The eastern Perth seat of Hasluck has changed hands at all three elections since its creation as Western Australia’s 15th seat at the 2001 election. Labor has outperformed the state swing in Hasluck at each election, but has twice been denied by the force of the state-wide tide to the Coalition.

The electorate consists of three discrete population areas, with those in the north and south favouring Labor and the one in the centre leaning to the Liberals.

Hasluck is held for the Liberals by Ken Wyatt, whose win in 2010 made him the first ever self-identifying indigenous member of the House of Representatives. Wyatt was formerly a director of the Office of Aboriginal Health director and is the uncle of Ben Wyatt, an emerging figure in the state Labor Party. His win came at the expense of Labor’s Sharryn Jackson, who had won the seat in 2001, lost it in 2004 and recovered it again in 2007.

Jackson became the seat’s inaugural member after defending a notional margin of 2.6% against a Liberal swing of 0.6%, before a further swing of 3.6% evicted her as Perth failed to take a shine to Mark Latham in 2004. The seat was then held for the Liberals by Stuart Henry, former executive director of the Western Australian Master Plumbers Association.

Jackson served as Labor’s state president in the interim, and was reportedly urged by the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union to seize the opportunity of Kim Beazley’s vacancy in Brand at the 2007 election. She instead declared herself set on recovering Hasluck, and was duly successful on the back of a 3.1% swing driven by a recovery of support for Labor in the electorate’s south following a slump in 2004. Redistribution cut Jackson’s 1.3% margin to 0.9% going into the 2010 election, and she was then seen off by an evenly distributed 1.4% swing in 2010.

Labor’s new candidate for Hasluck is Adrian Evans, deputy state secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia.