Chisholm – Australia 2025

ALP 3.3%

Incumbent MP
Carina Garland, since 2022.

• Geography
• Redistribution
• History
• Candidates
• Assessment
• 2022 results
• Booth breakdown
• Results maps

Geography
Eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Chisholm covers northern parts of the Monash council area along with small parts of the Whitehorse, Boroondara and Stonnington council areas. Suburbs include Ashburton East, Ashwood,  Burwood, Burwood East, Blackburn South, Chadstone, Glen Iris, Malvern East, Mount Waverley and Glen Waverley.

Redistribution
Chisholm changed quite dramatically, shifting west to take in Ashburton, Malvern East and Glen Iris from the abolished seat of Higgins and small area from Kooyong. Chisholm lost Box Hill to Menzies and Notting Hill to Hotham. These changes cut the Labor margin from 6.4% to 3.3%. About 64.5% of the enrolment of the new Chisholm was already contained in Chisholm prior to the redistribution, with almost 30% of enrolment coming from Higgins. The old seat of Higgins was cut into pieces, but Chisholm took in the largest share of Higgins, with about one third of the old seat being moved into Chisholm.

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 from 2016 to 2022.

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. Liu held the seat for one term, but lost in 2022 to Labor’s Carina Garland.

Candidates

• Katie Allen (Liberal)
• Kath Davies (Independent)
• Carina Garland (Labor)
• Peter Jones (Family First)
• Tim Randall (Greens)

Assessment
Chisholm swung very strongly to Labor in 2022, when areas with large communities of Chinese-Australian voters swung hard against the Liberal Party. But Chisholm has been redrawn significantly since the last election, with strongly Chinese suburbs like Box Hill replaced with parts of the former seat of Higgins. The chart above shows that the new boundaries are more right-leaning, but would have been even more right-leaning in the past. On the new boundaries, Labor would not have won Chisholm even in 2007, whereas in reality they held the seat from 1998 until 2016.

But the newly-added areas are much less strong for the Liberal Party than they were when the area was represented by Peter Costello in the 2000s, and they no longer have an incumbency benefit. Garland will have a fight on her hands to be re-elected but incumbency should help her.

2022 result

2022 two-party-preferred result

Booth breakdown

Booths in Chisholm have been split into four parts. Polling places in the Monash council area have been grouped as Central and South-East. Those in the Boroondara and Stonnington council areas have been grouped as West, while those in the Whitehorse council area have been grouped as North.

The ALP won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in all four areas, ranging from 51.3% in the west to almost 60% in the centre and north.

The Greens came third, with a primary vote ranging from 10.1% in the south-east to 18.2% in the west.

Election results in Chisholm at the 2022 federal election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for the Liberal Party, Labor, the Greens and independent candidates.

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