Font Size: Decrease Increase Print Page: Print Glenn Milne | October 22, 2007
FOR those who think Kevin Rudd will win this election based on the national swing as registered in the published opinion polls, here's some mail: the Liberal Party intends preferencing Gavan O'Connor in the seat of Corio.
If ever you needed evidence that, while the polls reflect a national mood for change, this election will still be fought out in the trenches, seat by muddy seat, Corio is it.
If the Liberals do preference O'Connor, the former Labor member who has quit the party in disgust at factional heavying and union influence to run as an independent, he may be in with a chance of winning back the seat he's already held for 14 years. And that will be one more on the list of 16 Rudd needs to take government that he will have to strike off. And it will be one more that he has to find somewhere else.
While the Liberals have yet to make any formal announcement, senior figures at the Melbourne campaign headquarters over the weekend gave the nod to O'Connor.
And why wouldn't they? He finds himself in the middle of the perfect election storm. A popular frontbencher and the only farmer in the Labor caucus, O'Connor fell victim two summers ago to a brutal union purge that installed ACTU assistant secretary Richard Marles in the seat, courtesy of some very public branch stacking.
As such, O'Connor is the ad man's pinup boy for a Coalition trying to project fear across the land that a Rudd government would be dominated and run by the unions. Right on cue, and unpaid, O'Connor spruiked precisely this message when he declared on Friday that he would contest Corio.
Let me count the ways. More in sorrow than anger, the silvering O'Connor accused the Labor Party of rampant branch stacking, illicit fundraising, money laundering and grubby dealings with property developers.
Oh, and he accused Rudd of being weak. O'Connor said that when he contacted the Opposition Leader (O'Connor was one of the few genuine friends Rudd had in caucus) and told him he faced an orchestrated preselection onslaught from the unions, Rudd replied: "Gavan, I'm not strong enough, I'm not strong enough to stop this happening." This was an admission by Rudd that the broader putsch was essentially fired by the burning ambitions of AWU national secretary Bill Shorten. Rudd may ultimately come to regret he didn't extinguish Shorten when he had the chance. But that will be a story for a later day.
So O'Connor's campaign is off to a flying start. And so are the Liberals. The mathematics in Corio tell us they share a base from which to launch a credible challenge to Marles.
In 2004 the seat went to preferences. And after the latest redistribution, Labor's margin was cut from 8.5per cent to 5.6 per cent. O'Connor finished first with 46.7 per cent of the primary vote, followed by the Liberals with 40.3 per cent and the Greens on 5.9 per cent. The two-party preferred results gave O'Connor 55.6 per cent of the vote and the Liberals 44.4.
In other words, if O'Connor managed to come in second to Marles, Liberal preferences could put him across the line. Is this likely? First, to the Greens vote. At present it would appear the Greens are disposed to preference Labor. But that was before O'Connor announced. Depending on what policy positions O'Connor put as an independent, he could still woo the Green vote.
This is particularly so when the Greens have shown a tendency nationally to preference independents in seats where they stand so they're able to boast they did not do deals with Labor simply as a matter of course. So it's conceivable the Greens would look kindly on him.
The biggest trick to getting O'Connor up for the Liberals would be to ensure their candidate ran third. There are two intersecting currents here and they are both media driven. The Liberals' "problem" (defined as pushing O'Connor into second place) is that Corio, based on Geelong, has a very strong local media, particularly the Geelong Advertiser.
The Liberals are fighting off a strong Rudd-driven Labor challenge to Stewart McArthur, their sitting candidate in the neighbouring seat of Corangamite. Facing this adjoining challenge, there has to be strong Liberal branding across regional media, making it hard to run dead in Corio. But the media equation is also working against Labor and Marles. Strong local media will ensure that all Marles's dirty laundry (and there is plenty) is aired, along with O'Connor's tilt at the seat. History suggests independents do best where there is a robust local media interested in what is happening in its back yard.
In NSW, after Liberal leader John Brogden resigned in tragic circumstances, his seat of Pittwater was won by an independent. His success was attributed in large part to the presence of The Manly Daily newspaper and its coverage of the internal woes of the Liberal Party that followed Brogden's dramatic exit.
What's more, history also suggests Labor independents, after the style of O'Connor, do better in safer ALP seats than they do in the true marginals, where the party faithful are more easily convinced their every vote counts. O'Connor is also a popular figure in his own right around Geelong, and Marles is an outsider. "Geelong's like Tasmania," said one senior Liberal at Melbourne campaign HQ. "They prefer their own."
And Marles is carrying baggage, quite a deal of it. Smelling blood on the waters off Geelong Bay, Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey put out a statement yesterday declaring: "The real challenge for Kevin Rudd is to sack his candidate for Corio, Richard Marles.
"Marles has been linked to the Transport 2020 slush fund and has admitted keeping dossiers on the private lives, personal habits and medical histories of 400 people in the Geelong community."
Transport 2020 was set up by Marles and former state secretary David Feeney in 1994 with the explicit intention, according to leaked minutes of its inaugural meeting, of paying "membership subscriptions to any trade union and the ALP of members".
Beyond that, not much is known. But expect Marles to face more questions about this company and its purposes as the campaign progresses. As to the dossier Hockey referred to, that has received an airing in the Geelong media. It was an intelligence-gathering exercise ahead of Marles's move against O'Connor and included references to one ALP member as having "just had a miscarriage", another "reputed to be a drunk" and another who "appears to have skeletons in her closet".
Confronted with the dossier, Marles's response to the Herald Sun newspaper was that "he had considered his actions in keeping notes and now regretted them".
When it comes to Marles's regrets, O'Connor has just ensured he has a few more. Said Marles: "The only winner out of this is John Howard and the Liberal Party."
