Gorton – Australia 2022

Keilor looks strange in this seat.

Keilor doesn’t really fit anywhere with the western suburbs seats, being an affluent Liberal area surrounded by mostly rock-solid Labor territory.

I guess Maribyrnong contains most of the best Liberal voting areas in the north-west, so probably it fits best there from a demographic point of view. A seat containing Moonee Ponds, Essendon, Strathmore, Niddrie, Keilor, and Taylors Lakes (excluding almost everything else) would be a winnable seat for the Libs IMHO. But they’re unlikely to ever get that lucky….

Moving it into Maribyrnong would make sense.

At a state level, Keilor is in the Niddrie electorate and parts of Taylors Lakes and middle class Gowanbrae have been proposed to be included at the next redistribution. So i guess there is precedent of including Keilor/Taylors Lakes with Moonee Valley council. Niddrie is much more marginal for this part of Melbourne.

The statement that Keilor is solid-Liberal voting is fairly misleading, mainly because it isn’t. It is certainly a Liberal suburb but the margin Keilor supports them in isn’t that high, mostly around the 52-56% mark.

Ryan, i would expect if the Liberals actually campaigned in the area, Keilor would be stronger for the Liberals than it is currently and the Keilor booths would hitting around 60%. Keilor, is actually demographically more like an Eastern Suburb than other Western Suburbs. Property prices and income levels would be similar to Vermont/Wantirna South etc. If the liberals actually competed i would also think they could even narrowly win some of the Taylors Lakes booths
https://www.realestate.com.au/neighbourhoods/keilor-3036-vic

I would say Keilor is similar to Bulleen, and Doncaster. The demographics are very similar. The houses are similar, and they are both very hilly.

Labor got the lowest margin ever in the history of the seat, even lower than the anti-Latham swing back in 2004. Looks like demographics are slowly changing in these Melbourne Western suburbs seats and the increasing discontent of inaction from Labor in general in terms of facilities and infrastructure.

@Alex I agree I also think the additional minor parties such as one nation and UAP who were preferencing liberals over Labor contributed to the swing aswell.

@Unknown Yeah that probably was the case in this seat. Melton/Kororoit will be interesting in the upcoming state election later this year.

@ Kaniel Outis , Agree about the comparison with Manningham interesting both Keilor and much of Manningham was developed in the 1970s. The streets, Houses look similar also both areas are close to a River and have creek valleys and extensive parklands.

The Labor lean of this seat seems to have significantly narrowed over the last decade. Prior to being contested in 2004, the notional Labor 2PP was around 18 percentage points higher than the statewide 2PP, but now it’s only roughly 5 percentage points higher. It looks like boundary shifts have played a slight role in reducing the Labor lean, but there must be other factors, and I would doubt it’s due to an improved Liberal campaign here, as I doubt they have tended to campaign here anyway since it’s previously been so safe for Labor, and the Lib primary vote hasn’t been increasing despite Labor’s falling by a lot in 2019 and 2022.

Continuing to suffer double digit primary vote swings as Labor did in both 2019 and 2022 is probably not sustainable, and I think Labor recognise this having taken note of adverse swings in safe Labor seats in their post election review.

@ GPPS, in 2019 there was an independent Jarrod Bingham who also ran in Melton in 2022 state election. Agree it is not sustainable and Labor should spend more time talking to the voters here they can talk about manufacturing revival. One thing about this seat is that it is fast growing with a lot of new housing estates in the Western end. Also the area would have among the highest % of Gen Z voters especially around Caroline Springs/Taylors Hill and Derrimut as the children who grew up in the areas it was developing in the 2000s are now coming of age so a lot of first time voters who still live at home.

Starting today I will be finding atypical suburbs in each electorate, where they seemed to vote differently to literally everyone else, and then I analyse them.

Here’s the Labor TPP in Keilor, Keilor Downs, Taylors Hill and Taylors Lakes, as of 2022:

* Keilor: 41.1% (–2.2%)
* Keilor Downs: 53.0% (–5.8%)
* Keilor Downs West: 55.2% (–6.7%)
* Keilor Village: 44.6% (+3.5%)
* Taylors Hill: 54.7% (–11.8%)
* Taylors Lakes: 52.5% (–0.2%)
* Taylors Lakes Central: 50.8% (–4.9%)
* Taylors Lakes North: 53.2% (+1.3%)

So it looks like these suburbs mostly swung to the Liberals but at very different levels, and two booths bucked the trend.

Keilor and Taylors Lakes seem to be cases of random swings in different booths (these do occur and nobody really knows why), for example while Taylors Lakes Central swung –4.9% against Labor and the Liberals almost won it, there was a swing of +1.3% to Labor in Taylors Lakes North.

Taylors Hill had the biggest swing against Labor. There were only three booths where the swing against Labor was in double digits: Burnside (59.0%, –11.6%), Deer Park West (64.9%, –10.8%) and Taylors Hill (54.7%, –11.4%). So Taylors Hill had the second largest swing against Labor in Gorton in 2022 (the largest was in Burnside).

The thing is though, a lot of the primary vote swing against Labor went to minor parties. I’ll discuss this below.

Which seat should I look at next, and which booths in particular are interesting? Let me know.

Here are the primary votes and swings in Taylors Hill:

* Labor (L): 37.5% (–19.4%)
* Liberal (R): 29.5% (+1.6%)
* UAP (R): 8.3% (+2.5%)
* Greens (L): 7.6% (+1.0%)
* One Nation (R): 7.2% (+7.2%)
* Independent (I): 3.8% (+3.8%)
* Socialists (L): 3.3% (+3.3%)
* Federation (R): 2.3% (+2.3%)
* GAP (R): 1.0% (+1.0%)

So only the top four parties (Labor, Liberal, the UAP and the Greens) fielded candidates last time, while everyone else ran for the first time. The massive swing against Labor went to everyone else. But the biggest swing was to One Nation who got 7.2% for the first time.

Let’s break it down:

* Right: 48.0%
* Left: 47.9%
* Independent (Steven Loncar): 3.8%

So this booth under this system (I looked at a hippie booth on the Sunshine Coast using this left-right system, I forget what it was called though), the right had this booth by 0.1%.

I’ve excluded Steve Loncar since I have no idea who he is and if he’s left or right, but if he’s left then he gives this booth to the left but if he’s right then he makes this a more conservative booth. It appears his preferences went 52.5% to Labor but that doesn’t mean much for a reason I’ll get to in just a second.

So if this booth leans 0.1% right, how did the left win it? Was it because of Steve Loncar? Not entirely. But an unlikely party has most of its preferences go to Labor, which makes Gorton the only seat where this happened in 2022. That party was One Nation. 53.7% of One Nation preferences in Gorton flowed to Labor MP Brendan O’Connor, while 46.3% went to Liberal candidate John Fletcher. In every other seat One Nation preferences flowed to the Coalition over Labor.

It’ll be interesting to see where the anti-lockdown vote goes. Will it go back to Labor or will it go to the Liberals, because it won’t stay with One Nation and the UAP.

@ Nether Portal
Thanks for looking at the booths. I will just make some comments about the suburbs. Keilor is established upper middle class and reliably Liberal voting. Taylors Lakes is established but more middle class and marginal. The three suburbs of Hillside, Taylors Hill and Caroline Springs were developed in the 2000s and would some of the nation’s highest % of Gen Z voters, first time voters living at home. I sometimes wonder if many first time voters last time had a big swing against Labor they were impacted by home schooling, no school formals, 18th birthdays etc. schoolies etc. I agree the UAP will not do well next time. The thing about the UAP is that they took about something unrelated each election and does not have a clear demographic base. All other suburbs especially St Albans, Kings Park and Delahey are very low SES. Labor would be hoping that many new voters in those 3 suburbs will vote Green (hence flow to Labor) as these voters will not be homeowners etc unlike their parents. If you can do a booth breakdown of the low SES suburbs as well that will be good for analysis.

* Albanvale, Deer Park i mean St Albans is in Fraser not Gorton