Most recently, this came up in the Bulletin, where the resident pundit suggested that the fact the local member was the Federal Opposition Leader was worth a few percentage points to Labor at the last election:
The former Labor leader holds the seat of Brand with a margin of 4.7 per cent. Being party leader was probably worth a couple of percentage points, so the actual margin is less than 3 per cent.Now I know many on the left of politics in Australia might be trying to forget the last election, but for a political journalist to not remember who were the two major party leaders is pretty poor. Especially as I'd personally think that Mark Latham was a fairly memorable politician.
So Big Kim wasn't the Labor leader at the last election, so I guess that means that the margin in Brand is genuinely 4.7%. Add that to the fact Brand is not held by the Government, and history shows the Government never picks up seats at bye-elections, you'd have to question why this is coming up at all. I;d guess of course it's because here in WA, we've had a bit of a recent scandal in state ALP ranks, involving our unlamented former Premier, Brian Burke, and one of the implicated local MPs was a state minister the member for Peel, Norm Marlborough, who's electorate is entirely within Brand.
Now Burkie showing up isn't ever going to be good for Labor in WA given his reputation as being a bit on the dodgy side, but still, this is a State thing, not a Federal one. If Marlborough resigned from politics today, and we had a state by-election for Peel, then Labor would be worried about the result maybe. Except it's a safe seat at 13.1% - certainly safer than any of Labor's Federal seats in WA.
The article in the Bulletin did bring up an interesting point though - whether having a WA boy as the opposition leader would help Labor in WA. I'll grant, we're a fairly parochial bunch here in the West - we did vote to secede from the Commonwealth once - so there's probably something in it. So I checked the swings in a few WA seats at the last election compared to the one before where Beazley was the Opposition Leader.
What I found was that nearly every seat had about a 3-5% swing to the Coalition, with the exception of Curtin (0.7 % to Lib) and O'Connor (1.2% to Lib). Both already had a tiny Labor vote so a big swing was difficult to start with. In Curtin, you could shoot a gun into a crowd and if you hit a Labor voter you'd halve the Labor vote - probably by killing my Dad, so I'd prefer you didn't; while in O'Connor Labor is a swear word - this is the seat with Ironbar Tuckey as the incumbent. So while it might be true - but if so, it already happened, at the last election.
So what does this mean in WA other than in a hypothetical Brand by-election?
My first reaction is that if I were the Coalition, I'd reckon that 2004 in WA was as good as it gets aided by the fact that Beazley was no longer the Opposition Leader, and that the only chance of keeping the status quo would be if the State Government imploded; an election on Federal issues only would be highly unlikely to result in any seats changing hand s to the Government. Certainly the two coalition marginals, Hasluck (1.8%) and Stirling (2.0%) would have exceptionally nervous sitting members. At this early stage I'd personally rate both as much more likely to change hands than any Labor held seat, even ultra-marginal Swan (0.1%) or Cowan (0.8).
In the end though, even if Kevin Rudd was caught in a compromising position with a farm animal, Julia Gillard turned out to be a man, and John Howard personally interceded to get Adam Vosges into the Australian Test cricket team, Brand should be unassailable.
(All figures grabbed from the ABC's election site)
