A state by-election will need to be held in early 2025 for the western Melbourne seat of Werribee. This by-election was triggered by the retirement yesterday of Tim Pallas, a long-serving Labor minister who has served as Treasurer since 2014.
Werribee lies on the western fringe of Melbourne and has always been a Labor seat. But this is the kind of seat that could flip at a by-election. We’ll have to see how the campaign plays out.
I’ve published my Werribee by-election guide here.
The inner eastern seat of Prahran is due to hold its by-election on February 8, and it’s possible Werribee could be held on the same day.
@Maxim, never said it had to be uniform, in fact I said it never is. But they would need swings close to the 8% range in very different types of seats.
They’d need to win at least Bentleigh (8%) or Mordialloc (8.2%) in the sandbelt; at the same time they’d need to win eastern suburbs seats on margins over 7% like Box Hill (7.2%) & Ringwood (7.5%); seats like Monbulk (7.6%) up around the Dandenong Ranges area which has its own set of characteristics; seats like Niddrie (6.7%) and Greenvale (7.1%) in the north-west; regional seats like Eureka that are also on more than 7%.
So that’s a wide range of seats. A party might have a strategy that targets one or two specific types or profiles of seats at the expense of others, but the Liberals don’t have that luxury. Yes they try to focus their swings to the target seats, but 17 very diverse seats across different regions doesn’t make that easy.
For every seat up to Bentleigh (8%) that they don’t win, that’s another seat further up the pendulum that they do need to win.
I’m not saying it’s impossible. I simply said it’s not likely. If you think it’s “likely” that a party who have historically had terrible campaign resources in Victoria can effectively target their swings to win no less than 17 very demographically & geographically diverse seats on margins up to 8% (more than half of them on 6% or more), I’d just have to say I disagree that Albo simply being PM makes that the “likely” outcome, which is the only point I was disputing.
@Trent: I don’t think it’s likely either but let’s look at it this way, most recent polling (pre Battin leadership) has the Liberals achieving a 6-7% swing (51/52-49/48 2PP), that swing I suspect will be a slight bump in the inner city seats they already hold, making up some ground and flipping a few middle ring eastern suburb seats (Glen Waverley, Ringwood, Bayswater come to mind) but the bulk of the swing comes from the outer suburbs and peri-urban seats where they need to make up close to double digit margins.
Your example of Bentleigh and similar sandbelt seats I don’t think represents their best path to government. They are probably a better chance of winning Werribee on about a 10% margin or Sydenham for example if they pursue Battin’s strategy and are frank with themselves about the lack of broad appeal the party has in seats they won in 2010
Regardless of who is in government federally that’s the strategy I think they need to pursue – amplify swings on the fringes in seats they’ve pretty much never won in order to outflank Labor who have more or less locked them out of a 2010 style map
You are right about the problems they will face trying to mobilise campaigns in such a diversity of seats I agree on that point too
They are all good points, and I do think if the Liberals are able to maintain their strong position (that’s a big if) and if Labor are still in government federally (especially if it’s a minority that is seen as dysfunctional), they can certainly get pretty close.
17 seats is just a huge ask when there are only 8 seats on less than 6.2%. So assuming they pick all of them up, they still need to snatch 9 seats on margins above that. They could very well get strong double-digit swings in some areas, but there are going to be must-win seats that Labor are simply able to sandbag, pushing that 17th seat higher and higher up the pendulum.
Another factor is that as the major party vote continues to decline in general, people have other avenues to place a protest vote and there is always going to preference leakage which somewhat dulls the potential 2PP swing.
We saw a lot of that in 2022, where 18% primary vote swings from Labor turned into 9% 2PP swings against them. In a previous era probably as recently as 2010, an 18% primary vote swing would probably have been at least a 14-15% 2PP swing.
And the current polling appears to reflect this same dynamic too, because while Labor’s primary vote has tumbled by 10-11% since the 2022 election, the Coalition primary vote has only increased by 3-4%. That leaves a lot of room for preference leakage back to Labor.
If the liberals need to win Weribee to achieve govt.. they are stuffed
I tend to think that what the Libs are looking at is not just the next State election, important though it is, but a 20-30 year project. If you look at the last 20 years at least (and probably a lot longer) the ALP has started with a block of seats in the West/north of Melbourne, then planned what they can win elsewhere. The Libs had that too in the East/inner South East. But as those areas are trending away from the Libs then they are now essentially fighting for every seat. I think the Libs are looking at consolidating all the seats in an arc from Cranbourne to Werribee as their new ‘base’ and working out what more they can win from there. This makes sense if you believe, as I do, that the realignment (uni educated voters going let/non uni voters going right) is underway and this is where we will get to anyway. But that is going to take 2-3 electoral cycles and they have already wasted 2 cycles with Guy/O’Brien/Guy/Pesutto trying to appeal to the same electorates that are trending Labor (noting that I have no idea who Matt Guy was supposed to represent).
I think you’re right MLV.
Party strategists would surely know that actually winning government in 2026 is a real long shot, even if Labor are “on the nose” and their vote tanks, the scale of the swings needed across not only such a large number of seats but such a diversity of seats would just be almost unprecedented. Especially in a state that generally leans progressive by default.
So I think a 2026 result where perhaps Labor are reduced to a minority with maybe 42-43 seats, while the Coalition manage to rebound to around 38-40 seats and reduce the margins in some of the outer suburban seats that are still too much to overcome in 2026, sets them up well to have a realistic path in 2030 and beyond.
And if Labor are in minority they could very well win in 2030, but it’s the “and beyond” that will be difficult as I truly think the Liberals would struggle to hold government for more than a single term in Victoria. I think the Liberals winning in Victoria will mostly be a case of the electorate just thinking Labor needed a term “on the bench” to regroup and reset, as was the case in 2010, moreso than the majority actually wanting a long term Coalition government.