Shortland – Australia 2022

Thanks Nether Portal
NSW Labor got 54.26% at a state level but 51.42 federally so 2.84% needs to be adjusted. The adjusted difference is now 9.8%. This seat voted to the Left of the state by 14.14% at a state level but at a federal level it is only 4.4% to the left of state. According to Antony Green prior to 2019 Shortland voted about 5-10 points to the left of state often averaging around 8% stronger than the state as a whole.

State level TPP here in 2019:

* Labor: 61.6%
* Liberal: 38.4%

So there was a +6.8% swing to Labor here in 2023. Nevertheless, while this is a much better result for the Liberals than 2023, Labor still did 7.1% better here on the state level in 2019 than on the federal level in 2019.

@Nimalan: Shouldn’t gentrification benefit Labor rather than the Liberals?

There’s a stark contrast between Federal Labor and State Labor between the Hawkesbury River and Port Stephens i.e. the Central Coast, Lake Macquarie, Hunter and Port Stephens, not so much Newcastle.

Shortland, Robertson, Dobell, Hunter and Paterson are on margins of 6% or less, though Shortland and Hunter have been Labor-held forever.

Federal Labor hasn’t recovered since the working-class backlash of 2019. The Lake Macquarie area is becoming more favourable for the Liberals as it contains more tradies and blue collar workers than the average and a large retiree population. This may be counter balanced by the gentrification and urban sprawl of Newcastle and the white collar WFH crowd who commute to Sydney.

@ Joseph
Gentrification can work both ways. Inner city gentrification often flips an area from Red to Green such as Fitzroy, Glebe, Newtown, West End etc. However, Suburban gentrification the most recent example is the George River (East Hils/Oatley) and Federal seat of Banks which are trending Liberal with the rise of home values along the water. Drommoyne is more Liberal these days, John Howard failed to win it and the Libs did not hold it between 1988-1995. The seat of Carrum in Victoria was also trending Liberal until the Libs shifted to the right. The Sutherland Shire is also more affluent these days back in the 1970s-1980s it was mortgage belt so there are indeed examples of gentrification/increased affluence benefiting the Libs.

@ Nether Portal
We can also look at Paterson and Hunter once we are done with the QLD seats if you like as there will be a huge gap.

Yes I agree completely about gentrification @Nimalan, it can go either way.

When an inner-city area is gentrified it often flips from red to green – a good example being Moorooka in Brisbane, which is traditionally a working-class ethnic area, but is becoming affluent and socially progressive due to pandemic-era interstate migration and subsequent property price rises.

A good example of suburban gentrification is Sandgate and Wynnum, two areas which are traditionally affordable middle-class suburbs on Brisbane’s shoreline. They have voted strongly Labor at all levels of government for decades. However, the rise in property prices due to pandemic-era interstate migration has meant that these areas have started to gentrify and become more affluent. Wynnum particularly has experienced significant swings to the LNP because of this – the LNP had a surprise victory in the safe Labor council ward, and almost came close to winning the safe Labor state seat.

Gentrification in Hill End [next to West End] started in 1978 when the Qld property market emerged from the 1973 crash and inner city property values exploded.
Basically, what was tragic dirt became magic dirt overnight and renters wanted to live there again.
Spring Hill and Paddington were similar, Bulimba took another 15 years.
The reason these areas don’t go Liberal is the ALP branch structure in place for 100+_ years, even though manufacturing was gone by 2010.

@Nimalan sure, but I will probably also calculate Paterson from 2019 too since there was a massive swing to Labor in Port Stephens in 2023 that is highly unlikely to remain.

I think it’s safe to say that with the exception of the more affluent or middle-class suburbs which are more Liberal than the working-class ones (Merewether is an affluent small-l-liberal area, Catherine Hill Bay is affluent and would vote Liberal if it had a booth which it will in the future, Valentine and Warners Bay are middle-class so more Liberal-friendly, Coal Point, Cooranbong and Morisset are more Liberal friendly too), the Hunter is the Moreton Bay of NSW. They’re happy to vote for the more moderate state Labor but are not impressed with more progressive leaders like Albo and Bill Shorten (2019 Shorten I should say) because of how they suck up to the Greens.

The state Liberals almost won Merewether in 2019. The only thing that stopped them was the swing to Labor thanks to Tim Crakanthorp’s personal vote. They also did well in areas like Cardiff Heights (but not Cardiff) and Warners Bay and even won Coal Point. It will be interesting to see how Newcastle shifts in the future. As a former resident of Newcastle (during my uni years I rented in Lambton and later Merewether Heights), it’s not the place for student politics so I reckon the Greens will gradually become less important except in inner-city left suburbs like Islington and Mayfield (the drug capital of Newcastle).

@AA good point about gentrification. I think it matters on where the people moving in are from too, e.g Byron Bay gentrified from being a popular tourist town full of hippies to a popular tourist town full of lefties. It still has a hippie vibe but it’s shifted even further to the left because people from Sydney and Melbourne moved there. However, the towns around it are still very much hippie towns.