Clarinda – Victoria 2022

Labor has a lot of fat to burn – and they are burning it. The Heatherton Railyard instead of the sports complex promised in 2018. The approval for Australian Super to convert the 18 hole golf course in the middle of Dingley to three and four storey apartment complex. In addition to a demographic that did not take well to lockdown (see the Fed polling booth figures of Springvale/Keysborough/Noble Park). Big swing here, which may be of interest in South East Metro Upper House.

Yes this area is probably like cabramatta in Sydney where local independent dai le won the federal seat of fowler, although the swing was amplified by Labor selecting an outsider.

In case of clarinda I thin the Labor mp is a local and also Cambodian so he is a good fit for the area. But if you indicate that Labor is prioritising more of the development aspects then there will be quite a large swing 10% or so which will make it a marginal seat.

@ Yoh An, i agree with the comparison to Cabramatta for much of the area. However, there south of the Dingley Bypass it is entirely different. The Dingley Bypass is a major social divide north of it is part of the SE Manufacturing belt centred on the Dandenong Rail Corridor very ethnically diverse and working class. South of it is much more middle class and Anglo. Dingley Village is usually strongly Liberal voting and one the least diverse parts of Melbourne while areas like Cheltenham are a bellwether and clearly part of the Sandbelt. There was a lot of controversy surrounding the redistribution and Dingley Village residents wanted to be put in the Mordialloc electorates and i submitted an objection as well due to demographics.

The eastern part of the seat around Springvale is definitely like Cabramatta, but the rest of the seat is more mixed. I’m not sure what a Sydney equivalent would be….maybe the area immediately south of Parramatta, where you’ve got a mix of solid Labor areas and more affluent 50-50 type territory.

At the very least, those Dingley booths should be light blue as part of any remotely decent Liberal performance.

A Perth equivalent might be something like Girrawheen for the Springvale end, and Yokine or Dianella for the Dingley end? Hard to compare cities sometimes.

This seat on these boundaries should be Labor for a long time to come.

It’s interesting how the demographics and electoral dynamics can change as you cross a road, especially Westall Road Extension and Heatherton Road.

I expect anti-Labor swings, in Springvale South and to a lesser extent, elsewhere, just as there were at the federal election.

Nimalan, does that make Dingley village and surrounding suburbs more like places such as Abbotsbury and Bonnyrigg being considered slightly more affluent and less diverse compared to Cabramatta and canley vale?

Yoh Anh, Abbotsbury is a possible comparison but i feel it maybe not the best as Abbotsbury is quite diverse has large Italian/Croatian communities and does feel somewhat connected to the rest of Fairfield LGA. While here i believe the communities south of the Dingley Bypass (including Westall Road extention) are an entirely different community you could defined it as Southern Melbourne rather than South East Melbourne. Maybe Dingley Village is comparable to Chipping Norton also in the seat of Fowler but entirely different Dingley Village residents orient themselves towards suburbs such as Parkdale, Mentone and Aspendale and often use Frankston line stations. Springvale South and Dingley Village are two neighbouring suburbs that could not be any more different. Springvale South has 3 different Buddhist temples walking distance while Kingston LGA South of the Bypass does not have any significant non European community.

@ Votante

Roads do form a social divide in Melbourne and even in Sydney. Some example.
1. Monash Divide From Warrigal Road to around Fountain Gate Shopping centre after which it is really no longer an issue
2. Warrigal Road often acts as a boundary between inner melbourne suburbs (often upper class such as Boorondoora) versus Middle ring suburbs such as Whitehorse more middle class. Not a perfect divide as Beaumaris is west of Warrigal Road while part of Surrey Hills is East.
3. Vardys Road in NW Sydney between Kings Langley and Lalor Park and Milperra Road between Milperra and working class communities to the North.
4. Here i would use the Dingley Bypass not Heatherton Road as a part of Heatherton Road north includes Green wedge areas while the Bypass is almost a perfect social divide.

In no real cases in Melbourne can i see a rail line acting as a social divide. So the old saying “wrong side of the tracks” does not really apply in Melbourne “maybe wrong side of the freeway/bypass” is more accurate.

I agree with you 100% Nimalan, particularly regarding Monash Fwy and Warrigal Rd divides. Also the Eastern Fwy divides middle class Whitehorse from upper middle Manningham.

I think the M4 in western Sydney divides the working class from the middle class, then the M2 divides the middle class from the upper middle class. E.g Merrylands working class, Parramatta middle class, Baulkham Hills upper middle class.

I guess Brisbane doesn’t really have much of a ‘class’ divide compared to Sydney or Melbourne. However, I think the Ipswich Motorway and/or rail line acts as a sort of semi class divide separating the fairly affluent riverside suburbs of Jindalee and Mt Ommaney from the more working-class areas of Darra and Richlands.

Adam, interestingly in the Menzies thread i used the M2 as an analogy to the Eastern Freeway and said that Manningham was a combination of the Eastern Part of the Hills Shire (Castle Hill, Glenhaven, Kenthurst) and the Western Parts of Hornsby Council (Beecroft, Cheltenham, West Pennant, Hills Dural and Glenorie) and compared Whitehorse to the area just South of the M2.

What do you feel about the Dingley Bypass as a second social divide in SE Melbourne. I feel much of Kingston LGA such as Aspendale, Cheltenham, Mentone, Patterson Lakes etc are very different from Dandenong, Springvale, Noble Park etc but that divide seems not be well known. Especially as areas such as Chelsea, Carrum etc become more affluent.

My favourite theory I’ve heard for the lack of a clear class divide in Brisbane is due to the hills – the rich live at the top of the hill and the poor in the valleys but these areas tend to be drawn in the same seats.

Definitely agree about that social divide between Greater Dandenong and Kingston. Dingley is demographically similar to the rest of Kingston, but feels a bit separate and detached because it is not along the Nepean Hwy and bayside like most of Kingston. It’s very different to the Greater Dandenong and the Dingley Bypass is definitely a social divide, and I would say forms the boundary between southeastern Melbourne and the southern/bayside suburbs.

I think another factor is that Brisbane is mainly an Anglo city and there is a lack of manufacturing base there (possibly explains why the Brisbane metro area is friendlier to the LNP). I feel much of Brisbane’s middle and outer suburbs (especially North of the River) are similar to areas in Melbourne’s Outer East (Knox, Maroondah, Yarra Ranges, and Berwick) and the Penrith area in Sydney given its demographics are pretty much similar with a great mix of the lower middle class, middle class, and upper middle class and being heavily Anglo. The only area that is an exception would be a corridor between Redbank to Woodridge as they are immigrant-heavy with Goodna being Samoan and African, Inala and its surrounds being Vietnamese, Sunnybank and its surrounds being Chinese and Woodridge being a very multicultural suburb

Interesting given Melbourne’s North class divide would be Bell St. The boundary isn’t straightforward in Melbourne’s West possibly since each suburb’s income seems to be all over the place (e.g. Low Income and educated mainly Anglo Werribee surrounded by higher income and educated new estates mainly populated by South Asians) although Ashley Street around Braybrook seems to be at least one example.

Marh, I would add that the corridor around Sunnybank/Runcorn does have a higher proportion of residents who are of Asian background, making it quite similar to Epping and Eastwood in Sydney.

Also, whilst much of Brisbane’s middle to outer suburbs are monolithically white and generally favour the LNP, they are also open to supporting Labor at state elections. This pattern may be similar to Perth and WA, with most of Perth’s northern suburbs also being monolithically white but these voters are considered ‘swinging’ in nature because they are open to supporting either party, depending which side is seen/able to deliver for them.

I say one factor why ALP is able to govern Queensland for most of the past 33 years despite voting LNP federally (besides 2007) is due to Queensland LNP not being effective in their policymaking and rather focuses their resources on attacking Labor (similar to Vic Libs). Another reason could be that Queensland ALP is more conservative than their federal counterparts meaning they could likely to connect with more conservative voters with rhetoric more about bread and butter rather than ideological

@ Marh you are correct Western Melbourne is a patchwork. In more established areas such as Brimbank/Hobsons Bay the class divide is clearer. In the former the affluent areas are to the north such as Keilor, Taylors Lakes and Sydenham while in Hobsons Bay it is along the water such as Newport, Williamstown and Altona-Seaholme.
In Melton/Wyndham LGA the new estates as you pointed out are more educated have a larger South Asian community.
I was wondering if there is an area in Brisbane with a large South Asian community

@Yoh An

Isn’t that area much lower SES than Epping and Eastwood?

@Nimalan

Very much like Sydney’s West too!

Inala has a large Vietnamese population (more than one-quarter), as do surrounding suburbs.

Sunnybank and its surrounding suburbs are a mix of Hurstville and Burwood in Sydney or Box Hill and Glen Waverley in Melbourne as they seem to mix in the vibrant ethnic food precincts where younger and newer Chinese immigrants live in its precincts but then an older demographics who tends to have families live in its nearby suburbs for suburbia atmosphere

Completely agree Ben,

Echoing my comments on the Malvern profile:

Brisbane and South East Queensland more broadly does not share the same coherence and centralization as a city like Melbourne. It is more sprawling, less dense, and features its own self-contained pockets and communities of interest – divorced from the Brisbane CBD. These pockets are all geographically distributed between various natural boundaries like rivers, creeks, reserves, mountains and along sea-ways. This creates more of a mixed and disorganised distribution of demographics (especially wealth), throughout the corner of SE QLD than say in Melbourne.

One other feature I find strikingly more common in Melbourne than South East Queensland is Melbourne’s established suburbs centered around and serviced by the traditional “high-street”/”main-street”, a common feature of cities developed prior to the automobile. This is far less common in South East Queensland which experienced much of its development throughout the 20th Century after the widespread use of the automobile, and thus has its communities more centered around the car. Suburbs are instead largely serviced by shopping centres and malls, more analogous to many of the parts of the USA. Only exception to the rule here is Victoria’s Chadstone Shopping Centre, the largest shopping centre in Australia.

Nicholas, I haven’t really analysed SES characteristics for these areas. I was just basing a comparison using observation of the type of people living around the suburbs in question from a culture/ethnicity point of view.

I’m a little sceptical about the impact of the supposedly controversial local issues mentioned upthread notwithstanding the vocal localised campaigns. There’s a stack of Liberal Party signs on Kingston Road in the neighbourhood directly affected by the planned SRL stabling yard but at the end of the day it’s a small and slightly isolated neighbourhood. I also wonder how many residents in Dingley will see the former golf course development as a top of mind issue. And for the other traditionally very strong Labor parts of the electorate awareness of, let alone interest in, these issues would be minimal I’d guess. I’m not commenting on the merits or otherwise of these campaigns, but rather their likely electoral impact

Springvale South is probably like Canley Vale or Canley Heights in western Sydney. They’re overshadowed by neighbours with larger and busier commercial centres. They also have large Vietnamese and to a lesser extent, Cambodian, migrant communities. Meng Heang Tak and the previous member, Hong Lim, are both of Cambodian origin. Springvale South could also be like Darra in Brisbane.

Dingley Village’s average resident is more likely to Australian-born and/or Anglo-Celtic. Clayton South has a much younger population with a lot of Chinese and Indian migrants.

As has been mentioned, you’d be hard-pressed to find a seat with such a clear cultural and social divide. South-west of the bypass, I expect the Libs and Anthony Richardson (who has been campaigning like no Lib candidate has before) to poll very well. Cheltenham, Mentone, Heatherton, and Dingley to an extent will show this I’d say. It is so under appreciated how big the divide is.

In saying this, the east of the electorate will retain Labour, and Meng Heang Tak, fairly easily. The interesting things however will be the polling place performance, and how big any swing is.

@Ben

You are correct the Libs got big swings to them South of the Bypass in the middle class areas while Labor actually got swings to them in some of the Springvale booths. The Two Dingley booths are now Blue again.