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July 29, 2010
The Coalition needs to pick up 17 seats to win a majority to govern outright, requiring a uniform 2.3 per cent swing. Queensland is the key because it has the most marginal seats on both sides of politics. There are 10 marginal seats held by Labor by less than 5 per cent, while the Coalition holds six seats regarded as marginal.
At Inside Story Norman Abjorensen comments on what has become increasingly obvious--- the election is about the unaligned voters in marginal electorates and has little to do with a conversation with the vast majority of us. It appears to be about the marginal seats in South East Queensland and western Sydney. Abjorensen comments:
this focus on unaligned voters hasn’t translated into an attempt by the major parties to convince more of us to buy their goods. It’s more a case of strategists identifying which particular voters in a handful of key electorates need to be persuaded to change or to repeat their vote from the last election. Instead of a national conversation on the big issues in which we can all take part, we have a series of private chats, informed via focus groups and local polling, that effectively exclude the vast majority of the population.
He comments that the problem, however, is that no two marginal seats are identical as they are highly local. Indeed, he adds, the issues in marginal seats might be highly antithetical. A key seat with a large number of environmentalists in inner Melbourne, say, might be vital, but so too might a seat in Tasmania where jobs are seen to be threatened by heavier environmental regulation.
The irony is that the federal election could be decided on the basis of regional and local issues in south-eastern Queensland, and yet we have little knowledge of what is happening around the local issues in these marginal seats.
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There appears to be a drift away from Labor in Lindsay Tanner's electorate of Melbourne