Division of Port Adelaide

This article is about the federal electorate. For the South Australian state electorate, see Electoral district of Port Adelaide.

Port Adelaide Australian House of Representatives Division
Division of Port Adelaide in South Australia, as of the 2016 federal election.
Created	1949
MP	Mark Butler
Party	Labor
Namesake	Port Adelaide
Electors	113,342 (2016)
Area	181 km² (69.9 sq mi)
Demographic	Inner Metropolitan

The Division of Port Adelaide is an Australian electoral division in the state of South Australia. The 181 km² seat extends from St Kilda in the north to Grange Road and Findon in the south with part of Salisbury to the east. Suburbs include Alberton, Beverley, Birkenhead, Cheltenham, Findon, Kilkenny, Largs Bay, Mansfield Park, North Haven, Ottoway, Parafield Gardens, Paralowie, Pennington, Port Adelaide, Queenstown, Rosewater, Salisbury Downs, Semaphore, Woodville, West Croydon, and part of Seaton. The seat also includes Torrens Island and Garden Island.

The seat was named after the suburb of Port Adelaide, the working port of Adelaide. Before 1949, most of the seat had been part of Hindmarsh, which moved south as a result of Port Adelaide's creation. The seat was proclaimed at the redistribution of 11 May 1949, and was first contested at the 1949 federal election. For most of its history, it has been a comfortably safe Labor seat. The closest Labor has ever come to losing it was at the 1988 by-election, where Labor candidate Rod Sawford won on a 5.2 percent two-party margin. The two-party margin currently stands, after the 2016 vote, at 20.72 percent, making it the safest Labor seat in the state and one of the safest Labor seats in the nation. Port Adelaide remains the only electorate in South Australia to have voted Labor at every federal election in its existence.

The seat was pushed slightly northward in 2004 with the abolition of the other safe Labor seat in northern Adelaide, Bonython. A few southern portions of Bonython transferred to Port Adelaide, however the majority of Bonython was transferred to Wakefield which contributed to Wakefield's change from a rural safe Liberal seat to a hybrid urban-rural notional marginal Labor seat.

A notable curiosity in recent years was that in the 1998 and 2001 federal elections, the seat was the only one in Australia where a Communist Party candidate, Michael Perth, stood for election. This was the only occasion when the Liberal Party did not preference the One Nation Party last. He achieved about one percent of the vote on each occasion.

Sawford retired at the 2007 election, which saw South Australian Labor's historically safe seat easily won by the newly endorsed Labor candidate, unionist and former head of the Left state Labor faction Mark Butler.

At the 2016 election, as a result of the emergence of the Nick Xenophon Team, Butler became the first Labor candidate in 20 years, and only the second ever, to come up short of a majority on the primary vote. He easily won after preferences, with NXT pushing the Liberals into third place. While Port Adelaide remains the safest Labor seat in South Australia on two-party terms, Butler's primary vote was actually one percent lower than that of Amanda Rishworth in Kingston. Despite also falling short of a majority on the primary vote, in the presence of Nick Xenophon Team candidates in all eleven state seats resulting in a suppressed major party primary vote, Rishworth received the highest primary vote of South Australia's 11 seats, but remained the second safest Labor seat in South Australia on two-party terms.

Members

	Party	Term
Albert Thompson	Labor	1949–1963
Fred Birrell	Labor	1963–1974
Mick Young	Labor	1974–1988
Rod Sawford	Labor	1988–2007
Mark Butler	Labor	2007–present

Election results

Main article: Electoral results for the Division of Port Adelaide

Australian federal election, 2016: Port Adelaide^[1]
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±
	Labor	Mark Butler	46,314	48.24	−2.34
	Xenophon	Michael Slattery	17,970	18.72	+18.72
	Liberal	Emma Flowerdew	17,884	18.63	−7.69
	Greens	Matthew Carey	6,683	6.96	−1.65
	Family First	Bruce Hambour	4,483	4.67	−2.85
	Animal Justice	Janine Clipstone	2,078	2.16	+2.16
	Christian Democrats	Jenalie Salt	597	0.62	+0.62
Total formal votes			96,009	94.19	+0.39
Informal votes			5,927	5.81	−0.39
Turnout			101,936	89.94	−2.23
Two-party-preferred result
	Labor	Mark Butler	67,119	69.91	+5.89
	Liberal	Emma Flowerdew	28,890	30.09	−5.89
Two-candidate-preferred result
	Labor	Mark Butler	62,274	64.86	+0.84
	Xenophon	Michael Slattery	33,735	35.14	+35.14
	Labor hold		Swing	N/A

References

Notes

↑ Port Adelaide, SA, Virtual Tally Room 2016, Australian Electoral Commission.

External links

Electoral Divisions of the Australian House of Representatives in South Australia

Adelaide Barker Boothby Grey Hindmarsh Kingston Makin Mayo Port Adelaide Sturt Wakefield Abolished: Angas (1903–34) Angas (1949–77) Bonython Hawker South Australia

Divisions in: New South Wales Victoria Queensland Western Australia South Australia Tasmania Australian Capital and Northern Territories

Coordinates: 34°46′37″S 138°32′46″E / 34.777°S 138.546°E / -34.777; 138.546

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