Today’s post features two maps showing the vote for the top five polling groups in the Legislative Council election by region, and the swings for the top four groups along with the Shooters.
Labor topped the primary vote in 57 seats, with the Coalition coming first in 35 seats, and the Greens coming first in Newtown. The Greens had also come first in Balmain in 2019, but Labor retook the lead there in 2023.
Overall these trends do suggest personal vote effects in the lower house flowed into the upper house, be it the Labor MPs retiring in the south-west, Chris Minns’ new position in Kogarah, Janelle Saffin dominating the progressive vote in Lismore or the Shooters losing strength in the west.
Let’s start with the vote total map.
Most of the maps are not that surprising, but the One Nation and Legalise Cannabis maps are interesting.
One Nation support is highest in two areas: in the outer south-west of Sydney, and the Hunter region, particularly the outer suburban areas around Newcastle. One Nation state leader Mark Latham lives in the south-west and used to represent a seat not far from there as a federal Labor MP.
Legalise Cannabis did particularly well in regional areas, with Cessnock and mid-north coast seats particularly standing out. They didn’t do particularly well in Greens heartland areas in Sydney or on the far north coast.
Interestingly, while Legalise Cannabis came fifth, they were not the most popular minor party in any seat. If you exclude Labor and the Coalition, the Greens came next in 56 seats, One Nation in 21 seats, the Shooters in twelve (all in inland NSW) and the Liberal Democrats in four Western Sydney seats. Legalise Cannabis support tended to be highest in areas with high Greens support, although they overtook the Greens in Cessnock only to be beaten by One Nation.
The swing map is arguably the more interesting one, although there is no swing map for Legalise Cannabis as they did not run in 2019. I’ve included the Shooters, who polled more strongly in 2019 and thus have an interesting story due to the negative swings.
Labor’s upper house vote increased in 89 out of 93 seats. The only exceptions were Fairfield, Cabramatta, Liverpool and Myall Lakes. The biggest upper house swing to Labor was in Kogarah, where the Labor vote increased from 36.1% to 52.4% – a 16.3% swing.
The Coalition unsurprisingly lost ground along most of the coastal strip, but actually increased their vote in western NSW.
The Coalition managed to increase their vote in eleven seats. The three biggest swings to the Coalition were in the three seats won by the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers in 2019: Orange, Murray and Barwon.
This can easily be explained by looking at the Shooters swing map. The Shooters vote went down everywhere, but particularly so in the west of the state. The Shooters suffered a double-digit swing in Barwon and swings of over 20% in Orange and Murray.
The Greens vote went slightly backwards from 9.7% to 9.1%. The Greens vote has now dropped for three elections in a row, and ended up being slightly lower than the 2007 result.
The Greens vote went up in 27 seats, down in 63 and were stable in three. The Greens suffered swings of 1-2% against them in Balmain and Ballina, and a huge swing of 9% in Lismore. The second-worst swing was 3.5% in Pittwater, a big gap.
When you look closely at the map, you notice a pattern that the Greens suffered larger swings in the north shore seats with strong independents. It does appear that the presence of those independents hurt the Greens vote in both houses. This post doesn’t include a map of the Elizabeth Farrelly vote, but her party’s support was strongest in those electorates. Perhaps some of the voters who had decided to vote for an independent (it certainly is not all of them) may have then wanted to match that with an independent vote in the upper house.
The One Nation swing map is also interesting. Positive swings are in purple and negative swings in orange. The One Nation vote went backwards, so unsurprisingly most seats recorded a negative swing. Most of the seats with a positive swing were in Sydney. The biggest swings were in Fairfield and Bankstown, which took in parts of new One Nation MP Tania Mihailuk’s old electorate of Bankstown.
EDIT: This post and the maps were updated on 29 April to reflect corrected results. The original data accidentally excluded below-the-line votes from the 2023 data, which made small differences to the numbers.
Whilst overall trends may have flowed from lower to upper, my electorate of Winston hills, which was won by the Libs, had 50.4% for the ALP & listed left parties and just 42.7% for the Libs and listed right parties. That result in the lower house would have seen the seat decisively flip, especially since there were other left parties (eg the socialists) who did not get into the total vote map and left votes tend to extinguish less than right ones.
The LC votes confirm that Labor has a serious problem in SW Sydney (Liverpool, Cabramatta, Fairfield). Federally, this area has already been lost to a conservative independent. It doesn’t look like this was just due to the dumb decision to run Kristina Keneally in Fowler, judging by the state-level results. I don’t know what the problem is, but it needs attention! Is it problems in the local branches? Poor candidates? Problems with local services and infrastructure that Labor is being blamed for?
There were a lot of comments in another recent blog post here suggesting a religion factor – those areas and electorates with a higher proportion of voters who identify as religious have a tendency to vote more for the right & conservative side of politics And SW Sydney does have a lower proportion of “non religious” than many other areas. Not saying there is a link, but the possibility was discussed at some length.
Ben, from a quick look it appears, at least on the north shore that some of the Green vote simply walked over to Legalise Cannabis.
The swings to Labor in Sydney do seem uniformly large – except for that corner of SW Sydney – though one could say the LV vote there may already have maxed out for Labor.
Ben, your swing map may benefit from another colour or two. Much of western Sydney only just crept over 5% swing to Labor, whereas a lot was 8%+, which is a big difference.
When you look at the arc from the lower north shore right through to the Hills district and beyond, a lot of it swung 9 and 10%, and the rest around 8% – this was the same area that swung heavily in the Federal election in the Reps. This is interesting given the theory that the NSW Libs held on in these seats better than Federal Libs, but may also simply reflect the lower starting point of the Labor vote in these seats
@Newcastle Moderate, Liverpool, Cabramatta and Fairfield were the only three seats with retiring Labor MPs.
There were really, really late preselections in the latter two and it seems that the local Labor branches are in a bit of a mess. I think the Kristina Keneally/Dai Le effect played out as well. I also noticed that independents that I’d never heard had scored really well so it could have been the apathetic vote, denying preferences to Labor in all three seats.
In Cabramatta, an ethnic Vietnamese Labor-turned-independent got 17% of the PV. There might have been some residual anti-vax/anti-lockdown or populist vote as well with LDP scoring 10%.
Hi Ben
Comparing the data here with NSW EC numbers it looks like you are only looking at or using above the line numbers for 2023, with changes versus group totals from 2019 perhaps? The results match above the line numbers at NSW EC, changes not sure
Cheers
Hmm you might be right. I’ll look into fixing this, not sure what happened. But might take a few days, big preference data dump today.
Hey PJ, this has been fixed now, although it might take some time for the cache to replace the maps.
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