Macnamara – Australia 2025

What is not understood is that there. Is a difference between these are who are Jewish for religious or cultural reasons and those who support the actions.of the.Israeli .government.
It appears the vote here is an almost 3 way.split
Whoever polls the highest between Labor and the greens will win this seat.
The liberals cannot win.
Assuming they poll 3rd would they preference the greens.?

@mick the greens will outpoll labor. most of the jewish vote is in caufield and its not that they support the actions of the israeli govt its the current labor govt has shown lack of support for both the israeli govt and israel as a state and have voted against israeli interests in the UN when it was Israel that was the victim of a terrorist attack. that and the lack of support against anti-semitism and attacks against the jewish community that the govt hasnt been seen doing muhc to combat will drive their votes away from labor and to the libs. on the other side of the coin some people also see the govt as weak in not supporting palestine and the palestinian people especially in gaza and for that reason those votes will be driven from labor to the greens. The liberals will likely poll 1st or second. As in Richmond, Brisbane, Ryan, Griffith and the new seat of Bullwinkel in WA the coalition will always make the 2CP due to the fact that the centre right vote is always 33.33% or greater and thereby ensuring they wil make the count. even if they didnt they learned their lesson from helping get Bandt elected in 2010 and they wont be making that mistake again for the forseeable future as given the federal greens radicalism they dont want anymore greens in the parliament. I wouldnt say they couldnt win in a GRN v LIB contest it would depend how that labor vote breaks and how well the libs do. I expect the 2PP LAB v LIB to recover and be around 43%. but im not gonna right them off especially if there is a decentre labor right vote that could break their way.

@Darth Vader, it’s unlikely to break much less than 80-20 to the Greens, which itself would be well below average and factors in Jewish Labor voters putting the Liberals higher. In neighbouring Prahran, the Labor vote broke 83-17 to the Greens in 2022.

Remember that the more of an ALP to LIB swing there is among Jewish Labor voters from 2022 over the Gaza issue, the less of a Labor vote there even is to be distributed. And as it stands there is only a 12% total Jewish population, not all of that is Zionist, and that’s already where much of the Liberal vote is concentrated even before factoring in a swing.

In the remainder of the seat which is far more demographically similar to the state seat of Prahran, there’s no reason Labor preferences would flow any differently to how they do in Prahran. And Labor HQ would never let Burns put the Liberals above the Greens (Danby did it once without permission and was told to stop).

Burns also wouldn’t risk doing that anyway because he knows that over 80% of the Labor vote is outside the Jewish community, and the controversy that would arise from distributing a HTVC that puts the Liberals higher than the Greens would just drive more of his primary vote straight to the Greens.

If the Labor 3CP is 29%, I think a 22-7 split to the Greens would probably be a minimum they would get (that’s under 76% so would be way below average). For the Liberals to be competitive vs the Greens, the Greens’ share of Labor preferences would probably need to fall below 65%.

@ trent i dont imagine all of the jewish voters will abandon labor and coupled with the fact i expect labor to lose some of the left vote to the greens im certain that it may break better then 80-20 also you have to take into account that labor is also unpopular at a state level and that could help the liberals however i dont see the liberals winning this seat barring some fluke of a landslide here

The current govt of Israel is a disaster the current leader needs to ride off into the sunset to give a chance for peace. Ie the 2 state solution.
No one should be be arming anyone in the middle east including the usa.
There have been many votes in the UN calling for Israel to vacate the occupied territories.

@mick hamaas needs to surrender and disband first if you disarm the state of israel they will be slaughtered. israel isnt ocupying anything. the only ones harming the peace process is iran and hamas. israel wants peace but they are dedicated to destruction of israel and the death of all jews. the “ocupied territories” is land land israel took in war when they were attacked its israeli territory thaey can build whatever nd whereever they want.

@john
Hamas = Israel they are both extreme neither should have weapons. I am sure if I lived under the authority of either I would at the least be in prison..or worse
Just disappear.
A precondition for peace is Benny has no power

@john – You hit on an important point there, which is that I think the type of ALP voter who would preference the Liberals above the Greens, is the type of voter most likely to swing from ALP to LIB as the primary vote anyway.

I am predicting probably a +5 LIB swing at the 3CP level anyway, and most of that will come at the expense of Labor, but specifically at the expense of the type of Labor voter more likely to preference the Liberals above the Greens.

So I think any LIB swing we see, will probably (mostly) offset any impact of ALP preferences flowing to the Liberals anyway.

I would expect a solid 80-20 preference flow to the Greens, which is still below average, but if applied to a 29% ALP 3CP would break around 23-6 to the Greens.

@no they arent one is a terrorist organisation whose sole purpose is to destroy the state of israel and cleanse it of all jews i.e genocide. one is a soverign country and a democratically elected governement. if the state of israel had no weapons they would be wiped out. i agree though once his term is up Netenyahu should retire.

Mick a precondition for peace, which strangely the ALP seem to hold as does basically everyone bar Iran and Qatar, is that Hamas is nowhere near power and in reality totally destroyed. Without that, the moment you get a Palestinian State they will essentially declare war on Israel who will simply walk in and take it and there is no Palestinian state anymore.

@Trent, I still think you are pricing in the possibility of the Libs winning this way too low. I don’t think it is above 50%, but as we saw in QLD there is some evidence that Greens voters have moved out of areas such as this, and if there is both ALP-Lib and Green-Lib moves (not as unlikely as you think) then there is an outside chance of the Libs winning.

@mostly exactly but they will not get statehood until Hamas and the radical elements are gone. Israel will simply not allow them to ever be in that sort of power. Any Palestinian state would have to renounce violence and recognise the right of Israel to exist. Short of that you will never see a 2 state solution. Israel is not occupying anything because the West Bank and Gaza are technically parts of Israel and you cannot illegally occupy your own territory. The West bank was territory taken from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt. Palestine is not currently a country.

The Territory of the Gaza and West Bank are not part of Israel they are occupied territories.. un has passed resolutions calling for Israel to withdraw many times
The extension of israelli settlers is also a provocative and a barrier to peace

@mick and to whom do they belong then? Gaza and the west bank were taken in a war from Egypt and Jordan respectively yea well the UN is as useless as tits on a bull. The UN has no legal authority and just because the UN says something doesnt mean they are right. If Gaza and the West Bank are occupied territory then so is places like Tibet, Chechnya and every thing west of the Bosphorus strait

also Gaza is not occupied by Israel. Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2006.

Gaza is controlled by Israel and blocked at the other end by Egypt.
I consider any country occupied by another against their wishes to be an occupied territory and Tibet certainly fits that definition.. those areas “in” Israel will help form a Palestinian state.

@mick gaza is controlled by Hamas. Palestine is not curently a state and therefore has no territory. Palestine has never been a country it has been a region controlled by one country or another since the Roman times. Palestine is the name the Romans gave Israel in order to to deprive teh Jews of their native homeland. The Jewish and Israeli people are the original inhabitants of the area Israel now occupies. The Jews are as native to Israel as the Aboriginals are to Australia or as the indians are to North America. Tibet was invaded by China whereas “Palestine” was apart of Israel going back millenia. its not a country. it never was.

Despite it being a loss, Greens should be quite encouraged by the by-election result. Greens primaries are about where they need to be. Some of that will be Labor voters, but not that much. Werribee was also indicative of a trend away from both majors , not just a neat ALP to LNP swing.

Liberals seem to be running a decent candidate who will do better than the last few Liberal candidates. That will help keep Macnamara the right order on 3PP for Greens even with a tactical vote campaign for Burns in Caulfield.

100% agree John.

Also, the sole St Kilda booth (which replaced 4 St Kilda booths from 2022) is where they did best not just on primary vote (50.2) and smallest 2CP swing against (-8.3), but most importantly the biggest primary vote swing to them (+6.4).

A sign their vote not only held up in St Kilda but they won Labor voters too.

Meanwhile like you say, all signs pointed to the Liberals also improving

The byelection, to me, pointed to a primary vote order of LIB > GRN >ALP.

And obviously a general election with a strong Labor incumbent won’t have the preferences splitting to the Libs like the byelection (even though I do expect ALP to GRN flows to be weaker than normal) so it should be a comfortable Greens win, although I do expect the Libs will get roughly a +7 2CP swing.

Just further to this too, regarding the Liberal vote: Prahran and Macnamara have had similar Liberals votes over the years, see-sawing between which is 2-3% higher (Prahran was actually about 3% higher in 2022).

The fact that in a byelection, and with no Labor candidate, the Liberals only managed a +5 primary vote swing and 36.2% primary vote, tells me that while the Macnamara Liberals will no doubt get a solid swing, there’s no way they’re erasing a 12+ point margin.

So I think they’ll easily top the 3CP vote but it will definitely remain a case of whoever comes second wins quite comfortably, as I don’t see the Liberal primary vote getting into (or near) the 40s

Of course the Greens vote held up, Labor didn’t run, had Labor run their vote would have gone massively down. Between the QLD election, MRP polling, council results in VIC/NSW, the by elections, all point to a similar story, Labor vote holding up well in the inner city, and the Greens losing ground in the inner city but gaining in the outer suburbs. Labor retain

3CP Predictions

LIB: 42
LAB: 31
GRN: 27

Lab: 55% TPP

@Drake, there the Greens vote only remained stagnant (which I think implies going backwards if Labor were running) was mostly across the area that overlaps with the seat of Melbourne.

In St Kilda, the Greens got a +6.4% swing which I think does imply that it held up independently of the Labor factor.

I agree though that there are also signs the Labor vote didn’t collapse in Prahran. Typically there has been a very low ‘Other’ vote there (only 6% in 2022), but in the absence of Labor running, the combined Liberal & Greens primary only increased by +5 but the ‘Other’ vote increased by +23.

That tells me Labor’s vote would still have been in the low to mid 20s, which is only a very small swing against them.

The council elections didn’t really show anything relating to the Greens vote in Port Phillip. Only a -2.7% swing but that’s in the context of a big push to vote for local independents instead of parties, and at least in the most Green-friendly ward (Alma) they actually lost to an even more Green-ish independent.

I think the Liberals will get a good swing but a 42% 3CP is probably a bit generous. As I mention above, the conditions of the byelection in Prahran were VERY friendly for the Liberals and they only managed a +5 swing and 36% primary vote.

Their vote in Macnamara is coming from a lower 2022 starting point (28% vs 31% in Prahran), and none of those byelection factors favouring them will be in play, so I don’t think they’ll get that high on 3CP, but probably around 39% range.

@Drake Liberals last election got 31,327 33.67 and the overall was 31,327 33.67 Lib, 31,149 33.48 Lab, 30,555 32.84 Grn. I reckon the libs are gonna do a bit beter the 42 maybe 43 or 44. Lab and Grn probably closer on about 28 each. Labor is gonna get hammered especially in the Caulfield area by the Jewish population. Libs could theoretically win seat if they go up against the green assuming an 80/20 split of the Labor vote.

@trent i think a 42% 3cp is about accurate. Labor are gonna get hammered on CoL and Antisemitism response especially in the Caufield area. and based of the by election result the libs could get close against the GRN candidate and possibly win the seat. In my opinion Burns can only win if he goes up against the LIB candidate on grn preferences but tbh i think he finish 3rd on the 3cp.

@john, remember though in Prahran the Liberals only got a +5 swing despite having a LOT of byelection factors working in their favour.

They won the seat and got the much bigger 2CP swing because of the lack of a Labor candidate which won’t be the case in Macnamara.

I can’t see any reason they’d be getting a +10 swing in Macnamara when they only got +5 in a very favourable Prahran byelection.

My guess is they might get a primary vote (and 3CP) swing in the 5-6% range, and then if they face the Greens who will get weaker preference flows from Labor than the other way around, the might get another 2-3% added to their 2CP swing.

Overall, I’d guess the 2CP swing will be in the 7-8% range if they face the Greens (so a Greens 2CP in the 54-55% range).

@trent remember that prahran is the probably the liberals least favourable part of Macnamara. also remember that there was no labor candidate ihis election and the greens stagnant vote was only because labor voters who had no candidate likely proped up what would have been a significatn drop in the primary vote. also now the entire macnamara seat is likely gonna punish josh burns for the problems of the state and federal governments. not to mention people who have become disillusioned with the greens over their stance on antisemitism and other stuff. like prahran the libs wont be able to hold macanamara medium long term even. labors best hope of holding macanara going forward is for the strong liberal parts in caufield to be removed making it a labor vs grn seat and then they will have to rely on liberal preferences. in a LIB vs GRN battle i wouldnt rule out a LIB win this time around

A 12.2% 2CP margin is a massive hurdle even with the factors you mention.

Remember, the Jewish community in Macnamara is only 12% of the enrolment, and is where the Liberal vote is already concentrated (moreso in the postal vote than the booth results due to the Sabbath).

So realistically, even a hard ALP to LIB swing in that community can probably only be around 2-3%.

That swing also means there are less Jewish ALP voters to have too much of an impact on the preference flow to the Greens.

Eg. If the Labor vote within the Jewish community was only 5% and there’s a 2% swing to the Liberals in that community, that only leaves a 3% Jewish ALP vote to impact the preference flow, the two offset each other.

As for the rest of the seat outside the Jewish community, firstly COL is less of an issue in an affluent seat like Macnamara, secondly the polling seems to have shown the Labor vote holding up better in the inner-city than the suburbs (they will still get a swing against but not as hard), and thirdly in specific relation to the Prahran byelection, if the Liberals were going to get a big swing in the inner-south it would have shown up in the Prahran byelection and it didnt: only a 5% swing. The absence of an ALP candidate should actually have boosted this.

@trent when i was helping at the Prahran polling booth CoL is the one thing the greens were basically running on.

also that swing was on the primary vote. on 2pp against the greens they managed a 13.6% swing. the wide field of independents obviously blunted the primary swing. also i imagine labors first preferences had there been a candidate the greens likely would have garnered at least a third of those if not more indicating that the greens primary would have acutally been massivley down

so i acutal fact its the greens primary that should have skyrocketed not the libs but they managed a net loss of 0.6%

The Prahran result really should be treated as a unique instance and not a sign of how future elections go. It’s rare enough that a seat is of Greens vs Liberals 2CP – rarer still when there is no Labor candidate. Being a by-election too and not a general election, with poor turnout and a focus on the individual candidates and not the statewide leaders, it makes it very difficult for transferrable learnings from the result that apply to future elections. I suppose it is worth noting how the independent preference flows were all very different from past elections – but that again could be heavily due to donkey-voting and general by-election apathy.

@adda Prahran has been a Greens v Lib contest since 2014. cant see that changing

And how many other seats? Plus in none of the other contests is there the lack of a Labor candidate. Certainly in Macnamara this is not the dynamic that will be present. As previously mentioned, I don’t see what applicable insights come from the Prahran result for this seat.

I do think there is more of a story that can be told from Queensland, council elections and some other recent results – in which Labor’s vote has been holding up in the inner city. Josh Burns appears to be a popular MP so as Drake says I don’t have too much trouble seeing his vote hold up. Of course the quality of Liberal and Greens candidates will be impactful on their vote but the Labor side should be relatively solid.

@none because the greens strongest areas in vic are all labor strong seats as well and weak lib voting areas thats why. josh burns being popular is irrelevant because too many factors are going to working against labor and his vote wont hold CoL, anti semitism, vic labor govt among other things the greens were less then 600 votes (594 to be exact) away from making the 2cp. the greens are running the same candidate and the Lib guy seems like a good choice. the jewish community is not gonna be voting labor this time around and that alone would put the greens into the 2cp. labors only hope is the green vote drops more then theirs and i cant see that happening

Yeah I think the problem for Josh Burns is less about his personal vote (which is strong but was also a factor in 2022), but just about the significant improvement in the Liberal candidate and better campaign.

Colleen Harkin was an absolute dud, possibly the worst they could possibly choose for that electorate, she was also chosen late to replace a candidate who pulled out of the race, and there were really no resources at all put into the seat. My polling place didn’t even have Liberal volunteers handing out. Not one. Unsurprisingly, the Liberal primary vote was 14% at that polling place.

The Liberals can only improve from there because they have selected about as good a candidate as they could (indigenous, moderate, actually an ex-Greens member) and have been campaigning for a while. They also have momentum from Prahran.

So I do at least a +5 Liberal primary vote swing is on the cards, and unfortunately for Josh Burns, while the LIB swing will come at the expense of both Labor & Greens going backwards, I think Labor voters are more likely to swing to the Libs than Greens voters.

In short, I don’t think the Prahran byelection and its unique set of circumstances provided any useful insights that change what I already predicted. If anything, the small signs (eg. More Labor vote going to Libs than Greens) probably reinforced it.

@john, the Greens aren’t running the same candidate. The Greens’ candidate from 2016, 2019 & 2022 is now an elected Senator, they are running Sonya Semmens who was the Higgins candidate in 2022.

Steph Hodgins-May has been extremely involved in the campaign though and her profile has only increased, so I’m not expecting too much of a loss of candidate-incumbency.

@ trent sry my bad i was thinking about a different seat.

The proposition that this seat is going to have a 10% primary vote swing to the Liberals is very dubious. Not even the Prahran by-election supports this, as Trent mentioned. A 5% swing with Labor absent during probably the best circumstances possible inside of a by-election for the Liberals doesn’t support the notion that Liberal support is growing in this area. Rather, the voters were putting a pox on both houses of the Greens and Liberals, and that hurts the Greens more than the Liberals.

As for the idea of a better candidate rescuing the Liberal vote, they might get a extra few % but the change is unlikely to be so substantive. The nature of a general election, and a federal election in particular, is that natural voter partisanship and the leaders dominate the discussion. Another Rachel Westaway can run in this electorate and it will mean very little against the backdrop of Dutton and the context of deciding who governs the country. In general, the Liberals have only been weakening in socially liberal inner city areas and that’s a trend which I don’t think has stopped – the Prahran result is a unique environment that allows for an aberration, not a sign of a change in this regard.

@adda macnamara as a whole at a general election is different to prahran at a by election in alot of different ways. As I said prahran is the least liberal friendly area for the libs, there’s also the fact of the wide field and the fact people are more likely to vote for a minor party or ind as a protest. It’s not the primary swing that matters its the 2pp swing. And you haven’t made any mention that the greens actually went backwards without a Labor candidate. This is a seat the greens won on a 12% margin and then lost. The libs will get a swing in macanamara as all the facttoes are working against the Labor party. The liberal primary swing will be at least 6-7% as they recover from the disaster of 2022 especially in vic. Burns cannot make the 2cp in my opinion and it will be a grn v lib contest here.

Also the only parts of prahran that are now in macnamara are the parts west of St Kilda and Williams road and south of high Street. The rest is now in koyyong.

If you see a +5% Liberal swing in Prahran and -0% Greens swing, that tells you the Labor vote went to a whole bunch of independents. That’s not a sign that the Labor vote would fall apart should they participate, rather the fact that they didn’t move to Greens or Liberals is a sign they were left homeless

@the only parts of Prahran that are in macnamara are the stronger greens voting area in the south so it’s effect on macnamara. Also I’m sure that if Labor ran you would find a much greater loss of primary for the greens it only held up because the more left leaning Labor voters propped them up. If the Labor vote wasn’t gonna crash Labor would have ran. It tanked in Werribee and would have done the same here.

Werribee is an entirely different contest. As I mentioned previously, Labor votes in inner-city areas over recent elections have held up – this is not applicable for the outer suburbs. However, it is entirely applicable for Macnamara.

The Queensland election is an excellent case in point – the socially liberal, inner urban suburbs continue to be fertile Labor territory. Notably, the Greens were on the worse end of that election – and had Labor contested Prahran, there no doubt would have been a big loss in the primary vote for them.

I believe it’s a mistake to conflate the Labor and Greens votes and apply a weakening of the latter in Prahran to necessarily indicate the former.

@john, the Greens vote went backwards in the booths that overlap Melbourne, but increased in the St Kilda & St Kilda East area (+6.4% primary vote swing at the sole booth in St Kilda). The Liberal vote in that same booth only increased by +1.1%. So I think where the swings occurred is important.

Fawkner (now overlaps Melbourne federally) had a +8 Liberal primary vote swing and a negative Greens swing, St Kilda (overlapping Macnamara) had a +1 primary vote swing and a +6.4 Greens swing, it’s quite a contrast.

Still, I agree with Adda that I wouldn’t really read too much into the Prahran byelection result because of its unique set of circumstances. ESPECIALLY the 2CP result which was especially meaningless with only one of Labor & Greens on the ballot instead of both, creating a completely different dynamic.

What I would take away from Prahran, albeit still with a grain of salt, is:

– A +23 swing to ‘Others’ and only +5 swing to the combined LIB+GRN vote, to me indicates like Adda said that the Labor vote would actually have held up pretty well if they ran

– The either static or small swings against the Greens in South Yarra & Prahran indicate that if Labor had run, the Greens primary vote would have gone significantly backwards in those suburbs (as some of their byelection vote would be Labor voters), but the +6.4% swing in St Kilda means the Greens vote probably held up there, and that matters more for Macnamara than what happened in South Yarra or Prahran

– The Liberals will get a positive swing, however if the best they could do in an extremely favourable byelection without Labor running was 5%, they won’t get much more than that. You’ve mentioned a few times the absence of Labor, that actually should have inflated the swing to the Liberals so if anything the LIB’s primary vote swing probably would have been lower had Labor run.

I think it will be an extremely close race for 2nd in the 3CP between GRN & ALP again. It could go either way but I do predict that Labor are more likely to fall behind than the Greens, partly because I think there will be a swing to the Libs in some of the less Green-friendly areas (Caulfield, Port Melbourne) which will be straight ALP to LIB swings. Still I think there could be about 1% in it.

The Liberals will win the 3CP because they will get a swing towards them and recover SOME vote from 2022, but as Adda said, if the best they could muster up in a nearby Prahran byelection with very favourable conditions was only 5%, I don’t see how they’re getting 10% in a neighbouring/overlapping seat with similar demographics in a general election where the focus will be on Peter Dutton.

@BlueNotJohn: “Greens primaries are about where they need to be”: In fact, the Greens primary vote are much lower than what it needs to be. One would have expected the Greens primary vote to be in the high 40s due to Labor voters switching to the Greens. Adding 40% of the 2022 Labor primary vote to the 2022 Greens primary vote (Labor preference flows to the Greens in a Greens vs Liberal contest will be more than 80%) will give the Greens a primary vote of 46.9% and an easy victory even with unfavourable preference flows from Tony Lupton’s voters.

In the 2009 Higgins by-election where Labor did not contest, the Greens primary vote increased by 21.65%, which was equivalent to 69.7% of Higgins’ 2007 Labor vote. This was in stark contrast to the 2025 Prahran by-election, where the Greens primary vote decreased slightly from the 2022 state election despite Labor not contesting. Higgins’ boundaries in 2007 overlaps Prahran’s boundary in 2022. This was why the loss of Prahran was a massive blow to the Greens. Even with high-profile independent Tony Lupton contesting the Greens primary vote should have increased.

I think the reason for the slight drop in Greens primary vote was because more 2022 Greens voters turned away from the Greens than 2022 Labor voters switching to the Greens. I guess that had both Labor and Tony Lupton contested, the Greens primary vote could be around 26%, back to a similar level where outgoing MP Sam Hibbins was first elected. This is far from an encouraging result for the Greens.

Understand Mr Upton. Preference the liberals.. surprise upset!!!!! They followed his suggestion.

Sure Labor may lose votes to the Libs, but they can easily gain votes back from winning back Labor-Greens swing voters. If you look at the most recent Redbridge poll, you can see the few seats that the Labor vote is increasing are inner city electorates

Macnamara:
ALP: 35 (+3)
GRN: 21 (-8.5)

Cooper
ALP: 43 (+1.5)
GRN: 25 (-2.5)

Wills:
ALP: 41 (+5)
GRN: 25 (-8)

Melbourne:
ALP: 27 (+1.5)
GRN: 44 (-1)

@BlueNotJohn: As I have analysed in the “ Prahran and Werribee by-elections live” thread, if both Labor and Lupton contested, the Greens would have had a double digit primary vote swing against it and its primary vote would have dropped to the mid-20s, and the Greens 2CP vs the Liberals would have been close, although the Greens would be still won. Some would argue that Lupton wouldn’t have contested had Labor contested, but even if Labor contested and Lupton didn’t, the Greens primary vote would have still only been in the high 20s, still a very significant swing against the Greens.

Is this the electorate where Labor should try putting the Greens last?