ALP 13.3%
Incumbent MP
Matt Thistlethwaite, since 2013. Previously senator for New South Wales 2011-2013.
Geography
South-eastern Sydney. Kingsford Smith covers southern parts of the eastern suburbs of Sydney, including all of the former Botany Council and most of Randwick Council. Kingsford Smith also covers a string of suburbs on the western shore of Botany Bay in the former Rockdale council area. Kingsford Smith includes the suburbs of Brighton-Le-Sands, Coogee, Kyeemagh, Monterey, Ramsgate Beach, Randwick, Maroubra, Mascot, Malabar, Kensington and part of Randwick.
Redistribution
Kingsford Smith took a turn south-west, expanding past the airport to take in Brighton-Le-Sands and Kyeemagh from Barton and Monterey and Ramsgate Beach from Cook. Kingsford Smith lost the remainder of Clovelly and part of Randwick to Wentworth. These changes cut the Labor margin from 14.5% to 13.3%.
History
Kingsford Smith was first created for the 1949 election after the House of Representatives was expanded. The seat has always been held by the ALP, originally being a marginal seat in its early years before gradually becoming safer, and it has been solidly safe since at least the 1960s.
Gordon Anderson (ALP) won the seat in 1949 with a bare 50.9% margin over the Liberal Party, and only won a 50.5% margin upon reelection in 1951. Anderson won with 54.2% in 1954, before retiring in 1955.
The seat was won in 1955 by Daniel Curtin (ALP), who had previously held the seat of Watson since 1949. Curtin won in 1955 with 55% of the vote, and the seat’s has only dipped below 5% once since 1955, in the 1966 landslide.
Curtin held the seat until 1969, and in that time solidified the ALP’s hold on the seat, but was almost defeated at his last election in 1966.
Curtin retired in 1969 and was succeeded by the state member for Randwick, Lionel Bowen, who won the seat with a margin over 10% for the first time. Bowen was a minister in the Whitlam government and became a senior member of the ALP in opposition in the late 1970s.
Bowen served as Deputy Prime Minister for the first three terms of the Hawke government, from 1983 until his retirement at the 1990 election.
He was succeeded in 1990 by Laurie Brereton. Brereton had briefly succeeded Bowen as member for Randwick from 1970 until the seat was abolished in 1971, when he moved to the seat of Heffron. Brereton served as a minister in the Wran and Unsworth governments before switching to the federal arena in 1990, after the Liberals won a landslide victory in New South Wales.
Brereton served as a federal minister in the final term of the Keating government and served as Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1996 until 2001, when he moved to the backbench.
In 2004 Brereton retired and was succeeded by Peter Garrett, former lead singer of Midnight Oil and President of the Australian Conservation Foundation. Garrett had also previously run for the Nuclear Disarmament Party in the Senate at the 1984 election, losing due to the Labor and Liberal parties preferencing each other over the NDP.
Garrett joined the ALP frontbench upon the election of Kevin Rudd as Labor leader in late 2006. Garrett served as Environment Minister in the first term of the Labor government, and as Minister for School Education from 2010 to 2013.
Peter Garrett retired in 2013, and he was replaced in Kingsford Smith by Matt Thistlethwaite, who had served as a Labor senator since 2011. Thistlethwaite has been re-elected three times.
Assessment
Kingsford Smith is a safe Labor seat.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing | Redist |
| Matt Thistlethwaite | Labor | 46,697 | 47.9 | +2.7 | 47.4 |
| Grace Tan | Liberal | 27,929 | 28.7 | -7.8 | 29.6 |
| Stuart Davis | Greens | 16,401 | 16.8 | +4.7 | 15.8 |
| Anthony Tawaf | United Australia | 3,388 | 3.5 | +1.7 | 3.8 |
| Darrin Marr | One Nation | 3,051 | 3.1 | +3.1 | 3.5 |
| Informal | 4,572 | 4.5 | -1.3 |
2022 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing | Redist |
| Matt Thistlethwaite | Labor | 62,868 | 64.5 | +5.7 | 63.3 |
| Grace Tan | Liberal | 34,598 | 35.5 | -5.7 | 36.7 |
Booths have been divided into four areas. Booths in the former Botany Bay and Randiwck council areas have each been grouped together. Booths in the City of Randwick have been split between Coogee in the north and Maroubra in the south.
Labor won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in all four areas, ranging from 50.9% in Rockdale to 67.2% in Botany.
The Greens came third, with a primary vote ranging from 8.8% in Rockdale to 23.7% in Coogee.
| Voter group | GRN prim | ALP 2PP | Total votes | % of votes |
| Maroubra | 14.8 | 65.0 | 17,565 | 17.7 |
| Botany | 13.9 | 67.2 | 13,558 | 13.7 |
| Coogee | 23.7 | 66.6 | 12,716 | 12.8 |
| Rockdale | 8.8 | 50.9 | 5,256 | 5.3 |
| Pre-poll | 14.5 | 62.2 | 35,437 | 35.7 |
| Other votes | 17.3 | 62.1 | 14,650 | 14.8 |
Election results in Kingsford Smith at the 2022 federal election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for Labor, the Liberal Party and the Greens.
Doesn’t make sense Parts of Rockdale is in this seat. Looks like a gerrymander
@micheal simply a numbers game its got to go somewhere and they were determined to push grayndler to the cooks river.
Can’t gerrymander in Australia. The AEC controls boundaries
@Michael It is weird. The airport totally disconnects the 2 parts of the electorate. What they could have done, and @Ben Raue suggested during the redistribution, was have Kingsford-Smith take the southern part of Sydney and push Sydney further west into Grayndler, Grayndler grab a bit more of Barton.
But that would give a bunch of Greens voters to Sydney maybe threatening Plibersek.
I should have added: the southern part of Sydney is quite strong Labor. Losing that would have added to the problems for Plibersek.
They did it because they wanted to use the Cooks river as a boundary for grayndler
They could have expanded Grayndler further west into Reid or Watson, and ended up with Watson re-raking enough of Barton to allow Barton to retain that area west of the airport.
Surely something like that could have worked?
@Michael and @greg-no more than the position of Lord Howe Island which is part of Sydney, when the island is closest in distance to Coffs Harbour(Cowper), Norfolk Island which is in Bean when the closest mainland electorate is Richmond(Byron Bay) or the Cocos Islands which is part of Lingiari when it is closest to Exmouth(Durack).
The AEC could use Botany Bay as the locator for the electorate with the electorate consisting of Maroubra Pagewood and Botany on the east and suburbs south of that to Cape Banks,Kyeemagh and suburbs south to Sandringham and the southern boundary of Kurnell.
That’s a pretty ridiculous suggestion idea @Sabena. Kurnell? Really?
AMFS-why?
The common feature is that they are (nearly) all on or adjacent to Botany Bay. Kurnell is physically distinct from the rest of Cook
i also submitted something similar to these boundaries although different but had grayndler going to the cooks river also
Kurnell is literally connected to Cronulla and the Sutherland Shire and disconnected from every other area you mentioned.
The only requirement is that a redistribution comply with s73 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act.
Subsection 4 reads:
(4) In making the determination, the augmented Electoral Commission:
(a) shall, as far as practicable, endeavour to ensure that the number of electors enrolled in each Electoral Division in the State will not, at the projection time determined under section 63A, be less than 96.5% or more than 103.5% of the average divisional enrolment of that State at that time; and
(b) subject to paragraph (a), shall give due consideration, in relation to each Electoral Division, to:
(i) community of interests within the Electoral Division, including economic, social and regional interests;
(ii) means of communication and travel within the Electoral Division;
(iv) the physical features and area of the Electoral Division; and
(v) the boundaries of existing Divisions in the State;
You can argue that (b)(ii) requires Kurnell to be in Cook because the only public transport available is from Kurnell to Cronulla but it is not decisive.
I think there may be a bus service from Sandringham to Eastlakes shopping centre,but otherwise there is little connection from west to east in the electorate.
can confirm that there is/was a bus from Sans Souci to UNSW via Mascot/Eastlakes – though agree that these areas have little in common. The forced merger of Botany and Rockdale councils also made little sense to me. A merger of Rockdale, Kogarah and Hurstville into a single St George council would have been more sensible as those areas are closely connected
It is literally antithetical to b(i)(ii)(iv) and (v) what are you on about???
Perhaps something to keep in mind is as Wentworth and Kingsford Smith will need to keep expanding, some time or later they will almost certainly cross the Cooks River. The only alternative is to further eat into Sydney, which is already very lopsided (when compared with Sydney city LGA, for example).
I definitely agree that this little expansion into Brighton-Le-Sands is a bit of a lazy option taken by the committee. It would have made a lot of sense to put Alexandria/Rosebery/Zetland into Kingsford Smith, Annandale into Sydney and Earlwood into Grayndler, albeit at the cost of moving more electors than just cutting across the airport. For now, I suppose the Cooks River is a nice boundary for Grayndler, but there’s definitely more crossings between Marrickville and Earlwood than there is between Mascot and Brighton-Le-Sands.
Looking at current enrolments and long term trends, when NSW loses its next seat (probably around 3 or 4 years from now), it’s almost certain to be one of the 9 divisions between Parramatta River and Georges River.
Grayndler sits right in the middle of that group and is one of the few names not worth keeping, so I suspect that will get the chop, as was already suggested by many at the recent redistribution. Or it might actually be Sydney as Wentworth could eventually need to take in Surry Hills and the CBD. Either way, that makes room for Kingsford Smith to take in the Green Square area as Barton expands to take in those areas of Western Bayside currently taken by Cook and Kingsford Smith.
Potential political ramifications:
– The Greens will probably only have one seat up for grabs once Albanese and Plibersek retire, instead of the current two
– All of Banks, Reid and Wentworth will continue to absorb more Labor friendly territory over time unless a larger redistribution or expansion of parliament occurs
So in the process of collecting data for a blog post that’s going up tomorrow, I was able to calculate the proportion of the electorate moved to a new seat in major redistributions (when the number of seats change) and the 2024 redistributions had the smallest proportion moved by quite some margin. It seems like the AEC is now significantly prioritising this measure more than they did in the past. Perhaps because of the scale of this year’s redistribution.
Something to discuss after the election.
Are we expect g a post on the qld state redistribution anytime soon?
There is no Queensland state redistribution. And there’s a federal election on. So, no.
I did write about this in 2023. I don’t think much has changed since then.
The qld government just announced the 3 people on the panel. So it’s prbably gonna start soon
Yes. But it hasn’t started yet.