ALP 15.0%
Incumbent MP
Ron Hoenig, since 2012.
Geography
Inner south of Sydney. Heffron covers southern parts of the City of Sydney, as well as northern parts of the Bayside Council. Heffron also covers those parts of the Inner West Council to the east of the Illawarra railway line, and small parts of Randwick Council. Key suburbs include Redfern, Waterloo, Eveleigh, Alexandria, Zetland, Beaconsfield, Kensington, Rosebery, Eastlakes, Mascot, St Peters, Tempe and part of Kingsford.
Redistribution
Heffron lost the remainder of Erskineville to Newtown and part of Kingsford to Coogee, and Moore Park and Centennial Park to Sydney. These changes reduced the Labor margin from 15.1% to 15.0%.
History
The district of Heffron has existed since 1973. It has always been held by the ALP.
The seat was first won in 1973 by Laurie Brereton. He had previously held the seat of Randwick for one year. He won it in a 1970 by-election following the election of the previous member Lionel Bowen to the federal seat of Kingsford Smith in 1969. Randwick was abolished at the 1971 election.
Brereton served as a minister in the Labor state government from 1981 to 1987, and held Heffron until 1990, when he resigned to contest Kingsford Smith. He served as a minister in the Labor federal government from 1993 to 1996 and a shadow minister from 1996 to 2001. He retired from Kingsford Smith in 2004.
Brereton was replaced at the 1990 Heffron by-election by his sister Deirdre Grusovin, who had been a member of the Legislative Council since 1978. She had served as a minister from 1986 to 1988.
Grusovin held Heffron at the 1991, 1995 and 1999 elections. In 2003 she lost a bitter preselection contest against Kristina Keneally.
Keneally won a second term in Heffron in 2007. Following the 2007 election she was appointed as a minister. In 2009, the ALP caucus elected her as Labor leader, and she succeeded Nathan Rees as Premier of NSW.
Keneally led the ALP into the 2011 state election, where the party was reduced to only 20 seats, after holding over 50 prior to the election.
In June 2012, Keneally resigned from Parliament. The ensuing by-election was won by Labor candidate Ron Hoenig, the mayor of Botany Bay. Hoenig was re-elected in 2015 and 2019.
Assessment
Heffron is a safe Labor seat.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing | Redist |
| Ron Hoenig | Labor | 20,409 | 40.8 | -3.5 | 42.6 |
| Alexander Andruska | Liberal | 13,863 | 27.7 | -2.0 | 28.1 |
| Kym Chapple | Greens | 9,565 | 19.1 | -2.0 | 17.5 |
| Chris Ryan | Keep Sydney Open | 4,575 | 9.1 | +9.2 | 8.5 |
| Michael Dello-Iacovo | Animal Justice | 1,598 | 3.2 | +3.2 | 3.3 |
| Others | 0.1 | ||||
| Informal | 1,292 | 2.5 |
2019 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing | Redist |
| Ron Hoenig | Labor | 28,874 | 65.1 | +1.0 | 65.0 |
| Alexander Andruska | Liberal | 15,462 | 34.9 | -1.0 | 35.0 |
Booths in Heffron have been divided between the four local councils which cover parts of the electorate.
The Labor two-party-preferred vote (against the Liberal Party) ranged from a slim 50.2% majority in Randwick to 75.9% in the Inner West Council area.
There was also a massive range in support for the Greens, from only 8.5% in the Bayside council areas to 30.7% in the Inner West council area.
| Voter group | GRN prim % | ALP 2PP % | Total votes | % of votes |
| Sydney | 20.2 | 61.7 | 8,706 | 20.8 |
| Bayside | 8.5 | 72.6 | 7,807 | 18.6 |
| Randwick | 13.9 | 50.2 | 3,607 | 8.6 |
| Inner West | 30.7 | 75.9 | 3,188 | 7.6 |
| Other votes | 19.3 | 63.2 | 13,656 | 32.6 |
| Pre-poll | 16.2 | 67.3 | 4,975 | 11.9 |
Election results in Heffron at the 2019 NSW state election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for Labor, the Liberal Party and the Greens.
What a horrible mishmash of a seat, covering four distinctive council areas. Hopefully is redistricted sometime in future.
Wilson nsw already completed a redistribution recently, so the next one is not due for another 8 years.
I think heffron is problematic to draw in any circumstance because it has to straddle the airport and contain suburbs across both eastern suburbs and inner west.
Enlarging the assembly and creating smaller districts may help in solving some of these difficult boundaries
Agree Wilson, doesn’t make the most sense geographically.
Greens candidate here is Philipa Veitch, West Ward councillor on Randwick council, from the more conservative part of the seat. With a poor Lib performance the Greens could crack into the 2CP. Although this is a seat where I would expect quite a few ‘legacy’ Liberal rusted-ons.
This seat should really be called “Mascot.”
This might be a Greens vs Labor contest. If it doesn’t, it’s probably because AJP, Socialists, the independent and Sustainable Australia will have split the left-wing vote and preferences don’t flow strongly to the Greens. It’s either that or the Liberals PV remains okay-ish.
I agree it is a mishmash of a seat seems to be leftovers like McMahon at a federal level with no clear community of interest for that reason a non geographic name like Heffron suits it. The issue of the Greens coming second is probably more challenging as this includes both suburban and inner city areas. The suburban areas will IMHO be classic Lib/ALP contests unlike the inner city parts. If Bell Street divides the Melbourne between the inner north and Suburban areas then Southern Cross Drive and Gardeners Road fulfill this role in this part of Sydney. The Cooks Rive also acts as a divide in some parts for example crossing from Tempe to Wolli Creek or Marrickville to Earlwood you enter suburbia, primary voting patterns change as the Green vote drops significantly and the Liberal vote increases, larger blocks and also increased ethnic diversity.
I actually don’t think that these boundaries are all that bad. Botany LGA should have been amalgamated with Randwick, not Rockdale. So that’d be one less LGA spanned by this district. St Peters, Sydenham, and Tempe seem similar enough to the adjacent suburbs in Sydney and Bayside LGAs.
The last redistribution certainly improved matters by removing Centennial Park.
What are some ideas for how districts in this part of Sydney could be redrawn?
seems a reasonable boundary with similar demographics of inner city dwellers in new apartments to the north, a few public housing estates and some older established inner urban suburbs in Mascot and Kensington
I thought the name had something to do with Heffron Park just to the east past Eastgardens which I assume was once upon a time included in the electorate
Both the park and the electorate are named after Bob Heffron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Heffron