1993_02_february_victoria

Tudging by recent opinion polls, Paul Keating is like a Bridge or 500 player with four or five cards left but only one or two trumps.

In this position, the player can either use his trumps in the hope of bleeding out some high off-suit cards or he play the off-suit first knowing he can salvage at least some tricks at the end.

The first course is highly risky. It increases the chance of winning, but if it fails the player misses out on his contract by a large margin. The second course increases the chance of a loss, but reduces the risk of being beaten heavily.

The first (risky) course is for Labor to spend a lot of time and effort in vulnerable Liberal marginal seats, such as those in Victoria, while not putting much effort in moderately safe Labor seats. It is a victory strategy. But if it fails the defeat will be large. The second course is to concentrate on Labor-held seats only. It is a minimise-the-size-of-the-defeat strategy.

If Labor is to go for victory, it must put a lot of effort into the seven marginals held by the Liberal party in Victoria and hope it is not wasted effort.

If it does that it will be relying on the Kennett factor.

At the last election in 1990 Labor lost nine seats in Victoria. And it seemed at least for the first two years of the term that more damage was to come.

The prosperous financial centre of Australia had become the major part of the rust belt. Unthinkably, that bastion of solid conservative security, the State Bank of Victoria, was gone. Manufacturing industries were wrecked. Savings sank with the collapse of the Pyramid Building Society in Geelong.

Then came Jeff Kennett. Revenge for Labor’s incompetent economic management was duly extracted and Victorians had something else to think about at least for a while. Labor strategists thought that come the Federal election there was a good chance that Labor could take some of those seats back. People were given a taste of harsh industrial relations in the form of revoked holiday leave loadings and large public-sector lay-offs. Polls showed a swing back to Labor.

If the Federal election had been held in December, perhaps a Kennett backlash could have given Labor several Victorian seats. But polls are showing now that Labor’s chances are not so good.

As a result of its gains last election, the Coalition has many more marginals in Victoria than Labor. The Liberals hold the following seats with the margin in brackets: Corinella (0.8), Bendigo (1.2), Dunkley (1.3), La Trobe (1.4), Ballarat (1.9), Deakin (2.4), McEwen (3.3), McMillan (4.5).

Labor’s marginals are Melbourne Ports (2.1), Jaga Jaga (2.7) and Burke (3.4). Labor is likely to hold both of these. Melbourne Ports is held by former Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and for Victorian Opposition Leader Clyde Holding. The Liberal candidate, Helen Friedmann, a Caulfield councillor, has accused Labor of “”shadowing” her and unfairly bringing up the fact that she had once been on a good-behaviour bond.

As Melbourne’s suburbs spread north-west, Burke is getting safer for Labor. It has been held by Neil O’Keefe since 1984. More of Jaga Jaga anon.

Of the Liberal seats McMillan and McEwen are non-urban and are likely to stay with the Coalition.

According to an opinion poll of Victorian marginals published this week in the Herald-Sun, Bendigo is a chance for Labor, but it is a notoriously unpredictable seat, and the small sample might have been unrepresentatively dominated by the town area which would be more pro-Labor. Ballarat is similarly unpredictable and volatile. Both seats have been held by both sides in Opposition and Government.

Labor has pinned most of its hopes on the three metropolitan Liberal marginals and Corinella which abuts the western edge of Melbourne. The Saulwick poll has Labor within 1 per cent of taking the seat, but the later Herald-Sun poll has the Coalition comfortably ahead.

La Trobe, held by Bob Charles, is an interesting litmus. It was held by the governing party since its creation in 1949 until 1980 (one term before a change of government). It stayed with the Government from 1983 until 1990 (the Liberals would hope one term before a change of government).

Dunkley was until a week ago, one of Labor’s best hopes. First the Saulwick poll put the Liberals 13 points ahead. Then this week, the Herald-Sun poll confirmed that with the Liberals nine points ahead.

Deakin, too, looks grim for Labor in the polls. The Herald-Sun poll has the Liberals 15 points ahead. The same poll has the Labor seat of Jaga Jaga going to the Coalition by a margin of five per cent. If it does, ANU law graduate Alistair Urquhart will be returning to his old stomping ground.

Any state, bar Tasmania, taken on its own can be described as “”the key to this election”, but it is perhaps more true of Victoria than elsewhere.

This is because Labor has to expect the loss of three seats in South Australia and perhaps as many as three in Western Australia. In NSW two natural National Party seats (Page and Richmond) are likely to return to the National fold. And as Victoria has as many seats in Victoria held by less than 4 per cent as in the rest of Australia combined, it is in Victoria that Labor must decide what sort of card game it must play.

Whatever the national polls say, the only two polls specifically targetted at marginal seats in Victoria give Labor no cause for comfort. They show the Kennett factor is not as significant as it was and is continuing to decline. Life goes on in Victoria and the fears of the early Kennett days have perhaps abated.

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