Key points
- Victoria may yet play a pivotal role in the election result.
- Tellingly, Morrison visited 11 Victorian seats on the campaign trail, while Albanese toured four seats.
- At the last election, Labor won 21 Victorian seats, the Liberals 11 and the Nationals took three.
Six weeks ago, when the election campaign began, few political experts thought that Victoria would play a pivotal role.
But as the contests have unfolded in Victoria – in once blue-blood Liberal seats such as Goldstein and Kooyong, in regional centres such as Geelong and on Melbourne’s suburban fringe – they have proved fascinating and may play a crucial role on election night.
The close contest between Monique Ryan and Josh Frydenberg in Kooyong became a hand-to-hand battle at pre-polling in Hawthorn.Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui
“Victoria potentially presents as being a considerably more intriguing and influential battleground than was expected,” Monash University politics professor Paul Strangio says.
The contests between two “teal” female candidates and two male Liberal MPs in the once-safe conservative heartland seats of Kooyong (covering suburbs including Balwyn, Hawthorn, Mont Albert and Camberwell and held by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg) and bayside Goldstein (Beaumaris, Brighton, Elsternwick and Sandringham, with incumbent Tim Wilson) have been lively, even testy.
They also go to the heart of whether the Liberal Party is losing its traditional small-l Liberal voters.
The battle has also come to the once-safe Liberal seat of Higgins, which takes in suburbs such as Armadale, Glen Iris, Malvern, South Yarra and Toorak. Labor believes there is an outside chance for its candidate Michelle Ananda-Rajah to defeat moderate Liberal MP Katie Allen. The Greens say they are in with a shot there, too.
Victoria is a progressive state: at the last election, Labor won 21 seats compared with the 11 which went to the Liberals and the three taken by the Nationals.
At the beginning of this election campaign, Labor was focused on marginal seats in Queensland and flipping Western Australian seats from blue to red. As its hopes in Queensland have faded, its expectation on Victoria delivering it Chisholm, in particular, has cemented, and it is confident it can hold two other marginals, Dunkley (centred on Frankston) and Corangamite (Geelong, the Bellarine Peninsula and the Surf Coast). But attention has focused on Victoria due to the “teal” battles and the shift by Scott Morrison to pursuing suburban seats in Melbourne and Geelong.
The tale of Victoria’s role can be told through the appearances from the leaders. Between them, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and opposition leader Anthony Albanese have made more than a dozen trips into Victoria’s marginal seats in and around Melbourne and Geelong.
Morrison has visited 11 seats, mostly Corangamite (three times) and Chisholm (four times, to this seat which covers Box Hill, Burwood, Glen Waverley and Mount Waverley), and on one trip sweeping around four outer Melbourne seats stretching from Berwick to Mernda. Albanese has visited four Victorian seats. Both leaders were back in Melbourne on Friday, with Albanese in Chisholm for the third time.
ABC election analyst Antony Green says Kooyong and Goldstein have been fascinating and will be close. “Josh Frydenberg spent two weeks standing on pre-poll at voting centres – that tells us a lot,” he said.
Strangio points to the more “orthodox” dimension of this election campaign. A swing towards Labor could deliver the seat of Chisholm, the Liberal Party’s second-most marginal seat which is held by just 0.57 per cent. “That in itself could be a harbinger of the fate of the Morrison government,” he says.
Green says both sides believe they can win seats in Victoria, Labor in Chisholm, and the Liberals in Corangamite.
Green nominates regional Nicholls in the state’s north, which takes in towns such as Seymour, Nagambie, Shepparton and Echuca, as a seat to watch. There, after the retirement of popular sitting National MP Damian Drum, independent Rob Priestly is challenging both the Liberals and Nationals.
At the start of the campaign, Labor had speculated that, if there was a sizeable swing to Albanese, electorates on Melbourne’s outer urban fringe such as La Trobe (the outer east and Dandenongs) and Casey (Belgrave, Healesville, Lilydale and Warburton) could fall. The Liberals hoped to take Dunkley and Corangamite as well as the seat of McEwen, on Melbourne’s northern fringe, held by the ALP’s Rob Mitchell.
But by Friday, one Labor strategist, who did not want to be identified, was predicting Labor would win Chisholm, narrowly hold on to Corangamite, and little else would change in Victorian seats. On the Liberal side, a party strategist said on Friday that the party had all but given up on Dunkley and Goldstein but that Kooyong would stay Liberal, that McEwen was looking unlikely as a Liberal gain, but that Corangamite could well end up turning conservative.
Strangio says the “teal” candidates fighting prominent Liberal MPs – Zoe Daniel against Wilson in Goldstein, and Monique Ryan battling Frydenberg in Kooyong – will tell a story beyond Saturday’s poll.
The challenges to Liberal MPs in these seats, and Higgins, serve as a litmus test as to whether Morrison and his allies will remake the Coalition’s base. He says Daniel appears on track to win Goldstein. “My hunch is that Frydenberg will hang on in Kooyong.”
If Liberals lose in those seats, Strangio says it would show a modern Liberal Party willing to expend inner-urban metropolitan seats so as to make headway in the outer suburbs and regional areas, “to have the Coalition defined more exclusively as a conservative populist outfit”.
“There’s been a trendline since Howard’s era of this shift – of Howard targeting the battlers in the outer suburbs. So, it’s not new. But Howard had the good sense to always balance the leafy suburban electorates and the moderates against that.”
Strangio says there are many echoes of this battle to the one Labor fought a decade ago with the Greens.
“There was some talk back then that Labor would have to abandon its inner-urban seats. But there was always a Labor view that the seats were so important to the psyche of the party because they were its historical citadel. To abandon them would damage the psyche of the party.”
He believes that the Liberal Party abandoning its inner-urban seats is electorally wreckless because of the votes it could lose in the long term. “But also, what does it mean in terms of the history of the Liberal Party? The history of the parties is very important, and you start abandoning your once blue-ribbon seats and the party becomes unrecognisable in some ways.”
Australian National University political lecturer Jill Sheppard lives in Canberra but originally came from Melbourne.
“I can’t remember an election campaign that nationally has had so much attention on Melbourne,” she says.
Sheppard says what has made the races in the “teal” seats so interesting is that “we don’t have any strong priors on how this goes – they are unknown territory in Australian politics”.
“This is genuinely different, and it has shaken us because none of us quite knows how it ends.”
Cut through the noise of the federal election campaign with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Sign up to our Australia Votes 2022 newsletter here.
Most Viewed in Politics
From our partners
Source: Read Full Article