History
Collie was originally created as the seat of "South West Mining" in the Constitution Act Amendment Act 1899, the last redistribution of seats to require a modification of the Constitution. It was first contested at the 1901 election. In 1904, it was renamed "Collie" with almost no changes to its boundaries. In the Redistribution of Seats Act 1911, its boundaries were so unusually contorted by the then-Liberal government, which was accused of trying to lock Labor votes in Premier Frank Wilson's marginal seat of Sussex behind Collie's boundaries, that the Kalgoorlie Miner and other newspapers used the seat's map as an effective mascot for the bill. However, the boundaries remained unchanged until a later redistribution ahead of the 1930 election.
The seat changed hands three times between the Liberal member John Ewing and his Labor rivals, but the seat was securely Labor from the 1908 election and for 81 years continuously remained a Labor seat, with only three members during that time—Arthur Wilson until 1947, then Harry May until 1968 and Tom Jones until 1989.
In 1986, the seat had 9,410 enrolled voters compared with an average of 13,796 statewide and over 28,000 in some metropolitan electorates such as Joondalup and Murdoch. The Burke Labor government's Acts Amendment (Electoral Reform) Act 1987, passed with National Party support, increased metropolitan representation from 29 to 34 out of 57 seats, and the 1988 redistribution which resulted in Collie gaining parts of Dale and Warren combined with a significant statewide swing against the Labor Party delivered the seat to the Nationals' Dr Hilda Turnbull, who held the seat until the 2001 election. Labor's Mick Murray, head of the Country Labor grouping in Western Australia, gained the seat on his third attempt with a margin of just 34 votes.
In the 2003 redistribution, the seat was renamed Collie-Wellington when it lost its southern and eastern sections and incorporated large sections of Waroona and Harvey which had been part of Murray-Wellington. The 2007 redistribution renamed the seat Collie-Preston and largely reversed the 2003 redistribution, but adding the coastal section of the Shire of Capel which brought in residents on the fringes of metropolitan Bunbury.
Read more about this topic: Electoral District Of Collie-Preston
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”
—Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)