the country because of loss of population [but] you’re going to have to do something in the city,” he said.

“I can’t see how messing around with the country will achieve what they’re setting out to do.”

A 1993 commission report shines some light on that, noting the number of “wasted” Liberal votes “locked away” in rural seats.

“The commission identified the extent of the imbalance and rectified it in a rural area [Frome] before proceeding with the remainder of the redistribution,” it said.

“It also identified the extent of this net advantage to the Liberal Party as being in the order of one seat.”

It noted that if the imbalance had been rectified prior to the 1989 election, John Olsen’s Liberals would have won with 24 seats.

“The imbalance problem was not caused in the metropolitan area but in rural areas,” the report stated.

“Accordingly it was most appropriate to rectify the problem where it arose, in a rural area.

“The Commission unlocked a representative cluster of rural conservative votes to the east of Port Pirie… by mixing a majority of such votes with a majority of Labor Party votes in Port Pirie itself, it is likely that, at the next election, the balance in the four northern and western districts will change from two seats each, to three Liberal Party seats and one Labor Party seat [Giles].

“Port Augusta was placed in Eyre [later abolished and divided between Giles and Stuart]. Previously Port Augusta and Port Pirie had been bracketed together in one district [Stuart], the latter being divided to keep the district within quota… now each city heads a separate district and is not divided.”

The report noted that “it may be that more marginal seats have been created than usual”.

“If that is so, it was an uncontrived outcome of the redistribution process and no other adjustments were called for on that account,” it said.

“The Commission can only say that there is a reasonable chance that the Liberal Party could win enough seats to form Government at, say, 51 per cent.”

At the 2014 election, the party fell short with 53 per cent of the statewide vote.

The Labor Party’s hired QC, Dick Whitington, told the boundaries commission last month that “the natural constituency of Frome is a Liberal Party or conservative constituency”.

“That’s demonstrated by its history and past events,” he said.

“And the independent [Brock] might well have thrown his lot in with a Liberal government had Dr [Bob] Such [the late member for Fisher, now held by Labor] not got ill.”

Local News Matters
Advertisement
Copyright © 2024 InDaily.
All rights reserved.