ALP 0.2%
Incumbent MP
Susan Templeman, since 2016.
Geography
Macquarie covers the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury council areas, including the towns of Katoomba, Blaxland, Wentworth Falls, Lawson, Richmond, Windsor and Kurrajong.
History
Macquarie is a federation seat, and has always sat to the west of Sydney and covered the Blue Mountains, although its boundaries have shifted. It has tended to be a marginal seat, although in recent decades it has not always swung with the national trend.
The seat was first won by the Free Trade party in 1901, and they held it for two terms before Ernest Carr won it in 1906 for Labor. Carr held the seat until 1917, when he was defeated for reelection after leaving the ALP in late 1916 to join the Nationalist Party. The ALP held the seat again from 1917 until 1922, when the Nationalist Party won back the seat. Arthur Manning was reelected in 1925 against future Prime Minister Ben Chifley, who defeated Manning on a second attempt in 1928.
Chifley held the seat for two terms before losing to John Lawson of the United Australia Party in 1931. Lawson was reelected in 1934 and 1937 before Chifley defeated him in 1940. Chifley went on to serve as a senior Minister under John Curtin and became Prime Minister in 1945. He lost the Prime Ministership in 1949, then led his party in Opposition. He was reelected in Macquarie at the 1951 double dissolution before dying a few weeks later.
The seat was won in 1951 by Anthony Luchetti, a longstanding Labor activist in Macquarie. Luchetti had been Chifley’s campaign manager during his first stint in Macquarie in the 1920s, but stood as a Lang Labor candidate at the 1931 election. The split Labor vote saw the UAP win the seat in a slim margin. Luchetti held the seat from 1951 until his retirement in 1975.
The Liberal Party won the seat in 1975 in the person of Reg Gillard, who was defeated by the ALP’s Ross Free in 1980. The 1984 redistribution saw Free move to the new seat of Lindsay, and the Liberal Party’s Alasdair Webster won Macquarie.
Webster lost the seat in 1993 to Maggie Deahm of the ALP, who lost the seat herself in 1996 to Kerry Bartlett. Bartlett made the seat fairly safe over the next decade before the 2007 redistribution saw Bartlett defeated by the long-serving state MP and Minister Bob Debus. Debus went straight into Kevin Rudd’s ministry as Minister for Home Affairs. Debus resigned from the ministry in June 2009 in anticipation of his retirement from politics at the next election.
At the 2010 election the seat’s boundaries were shifted back to the boundaries in 2004. Louise Markus, who held Greenway in 2007 when it covered Hawkesbury council, chose to run for Macquarie instead, and won the seat with a 1.3% margin. Markus was re-elected in 2010 and 2013.
Markus lost in 2016 to Labor’s Susan Templeman. Templeman was re-elected in 2019.
Assessment
Macquarie is Labor’s most marginal seat and is far from safe.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Sarah Richards | Liberal | 43,487 | 44.9 | +6.6 |
| Susan Templeman | Labor | 37,106 | 38.3 | +2.8 |
| Kingsley Liu | Greens | 8,870 | 9.1 | -2.1 |
| Tony Bryan Pettitt | United Australia Party | 3,877 | 4.0 | +4.0 |
| Greg Keightley | Animal Justice | 3,611 | 3.7 | +0.9 |
| Informal | 4,338 | 4.3 | -2.3 |
2019 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Susan Templeman | Labor | 48,661 | 50.2 | -2.0 |
| Sarah Richards | Liberal | 48,290 | 49.8 | +2.0 |
Booths have been divided into three parts. The Macquarie electorate is clearly divided between the Hawkesbury and the Blue Mountains. There is also clear divisions between the upper and lower mountains.
There is a tremendous variance in the vote between the three areas. Labor’s two-party-preferred majority was just 56% in the lower Blue Mountains and over 70% in the upper Blue Mountains, while the Liberal Party almost reached 64% in the Hawkesbury.
The Greens vote varied enormously, ranging from 4.6% in the Hawkesbury to 17% in the upper mountains.
| Voter group | GRN prim % | ALP 2PP % | Total votes | % of votes |
| Hawkesbury | 4.6 | 36.1 | 26,362 | 27.2 |
| Lower Mountains | 10.1 | 56.1 | 17,421 | 18.0 |
| Upper Mountains | 17.0 | 70.2 | 13,963 | 14.4 |
| Pre-poll | 8.6 | 50.5 | 29,725 | 30.7 |
| Other votes | 10.4 | 48.1 | 9,480 | 9.8 |
Election results in Macquarie at the 2019 federal election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for Labor, the Liberal Party and the Greens.
Hawkesbury Councillor Mike Creed will be the Liberal candidate here at the next federal election.
@james has sarah mcmahon finally given up?
@John – I would presume so. I haven’t seen any information on the preselection, including all the candidates for it. It is very much likely that since she lost to Templeman twice and thus, it would be hard for her to get it on the third time.
I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: this is probably the most geopolitically divided seat in Australia. The Hawkesbury (the northern half of Macquarie) is strongly Liberal while the Blue Mountains (the southern half of Macquarie) is strongly Labor.
Hence why this seat is nonsensical. Windsor, Kurrajong and Richmond have little to no connections to Katoomba and Blackheath. They both have more connections to parts of Sydney than each other (the Hawkesbury is more connected to the Hills District while the Blue Mountains is more connected to Penrith, despite major demographic differences between both of those areas and their connected regions of Sydney).
@Np unfortunately there just wasn’t anyway to split them without creating further problems.