Victoria 2022 – candidate update

I’ve recently completed an update of my candidate list for the Victorian state election, and I’m now publishing the list for the first time. The list now includes 296 Legislative Assembly candidates and 89 Legislative Council candidates in 61 separate groups across the 8 regions.

There are an average of 3.3 candidates per seat, but that’s bound to increase. There are six seats where only one candidate has announced: Bendigo West, Bundoora, Gippsland East, Malvern, Murray Plains and Ovens Valley. There are another four where six candidates have announced: Albert Parks, Broadmeadows, Morwell and Pascoe Vale.

The most interesting feature of the data is the very high proportion of candidates who are women.

There were 507 lower house candidates in 2018. 322 of those candidates were men, 184 were women and one I wasn’t able to identify. That’s at least 36.3% women.

Right now, 54.4% of all lower house candidates are women. That’s 161 women, 134 men and one non-binary candidate.

Now that list is not complete, but it’s a very interesting shift. When you break down the gender balance by party, most parties have a larger proportion of female candidates than in 2018.

The current list includes 76 Labor candidates, 32 candidates each for the Greens and Animal Justice, 22 Victorian Socialists candidates, and 6 Reason Party candidates. There’s definitely a lean to the left amongst minor party candidates, but there are also five candidates each for the Liberal Democrats and the Freedom Party.

There are 72 Liberal candidates and 10 Nationals candidates running across 77 seats – there are five seats where both parties are running: Bass, Euroa, Mildura, Morwell and Shepparton.

In terms of gender balance by party, the Nationals are steady on 40% women and the Liberal Party is down slightly to 32%. All of the parties of the left have currently announced a higher proportion of women than they ran in 2018: the Socialists, Reason, Animal Justice, Labor and the Greens. Almost 60% of Labor and Greens candidates are women.

The biggest change, however, is amongst independents. So far 32 independents have announced their candidacy, compared to 102 in 2018. Only 28 out of 102 were women, but 23 out of 32 announced this year are women, plus one person identified as non-binary. That’s three quarters of all the independents.

I’m going to return to analysing the list of independents in another blog post, but looking through the websites of the candidates you very clearly see a similar trend to what we saw in the federal election: a lot of women running with professional websites. Of course that doesn’t mean we’ll see the same kind of results – but the same forces that encouraged that big wave of candidates is also playing out in Victoria.

I’ve noticed one other interesting trend: surprisingly few Labor candidates have websites or any web presence at all. When I’m seeking out web addresses for candidates, I prefer a personal website, but I fall back to a profile on their party website (a page dedicated to that one candidate), or a Facebook page if neither of those things are available.

The Liberal Party and the Greens have party websites with profiles for each candidate. It seems like pretty much every Liberal candidate, including those running in very safe Labor seats, has their own website, bare as they may be. There are just 3 recently announced Greens candidates with no website presence, and no Liberals in that position. Yet there are 11 Labor candidates with nothing, and another 19 for whom I could only find a Facebook page.

Labor incumbent MPs generally have their own websites, but for the 40 non-incumbent Labor candidates in the lower house, I’ve found websites for just eight. There is no central website with profiles for each candidate. This includes candidates with a very high chance of winning: a number of safe seat MPs were deselected, and often their successors have no website.

Does it matter? Maybe not. But it seems interesting that this infrastructure isn’t in place, less than two months out from election day.

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