ALP 19.8%
Incumbent MP
Clayton Barr, since 2011.
Geography
Hunter region. Cessnock covers the entirety of the Cessnock council area, along with a small part of Lake Macquarie council area. The seat’s main centres are Cessnock and Kurri Kurri, as well as the suburbs of Barnsley, Cameron Park and Edgeworth on the fringe of the Lake Macquarie urban area.
Redistribution
Cessnock previously covered south-western parts of the Singleton council area, although this area has a very small population. This area was moved to Upper Hunter, while there was no other change. This change increased the Labor margin from 19.3% to 19.8%.
History
The electoral district of Cessnock was first created in 1913. It was merged in the multi-member district of Maitland in 1920, but was restored in 1927. In that time, it has been won by the ALP at all but one election. It was won by the Liberal Party in 1988, before being won back by the ALP in 1991.
Cessnock was won in 1927 by the ALP’s Jack Baddeley. He had served as member for the multi-member district of Newcastle since 1922. He served as a minister in a number of Labor governments, from 1925 to 1927, from 1930 to 1932 and from 1941 until his retirement in 1949. He served as Deputy Premier from 1941 to 1947 and served as acting Premier for a period in 1948.
The ALP’s John Crook won the 1949 by-election, and held the seat until his retirement in 1959. He was succeeded in 1959 by George Neilly, who had been a member of the Legislative Council since 1954.
Neilly retired in 1978, and was succeeded by Bob Brown. He served less than one term, resigning in 1980 to take the federal seat of Hunter. He moved to the federal seat of Charlton in 1984. He served as a federal minister from 1988 to 1993, and retired in 1998. He was succeeded in Charlton by his daughter Kelly Hoare, who held it until 2007.
The 1981 Cessnock by-election was won by Stan Neilly, the son of the former MP George. He held the seat at the 1981 and 1984 elections, but in 1988 he lost Cessnock by 275 votes to the Liberal Party’s Bob Roberts, a Singleton shire councillor.
Roberts only held the seat for one term, losing to the younger Neilly in 1991. Neilly held the seat until his retirement in 1999.
Cessnock was won in 1999 by Cessnock councillor Kerry Hickey. He served as a minister in the Labor government from 2003 to 2007. His career was buffetted by a number of scandals, including drink driving charges in 2006 and revelations that he had an affair with a staff member and had fathered a child.
Hickey retired in 2011, and Cessnock was won by Labor candidate Clayton Barr. Barr was re-elected in 2015 and 2019.
Assessment
Cessnock is a safe Labor seat.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing | Redist |
| Clayton Barr | Labor | 27,122 | 54.5 | -7.7 | 54.8 |
| Josh Angus | Nationals | 12,081 | 24.3 | +1.0 | 23.9 |
| Janet Murray | Greens | 4,010 | 8.1 | -0.4 | 8.1 |
| Chris Parker | Animal Justice | 3,949 | 7.9 | +7.9 | 8.0 |
| Steve Russell | Sustainable Australia | 2,619 | 5.3 | +5.3 | 5.2 |
| Informal | 2,643 | 5.0 |
2019 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing | Redist |
| Clayton Barr | Labor | 30,229 | 69.3 | -2.7 | 69.8 |
| Josh Angus | Nationals | 13,364 | 30.7 | +2.7 | 30.2 |
Booths in Cessnock have been split into four areas. Booths in the two main towns of Cessnock and Kurri Kurri have been grouped together. Polling places in the Lake Macquarie council area have been grouped as “East”, with the remainder grouped as “Rural”.
Labor won a large majority of the two-party-preferred vote in all four areas, ranging from 64.7% in the rural parts of the seat, up to 72.7% in Kurri Kurri.
| Voter group | ALP 2PP % | Total votes | % of votes |
| East | 72.0 | 9,522 | 20.1 |
| Cessnock | 69.8 | 6,263 | 13.2 |
| Kurri Kurri | 72.7 | 6,037 | 12.7 |
| Rural | 64.7 | 5,955 | 12.5 |
| Pre-poll | 68.9 | 11,614 | 24.5 |
| Other votes | 70.1 | 8,070 | 17.0 |
Election results in Cessnock at the 2019 NSW state election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for Labor and the Nationals.
One of the 20 electorates that stayed with Labor in 2011 landslide defeat.
And the safest Labor seat following the 2015 election.
Could be better…
the nationals candidate Ash Barham has been dis-endorsed due to racist and sexist tweets discovered from a couple of years ago
Will be safest Labor seat after election due to circumstances around Nationale candidate, around a 25-28% margin post election.
@daniel T good luck with that
Well, I think Daniel has a good point. Once a candidate is disendorsed they struggle to gather support, especially for a party that will suffer a swing against them. A good example is Isaacs, Victoria in the 2019 federal election where Liberal candidate Jeremy Hearn was disendorsed. He suffered a 3% swing against him in 2PP terms and a worse 7% primary vote swing. This was at an election where the overall swing was against Labor and where adjacent seats like Hotham and Bruce only saw negligible 1% or less swings.
The disendorsed candidate could do a Pauline Hanson and win a safe Labor seat, but I highly doubt this’ll happen at this election.
I wonder what happens at pre-polling and on election day at polling booths when a candidate is disendorsed. Are there volunteers? What happens to all the corflutes/signage?
People will still keep them it’s a safe Labor seat so it’s not like they were gonna win im not sure either most likely the campaign team will try and keep up the volunteers but I wouldn’t know tbh. Dirty tactics though digging up old deleted tweets that people stupidly made. It’s not like anyone here has never done anything stupid in their youth.
I’m too lazy, but can anyone generate total ON primary vote. This seems to be the electorate Latham is most interested in, and despite their meagre results in 2022, they seem to be getting above the nationals on average. Honestly, if ON gets the national vote they would definitely make this a non-classic 2pp, and even take a good margin off labor.
Probably for the first time this century, One Nation has come second on primaries and 2PP in a NSW seat. They came second on primaries and 2PP in 1999 in Cessnock and possibly elsewhere too.
AEC officially has the Nationals as fourth, though he was disendorsed. I’ve seen Labor come fourth in teal seats but havne’t seen LNP come fourth in any seat.
Today, the NSW parliament overwhelmingly voted to adopt Net Zero and 2030/2035 targets. The Coalition actually voted constructively with the Greens to include the 2035 target as well. I was also heartened to see Cross benchers such as AJP, Legalise Cannabis and even Mark Latham put sensible suggestions to improve the bill and ensure it is had broad support. I was worried that the Greens would blow the whole thing up with a purist approach similar to the CPRS in 2010. I mentioned in the Ryde thread after the election that this legislation would be a folk in the road for the state libs. The state libs decided that they did not want to sacrifice their eastern suburbs, north shore, northern beaches heartland for the coalition to possibly win Cessnock. Having the climate issue settled with legislation means that both parties can focus on service delivery, economy and bread and butter issues rather than an endless climate war.
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/archive/nsw2023/ryde2023/comment-page-2#comment-787509: My comments in the Ryde thread.