Tangney – Australia 2025

ALP 2.8%

Incumbent MP
Sam Lim, since 2022.

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

Geography
Southern Perth. Tangney includes a number of suburbs on the southern shore of the Swan River and Canning River. Tangney covers most of Melville council area and parts of Canning and Gosnells council areas. Suburbs include Alfred Cove, Attadale, Melville, Applecross, Mount Pleasant, Winthrop, Leeming, Willetton, Canning Vale, Bicton, Willagee, Rossmoyne, Palmyra and Shelley.

Redistribution
Tangney shifted slightly west, losing Ferndale and Wilson to Swan, and gaining Palmyra from Fremantle. These changes slightly increased Labor’s margin from 2.4% to 2.8%.

History
Tangney was created at the 1974 redistribution. The Liberal Party has dominated the seat, winning Tangney at all but two elections.

Tangney was first won in 1974 by 27-year-old John Dawkins, running for the ALP. Dawkins only held the seat for one term, losing it in 1975. Dawkins later won the seat of Fremantle in 1977 and served as a cabinet minister in the Hawke government and then Treasurer in the Keating government until his retirement in 1993.

The Liberal Party’s Peter Richardson won Tangney in 1975. Richardson left the Liberal Party in 1977 and joined the minor Progress Party, a libertarian pro-market party founded by John Singleton. He ran for the Senate in 1977, but failed to win a seat.

Tangney was won in 1977 by Liberal candidate Peter Shack. He held the seat until 1983, when he lost the seat to the ALP’s George Gear. Gear only held the seat for one term, before transferring to Canning in 1984. He later served as Assistant Treasurer from 1993 to 1996, and lost Canning at the 1996 election.

In 1984, Tangney was won back by Peter Shack, after a major redistribution shifted Tangney into much safer Liberal territory. He held it for the next decade, before retiring in 1993.

Tangney was won in 1993 by barrister Daryl Williams, also from the Liberal Party. Williams was appointed Attorney-General upon the election of the Howard government in 1996. He served in the role until 2003, when he became Minister for Communications. He retired from Parliament in 2004.

In 2004, Tangney was won by Dennis Jensen. He is a prominent climate change skeptic, and was often the loudest voice criticising action on climate change in the Parliament. Dennis Jensen was re-elected three times, but before two of those elections, in 2006 and 2010, the local branch denied him preselection before he was given preselection by the state executive.

Jensen was finally defeated for preselection in 2016, and ran for Tangney as an independent. He came fourth, with Liberal candidate Ben Morton winning comfortably. Morton was re-elected in 2019.

Morton was defeated in 2022, when a large swing in Western Australia saw him lose to Labor candidate Sam Lim.

Candidates

Assessment
Labor did very well in Western Australia in 2022 and only won Tangney narrowly. While Lim would likely benefit from a personal vote, any swing back to normality in Western Australia should see Tangney as the first seat to fall.

2022 result

2022 two-party-preferred result

Booth breakdown

Booths have been divided into three parts. Polling places in Melville council area have been split into “west” and “west central”, while those in the Canning and Gosnells council area have been split into “east” and “east central”.

The ALP won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in all four areas, ranging from 50.2% in the west to 58.2% in the east.

The Greens came third, with a primary vote ranging from 9.9% in the east to 15.5% in the west.

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

Become a Patron!