Lalor – Australia 2022

ALP 12.4%

Incumbent MP
Joanne Ryan, since 2013.

Geography
Lalor covers areas on the western fringe of Melbourne and on the way to Geelong. The seat covers Werribee and surrounding areas. The seat covers most of the Wyndham council area.

Redistribution
Lalor’s eastern boundary was modified. The seat lost the remainder of Point Cook and Truganina to Gellibrand, and gained Williams Landing.

History
Lalor was created in 1949 as part of the expansion of the House of Representatives. It has been won by the ALP at all but one election since then, and has usually been held by prominent Labor figures. The first four Labor MPs for the seat have held ministerial office, including two Deputy Prime Ministers and a Prime Minister.

The seat was first won in 1949 by the ALP’s Reg Pollard. Pollard had previously held the federal seat of Ballarat since 1937, and had served as a minister in the Chifley government between the 1946 and 1949 elections. He held Lalor until his defeat in 1966.

Pollard lost his seat to Liberal candidate Mervyn Lee in 1966. Lee attempted to move to the neighbouring seat of Bendigo in 1969, but failed to win the seat.

Lalor was won in 1969 by the ALP’s Jim Cairns. He had previously held the seat of Yarra since 1955, but the seat was abolished at the 1969 election. Cairns was a leading light of the Labor Left and was a leader of the movement against the Vietnam War.

Cairns was appointed to Gough Whitlam’s ministry after the 1972 election. He was elected Deputy Leader of the ALP, and thus Deputy Prime Minister, after the 1974 election, and later was appointed Treasurer. Cairns, however, was caught up in a sex scandal and the ‘Loans Affair’, and Whitlam sacked Cairns from the ministry in July 1975. Cairns retired from the Parliament in 1977.

Lalor was won in 1977 by state Labor MP and former radio host Barry Jones. Jones served as Minister for Science in the Hawke government from 1983 to 1990, when he failed to retain factional support for his ministerial position. He went on to serve as National President of the ALP from 1992 to 2000 and again in 2005-6. Jones retired in 1998.

Lalor was won in 1998 by Julia Gillard, who had most recently been chief of staff to Victorian Labor leader John Brumby. Gillard was promoted to the Labor frontbench, first as Shadow Minister for Immigration then Shadow Minister for Health.

In late 2006 Gillard joined with Kevin Rudd on a Labor leadership ticket, and she was elected Deputy Leader of the ALP, and Gillard took on the Workplace Relations portfolio. She became Deputy Prime Minister after the election of the Rudd government in 2007. In June 2010 she became Prime Minister after she was elected as Labor leader. She served as Prime Minister until June 2013, when she was replaced as Labor leader by her predecessor Kevin Rudd, and she announced her retirement from politics.

Lalor was won in 2013 by Joanne Ryan, and she has been re-elected twice.

Candidates

  • Aijaz Moinuddin (Independent)
  • Claudio Uribe (Victorian Socialists)
  • Juanita Paterson (United Australia)
  • Joanne Ryan (Labor)
  • Patrizia Barcatta (Liberal Democrats)
  • Peter Malliaros (Federation)
  • James Ingarfill (One Nation)
  • Jack Boddeke (Greens)
  • Ravi Gaddipati (Liberal)

    • Assessment
    Lalor is a very safe Labor seat.

    2019 result

    Candidate Party Votes % Swing Redist
    Joanne Ryan Labor 48,332 51.7 -0.9 51.6
    Gayle Murphy Liberal 28,209 30.2 -0.1 30.1
    Jay Dessi Greens 7,273 7.8 -1.8 8.0
    Jeffrey Robinson United Australia Party 4,451 4.8 +4.8 4.9
    Susan Jakobi Australia First 4,094 4.4 +1.3 4.4
    Aijaz Moinuddin Independent 1,119 1.2 +1.2 1.1
    Informal 4,337 4.4 -0.1

    2019 two-party-preferred result

    Candidate Party Votes % Swing Redist
    Joanne Ryan Labor 58,341 62.4 -1.8 62.4
    Gayle Murphy Liberal 35,137 37.6 +1.8 37.6

    Booth breakdown

    Polling places in Lalor have been divided into three parts: central, north-east and west.

    Labor won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in all three areas, ranging from 62.6% in the centre to 68.5% in the west.

    Voter group GRN prim % ALP 2PP % Total votes % of votes
    North-East 8.5 65.4 18,225 21.8
    West 9.1 68.5 9,225 11.0
    Central 8.6 62.6 8,856 10.6
    Pre-poll 7.1 59.6 36,322 43.4
    Other votes 8.7 61.7 11,087 13.2

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

    Become a Patron!

    22 COMMENTS

    1. Funny to think it was only a decade ago when Werribee, Point Cook, and Melton were all in the same electoral division.

    2. Go back to before the 1976 state election and they were in the same state seat, Gisborne, represented by Athol Guy 1971-76 (previously and subsequently of the Seekers, retired as an MLA at the 1979 election).

    3. It’s been three federal Divisions created in the western suburbs in the last 20 years (Gorton was a kind-of-successor to Burke but was effectively a new seat)….not sure that level of growth has been replicated anywhere.

    5. Hey guys, So I live in Point Cook and it honestly looks like a United Australia Pick-up, The local candidate is a strong community local, she’s campaigning vigorously and a simple walk on Watton Street will affirm this connotation. 1 in every 3 shops have her campaign poster and plenty of local residential area’s have the UAP freedom sign. My theory is, if she is able to connect with the other parts of the electorate, that being Point Cook, Tarneit, Hoppers, Wyndham Vale and more, she has a real shot at winning, especially if stores in the Plaza, Point Cook town center, etc keep putting up her posters, she will be known.

      Lalor is an electorate which is a strong Labor seat due to it’s tradies and union members, however, those people were also the people dissatisfied with the lockdown and have beliefs similar to conservatism, and also an area with Politically uneducated residents. Juanita’s nomination may also bring some personal votes, that being people who do may not agree with her but vote for her. She’s young, pretty and experienced and may engage those disengaged voters. Especially since this is one of the first times, in my whole life living in Lalor, that a political campaign has campaigned this heavily, Labor has taken this seat for granted, and if the United Australia Party funds this campaign, there is a big possibility of them winning it

    6. /s

      with all due respect, this is not happening. Why would the UAP focus on a lower house seat when their votes are too spread out to make a difference? They’ll campaign for the Senate and call it a day.

    7. Ryan, unless the uap candidate Jack is talking about is more like an independent and not as closely tied to the main party

    8. Bob, The Werribee South booth is in a green wedge area and has some of the largest vegetable growing areas of Victoria (in some ways the food bowl).

    10. Hi Ryan, With all due respect you’re extremely wrong, she’s gonna win and she’s the favourite to do so, I’d say her chances are 60-40 in her favour, there’s a chance Labor wins it just doesn’t seem likely

    11. I’m not sure where you are getting the idea that she is favourite to win. Care to share your source? If the UAP candidate for Lalor is busy campaigning in Point Cook then she probably needs to check her electoral boundaries, given Point Cook is in Gellibrand, not Lalor. I would never take posters in shop windows as support one way or another. My local high street where I work in Melbourne’s west usually has shop windows displaying candidates of all parties that go into the shop asking to display their poster. While the UAP candidate may have some posters up now, she will no doubt be joined by posters of other parties any time soon.

    12. It’s ok WenderWest, I get that you’re an inner city greens supporter….. but you can’t deny the fact that this is the ONLY seat which favours the UAP, it’s Juanita’s for the taking

    14. This is a probable Labor win based on all the evidence. Electoral signage is no guarantee of electoral success as Clive Palmer’s expenditure on advertising shows.

    15. That’s right Yoh An, I’m Corangamite based and I work across Fraser, Gorton, Gellibrand, Lalor and Corio.

    16. The UAP did significantly outperform their state-wide result in the 2019 Senate vote within Lalor, scoring 3.15% in Lalor to 2.48% across Victoria. This suggests there may be some merit in suggesting this is a reasonably good seat for the party within the Victorian context, although it should also be noted that this was still behind Labor, the Coalition, the Greens, the DLP, and One Nation. For the lower house, about 1 in 20 Lalor voters supported the UAP candidate, which suggests about a 700% increase in the UAP vote would be required to give their candidate a solid chance at winning this seat.

    17. Lalor seems strange that some booths in the seat swung away to Labor in the TPP (especially in the new housing estates) significantly yet the electorate overall still got a swing towards Labor in the TPP. I believe one factor could be that more ALP voters went to vote early compared to 2019 so it left many who voted on election day voting for the far-right and to some extent the Libs. I believe this is a factor why the swing against the ALP in the TPP for the new housing estates seems higher than it should be.

    18. An interesting voting pattern here, where the older, whiter areas voted no but the more immigrant heavy (especially South Asians), new estates voted Yes

    20. Interesting that while areas in Melbourne with a high Indian population voted yes, the part of Sydney with the highest Indian population, Parramatta, voted no. Although it voted no by a much smaller proportion than other western Sydney seats and Parramatta Central, Westmead and Wentworthville, where the highest proportion of Indian Australians live, voted yes. Still thought that seat would be a yes.

    21. There’s some notable differences in the Parramatta booths. I haven’t had a chance to fully dive into the data yet but it could be explained by different ethnic mixes (which definitely happened in 2022).

    22. My theory is that the messaging of the yes vote resonated with many Indians who are anti-colonialism due to past British colonisation of India.

    LEAVE A REPLY

    Please enter your comment!
    Please enter your name here