The CEO of the AIOFP, Peter Johnston, reports on the squeeze play to ALP “safe” seats.

The latest crisis to threaten Federal ALP chances at the next election is the Muslim community coming together as a political force over the middle east conflict and the Albanese Government’s position.

With 1,000,000 Muslims in Australia and a concentration in ALP held seats in the major cities, senior Politicians Tony Burke and Jason Clare [who are in what are considered ‘safe’ seats at the last election] are no longer enjoying this comfort. When you consider Burke’s Watson seat has a margin of 15.1% but a Muslim population of 25.1% and Clare 14.9%/31.7% ratio and they are targeting other marginal ALP seats around the country, ALP HEADQUARTERS must be worried.

This is an encouraging scenario for the Advice community, its about the ALP having to please pressure groups demanding attention BEFORE the Election or suffer the consequences.

The ‘Achilles heel’ for the ALP are their 18 marginal and 21 ‘fairly’ marginal seats where 4 are under 1%, 3 under 3%, 5 under 5%, 6 under 6% and 21 under 10%, that’s 39 seats under immediate or moderate threat.

At the last election the ALP won 77 seats of the 151, 58 to the Coalition and 16 to the cross benchers. It looks mathematically challenging for the Coalition to form Government, but not impossible. When you consider each electorate is designed to have around 100,000 votes each, those 18 marginal seats ranging from .5% to 6%, is only 500 to 6,000 votes. We only need a handful of Advisers and their clients in some seats to be the KING MAKER.

Consent forms, Risk Commissions and the Dixon fiasco are our ‘middle east’ issues that the ALP must resolve before the next election or face stiff opposition from the Advice community and their clients. Considering we have around 14,000 Advisers and the average is 134 clients each, we have 1,876,000 potential votes across the nation.

We came across this quote during the week that sums up Politics, ‘our vote is for lease not sale’….in other words give us what we want now AND on an ongoing basis. This is precisely why we are not exactly friends with the ALP at the moment….Minister Jones started off well with the Education Pathways but has not acted in our members and their client’s best interests over the past 2 years…..and we have let him know that in very direct terms.

We are getting very encouraging feedback from members communicating with their clients and local Politicians, please continue this activity, we need to be ‘in their face’ to get attention and what we want – remember, shrinking violets and fence sitters normally get nowhere!

Just waiting for legal sign off for our ‘political donation’ strategy that will give us some firepower to get what we want, more information shortly.