Australian Capital Territory general election, 2008
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Legislative Assembly, 2008
Party	Vote %		Seats
Labor	37.4	↓9.5	7	↓2
Liberals	31.6	↓3.2	6	0
Greens	15.6	↑6.4	4	↑3
Independents			0	↓1
No majority

The 2008 election for the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly was held on 18 October 2008.¹ The incumbent Australian Labor Party, led by John Stanhope, was challenged by the Liberal Party, led by Zed Seselja. Full results were officially declared on 29 October,² with Labor winning 7 seats, the Liberals 6 seats and the Greens finishing with 4 seats, giving them the balance of power in the 17-member unicameral Legislative Assembly.³⁴⁵

On 31 October, after almost two weeks of deliberations, the Greens chose to support a Labor minority government.⁶⁷⁸ Consequently, Labor was reelected to a third consecutive term of government in the ACT.

Overview

Major party leaders
Labor Jon Stanhope Chief Minister Parliament: 10 years Leader since: 1998 Electorate: Ginninderra
Liberal Zed Seselja Opposition Leader Parliament: 4 years Leader since: 2007 Electorate: Molonglo

The incumbent centre-left Australian Labor Party, led by Chief Minister Jon Stanhope, attempted to win re-election for a third term after coming to power in 2001. They were challenged by the opposition centre-right Liberal Party of Australia, led by Zed Seselja, who assumed the Liberal leadership in December 2007. A third party, the ACT Greens, held one seat in the Assembly through retiring MLA Deb Foskey.

The election saw all 17 members of the Assembly face re-election, with members being elected by the Hare-Clark system of proportional representation. The Assembly is divided into three electorates: five-member Brindabella (including Tuggeranong and parts of the Woden Valley) and Ginninderra (including Belconnen and suburbs) and seven-member Molonglo (including North Canberra, South Canberra, Gungahlin, Weston Creek, and the remainder of the Woden Valley). Election dates are set in statute to occur once every four years; the government has no ability to set the election date.

Following the 2004 election outcome, Labor held 9 seats, becoming the first majority government in the territory's history. The opposition Liberal Party held 7 seats, with the Greens holding a further one. The Liberal numbers in the Assembly dropped to six in December 2007 when former Shadow Treasurer Richard Mulcahy was expelled from the party and began sitting as an independent. The opposition thus would have needed to win a further three seats, on top of regaining Mulcahy's seat, to hold government in its own right.

The Liberal campaign suffered early problems in February 2008 when a number of prominent Liberal Party and business figures, including popular former Chief Minister Kate Carnell and high-profile businessman and former party finance director Jim Murphy, relaunched the 250 Club, previously a Liberal fundraising group, as the independent Canberra Business Club. The new organisation pledged to support minor party and independent pro-business candidates in the election, citing their disillusion with both major parties and the need for a third political force in the Assembly. At the same time, their best prospect for winning Mulcahy's seat of Molonglo withdrew.⁹

Polling

Conducted by Patterson Market Research, and published in The Canberra Times, polling released on 4 October suggested the Green vote had doubled to tripled since the last election, at the expense of Labor, with the Liberal vote relatively unchanged. Commentators predicted the Greens would hold the balance of power and decide who forms government. The Greens stated they were willing to court both major parties.^10111213

Scanning of ballot papers

In the 2001 and 2004 elections, after the first manual count of paper ballots the preferences were data entered for distribution. For the 2008 election, paper ballots were scanned and character recognition software used to identify preferences. Any preferences that could not be identified by the software were entered manually.¹⁴

Retiring members

• Wayne Berry (Labor, Ginninderra) ¹⁵
• Deb Foskey (Green, Molonglo) ¹⁶
• Karin MacDonald (Labor, Brindabella) ¹⁵
• Bill Stefaniak (Liberal, Ginninderra) ¹⁷

Candidates

Labor Party

Labor preselected candidates for all three seats in the election.

Ginninderra: incumbent MLAs Jon Stanhope and Mary Porter, indigenous dentist Chris Bourke, party staffer Adina Cirson¹⁸ and training consultant Dave Peebles¹⁹

Brindabella: incumbent MLAs John Hargreaves and Mick Gentleman, former ACT Democrats president Wayne Sievers, nurse Joy Burch and community worker Tracy Mackey

Molonglo: incumbent MLAs Simon Corbell, Katy Gallagher and Andrew Barr, IT expert David Mathews, union official Louise Crossman, Eleanor Bates and former United States Airforce rocket scientist and environmentalist Mike Hettinger

The Labor preselection announcement was most notable for the surprise nomination of whistleblower, former police officer, and ACT Australian Democrats party president Wayne Sievers, who nearly won a seat in the Senate for the Democrats at the 2001 federal election. This made Sievers the early favourite to succeed retiring Labor MLA Karin MacDonald. ²⁰

Previously, Labor had six candidates standing in the Ginninderra and Brindabella electorates. However on 15 July 2008 it was announced that two candidates had dropped out of the race for family and personal reasons - Pascal Leahy from Ginninderra, and Rebecca Cody from Brindabella - and the positions were not filled.

Liberal Party

The Liberal Party also preselected candidates for all three electorates in the election.

Ginninderra: incumbent MLA Vicki Dunne, Andrea Tokaji, public servant Matthew Watts, Alistair Coe, and former Senate candidate Jacqui Myers

Brindabella: incumbent MLAs Brendan Smyth and Steve Pratt, David Morgan, soccer identity Steve Doszpot and Audrey Ray.

Molonglo: incumbent MLAs Zed Seselja and Jacqui Burke, former party president Gary Kent, former party staffer Giulia Jones, soldier Jeremy Hanson, community worker Belinda Barnier, and Clinton White, media adviser to retired Liberal MLA Bill Stefaniak.²¹²²²³

The party had earlier faced some difficulties with candidate selection. Troy Williams, the party's candidate for Fraser at the 2007 federal election, had intended to contest a seat in Molonglo, and had been reported as a potential strong challenger to ex-Liberal independent Richard Mulcahy. He withdrew on 28 February 2007, citing "personal and business reasons". The Canberra Times, however, reported that Williams' withdrawal had been due to a falling out with the territory's Liberal Party director.²⁴

ACT Greens

The sole Greens MLA in the Assembly, one-term representative Deb Foskey, retired at the election.¹⁶

The party announced lead candidates for each of the three electorates:

Ginninderra: Meredith Hunter, community worker and 2007 candidate for the federal seat of Fraser

Molonglo: Shane Rattenbury, former Greenpeace official

Brindabella: Amanda Bresnan, mental health policy worker and 2007 candidate for the federal seat of Canberra²⁵

An additional Greens candidate ran alongside each of the lead candidates in each electorate, and Caroline Le Couteur was elected in Molonglo after distribution of preferences.

Independents and minor parties

Ex-Liberal independent MLA and former Shadow Treasurer Richard Mulcahy recontested his seat. He created a new minor party, the Richard Mulcahy Canberra Party, in the wake of electoral changes passed by the Stanhope government in May 2008 which decreased the prominence of independent candidates on the ballot paper²⁶²⁷, but failed to obtain re-election and thus lost his seat.

The Australian Democrats, who held one seat in the 5th Legislative Assembly (from 2001 to 2004) and two seats in the old House of Assembly, prior to ACT Self-government (1979 to 1985), contested the election in the ungrouped columns, as the Democrats were no longer a registered party in the ACT. Candidates Darren Churchill and Greg Tannahill contested Ginninderra and Molonglo respectively²⁸, but did not pick up a seat.

Frank Pangallo, the outgoing seventeen-year mayor of Queanbeyan, ran as an independent in Molonglo, relocating to Narrabundah to enable him to stand for election in the ACT. Pangallo, well known as a maverick critic of the Stanhope government unattached to either major party, was tipped to be in serious contention for the seventh and final seat there. ²⁹³⁰

A new minor party, the Community Alliance Party, contended the election. Led by Ric Hingee, an advocate for the victims of the 2003 Canberra bushfires, the party campaigned around focusing government issues of basic services and infrastructure, suggesting that the ACT should be run more like a local council than a state government. This included staunch opposition to the territory government's 2006-2008 round of school closures and development concerns, including the proposed power station at Hume. While Hingee was critical of the ACT government's support for gay civil unions and the Human Rights Act 2004 and is fiercely opposed to Chief Minister Stanhope, it was reported that he would consider supporting the government in the event of a hung parliament if Katy Gallagher were Labor leader. The party ran seven candidates: Norvan Vogt (Molonglo), who unsuccessfully ran for the federal senate (for the Australian Democrats) in the 2007 federal election, Alvin Hopper (Molonglo), Save Our Schools spokesperson Jane Tullis, prison officer Mike Crowther, and Roger Nicoll (Ginninderra), and Tharwa store owner Val Jeffery and IT worker James Sizer (Brindabella).^{312232 33 343536}

The Australian Motorist Party, led by Geoff Develin, contested the election with candidates in each seat equal to the number of vacancies (five in Brindabella and Ginninderra, and seven in Molonglo). The candidates polled poorly, with the vote split almost equally amongst candidates - an effect caused by the Robson Rotation system used in the ACT.²²

Adam Verwey, who ran as an independent in Ginninderra, was opposed to poker machines in the ACT. He was formally the president of the University of Canberra Students' Assosiation.³⁷

Mark Parton, previously co-breakfast announcer on Mix 106.3, ran as an independent in Ginninderra.

Harold Hird, a former MLA from 1995-2001 and a former Speaker of the ACT House of Assembly, ran as an independent in Ginninderra.

Result

Election Night

At the close of counting on election night 18 October 2008, with 82.1 per cent of the vote counted Labor had obtained 37.6 per cent of the vote across the ACT, with the Liberals at 31.1 per cent and the Greens at 15.8 per cent. Swings were recorded against both the Labor (-9.3 per cent) and Liberal (-3.7 per cent) parties with a +6.6 per cent swing towards the Greens. Labor won 7 seats, the Liberals won 6 seats, while the Greens won 4 seats, giving them the balance of power, and negotiated with both major parties for the formation of a minority government.³⁸³⁹ After almost two weeks of deliberations, the Greens chose to form a minority government with Labor.⁴⁰

Final result

The ACT Electoral Commission determined and announced the election's final results on 25 October 2008 after distribution of preferences⁴¹.

The election delivered a Legislative assembly with: Labor (7), Liberal (6), Green (4).

MLAs elected are presented in the order of their achieving the required quota for election.

Brindabella⁴²⁴³:

• Brendan Smyth (Liberal)
• Steve Doszpot (Liberal)
• Amanda Bresnan (Greens)
• John Hargreaves (Labor)
• Joy Burch (Labor)

Ginninderra⁴⁴⁴⁵:

• Jon Stanhope (Labor)
• Meredith Hunter (Greens)
• Alistair Coe (Liberal)
• Mary Porter (Labor)
• Vicki Dunne (Liberal)

Molonglo⁴⁶⁴⁷:

• Zed Seselja (Liberal)
• Katy Gallagher (Labor)
• Shane Rattenbury (Greens)
• Andrew Barr (Labor)
• Jeremy Hanson (Liberal)
• Simon Corbell (Labor)
• Caroline Le Couteur (Greens)

MLAs not returned

• Steve Pratt⁴⁸
• Mick Gentleman⁴⁸
• Richard Mulcahy⁴⁹
• Jacqui Burke

References

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