Chisholm – Australia 2022

LIB 0.5%

Incumbent MP
Gladys Liu, since 2019.

Geography
Eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Chisholm covers a majority of the Monash council area along with south-western parts of the Whitehorse council area. Suburbs include Burwood, Burwood East, Blackburn South, Chadstone, Mount Waverley, Glen Waverley and Box Hill.

Redistribution
Chisholm shifted south, losing Blackburn North, Forest Hill and parts of Blackburn to Deakin, and losing the remainder of Surrey Hills to Kooyong. Chisholm then gained suburbs on its southern border from Hotham, including Chadstone, Notting Hill and Wheelers Hill. These changes reduced the Liberal margin from 0.6% to 0.5%.

History
Chisholm was created for the expansion of the House of Representatives at the 1949 election. For the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the seat was relatively safe for the Liberal Party. Boundary changes saw the seat become a marginal seat in the early 1980s. It became stronger for Labor in the 2000s but was lost to the Liberal Party in 2016.

The seat was first won in Kent Hughes for the Liberal Party. Hughes was a former Deputy Premier of Victoria who had enlisted in the military at the outbreak of the Second World War, and ended up captured as part of the fall of Singapore and spent four years as a prisoner of war before returning to state politics, and moving to Canberra in 1949.

Hughes was chairman of the organising committee for the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, but after the Olympics was dropped from the ministry, and sat on the backbenches until his death in 1970.

Tony Staley won the 1970 by-election for the Liberal Party. He served as a junior minister in the Fraser government from 1976 until his retirement from politics in 1980. He went on to serve as Federal President of the Liberal Party.

The Liberal Party’s Graham Harris held on to Chisholm in 1980, but with a much smaller margin then those won by Hughes or Staley. He was defeated in 1983 by the ALP’s Helen Mayer.

Mayer was re-elected in 1984, but lost the seat in 1987 to the Liberal Party’s Michael Wooldridge. Wooldridge quickly became a senior Liberal frontbencher, and served as Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party from 1993 to 1994. Wooldridge was appointed Minister for Health upon the election of the Howard government in 1996. Wooldridge moved to the safer seat of Casey in 1998, and retired in 2001.

Chisholm was won in 1998 by the ALP’s Anna Burke, who held the seat for six terms. Anna Burke served as Speaker from 2012 to 2013. Burke retired in 2016, and Liberal candidate Julia Banks was the only Liberal in the country to gain a seat off Labor in winning Chisholm.

Julia Banks announced she would not run for re-election as a Liberal following the removal of Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister in 2018, and a few months later resigned from the party to sit as an independent. Banks went on to run as an independent unsuccessfully for the Liberal seat of Flinders in outer Melbourne.

Chisholm was narrowly won in 2019 by Liberal candidate Gladys Liu.

Candidates

Assessment
Chisholm is a very marginal seat. The Liberal Party missed out on the benefit of incumbency in 2019 with the loss of Julia Banks, and that may well have made things even harder for the Liberal Party. Liu should benefit from her new incumbency, but if a swing is on that may not be enough.

2019 result

Candidate Party Votes % Swing Redist
Gladys Liu Liberal 41,172 43.4 -3.7 44.0
Jennifer Yang Labor 32,561 34.3 -0.4 36.3
Luke Arthur Greens 11,235 11.8 +0.3 10.6
George Zoraya United Australia Party 1,517 1.6 +1.6 2.2
Ian Dobby Independent 2,319 2.4 +2.4 1.7
Anne Wicks Derryn Hinch’s Justice 2,063 2.2 +2.2 1.4
Rosemary Lavin Animal Justice 1,780 1.9 -0.2 1.3
Philip Jenkins Democratic Labour Party 1,702 1.8 +1.8 1.2
Angela Mary Dorian Rise Up Australia 571 0.6 -0.6 0.7
Others 0.6
Informal 4,463 4.5 +1.8

2019 two-party-preferred result

Candidate Party Votes % Swing Redist
Gladys Liu Liberal 48,005 50.6 -2.3 50.5
Jennifer Yang Labor 46,915 49.4 +2.3 49.5

Booth breakdown

Polling places in Chisholm have been divided into three areas: north, south-east and south-west. The north covers those booths in the Whitehorse council area.

The Liberal Party won 53.3% of the two-party-preferred vote in the south-east, while Labor won the south-west and the north. The Liberal Party overcame this deficit thanks to 53.0% of the pre-poll vote.

The Greens came third, with a primary vote ranging from 7.7% in the south-east to 13.8% in the north.

Voter group GRN prim % LIB 2PP % Total votes % of votes
South-East 7.7 53.3 18,209 18.8
South-West 12.4 46.5 16,459 17.0
North 13.8 45.3 15,313 15.8
Pre-poll 10.0 53.0 28,539 29.4
Other votes 10.4 51.7 18,542 19.1

Election results in Chisholm at the 2019 federal election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for the Liberal Party, Labor and the Greens.

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268 COMMENTS

  2. Carina Garland may be in trouble here. Most MPs would get a sophomore swing, but she is almost invisible as a member. I am relatively active in the community and have physically seen her once since the election. There has been nothing in the letterbox apart from emergency contacts from her office.

    I am being redistributed out of Chisholm this month so perhaps her lack of presence is just due to where I am, but I think that Katie Allen could be back in the next parliament.

  6. What did Scotty do?
    He didn’t get paid for the extra Ministries, otherwise Plod would be i the picture.
    Unless someone will enlighten me, the only thing that springs to mind is a ploy to head off a Cabinet revolt?

  7. Katie Allen has been campaigning here and I have even seen ads whereby the Labor mp has been absent which is surprising.

  9. NP, she was never defeated, I’m strictly speaking from f defeated MP’s trying to make a comeback after being rejected by the electorate, especially since 2022 was ab election that punished the Liberals and not rewarded Labor.

  10. And John, she should not be the candidate, another person was previously pre-selected but the faceless men in the liberal party now want to install quotas where they “have” to run a certain number of women in marginal seats, We need merit based pre-selections, not quotas.

    Allan replacing the previous Liberal candidate is comparable to Mundine replacing the Liberal candidate in 2019 and that went well for them didn’t it?

    She deserves to lose for replacing the previous liberal candidate who was chosen by pre-selectors, it’s not our fault Higgins was abolished, I campaigned for the seat to remain.

  11. @daniel t it’s different because they should never have preselected candidates in seats they were on the chopping block. She was only put there because the seat she was preselected in git abolished and Chisholm contains part of Higgins. They should have reopened preselections instead of just replacing him. She was punished because she was a liberal not directly because of her. Defeated candidates who lose because of either the fault of the party or leader should deserve the right to reconnect because now the electorate wants to punish Labor

  12. It would be difficult for Allen to win simply because Dutton is quite unpopular in Melbourne, similar to how Albo is deeply unpopular in Queensland.

  13. I am not a liberal but party democracy means the party opens pre-election for the seat… calls for nominations by a certain date…… vets the candidates
    Then holds pre-election ballot… which chooses the candidate. The liberals picked there candidate. Then decided to replace him with K.allen. this is not democracy.
    ..

  14. This was part of the trouble with Morrison he did not give a stuff about liberal party internal democracy especially in nsw

  16. This doesn’t worry me personally if the chances of the liberal party winning a seat are reduced. However in terms of how democracy should work within a party this sends alarm bells ringing…. it is either favouritism or incompetence

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