Saturday’s by-election in the federal seat of Canning in Western Australia resulted in the Liberal Party’s Andrew Hastie to win despite a sizeable swing to the ALP. At time of writing, the swing to the ALP was sitting on 6.65%, with a bunch of special votes yet to be counted.
While the Liberal margin has been halved, the swing was below what was expected prior to Tony Abbott’s downfall as Prime Minister last Monday.
The swing varied quite a lot between different parts of the seat. A large majority of Canning’s population lives in the two urban centres of Armadale and Mandurah. In Armadale, the Liberal two-party-preferred vote dropped by 9%, but it only dropped by 3% in Mandurah.
This is encouraging for Labor’s chances in the new seat of Burt at the next election, which covers parts of Armadale. About 40% of the population of Canning will be moved into the marginal seat of Burt according to the draft boundaries. The ALP gained 53% of the two-party-preferred vote in the Burt part of the seat, but only 41.4% in the rest of the seat. The Labor swing was much larger in the proposed seat of Burt – 9.1% against 5.4% in the remainder of the seat.
Below the fold, I’ve broken the results up based on the same boundaries I used in the pre-election guide, and included maps of the by-election results.
As in the pre-election guide, I split booth results into five parts, based on the four largest council areas, and grouping the two at the southern end.
| Voter group | 2013 LIB 2PP % | 2015 LIB 2PP % | Swing to ALP | Total votes | % of votes |
| Armadale | 58.35 | 49.08 | 9.27 | 26,927 | 42.52 |
| Mandurah | 61.65 | 58.33 | 3.32 | 18,633 | 29.42 |
| Serpentine-Jarrahdale | 66.37 | 58.09 | 8.28 | 8,575 | 13.54 |
| Murray | 65.22 | 59.78 | 5.44 | 6,634 | 10.47 |
| South | 68.14 | 63.47 | 4.67 | 2,565 | 4.05 |
| Other votes | 62.68 | 56.26 | 6.41 | 10,858 | 0.00 |
How did the Greens go? Or was there such a big pool of alternative candidates that the question is meaningless?
They’re currently on 5.9%, a swing of 1.5% against.
It is interesting to compare the 2015 results with those for 2010 in Canning as well as the Don Randall landslide of 2013. In most boxes the 2015 Liberal percentage is higher, marginally so across Armadale, substantially higher in Mandurah and semi-rural areas.
The north/central section of Mandurah is not natural Liberal territory but Andrew Hastie has won every polling booth.
Comments are closed.