Kennedy – Australia 2025

The agricultural rural areas were always Nationals while the industrial ones were always Labor. Now both are solidly Nationals, with limited exceptions now (e.g Gladstone and Whyalla anre industrial but still vote Labor).

Barcaldine is one of the weakest booths of the LNP in Maranoa but nevertheless it’s still now an LNP booth. Barcaldine was where the Labor Party was founded.

@Nimalan thanks for the booths, I will calculate that now.

@ NP
Look at seats like Maranoa, Gwydir, Riverina and Hume. None of those seats were ever industrial but in the past Labor often won it.

@Nimalan they had union movements though whereas seats like Cowper, Gippsland, Lyne, Mallee and New England didn’t and thus always stuck with conservatives.

State TCP/TPP here (2024):

* KAP/Labor: 61.1%
* LNP: 38.9%

The KAP TCP/Labor TPP on the state level is 2.0% lower than Bob Katter’s federal TCP but 0.2% higher than Labor’s federal notional TPP.

Since the three KAP seats (Hill, Hinchinbrook and Traeger) are KAP vs LNP but Burdekin, Cook and Mulgrave are LNP vs Labor, the KAP TCP in the Kennedy booths in the three KAP seats and the Labor TPP in the Kennedy booths in the three other seats are combined. Kennedy is a KAP vs LNP seat.

Now that we’ve done all 30 seats I’ll post the map once it’s finalised.

@ Nether Portal
Can i ask if you can do a Table when you get a moment for % of people with No religion by electorate. It is actually good timing with Deeming V Pesutto issue will religion versus secularism be a major divide in society going forward and a cause of realignment

@Nimalan sure. You’ll find that rural seats often have high percentages of no religion while ethnic seats have high percentages of people who follow a religion (not necessarily Christianity).

However the non-religious population in Australia is higher than what it says on the census because lots of people would’ve been baptised Christian and many of those people aren’t religious anymore but still put their old religion on the census. Plus you have to be 18 to fill out the census so religious families might have non-religious children.

It appears that Australians usually describe themselves as non-religious rather than atheist or agnostic though.

@ Nether Portal
Thanks look forward to it
Religion and Faith are two different things sometime religion is more about identity than belief. A lot of people who say No Religion actually believe in a God of some sort but do not identify with any of the worlds religion. Something i have found is that ethnic forms of Christianity like Greek Orthodoxy is actually growing even with little immigration these days as it more about identity. Judaism is also growing slowly even with little immigration because even Secular Jews have a strong identity. I have met a lot of people who are Catholic but only go to Church on special occasions like Christmas Eve, Easter but they still prefer to have a wedding in a church and Baptise children but they do not really care about abortion, SSM etc.

The reason inland NSW and Queensland seats used to sometimes vote Labor was that there were large pastoral properties that depended on iterinant workers like shearers who were heavily unionised (AWU) and railway workers – more widely scattered during the days of steam. Towns like Junee and Cootamundra were seen as ‘Labor’ towns. More mechanisation, railway rationalisation and decline of the wool industry saw the decline of this rural working class. Southern NSW was also much more Catholic and some of this vote went to the DLP. Similarly in Queensland much of the rural Labor vote went to the QLP and DLP after 1957. In inland NSW there was also still Labor infrastructure as they held state seats until 1988. Inland NSW is a classic example of where Labor has hollowed itself out – it has taken the ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ approach and outsourced the anti-Coalition vote to various independents or the Shooters. With the result that Labor primary votes are hard pressed to get to 20%. It would be interesting to know how much Labor infrastructure is left in towns like Armidale, Wagga, Bathurst or even Broken Hill.

@ Redistributed,

Good points. I think Gundagai was seen as a Railway town.

When do you feel the Catholic/Protestant divide almost ceased. In the Republic referendum many commentators said that many Catholics were more Republican than Protestant. i dont think that was a big difference in the Voice referendum.

@Redistributed yes but some regional seats like Barker, Gippsland, Lyne and Mallee have never been won by Labor (I grew up in Lyne). Cowper has only been held by Labor once and it was for one term.

I grew up in Cowper and first voted in that seat.
There were definitely trade unions in Cowper – in the timber industry, sugar mills, abattoirs etc.
In regional areas, Labor Party support was strong among small business owners, as the coalition were the parties of big business.
The country party’s base was small farmers. In the regions with small farms, farmers were a larger voting block. In NSW, this was primarily the Northeast corner of the state, and in Queensland, the Southeast corner outside of Brisbane. Prior to the recent Queensland state election, the bulk of the LNP’s state seats were still in the rural southeast outside of Brisbane.

Maranoa was one of five rural seats Labor gained in 1940. I suspect the win had more to do with that election campaign, rather than a sudden uptake in trade unionism.

@WW definitely a small farmer thing but also unionism was never really that big in southern part of the seat. At least not the unions Labor work with.

Nether Portal,
If you dig around you will probably find that there were and still are many trade unions active in that area. The majority of Labor voters are not active in the trade union movement.

Labor MPs elected in rural areas tended to be small businessmen.
Small businesses in country towns have been replaced by the large business chains, with their outlets concentrated in the larger population centres.

@Watson Watch growing up the small businesses weren’t trade unionist and they aren’t now (I lived in a small town), but of course that was only the 1990s and 2000s.

I wasn’t saying small businesses were trade unionist.
Small business owners often voted Labor, and were Labor Party candidates, because Labor supported small business while the coalition supported big business.

Katter nearly lost Kennedy in 2013 when the swing was last on, Katter Party in Qld stabbed the LNP in the back over abortion laws, it didn’t do them any good, they were seen to be playing Ducks and Drakes.
Time could be up for old bluffi n ‘and blusterin’ Bob after 32 years ridin’ the Canberra gravy train and another 18 in Qld Parliament before that.
******************************************
The Labor Party of early 20th century Qld bears no resemblance to today’s Labor Party.
The bush Labor MLAs of those days were miners, cane farmers, businessmen with organisational and administrative skills.
Post War saw an exodus from the bush into the coastal cities and Brisbane and the writing was on the wall for Labor west of the Dividing Range.

@Gympie given that all the KAP members won comfortably on the state level where abortion was an issue I don’t see that happening on the federal level where abortion isn’t an issue.

However, what we did see at the state election was Labor dropped to third place in all three KAP seats and they all became KAP vs LNP contests. In 2020, Hinchinbrook was KAP vs LNP but Hill and Traeger were KAP vs Labor.

Who would likely win this area between the two major parties if Katter wasn’t here, I personally reckon that now the LNP but there would’ve been a time like through the Rudd/Gillard years where Labor could have won here.

@SpaceFish
2 Party Preferred result from 2022 was LNP 60.16%; ALP 39.84%.
https://results.aec.gov.au/27966/Website/HouseDivisionPage-27966-167.htm
LNP wins it eventually.
LNP got 40% to Katter’s 29% in 2013, but it wasn’t quite enough.