For what it’s worth, these are the reasons why I think Maxine McKew lost Bennelong on Saturday night.
1.The deep unpopularity of NSW Labor:
The swings against sitting Labor members in Sydney, particularly in the West were enormous as voters, impatient for the NSW state election, decided to punish them now. Look at the figures – an 8.7% swing (2PP) against Labor in Watson, 13.2% in Fowler, 5.6% in Parramatta . The swing against Daryl Melham in Banks was 9% and in Bennelong it was 4.9%.
When Julia Gillard appeared on a stage with Kristina Keneally to announce the Parramatta to Epping rail link, it was greeted with derision, and forever confused state and federal issues in the voters minds.
Local blogger Andrew Elder summed it up well: “Firstly, whose idea was it for the Prime Minister and other Federal ministers to be photographed with Keneally? Federal-State separation is all very well, but no Labor person would want to make any sort of association in the public mind between Gillard .. and Keneally (who) should have been sent to Ohio for the length of the campaign. Only if you are in denial about how bad the NSW goverment is would you risk the entire Labor campaign for federal government by giving Gillard a dose of the loser virus, Macquarie Street strain.”
2. Poor national campaign:
ALP head office had no idea how much the electorate would object to the removal of Kevin Rudd. This feeling was particularly strong in the Asian communities in Bennelong. The local Asian voters had felt a strong link with the Mandarin-speaking former diplomat, who has a Chinese-born son-in-law.
Local leaders also told me they felt that the manner of his removal was disrespectful to the office of PM. Many considered it inconceivable that an elected leader could lose his or her job in that way.
Maxine said on Saturday night:
“When I think back over the national campaign and I compare it with what happened in 2007, there is a very vast gulf.
“I won Bennelong in 2007 off the back of a disciplined, well-run, highly respectable national campaign, with a key set of central messages.
“I think it’s fair to say that this national campaign was confused. It did not have a central message, it did not have clarity. We shouldn’t be on a knife-edge tonight and we shouldn’t be losing colleagues all over the country.
There are significant questions for the Labor Party which we are facing tonight. You cannot have a Labor leader removed within two months of an election for it not to have significant ramifications. Clearly that was a factor.”
3. Revitalised local Liberal campaign:
Many of the local Liberals never forgave Labor for knocking off John Howard, and they threw everything they had at getting it back, including a targeted campaign to the Asian communities.
Earlier this year, Tony Abbott attended the launch of the Liberal Party Chinese Council. In early August the LPCC had a fundraising dinner in Chatswood, headlined by Abbott and Howard and attended by Liberal candidate John Alexander.
The local Liberal branch got its act into gear and a large selection of Chinese and Korean how-to-votes were printed up well before election day. On the day, many of the booths were manned by Chinese and Korean-speaking volunteers.
By contrast, ALP head office dragged its heels on approving Chinese-language materials, which were only produced late in the penultimate week. There appeared to be no Korean-language materials.
Independent Ryde councillor Justin Li said that there were 15,000 “Asian” voters in Bennelong, “what sort of message does that send to them?”
He said he thought that the Liberal Party had reproduced a lot of the strategies used by the ALP in the last election.
“It’s a mystery, (the ALP) had such a successful winning formula in 2007, why wouldn’t they stick to it?
Local Chinese-born volunteers handing out at Eastwood Public school rang me on Saturday afternoon to tell me that the ALP had lost. On the street, the mood had changed, and people were refusing to take ALP how-to-votes.
On top of this, the local Libs ran a fairly negative (but ultimately effective) campaign focused on overdevelopment, congestion, lack of infrastructure. Bennelong, like a lot of North-West Sydney, is very car-dependent because public transport is so bad. You can spend hours in your car doing the daily commute, and the local roads are a nightmare. This tends to produce very pissed-off voters; understandably, they tend to blame the incumbents – even if, of course, these are mainly state-based issues.
In the end, of course, it is up to the will of the people, and the Bennelong voters have now decided that they want former tennis star John Alexander to represent them in Canberra.
The shame of it is that Maxine was in fact a very committed local member. For those people who read the local papers each week, (including me), she appeared everywhere, opening fetes, attending concerts, getting out and about. Most people would find it a grind, but she genuinely seemed to like it. How many local members would have received truckloads of home-made cakes during the campaign, flowers, remedies for sore throats? Many commentators said she seemed absent from the national stage, but that’s only because she wasn’t in the national press – she was at Ryde Hospital, handing over money for new equipment.
This morning, she was in the office, helping her staff to find new jobs, but she’s not bitter about the result. “I don’t regret a minute of it. I loved doing the job locally and I loved working on public policy. It was a great thing to do.”
And for those people who have predicted that she will move back to Mosman, she has a final word.
“I live in Epping, and I’m not going anywhere.”
I’m afraid Maxine just didn’t measure up to having a real politician as the Bennelong incumbent, plus the ALP gave her nothing to do, plus the 4th estate conveniently keep failing to mention the electoral boundary redistributions that have played a big part in this and the last election plus I think the voters are now sorry they dumped John Howard on a flimsy whim for Rudd’s shallowness. John Alexander isn’t Howard but he is the electorates’ apology candidate.
“Mrs Boss Hogg” has her evenings free – is “Mad Maurie’s Lateline Laugh In” replacing?
Blue – I see the opposite. Bennelong wants to vote Liberal but couldn’t bring itself to vote for Howard. That is how toxic he became.
I think another factor is serious – the social capital of the non government sector had refocused elsewhere. The Greens, Andrew Wilkie, Not Happy John never really got the credit they deserved for unrusting conservative voters in 2004 creating the right conditions for a quality candidate in McKew who cannily eschewed conflict politics – because it had all been done. She was good cop but she missed bad cop in 2010.
For instance she could have done with an Abbott is a Dog on refugees outreach. Get Up in Bennelong perhaps but they were in Lindsay (including moi).
But yes I put it mostly down to Rudd’s Chinese factor. Not least the fear of Chinese Australians recalling the consequences of leadership coups back in the mother country prefacing cultural revolutions and the like. That would turn anyone off leadership routs.
And then there is the disgrace of the Lane Cover River rail bridge wasting $1B dollars. An ALP disaster as 300-600 Sydney siders die prematurely of air pollution every year for lack of affordable rail options. The transport green movement know where the bodies are buried on that one, and I for one want accountability. The fact is the ALP corrupted the ngo sector making a financially independent Green Party an absolute imperative. What the ALP prefer is a Garrett in a gilded cage.
I’d agree with your first par Tom – in the 2004 Wilkie campaign a number of voters rusted on to both parties changed their votes for the first time ever. Some of those from the Lib side went to MM in 07 – once their confidence in Howard was shaken it didn’t come back.
I agree the the big mistake re. Bennelong was the announcement of the rail link – NO-ONE believed it, it reminded voters of just how appalling State Labor is and it linked State and Fed issues in an entirely unhelpful way. You have to wonder at the sheer stupidity of such a tactic.
Yes, there would be a large number of Chinese voters who were concerned about the “disrespect” issue with the replacement of Rudd, but more who would have been upset just to lose Rudd as Rudd – they just liked him. And THAT goes way beyond the Chinese community. TOTALLY agree that the ALP underestimated support for Rudd – lots of people saw him as, OK, flawed, but a good man who should have been supported by his party, not dumped by them. My mother and a few others I spoke to were moved to tears by Rudd’s speech after losing the leadership, and that turned pretty quickly to anger at Gillard – she just looked like an over-ambitious upstart. People who were upset about the way Rudd was knifed didn’t give a flying about having a woman PM – they were just disgusted with the whole thing. A friend who has always voted Labor told me that this time Gillard didn’t deserve to win (although she did give the ALP a higher preference than the Libs) – and since the election has said that Gillard has got what she deserved – there is a sense of “so there, serves you right, fool” about the attitude to Gillard now. How tragic that our first female PM turned out to be such a fizzer.
Bennelong (which I have lived in for all but 8 of my almost-50 years) is a funny sort of electorate – very, very diverse, ethnically and politically, large wealth disparities, a real mix of housing types and prices (from waterfront/water views at Putney to old and new blocks of units in the old industrial areas of West Ryde, Meadowbank and Ermington), lots of “aspirational” types who move into housing estates around North Ryde and send their kids off to private schools, many migrants from all over with kids in the public schools (I think around 40 language backgrounds in my daughter’s old primary school in the middle of the electorate, from memory), small business, people in trades, city commuters, professionals.
Very interesting to look at the Green vote – it’s crept up slowly over the years (the Wilkie aberration aside), and was enough in 2007 for Maxine to need it to get over the line, but it is incredibly variable across the electorate, reflecting the demographics of the different areas. Similarly, the Liberal and Labor votes vary substantially. And about 80% of Greens preferences go to the ALP, with a large proportion going straight there (ie number 2) rather than following the Greens HTV. No doubt about Greens voters – they like to think for themselves!
The other factor in MMs 2007 victory was the big YRAW presence in the electorate. It’s interesting that this time YRAW was not really very active in Bennelong as an organised campaign (the members of the Bennelong group were certainly active in the election, if not all in Bennelong, but not as an identified coherent campaign group). Why would that be? It might have SOMETHING to do with the fact that in 2007 , members of education unions were key drivers of the Bennelong YRAW campaign (not the only ones, by a long shot, but certainly at the core of the group) and this time they, and unionists generally, were pretty bloody crapped off with the ALP. The YRAW campaign generally was not nearly as effective this time as last time – the union movement also needs to be asking itself some serious questions in the face of this outcome – not so much in Bennelong (which was probably always going to swing back, although we would have hoped to a lesser extent than it did) but in the wider situation across the country.