ALP 11.9%
Incumbent MP
Steve Georganas, since 2019. Previously member for Hindmarsh, 2004-2013 and 2016-2019.
Geography
Central Adelaide. The seat of Adelaide includes the Adelaide CBD as well as the surrounding suburbs including Unley, North Adelaide, Norwood, St Peters, Prospect, Croydon Park, Hindmarsh and Blair Athol.
History
Adelaide is an original South Australian electorate, having been created for the 1903 election, the first at which single-member electorates were used in South Australia for a federal election. While the ALP has held the seat for a majority of its existence, it has been held by conservative parties for much of this period, including eleven years in the 1990s and 2000s.
Adelaide was first won in 1903 by Protectionist candidate Charles Kingston. Kingston was a former liberal Premier of South Australia who was elected one of South Australia’s seven MPs in 1901 before winning Adelaide in 1903. He was Australia’s first Minister for Trade, but resigned from the ministry in 1903. He was re-elected to Adelaide in 1906 before dying of a stroke in 1908.
The ensuing by-election was won by the ALP’s Ernest Roberts. Roberts served as a minister in Andrew Fisher’s government and was re-elected in 1910 and 1913 before dying suddenly later in 1913. Another by-election in Adelaide was held in early 1914 and was won by the ALP’s Edwin Yates.
Yates was re-elected at the 1914 and 1917 elections, but was defeated in 1919 by Nationalist candidate Reginald Blundell, who had previously been a state MP and minister in the state Labor government before the split over conscription and continued in a conservative government until its defeat in 1918. Blundell only held Adelaide for one term, losing to Yates in 1922. Yates held the seat again for the ALP until 1931.
In 1931 Yates was defeated by United Australia Party candidate Fred Stacey. Stacey held the seat for the UAP until 1943, when an ALP landslide win swept Stacey aside, and Adelaide was won by ALP candidate Cyril Chambers. Chambers served as Ben Chifley’s Minister for the Army following the 1946 election until Chifley’s defeat in 1949.
Chambers remained in Parliament in opposition, although criticism of HV Evatt’s leadership saw him expelled for a year in 1957-8, and by the time he was readmitted it was too late to be preselected for the 1958 election, and he was replaced by the ALP’s Joe Sexton.
Sexton held Adelaide until 1966, when he was defeated by Andrew Jones of the Liberal Party, who was 22 at the time and one of the youngest people ever elected to Australia’s federal parliament. Jones held the seat for one term but lost it in 1969 when the political balance swung back from the Liberal landslide of 1966.
The ALP’s Chris Hurford won the seat in 1969, and held the seat for eighteen years. He served as a minister in the first two terms of the Hawke government before retiring at the end of 1987 to take up the position of Consul-General to New York. His retirement triggered a third Adelaide by-election in February 1988, where a large swing saw the seat lost to Liberal candidate Mike Pratt.
Pratt only held Adelaide for two years, losing to the ALP’s Bob Catley at the 1990 election. Catley lost the seat in 1993 to Trish Worth, who held the seat for the Liberal Party for over a decade. She held the seat at the next three elections, but lost in 2004 to the ALP’s Kate Ellis, going against the trend of a strong national result for the Liberal Party.
Ellis was re-elected four times, and served as a minister in the Labor government from 2007 to 2013. She retired at the 2019 election.
South Australia lost a seat at the pre-2019 redistribution, and Adelaide became safer for Labor. Labor MP Steve Georganas, who had held the neighbouring seat of Hindmarsh at all but one election since 2004, won the seat of Adelaide. Georganas won Adelaide again in 2022.
- Steve Georganas (Labor)
- Amy Grantham (Liberal)
- Steven Marks (Trumpet of Patriots)
- Mat Monti (Greens)
Assessment
Adelaide is a safe Labor seat.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Steve Georganas | Labor | 45,086 | 40.0 | -0.3 |
| Amy Grantham | Liberal | 36,080 | 32.0 | -4.2 |
| Rebecca Galdies | Greens | 22,666 | 20.1 | +4.4 |
| Gayle Allwood | One Nation | 3,376 | 3.0 | +3.0 |
| Sean Allwood | United Australia | 3,055 | 2.7 | -0.5 |
| Matthew McMillan | Fusion | 1,631 | 1.4 | +1.5 |
| Faith Gerhard | Federation Party | 870 | 0.8 | +0.8 |
| Informal | 4,438 | 3.8 | +0.1 |
2022 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Steve Georganas | Labor | 69,816 | 61.9 | +3.7 |
| Amy Grantham | Liberal | 42,948 | 38.1 | -3.7 |
Polling places have been divided into three parts: north, south-east and west.
The ALP won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in all three areas, ranging from 60.7% in the south-east to 69.7% in the west.
The Greens came third, with a primary vote ranging from 18.4% in the north to 26.8% in the south-east.
| Voter group | GRN prim | ALP 2PP | Total votes | % of votes |
| North | 18.4 | 62.3 | 33,327 | 29.6 |
| West | 24.0 | 69.7 | 15,647 | 13.9 |
| South-East | 26.8 | 60.7 | 13,326 | 11.8 |
| Other votes | 17.0 | 59.2 | 25,513 | 22.6 |
| Pre-poll | 19.5 | 59.9 | 24,951 | 22.1 |
Election results in Adelaide at the 2022 federal election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for Labor, the Liberal Party and the Greens.
The Greenest seat in SA – wouldn’t surprise me if this was but on a target seat for 2025 for the Greens SA.
@CG the greens are a long way from taking seats in SA. tbh id be surprised if they held on to Ryan and Brisbane in QLD. id say theres about 3 in VIC they have hopes of taking, Wills, Cooper and Macnamara will certainly be on their list
Labor will retain this in 2025. Little chance of the Greens picking up a seat in SA/NT/WA.
The primary vote gap between Labor and the Greens is like 20 points here. I think that gap is too big to close in one election. in 3CP terms it looks like the gap narrows slightly to 18.6 points. So effectively the Greens would need to get a 9.3% swing directly from Labor to get ahead of Labor. I think that’s a tough ask in one election.
I reckon Sturt might be a better bet for the Greens in the short-run, at least in getting ahead of Labor. The primary vote gap is only 14.3 points, and in 3CP terms 13.2, so the Greens only need roughly a 6.6% swing in 3CP from Labor to get ahead of them. Sturt doesn’t have a Labor incumbent and no real Labor history at a federal level so I would think Labor won’t be as well-resourced in Sturt in comparison to defending Adelaide. I’d also note that the Greens seem pretty keen to have a good go at the state seat of Dunstan (held by former Lib premier Steven Marshall), which sits in the inner west of Sturt. It looks like the Greens have already preselected their candidate there (Katie McCusker, 2022 Sturt candidate) and are doing regular door knocks according to public social media, so regardless of whether there is a byelection in Dunstan soon, the long-term campaigning they do in Dunstan will probably help them federally for a Sturt campaign.
Interestingly the Liberals have won this seat before, but lost it in 2004 on TPP despite having a higher primary vote. Ever since then Labor has won the seat and they have won the primary vote there at every election since except for in 2016. However, in 2022, Labor and the Liberals only had a primary vote gap between them of 7.98%, but because the Greens got 20.10% of the vote, Labor managed to get 61.91% of the TPP vote.
However, I should note that the state seat of Adelaide was held by Rachel Sanderson of the Liberal Party from 2010 until 2022 (when Lucy Hood won the seat for Labor).
Anyway, my call is Labor hold.
Greens haven’t even been able to make much of a a dent in the state seat of Adelaide. While they’re well positioned to pick up a lot of left of centre vote from Labor, they’re probably better positioned in areas where the Liberals tend to win (on primaries if not the seat). That’s Sturt as GPPS said above, and at the state level Dunstan and Heysen.
I think Greens will pick up Perth before Adelaide – the two seats are fairly similar but Perth seems to have stronger pockets of Green vote and a lot of Gorman’s primary vote may disappear (WA is unpredictable after 2021. There seem to be some flurries of doorknocking there too.
Neither compare to actual Green target seat Richmond though, where they preselected 2 years out.
Labor will retain this in 2025. There was rumblings that the right faction of the ALP would kick Steve and Senator Marielle Smith would take the spot but its clear thats not happening. Also see commentary on Sturt re potential green win in the future, no way its happening in Adelaide with the western suburb belt
Been flicking through some of the very in-depth analysis in this topic so I thought I might add my two cents worth.
Under the assumption that Labor will have Steve Georganas again next year and the Liberals have endorsed Amy Grantham to run again, this will be a Labor hold. Not just with the incumbency factor, but the demographics of this electorate is also worth looking at.
Unlike the other metropolitan electorates named under the capital city (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth) which are all contained within the CBDs and (in Perth’s case) surrounding inner-city suburbs, Adelaide (the electorate) also contains a range of different suburbs (with significantly different demo profiles) surrounding the CBD.
In the west you have suburbs like Mile End, Keswick, Woodville which are traditional Labor heartland areas, in the north is Prospect, Kilburn, Blair Athol, Croydon Park, Regency Park which has a very multicultural profile with many migrants from the Middle East/Vietnam living in the area (if you’re in Adelaide, go along Prospect Road and past the Regency Road intersection and you’ll get what I mean) which is a strong Labor voting cohort yet again. Then to the North-East you have Collinswood, Greenacres, the newly developed Lightsview, Northgate etc, the latter two are significantly gentrified areas. This plus the inner-city Adelaide areas (minus North Adelaide which seems to have always voted Liberal) makes the Labor vote so strong.
Liberals do very well in the eastern flank of the electorate in places like Walkerville, Gilberton and south like Unley, Malvern, Hyde Park etc which are blue-ribbon blue suburbs with affluent residents and house prices exceeding $1.5 million in many cases. What makes this area harder to break through is that the demos here are more older and retired, and would therefore be unlikely to be small-l liberals that’d probably vote Teal in places like Wentworth or Kooyong.
The Greens vote are mainly concentrated within the CBD (naturally) but given the strength of both Labor and Liberal votes in the other areas, the Greens won’t have a chance of making the TPP (at least for the next election), and even if they somehow miraculously did, they’d be a long way from beating Labor who’s going to benefit from the strong western suburbs vote and Liberal preferences elsewhere.
Agree Tommo9
I dont think the Greens will pick up this seat for a while (they are more likely to pick up Higgins if it still exists) as you correctly stated it is very demographically mixed as Adelaide is a small city. The other thing is as Adelaide has slow population growth gentrification is a slower process here.
@Nimalan Should also add that suburbs like Bowden and Brampton are undergoing fairly evident gentrification from its industrial past so that could potentially be another area for the Greens to gain strength (though it won’t be to the scale of Brunswick, Fitzroy, Northcote etc) in the future. But Labor would still have the upper hand overall given Labor’s strength on a state and federal level overall.
Correction: Brompton not Brampton.
SA Greens seem to have chosen Sturt as their target seat. I think they should have chosen Adelaide though. The Liberal vote in Adelaide is strong enough that there is no risk of the Libs falling to 3rd. Greens 3CP here is 23.15%, they’d need a scenario of strong swing ALP-GRN and than another ALP-LIB swing to win with maybe 30% 3CP.
Greens outpolled the Libs in Adelaide in 11 booths, and Labor in 1. Greens would be better off targeting the state seat of Adelaide which contains all their best booths.
Greens won’t be able to win federal Adelaide if they can’t even crack 15% in state Adelaide. There’s ways for Greens to make inroads into all the diverse parts of the seat, but without even the “base” areas being all that solid, it will be hard to make the case for a winnable seat.
If Greens can secure even one overlapping state seat, then they could win here when the tide goes out on Labor, as an alternative outlet to the Liberals. Boothby may be in a similar boat, or Mayo if Sharkie finishes up. In the mean time, targeting Sturt makes sense – it means Greens aren’t exclusively targeting Labor held seats, have something to do other than reelect SHY, and where “Green preferences” could be the narrative for an ALP gain in an election where Labor might otherwise go backwards.
i agree they should win a state seat and then can challenge for a Federal seat. i would say Boothby is hard for the Greens as it includes working class areas in the Centre of the seat.
The seat Adelaide narrowly voted No to the The Voice Referendum given an equivalent seat in Melbourne is like Higgins, Melbourne and Fraser combined yet all those 3 seats voted Yes. I understand the lower gentrification in SA might had played a role but is there other issues that might had lowered the Yes Vote?
@Marh The lower level of gentrification (apart from Bowden, Brompton etc) is definitely a factor, although I’d argue that the demo mix in Adelaide (electorate) overall played a bigger role.
The working class, industrial western suburbs are kind of like your Ipswich, Logan etc, whilst the north past Regency Road is very much Western Sydney with the multicultural diaspora and they all had a fairly high No vote (Kilburn, Broadview, Kilkenny etc). The Liberal areas actually voted Yes (Goodwood, Unley) which suggests that that part of the world is Small-l liberal, but the ones that voted No (Walkerville, Gilberton) are your old money Liberal like Toorak and Armadale rather than Hawthorn or Kew. The CBD itself was overwhelmingly Yes as well as Bowden and Brompton but the bigger margins of No in the northern parts of the electorate made it a narrow No margin overall.
@Tommo9 similarly the most Liberal parts of Clark and Newcastle voted Yes (Sandy Bay in Clark (Hobart) and Merewether, Merewether Heights and The Junction in Hobart). However, Sandy Bay Beach (the most Liberal part of Hobart) only narrowly voted Yes. Similarly Terrigal itself on the Central Coast which is Liberal voted narrowly Yes but the other booths in and around Terrigal voted No. Docklands used to be the only area of the Melbourne CBD where the Liberals did well (in 2016 the Liberals finished first but the Greens won it with 53.1% TPP on Labor preferences) and it voted Yes. Millers Point and Pyrmont are the most Liberal parts of the inner Sydney CBD and they both voted Yes. Sturt narrowly voted No and it’s a Liberal seat. All the teal seats voted Yes too (though Mackellar barely voted Yes).
The referendum wasn’t divided on party lines, it was mainly divided by social status. The elites and upper-class mostly voted Yes while the middle, lower and working-class united to (for the most part) vote No. And it’s the latter who would’ve known more about the struggles faced by Indigenous people than the former. I grew up in a conservative rural town and you could (and still can) see the issues Indigenous people face even though they’re only a minority there. But in the inner-city you can’t see it as much because most seats in major cities have an Indigenous population of less than 1%. However, the cities are where you see ethnic issues more visibly.
@Nether Portal, the richest areas like Vaucluse, Toorak and Hamilton also voted No to the Voice and even in some seats (like Deakin) it was richer suburbs that voted No while the middle class areas voted Yes. This might indicate professions might be a better indicator than income.
@Marh yep that’s true.
Top five least English-speaking seats in SA:
1. Adelaide (Labor): 60.0%
2. Sturt (Liberal): 66.3%
3. Makin (Labor): 72.7%
4. Hindmarsh (Labor): 73.3%
5. Spence (Labor): 75.7%
Greens have preselected a very young candidate and basically talk about Adelaide the way they talk about all the other lower house seats in SA (other than Sturt). In previous elections they’ve preselected experienced campaigners or relative “star candidates” for this seat in order to drive up their vote at the Senate race (e.g. Barbara Pocock in 2019 before she ran for the senate in 2022).
If Greens have any designs on this seat, they aren’t going to come to a head in 2025. Easy ALP retain.
Labor hold. No issues here with a high profile long-time member and an area that’s trending more and more left, even the usually conservative North Adelaide and Unley. Keep an eye out on the Greens vote outside the city though. Usually it’s Brompton that gets the highest Green vote outside the city but Torrensville, Mile End and Goodwood are starting to see Green shoots appear in their booths by coming 2nd to Labor. I’d anticipate Prospect to emerge as the next booth with a high Green vote with the rapidly changing dynamic of the area and we’d have a Lab vs Green contest in the next few cycles.
Though what will keep it safe Labor are the working class, more derelict areas in the north and west.