Politics
The two parties are slowly dying in Melbourne’s suburbs
If you believe the Murdoch media, two by-elections in Melbourne confirm that the Coalition has come back with a roar. Albanese is finished, and Australia will soon be back on track, with Great Leader Dutton at the helm.
Although these were state elections, there is an idea that people were voting against Labor as a party, rather than against the Victorian Labor government which has held office for 10 years and has not been travelling well recently.
That’s a possibility, but not a strong one. Peter Brent, writing in Inside Story – Queensland to the rescue? – describes research confirming the idea that sentiment towards state parties influences sentiment to federal parties, and vice versa, but the effect is weak.
Labor did badly in these by-elections, but performance of the Liberals was pathetic. If there is any implication for the federal election it’s probably about voters turning off both the Labor and Liberal parties.
In her post Two by-elections tell a bigger story about the wild, unpredictable federal election ahead Patricia Karvelas writes:
Voters are sending Labor a message, but they're not switching over to the Liberal Party as the alternative.
Similarly Saul Eslake, writing in the Financial Review – Liberal Party is yet to heed the message sent in Werribee – draws attention to particular state issues that went against Labor, and the strong performance of independents in these elections.
There are messages for the two old parties. For Labor the message is the same as for social-democratic parties the world over, and it has to do with re-connecting with low-income workers and attending to their needs: on this Labor at the Commonwealth level is trying hard. For the Liberals there is an even stronger message: your “small government” policies, which would see massive cuts in already under-funded public services, have no attraction for voters.
As for the Greens, although they lost a seat, they didn’t lose support.
Because the two electorates in which the by-elections were held epitomize regional differences within our cities, it’s informative to look at them in turn.
Prahran
The Prahran by-election was messy.
Prahran lies just southeast of Melbourne’s CBD, stretching down to the suburbs east of St Kilda. It includes some of what was once considered Liberal heartland, such as South Yarra, but between 1979 and 2014 it was swinging between Liberal and Labor. A steadily rising Green vote saw Sam Hibbins win the seat for the Greens in 2014, but late last year, after it emerged that Hibbins was having an affair with a staff member from his office, he resigned, precipitating a by-election.
Labor looked at the numbers from the 2022 state election, which were pretty well split three ways between Liberals, the Greens and Labor, and decided not to contest the by-election. They knew Labor was on the nose, and they thought a Green victory would be better than a bad Labor loss and the possibility of a Liberal victory.
That strategy fell apart when Tony Lupton, who had held Prahran for Labor from 2002 to 2010, decided to stand as an independent. As Rachel Eddie of The Age explained in an article a week before the election – Ex-Labor MP targets Greens in Prahran, boosting Liberal hopeful’s bid – Lupton went all out campaigning against the Greens, even to the extent of swapping preferences with the Liberal candidate, Rachael Westaway. The Greens were already in the disadvantaged position of having to choose a candidate at short notice, enabling the Liberal Party to point out that the Greens’ candidate, Angelica Di Camillo, had no connection to the Prahran community and had contested a number of seats before.
With such uniquely favourable circumstances, it’s no wonder the Liberals won, with a hefty two-candidate-preferred swing, helped by a strong preference flow from Lupton’s supporters. The full numbers are not yet in (see the count on the Poll Bludger site), but in round numbers both the Liberals and the Greens won 36 percent of the vote, meaning there was almost no change for the Greens and a 6 percent swing towards the Liberals. Lupton won 13 percent of the vote. There was another independent, Nathan Chisholm, Executive Principal of Prahran High School, who described himself as “economically responsible, socially progressive”. He picked up a respectable 6 percent of the vote.
There was a time when a Labor or Coalition politician standing in an election in which the other side was not running, could have counted on a primary vote majority and a whopping TCP victory. A primary vote of 36 percent (the same as the Coalition’s average in the 2022 federal election), is nothing the Coalition’s cheer squad in the Murdoch media should be celebrating.
There were some unique features of this election, but anyone believing that federal or state elections inevitably revert to a simple two-party model is seriously deluded.
Werribee
Werribee is about 25 km southwest of Melbourne, on the busy Geelong freeway and railroad line. It was once a separate city, but now it is definitely an outer suburb – once solidly Labor, now definitely contestable. It’s in the demographic that Dutton, using his Trumpist tactics, seeks to take off Labor in the federal election.
In spite of a 10 percent TPP swing Labor has scraped back in, with less than a one percent margin. Its swing on primary vote, 17 percent, was even worse: it was a terrible result for Labor. But the most telling outcome was that neither of the two old parties managed to get even 30 percent of the vote. The outcome is shown on the pie chart below.
Maybe the Liberals can draw some comfort from seeing two parties on the right – the libertarian Legalize Cannabis Party and the authoritarian Family First Party – pick up support, but the left can also point to an impressive vote for the Socialists, whose vote rose by 4 percent.
The big swing in this election, of 9 percent, was to the independent Paul Hopper, who had contested the seat in the state general election last year. He was running on what some would dismissively call “local issues”, but which are vital to people’s well-being. Roads, public transport, health services, schools. Werribee has experienced a huge growth in population, but government services have not kept up.
This carries a strong message for both parties. In terms of votes the message is for Labor, because it has taken outer suburbs for granted. But in terms of policy the strongest message is for the Liberals, because this demand for tax-funded public goods and services is quite at variance with the Liberals’ espoused “small government” ideology, and Dutton’s promise to make savage cuts to government outlays.