Higgins – Australia 2022

It’s instructive to look at the three-party-preferred swings in Higgins over the last decade. Nether Portal has done a similar analysis with the primaries, but I think the 3PP is cleaner.

* 2013 we start out as a very safe Liberal seat (56), with Greens on 19, Labor on 25.
* 2016: Jason Ball propels the Greens to 28 and Labor drops to 17. Only a slight drop to the Liberal vote (55).
* 2019: Liberals down to 49 (perhaps from Turnbull->Morrison). Greens soften to 25. Labor back in second with 26. Now marginal.
* 2023: Net swing of 4 points Liberals to Labor flips the seat. Greens still on 25.

So it ended up just being classic 2PP swing that did the job!

I’ve also attempted to look at swings between booths (just based on matching the booth name) and the Greens have been up in some booths; down in others. But Labor have been up and the Liberals down across the board.

I say this seat will continue to move left in the future for various reasons
– The new generation are no longer as supportive to the Libs as their parents are
– More progressives are moving in
– Libs moving right-wing populism and anti-intellicualism has alienated the highly educated professional base as evident from Libs No campaign slogan “If you don’t know vote no”

3CP analysis is good but it may hide where a swing between a pair is offset by another swing between a pair.

Higgins is a seat where you would have expected a swing towards the Liberals from Labor in 2016 under Turnbull, similar to Melbourne Ports (Macnamara) ,Chisholm, Kooyong and Goldstein. I think Jason Ball’s first campaign really did shift the dial even though in practice it appeared to be mostly at ALP’s expense.

Then in 2022 there’s a case that Libs lost votes to both parties, and there was also a Green to ALP swing after Labor came 2nd in 2019 and Jason Ball didn’t recontest.

I get the sense that a certain type of seat in 2022 wanted the libs out and would back in the strongest candidate – teals in seats where Labor never do well, Labor in marginals like Boothby (where teals underperformed), and Greens in Ryan where they had state government precedent. Despite Greens having Prahran, Labor were better able to argue that Higgins was a Labor vs Liberal marginal and they won.

I don’t see Greens winning it off Labor even with strong Green areas in the mix unless they go in hard like in Griffith (but they could win it off the Liberals). Labor can advertise heavily that it’s a red vs blue seat and if Labor loses X votes then it’s +1 for Dutton. Most other ALP held seats where Greens are competitive are safe for ALP vs Liberals (though Moreton and Lilley could be Green targets that flip despite the margin)

I see Higgins as more like Brisbane where the Liberals are well ahead on first preferences and Labor and Greens battle it out for second place in the 3CP. The second place-getter ends up winning the seat with preferences from the other party. Ryan is a blue/green seat. There’s little chance Labor can gain it.

@Nether Portal, you asked why this isn’t a Green/Liberal seat. The Green vote went backwards a bit, the Liberals crashed and Labor increased a bit. Labor really targeted this seat in 2022 and saw an opportunity. Labor came first or second at almost all booths. This seat mixes Labor-leaning areas in the east and south-east, staunchly Liberal Toorak and Armadale, and Labor-turned-Green South Yarra and Windsor.

@Nimalan, regarding why Labor outpolled the Greens in Toorak and Malvern, they have high median ages, and I sense that the older generations are more used to the Labor/Liberal duopoly.

John, I get a slightly different sense. For a long time, probably since the days of Howard, there has been a kind of person who have been trending away from the Liberals as they become a more conservative party. There really hasn’t been anywhere for them to go, so they tend to default to Labor, sometimes the Greens but these aren’t really radicals. Culturally though the Teals are a perfect fit. Labor has also been trending towards this kind of person, but with too much ‘old Labor’ baggage (CFMEU anyone?).

So I think that rather than trying to find someone to vote the Libs out and landing on the Teals in 2022, they have been doing that with Labor/Greens until the Teals came along. I would not be surprised if a Teal turns up here with a war chest, because knocking off a Labor member and adding a Teal helps them get closer to BOP.

@ Votante
Yeah median age is the only reason i can think off why old money areas had Labor outpolling the Greens. The same occured in the Federal electorate of Brisbane where Labor outpolled the Greens around Clayfield, Hamilton, Ascot etc. I do agree that older voters are probably used to the Duopoly while younger voters are often prefer to choose minor parties hence the long term decline of the major party vote. However, there is still a long term decline in Labor PV in Higgins they actually got a higher primary votes in 2004 than in 2022 despite the boundaries during the Costello years having far less middle class areas and a large portion of Camberwell. So i can see a scenario longer term when the Greens outpoll Labor in Higgins especially in the old money areas as older generations are replaced. In Kooyong before Monique Ryan the Greens were looking like replacing Labor as the main challenger. At the last state election, despite a sitting Labor member the Teal outpolled Labor in all booths along Glenferrie Road (younger demographic). This is why i think it is better for Labor to target an outer suburban mortgage belt seat like Petrie, La Trobe than Higgins as they can easily slip to 3rd and get knocked out of the TPP.

The point about “Labor baggage” is what drove the Greens in Higgins before. The progressive children of Liberal voting households – they won’t vote for the other tribe but they will vote for some more ideologically aligned 3rd party.
Teals got that even more so with Ted Baillieu’s son being a prominent organiser for Monique Ryan’s campaign.

You have the opposite effect with far right parties in QLD seats where Labor used to be competitive, and Dai Le.

But now they do have a local Labor MP, I can see a lot of those voters thinking “I don’t like Labor but my local MP is nice enough” as their psychological way past tribal politics. The Greens have also attracted tribal opposition in their own right.

I think you’d have to back Labor to put up a good fight and hang on to Higgins in 2025, especially with the benefit of a sophomore swing, but also that the “right sort” of Liberal could get it back in 2028, especially once swing voters are ready for another change of government.

Of course, with the redistribution it may well be the case that this seat ends up notionally marginal Liberal next year.

For a while before the last election, I thought this would be the Greens’s second lower house seat, after Melbourne. Richard Di Natale was hellbent on the Greens targeting and winning this. Kooyong was also on the radar for some time. In 2019, the Greens as well as Oliver Yates, an earlier version of a teal and also backed by Simon Holmes a Court, brought Josh Frydenberg’s primary vote below 50%. I thought JF’s personal vote and seniority would save him in 2019 and possibly even 2022. Katie Allen was a backbencher in 2022 so I thought Higgins was more likely to flip.

@Nimalan, Labor’s win in Higgins was a surprise pick up in my view. They of course will want to defend it in 2025. If they didn’t win in 2022, then yes, outer Melbourne and metro Brisbane would be potetial gold mines for Labor, and Labor could just let the Liberals, Greens and teals compete in Higgins as well as other affluent inner-city electorates like North Sydney.

Methinks that in 2025, Labor can solidify their vote with a sophomore swing by winning over:
1. Green voters who are voting tactically.
2. Small-l liberals who don’t identify with Duttons-Liberals but voted Liberal in 2022 because of their affinity to Katie Allen.

@ Votante
I agree that Oliver Yates was a proto-teal and his campaign was a prelude to Monique Ryan’s successful campaign. It is interesting that it took until an independent ran in 2019 for the Liberal primary vote to fall below 50%. Interestingly if we had the Liberal primary and Yates in 2019 it was around the same that JF got in 2016 (actually slightly higher) i use that in my contention that the Teal areas are not moving to the left-economically. If there was no independent in 2019 IMHO the liberal primary would have fallen to around 54% and the Greens would have just displaced Labor as the challenger. If we look Goldstein in 2019 where there was no high profile independent there was only a drop in the PV of less than 4% even though Goldstein has more middle class areas along the Frankston line that are receptive to Labor (very little of that demographic in Kooyong). In Higgins, there is no need for a centrist to drop the Lib PV to below 50% i personally think Labor can get a sophomore surge but that will be in the more middle class parts rather than Old money. I do agree Dutton will be a drag but Katie Allen is running again so she can mitigate that. Also even the slightest moderation would probably help the Libs for example if they slightly increase the 2030 emissions target from 26-28% to 33-36% or if Dan Tehan/Susan Ley was the leader. I still think many in the old money areas switched from Lib to Labor with a lot of hesitation and a class based aversion would remain.

Regarding mortgage belt/traditional bellwethers if Labor could win those seats then they would not put as much effort into seats such as North Sydney etc as they did last time. An example of this would be the seat of Hawthorn where Labor did everything possible to handball the seat to the Teal, they ran dead with virtually no campaigning, did not provide resources to John Kennedy, make any local commitments and ran push polls to assist Melissa Lowe. This is contrast to Bayswater which was notionally Liberal but ran a saturated campaign as they believed this was a seat they can hold longer term.

There was basically no ALP Head Office resources into North Sydney in 2022 – it was all the doing of local members. I think many on here misunderstand how most major party campaigns in non-held and non-target seats work.

I can’t speak for what happened in Hawthorn though. It does some somewhat odd that a held seat was not more vigorously defended.

@ High Street
I would say Hawthorn was a special case as Labor did not really see it as a seat they could entrench themselves in or hold it longer term which is why they felt losing it to a Teal would be strategic if a Teal could hold it longer term. This allowed Labor to fight Libs in the suburbs and allow Teals to fights Libs in their affluent heartland.

Labor’s strategy with Hawthorn was they realised the Teals do about 5% or so better on the TPP than Labor does. So they were willing to sacrifice possibly winning the seat, to allow a Teal to run and win the seat. Labor saw the possibility of a Pesutto led Lib-government as a risk to them in 2026. Sacrificing one seat to try and prevent what you think is the Libs strongest candidate winning makes a lot of sense.

Labor and the Teal ended up doing about the same on the TPP preferred anyway, but Labor had no way of knowing that based on what happened at the federal election.

The very western end of the seat is by far the strongest area for the Greens and they still were ahead there, but did not put any resources into it last election (despite it being a good prospect on paper – tells you how limited their resources are), which is why all the swing across the seat was LIB -> ALP. I suspect it would have been winnable for the Greens if they’d been able to throw a proper fully-resourced campaign at it, and still could be in future barring the redistribution. Of course, the redistribution could easily heavily shake this seat up, and make it nominally Liberal again, or remove it from being a sensible Greens target entirely.

> Labor can advertise heavily that it’s a red vs blue seat and if Labor loses X votes then it’s +1 for Dutton.

This never seems to be an effective strategy for them.

It seems that Australia (until 2022) had a significant number of social progressives but fiscally conservative it votes for the Conservative Party mostly of the time.

The only comparable place in America would probably be New Hampshire where it is irreligious, highly educated, and somewhat Socially Liberal but Fiscally Conservative (and Pro-Gun) so it votes for GOP for most of the time until 2000 and even to this day, GOP still makes percentage (45% for Trump in 2020) despite being in New England. I think seats like Higgins would probably be comparable New Hampshire (minus the guns).

Angelica Di Camillo is the Higgins candidate for 2025. Funny that the only Aston by-election candidate who actually lived in Aston is now contesting a completely different electorate.

Meanwhile Semmens (2022 Higgins candidate) is contesting Macnamara.

Talking about the Greens above

I don’t know why all the parties are preselecting when these seats may not even exist at the next election.

Also, I realise that by-elections are different but Di Camillo suffered a 2% swing against the Greens in Aston. Totally different area to Higgins though.

I think this will be a Labor retain if the seat stays anything like the current boundaries. The Israel Gaza conflict stance hurts the Greens here where there is a large Jewish population, whereas it helps them in Wills. Di Camillo is an unknown candidate who is from Rowville, miles away from Higgins. I don’t see these inner city Melbourne areas drifting back to the Liberals under Dutton either.

@Adam

>I don’t know why all the parties are preselecting when these seats may not even exist at the next election.

Particularly for parties like the Greens it’s because getting an organised campaign running takes a very long build up. If they wait until boundaries are finalised their campaign will be much worse.

It’s better to preselect somebody and hope a seat stays pretty much the same (which they most often do) and deal with the issue of a massive change when it actually arrives.

@Adam
Whilst i agree there is a large Jewish community in Higgins and the Israel issue will be important here i dont actually feel that it will hurt the Greens here or even in Macnamara for this reason alone. I doubt anyone in the Jewish community who identifies with Israel would have voted for the Greens before October 7 anyway. Michael Danby has been one of the most hostile MPs against the Greens and even back in 2012 he wanted to preference the Greens last so this demographic has never been supportive of the Greens. To win Higgins and Macnamara the Greens will be looking to increase support among other demographics.

@Nimalan the Greens are less popular among Jews than One Nation are among Muslims. The reason: the Greens have a number of anti-Israel policies and there are several reports of anti-Israeli sentiment and antisemitism among members of the Australian Greens.

@adam yes obviously someone will be left without a chair but they are preparing in case albo goes early before the redistribution is completed

@ Nether Portal
I agree with you, the Greens have never really had much support among the Jewish community so i dont know know how they can loose support they never had in the first place.

@nimalan but given their close association with Labor and the potential for a hung parliament plus the fact of their weak support for Israel as they’re trying to play both sides that could hurt labor

@John
I think it certainly can hurt Labor in Higgins (not Greens). However, Macnamara is unwinnable for the Libs these days so that is really a Green versus Labor contest. There is a few other seats with Jewish communities like Kingsford Smith and Issacs but the community is smaller and Labor margins greater. However, in some outer suburban seats like Werriwa, Bruce, Holt and Calwell Labor could get a 2PP swing (as Greens wont make the 2CP) as a result of Greens strong performance among Muslims.

We need to see how the redistribution pans out, if MacNamara loses Caulfield and gains South Yarra, Prahran and Windsor the size of the Jewish vote is greatly diminished and won’t really affect the result. If Higgins gains Caulfield that will throw a spanner in the works for Labor.

A lot of younger Jews I know as wedded to the idea of Israel that many seem to think, quite a few are pro Palestine. Like a lot of voters in Australia a variety of issues inform how people vote, Jewish Australians won’t be voting solely on Israel-Palestine.

I agree with all of Nimalan’s comments.

I have lived in Ports/Macnamara for every election since 2007 (except 2019 I was actually in Higgins when I briefly moved to Prahran), and the Greens’ position on Israel has been a hot topic at every single election. Besides Danby handing out alternate HTV cards, I even remember getting pamphlets from him attacking the Greens for being anti-Israel, back in 2016.

The war in Gaza won’t change a thing in terms of the Greens’ almost non-existent support among the Jewish community in Macnamara, because their position on Israel has always been very well known, probably moreso in Macnamara than anywhere due to Labor actively campaigning on it.

My theory is that the war in Gaza may actually HELP the Greens’ chances in Macnamara, assuming boundaries don’t change. Sounds weird, but here’s why:

Currently due to the 3CP dynamic of the seat, even a 1% swing from ALP to LIB (with no change in the Greens vote) would have resulted in a Greens win, as it would have knocked Labor out of the 2CP count.

The Jewish community in Macnamara basically choose between ALP & LIB. They are not where the Greens vote has ever been anyway. So, if Labor’s softer support for Israel than the Liberals results in even a 1% swing from ALP to LIB and the Greens simply retain their current support elsewhere, the Greens win the seat.

I know that’s simplistic because there are so many other factors too, but in exclusion of other factors, that is an example of how the Gaza situation could actually help the Greens, because perversely on the current boundaries, the Greens’ best chance of winning the seat is actually a small swing to the Liberals (at Labor’s expense), whereas a swing against the Liberals would actually hurt the Greens’ chances by turning it into an ALP v GRN contest they’re unlikely to win.

I also agree with KT1 that the Jewish community doesn’t vote as a bloc and not everyone is pro-Zionist or even pro-Israel. Even with that in mind, those younger Jewish Australians who might be pro-Palestine are unlikely to have their vote changed by the Greens’ position, and those who are pro-Israel would never have voted Greens in the first place. Which is why I don’t think the issue will impact the Greens vote very much at all.

Any vote that is decided by the Gaza situation in either Macnamara or Higgins will likely only impact the ALP & LIB primary votes. This differs from seats like Wills where it is more likely to impact the ALP/GRN contest.

@nimalana the new werriwa will fall to the coalition as for holt and bruce given how the excess in latroboe and specifically casey lga they could ecome targets for the coalition as bruce will shed labor voting dandenong over time and become less safe

@KT1 i imagine hggins will to the coalition either way as the areas of caufield will probably switch to coalition as traditional labor voting jews switch to the coalition due to israel issues and labors weak support for isreal

@trent that could theoretically favor the coalition as traditionall labor voting jews would send their preferences to libs over the greens and i expect the leakage might get them there (probably not but its possible)

i think the greens are gonna go hard for Wills giving the pro palestinian support and the fact the victorian greens leader is gonna quit to contest the federal election. she could however in theory fill her own casual vcancy if she fails as the nat guy did after he failed to win ballina

Further to Trent’s point the Greens actually want Caulfield to remain in Macnamara and that is what they submitted to the AEC in the distribution process. Longer term they probably also feel they can outpoll Labor in Higgins in primaries.

@ John
Regarding Werriwa i dont know what the new boundaries will be so i will not comment. However, on the current boundaries it is 16% Muslim (and growing) which is a higher percentage than Higgins would be Jewish even if the Caulfield Swap went ahead.

Back to the Casey LGA, many have suggested the outer suburban strategy or realignment will work here. Casey LGA has often been compared to Lindsay/Penrith LGA. One major demographic difference is being missed is ethnic diversity and how much it has changed in Casey LGA over the last 20 years. As Melbourne has grown thanks to immigration, the City of Casey due to presence of affordable housing has absorbed much of that new migration.

In 2001, only 20.9% of residents in Casey spoke a Language other than English (lower than Greater Melbourne average at the time today it 41.8% and much higher than the greater Melbourne Average. In 2001, there were 773 people born in Afghanistan, in 2021 it was 14, 679 people born in Afghanistan. The Muslim population was 2.6% in 2001 exact same as the Greater Melbourne Average today it 10.5% and double the Greater Melbourne average. It is the exact opposite of a seat like Lyons which really represents the Australia of yesterday while much of Casey’s is tommorow’s Australia. For this reason, the demographic changes in the Growth areas are just making it harder for the Libs longer term. It will also be an issue in La Trobe as it becomes less rural with urbanization.

@nimalan macarthur will shrink and there will be a new western sydney division so on those two points alone it will be a liberal gain one way or the other not to mention the underperforming current mp.
in regards to la trobe its more likely to lose the parts of casey then the rural parts given neighbouring monash is at about quota it can only really shed voteers in one direction

@ John

I have posted regarding Casey LGA in the Victorian redistribution thread and i have also posted about Werriwa in the Werriwa thread so we can continue the discussion about the impact of Gaza on those suburbs.

@john, there’s no way that scenario could favour the Coalition in Macnamara. They are completely uncompetitive there now and there’s no sign that will turn around any time soon. It’s the exact demographic that has not only abandoned them for the forseeable future, but that the Liberals themselves have not only expressed no interest in winning back but even demonise as the “woke elite”.

Let’s also remember that for all the talk about Macnamara’s Jewish vote, only 12% of the voters are Jewish, and they are in the part of the seat where the Liberals are already the strongest, implying that the majority of that 12% are most likely already voting Liberal.

Remember the theory we’re discussing here is that a small ALP to LIB swing among Jewish voters would turn the seat Green. If it’s likely most Jewish voters in the seat – or at least half – are already voting Liberal, mathematically there are just nowhere near enough Jewish Labor voters for their preferences to make any meaningful dent into what would likely be a double-digit GRN vs LIB margin.

Turning Macnamara into a coalition seat would require a lot of redrawing, you could start by taking out St Kilda, St Kilda East, Elwood and Port Melbourne, then add South Yarra, north of Toorak Rd, add all of Toorak and Malvern, and if the quota allows it, keep Caulfield, however it would still be a marginal.

The AEC would have to place St Kilda into Goldstein, but do St Kilda and Brighton belong in the same electorate, and placing St Kilda into Goldstein would cause a realignment between Goldstein, Hotham and Issacs.

Short of actually just switching the names of Macnamara & Higgins after doing a Caulfield for Chapel St swap – that is renaming the Port Phillip & Chapel St seat Higgins and renaming the Malvern & Caulfield based seat Macnamara – there’s just no realistic or workable way any boundaries could be redrawn to make Macnamara competitive for the Liberals in the foreseeable future.

Also, I’d vigorously oppose any redistribution that put St Kilda with Brighton!

The Libs themselves have clearly given up on Macnamara anyway. Ran a totally unsuitable, controversial and non-local dud candidate in 2022 with pretty much zero advertising and didn’t even have a polling booth presence (at least where I voted in St Kilda).

So I can’t foresee any effort being made by anybody to redraw it into a more competitive seat for the Libs, if anything it would be the opposite and they would try to move the more Liberal friendly areas out to help surrounding seats. In fact in their redistribution submission they did this, effectively merging Melbourne & Macnamara together to create a guaranteed GRN v ALP seat while moving the stronger Liberal areas like Caulfield into more competitive surrounding seats.

@trent tbh i think higgins should swap names with Kooyong at lesat take it on as Kooyong the divisions namessake is now in higgins and since

I think the Greens’ position on Israel could really hurt them in both Macnamara and Higgins. It seems that the general argument is that anyone who is Pro-Israel would never have voted Greens in the first place, but I find this hard to believe. The Greens have slowly been making in-roads into Caulfield (where in one booth they actually outpolled Liberal and Labor), Ripponlea, Balaclava, and Elsternwick, and these are all areas which have substantial numbers of voters who identify as Jewish. Surely some of the in-roads must have come from pro-Israel voters who were more open to voting Greens in 2022 because Israel was much less a focus than previously, such as 2016 where the 2014 Gaza war would have been more prevalent as an issue.

With Israel likely to be much more of a campaign issue than in 2022, 2019, and 2016, I think it’s very possible the Green vote could go backwards and these voters will return to Labor or Liberal. Couple this with the fact that Higgins has shown little promise as a good target for the Greens given their vote’s gone backwards twice and that Steph Hodgins-May isn’t running in Macnamara, and with a very unpredictable redistribution where the Greens seem determined to shoot themselves in the foot by keeping Caulfield in Macnamara, I would be very hesitant if not pessimistic about the Greens chances in both seats.

@ GPPS
You need to remember that many Jews dont vote on polling day due to the Sabbath so the booth results actually overestimates the Green vote in many Caulfield booths. Even then Ripponlea and Balaclava are only 12% Jewish and have many young renters who are not Jewish to off course the Greens do well there. Even Caulfield suburbs are only 40-50% Jewish and an atheist of Anglo-Celtic heritage who lives in Caulfield cares about Israel as much as someone who lives in Eltham. You would expect Caulfield to generally be better for the Greens if you exclude the Jewish community since it is higher SES than the Australian Average.

@GPPS the first few weeks or so after October 7 was pretty dicey, when the pro-Palestine movement was basically protesting against a counteroffensive on 1948 Israeli territory, and there was clearly an antisemitic streak at protests (with Mehreen Faruqi appearing in front of one such sign). Calls for ceasefire seemed like the left were not grappling with, and at worst even justifying, the horrors of October 7, Voting against “Israel has a right to defend itself” seemed callous. At that point I think you would be on to something and there’d be young and non-practising Jewish voters in those areas who would be reconsidering their 2022 Green vote.

But more recently it’s clear that Israel has gone too far and the left’s fears of collective punishment and calls for ceasefire seem far sighted. The Greens for their part lately have been going with a position that boils down to “Ceasefire now and free the hostages, war crimes to the ICC/ICJ” line that I think is in line with the general public sentiment among their likely voters.

Of course people will have long memories and no doubt Faruqi standing in front of a protester holding up an antisemitic sign will do the rounds in a Higgins/Macnamara letterbox drop. Over-all though I think Nimalan is more correct.

John, I’ve not once heard anyone from the Greens mention freeing the hostages.

The Greens have consistently called for the release of hostages. They did so as early as October 16 – that’s during the “dicey” period I described above: https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/greens-cant-back-invasion-gaza, and repeated it in their November media release: https://greens.org.au/news/australian-greens-statement-one-month-after-terrorist-acts-hamas-israel.

With the way this seat sets out I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liberals and Greens’ stance on Israel and Palestine cancelled each other out and divided the vote and the final beneficiary will still be Labor given that both will preference Labor over the other in any cases.

In terms of candidates I don’t think Katie Allen running again will benefit given that as a ‘Moderate’ she would be the face of Dutton’s nuclear fantasy and culture wars rather than a sensible centre-right Liberal opposition/government and I don’t think voters in Higgins would approve the former. Michelle Anandah-Rajah will have the benefit of incumbency and she does seem fairly likeable so she will get a sophomore’s surge that will benefit her. With the Greens candidate I don’t like the notion of parachuting candidates in from other electorates that they’ve lost to try and win this one. They need someone to bed in and really build their profile to have a good chance. Alex Bhathal almost got Batman/Cooper from Labor in the last few years before they imploded and now Ged Kearney’s got a high profile in the area and is pretty much bullet-proof.

Harolt Holt and John Gorton would be rolling in their graves to think that Higgins is now Labor held for the first time in history.

Tommo Harold hold isn’t rolling in anything he drowned and wasn’t recovered either that or take by a Chinese submarine.

John, I am not talking about press releases. What has been said in the media or on social media or in parliament about the hostages? Sfa. If I, as a keen political observer, haven’t heard anything, I doubt many voters have. And this is coming from someone who sees the the wider impact of thousands of innocent Palestinian lives being lost as a much more serious issue than a few dozen hostages.

@Tommo9 I’m not familiar with the exact situation of both the Higgins and Macnamara candidates but I was wondering could they both be renters? Would explain the running in different seats due to having moved address so not technically parachuting although prolly not ideal. Ik the greens have a large base of renters so naturally a lot of party members would be.

@adam they are casualties of war, a war Israel did not want and harassment started and a result of harassment building military infrastructure near, within and under civilian targets. Their deaths are solely at the feet of hamas

I don’t think on current (or any likely future) boundaries, Higgins is a realistic target for the Greens. As Tommo mentioned they have gone backwards at the last couple of elections. The seat on current boundaries is too mixed with really only the Chapel St corridor being particularly strong for the Greens, and any redistribution will only either remove that, or even if Chapel St remains, it can only add areas where they aren’t particularly strong (whether it expands east to Hughesdale, southeast to Bentleigh East, or south to parts of Caulfield – there’s really nowhere else for it to go).

@Sam, I’m almost certain Sonia Semmens (ex-Higgins, current-Macnamara candidate) is a renter and in fact, as a Macnamara resident myself, I got an email from her introducing herself as the candidate which spoke about focusing on the housing & rental crisis because she found herself homeless for a period of a few months with her children a couple of years ago, and had to live in someone’s granny flat until she could find a new rental.

@Trent

I strongly disagree. Higgins is a realistic target.

The 3 candidate preferred in Higgins in 2022 was LIB 44.8, ALP 30.0, GRN 25.2

The Greens would need 2.4% directly from Labor to equal them, ie- 1 in 12.5 Labor voters. You cannot tell me there aren’t 1 in 12.5 Labor voters out there in Higgins that could be convinced to vote Green.

What I think the biggest bottleneck for the Greens in Higgins on current or future boundaries is winning Macnamara first. I think it’s quite difficult for the party to do a big campaign in two seats that border each-other.