Hastings – Victoria 2022

Unless Liberal party does terribly again I would say Liberal gain as Neale Burgess has incumbency on side.

@Bob I believe Neale Burgess is retiring at the next election.
https://cranbournenews.starcommunity.com.au/news/2021-11-12/burgess-gives-up-seat/

This seat will be interesting as Labor has preselected actor from Strictly Ballroom Paul Mercurio. Yes, some will play the celebrity candidate card but Mercurio is a locally based councilor these days. The Liberals have preselected Briony Hutton a executive officer of the lobby group Committee for Mornington Peninsula.

The Liberals have no chance of government if they don’t retain this seat. And you would think they would be favorites as the crushing Labor result last election is the reason this seat is so marginal. But statewide polling has had the Liberals going back even further. And with Mercurio being so high profile and no incumbent this seat is far from being decided.

The LNP really should not have any issue holding here but if the current polling stays true then they will be in serious trouble here.

The seat will be won or lost in Langwarrin. The Township of Hastings itself is quite industrial and Labor leaning. The Rural areas in the centre of the electoral are Liberal leaning so it will be the bellwether area of Langwarrin to determine the fate of the seat.

Labor could do with improving and winning in Somerville if they are to win this unless they get swings to them in Langwarrin.

Another seat that the Bracks government lost in 2006 that has been trending to the right, although the new boundaries make it less so, and isn’t the same seat as it was in 2006.

Nimalan,
Langwarrin is in the Federal seat of Dunkley which saw Labor hold those booths, although we shouldn’t read too much into it as if you look at Victoria in 2010 where Labor did really well federally but lost in the state election in 2010.

Agree, Bob, This is not an indication of what may happen at a federal level. I dont know too much about Langwarrin but looking at the census results it seems to be very middle income and has a high proportion of tradespeople maybe it is similar to Montrose, Mount Evelyn. etc in Casey?

*happen at a state level

Given the Liberals held Flinders comfortably, I think they will gain Hastings and Nepean.
But this is all I think they will gain.

Maybe Hawthorn, just maybe.
I’ll consider Ripon a chance too, given incumbency.

As an outsider, it looks to be shaping as a dark day for the Libs in November. I hope I am wrong.
Nats to do ok though.

The 2 Mornington Peninsula seats are narrowly Labor..I think there is sitting Labor mp in one but not the other. These are ultra marginal. I can’t pick but the liberals are not sure of victory.. the irony is they should be . Flinders vote in 2022 does not mean much.. but Flinders is not the safe liberal seat it once was

Flinders and Nepean are highly likely Liberal gains, these are seats that Labor has never held except for once after the Bracks landslide in 2002. I can’t see any solid reason as to why these would be retained?
If any seat in the state was the most likely to be gained by the Liberals it would be Nepean or Hastings.

I actually agree with BJA for once, but I’ll add Pakenham to his Liberal gains. The coalition preformed very strongly in the La Trobe region at the federal election which is Pakenham. They got swings to them in La Trobe but not in Monash which is strange.

As I said in Nepean this is still 50/50 but I’d tilt this to the Liberals due to anti-lockdown and the results in Flinders federally.

The recent update with this having a buffer of 0.01 instead of 0.4 would suggest that the LNP could pick this up as labor seems to be unpopular in the South-Eastern part of the state.

The Liberals have just announced electrification to Baxter including a station at Langwarrin which is much needed. Labor has not commited to it but did commit to make entire existing Frankton line free of level crossings. Simmilar to Melton scenario where there is an issue of which project should come first

Nimalan, I think the Baxter/Frankston situation is slightly different to Melton in that the Frankston line is already electrified so removing level crossings would require similar effort either before or after extending the electrification to Baxter.

Unless it is talking about removing level crossings for the unelectrified section, which means both could be completed simultaneously as line closures are generally required for electrification (as was case with Gawler line in Adelaide/SA).

Yoh An, you are correct it is only on the electrified section so Labor has committed to. There are levels crossings on the unelectrified section but no commitment so far on removing them unfortunately. Even if Labor does not commit to electrification they could commit to duplicate the unelectrified section which is single track which they did for Melton.

Nimalan,
The Baxter electrification is the same policy that Guy was pushing in 2018.
The federal Liberal Government, at the time, committed to conducting a business case.
The business case found that it would cost $1.3 to $1.5 billion and result in the poorest economic outcome, from the options considered, for improving public transport on the Mornington Peninsula.
Guy has promised $1 billion, so he is $300 to $500 million short of the 2019 estimated cost.
https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/media-centre/publications/frankston-baxter-preliminary-business-case

Watson, how do you define ‘poorest’ out of all options. Whilst electrification does cost more, I saw that the cost-benefit ratio (BCR) is actually marginally better than the duplication option (0.5 vs 0.4).

But agree overall this would be a more long term strategy say 2030 or later, not as high priority compared to more established corridors like Melton, Tarneit and even Doncaster area.

The Baxter option makes sense due to it following the original Mornigton train line and would enable the line to travel through Frankston East and Langwarrin.

I agree the Business Case did not recommend it for now. Just a couple of points. I am thinking maybe in the interim some enabling works could be done such as removing level crossing on the unelectrified section, rail duplication a new station at Langwarrin. passing loops etc. We need to remember that Frankston East and Langwarrin are suburban areas and there are equity issues for the fact that they dont have stations. This could be done in a staged way such as currently being done for Hurtsbridge line duplication as funding is available. Also i dont believe the state government should cover the entire cost. The Federal government should come to the party as they have done with Moreton Bay Rail Link, Gawler electrification, Melbourne Airport rail link, Gold Coast light rail etc

Nimalan & Yoh An,
I wasn’t arguing for or against Baxter electrification. Apologies if it seemed that way.
It is a reannouncement of a policy from 4 years ago. There were big swings against the Liberal Party in all the seats in that area – the smallest anti Liberal swing I can find was 6.6% in Hastings.
The amount being promised is insufficient to complete the project. Matty maths again?

The proposed Langwarrin Station doesn’t make much sense to me. The location is bounded by the Mornington Freeway to the west and the Langwarrin Flora and Fauna Reserve on the east.

Interestingly, the former federal Liberal Government contributed significant funding to Victoria’s Regional Rail Revival projects.

Watson Watch,

Totally agree with you that it is a reannouncement nevertheless i personally hope this leads to Labor matching it as this is part of the PTV Network Development Plan

Also regarding amount being insufficient i feel Matt Guy should just be clear that it is is conditional on federal government funding a share of the project.

Hastings will be notionally gained by Liberal.

Labor underperformed here at the federal election plus there’s anti-Dan sentiment in the growth corridors and on the outskirts of metro Melbourne.

My sense is that the Lib gains will be Hastings, Mornington, Nepean, Pakenham, Berwick based on these being ‘surprise’ / ‘accidental’ gains for ALP in 2018 and also being outer-suburban seats where the Libs have in a general electoral geography sense been gaining whilst ALP have been suffering.

Yes, Hastings will probably swing back to Libs. But still interested to see how much Paul Mercurio’s name recognition is worth.

@ Entrepreneur, i agree with you that the Libs will most likely win the seats you mentioned. However, Mornington and Berwick are already Liberal held. Hastings has a very tiny Labor notional majority based on VEC Calculation but it is so small that Antony Green is classifying it as a Liberal seat.

Don’t think anyone here was picking this as a potential Labor win. Could the surprise result here be thanks to the celebrity candidate selection? Certainly seems to have been of help to Sam Groth in Nepean. Or is there more to the story?

The Lib candidate was a young professional woman so you’d have thought she would be more comfortable – but if the postal votes and prepolls can save someone as uninspiring as Crewther in Mornington, they will probably help Hutton close the narrow gap here.

Another seat in this region were the liberals short themselves in the foot, Labor has got a small swing towards them which is just phenomenal.

The fact that Hastings, Bass and Pakenham are so close speaks volumes of how poorly organised the Liberal campaign was.

It has been declared that the Labor has gained this electorate which is astonishing & a really poor result for the LNP.

This seat, along with Morwell and Mildura where both Libs and Nats ran, is the only seat where the winner wasn’t the candidate who led on first preferences I believe.

Prior to the election, i said in this thread that this seat would be won or lost in Langwarrin. I would say this suburb in many ways is a reflection of the scale of Labor’s victory at last month’s state election. There were swings to Labor in the Langwarrin booths and they are all Red. In 2014 even as the Libs lost government they won all the Langwarrin booths fairly comfortably. If we look at the demographics of Langwarrin it is an area that most expect would be increasingly be a new Liberal stronghold. Hastings is the least diverse seat in terms of % of people who speak a language other than English at home. It also has the highest % of tradespeople in Victoria. Langwarrin is a suburb full of self-employed tradespeople, middle income, detached owner occupied (83% home ownership rate) with only 0.2% of houses being flats. It is on the urban growth boundary with some green wedge area. It is very much textbook middle Anglo Australian suburbia with no significant ethnic communities yet the Labor party managed to romp home here. An area which is focused on bread and butter issues and not exactly an area going “woke”. This probably shows that it was middle Australia (Ringwood, Bayswater, Sandbelt, Box Hill etc) which gave Labor a comfortable majority