Morwell – Victoria 2022

@Mick I’m not exactly sure where she is based but I think the ALP have a better chance of winning here with her as well as their promise for SEC will help them.

With all the la trobe Valley in the one seat Labor has an excellent chance with a good candidate. Watch the swing in Nacarran with the sitting lib mp retiring and an a history of strong voter attachment for all
sitting .mps in past years

Moe based councillor Sharon Gibson is running as an independent. If she can scoop up the Moe vote I wonder if she becomes the strongest independent chance.

Sharon Gibson appeared with the lead Freedom Party upper house candidate at her campaign launch. She is obviously trying to scoop up the right wing outliers. Of note, Sharon Gibson ran a campaign to get the Morwell boundaries changed after the draft boundary release – and she was successful.

@Redistributed

The Freedom Party candidate is Greg Hansford, another well-known Moe local. He ran for Gippsland in the federal election as the One Nation candidate and polled 10pc which apparently made him the most successful ON candidate in Victoria at that election.

https://www.tallyroom.com.au/vic2022/morwell2022/comment-page-2#comment-777661

Ironically the boundary changes have helped the ALP.

This seat has a history of various independents running at each election, but many of whom don’t end up poll more than a few %. Their preferences however will likely have a big impact on who wins this seat.

I suspect this will be an ALP v NAT contest with a very crowded minor party/ind vote

Lisa Proctor, whose preferences famously elected the Nats in 2006 for the first time, is back running again and surprise surprise, is preferencing the Nats again. She has a much lower profile these days though so probably won’t get the 9% she did back then, although there are some who think the local women’s vote will gravitate towards these independents and the ALP rather than the very blokey footy player the Nats are running with.

SFF have Labor at number 2 on their HTV cards. Interesting I thought.

Makes sense and is clearly quite transactional – SFFP are directing their prefs to help Labor win Morwell, whilst Labor are preferencing Bourmann in Eastern Victoria.

The SFF and Labor are on very friendly terms in NSW too.

With a 4% boost in the alp.vote
Due to boundary change a open
Seat snd a good candidate alp
Excellent chance

Used to be very pro-Labor with big unionised state enterprise (an 80s equivalent of Bendigo & Ballarat) then swung violently against Labor on climate policy & has since swung back somewhat to where you would expect Labor to usually win it, especially if they win govt.

End of 2017 I bumped into Ricky Muir and had a chat about SFF and Labor preferences.

At that point, he reckoned he had a genuine shot at winning Morwell and maybe even holding balance of power if there was a minority Labor government. Either was being a bit optimistic or had crap intel (maybe both).

But notably, if you ask him his political philosophy he’ll tell you he’s actually an old-fashioned Labor voter in a lot of ways. Or at least, the kind of person who would have been a solid industrial Labor voter 50 years ago.

Nate are spending big here as its their marginal seat & Libs are not campaigning hard defining their role as supporting Nats. Their candidate is a footy star from Traralgon but that’s not where they need to pick up votes.

Had interesting discussion with media about Tracie Lund the teal-ish independent who is defying stereotype by having following in the battler areas where she has big profile from her Neighbourhood House work, apparently some people who have never voted before are displaying her signs.

I was wondering about Lund. From memory she is a former local councillor, and in 2018 there was some chatter that she should have done a lot better. Probably the crowded field didn’t help. Maybe she’ll surprise…

Hard to see Lund doing better with a serious ALP campaign and 2 other female independents, Gibson and Proctor. This seat will be fun to watch on the night and probably for the 2 weeks of counting after.

Prediction
Alp Victory Labor margin at
Least 5% probably more

@Entrepreneur I would be surprised to see Lund do worse than Gibson or Proctor. Like Lund and Harriman (the Liberal candidate), Gibson is a current Latrobe City councilor and is notorious for her focus on ‘advocating’ for her home-town of Moe above all else and her somewhat “unorthodox” personality. I also noticed that the Freedom Party were handing out pre-poll HTVs recommending a “1” vote for “Sharon Gibson or Alex Maidana”, which struck me as a very odd endorsement from a party running their own candidate!

I’d expect Gibson to poll well in the Moe booths specifically, but I think her reach beyond that will be very limited – about 1-3% total. Lund has a much larger community reach and is far less controversial than Gibson, so I’d expect her to get anywhere from 5% to 15% and up to 20% if she has a really good night. Lisa Proctor is barely worth mentioning and is a relic of the 90’s, so I’d be surprised if she polls higher than dead last.

This has already been discussed, but can Libs overtake Nats here?

Unlikely that Harriman would beat the Nat once it goes to preferences.

I think the Nats will pick this one up.

Labor have preselected very well. Initiatives like the Commonwealth Games would give them a boost. There’s lots of political initiative behind not leaving the area behind in any transition away from coal. They’ve stitched up a good preference deal with the Shooters (in return for Eastern Vic GVTs). They did win in 2018 2PP, and there was a Morgan poll that had them gaining. So possibly a bold call.

But I still get the sense that coal communities aren’t quite buying any of the just transition narrative. The Labor retained Hunter federally this year with a small swing to them, but looking at the booths it seems like it was Newcastle suburbs, not Muswellbrook and Singleton, that clinched it for Labor. Libs are making mixed environmental noises, but there’s less ambiguity with the Nats. Plus the area isn’t attracting millennials priced out of Melbourne the way e.g. Geelong is.

I think that Morgan poll is just applying the 55-45 respondent 2PP to a uniform swing (2.3%). Which naturally means this seat is retained. see

Personally I think it’s more likely than not that it’s a Nationals gain, and possibly against the trend occurring in metropolitan areas. I can easily see a gain in a seat like Glen Waverley happening while at the same time losing this seat.

Uniform swings are arguably useless here. This seat swings entirely to its own beat, in 2002 it swung massively against Labor when the rest of the state was a landslide towards it. Similar instances occurred in 1992 and 2010 when the swings were vastly different to the rest of the state.

@John

I’d argue that Hunter (black coal for export) is actually pretty different demographically and economically to Morwell (brown coal for power stations). The number of people actually directly employed by the power stations is a fraction of what it was a few decades ago, and it’s not like Qld or NSW where you’ve got young men making a ton of money digging stuff up.

When the SEC got privatised in the 90s, the Valley’s demographics changed significantly to where there’s an enormous social housing population in Morwell and Moe, a lot of refugees etc. You could almost more usefully compare it to a combination of a seat like Dandenong, dropped in the middle of regular Nats-voting Gippslanders.

Any polling that looks at uniform swings is laughable in this election. What I think will happen is there are a lot of ALP seats on double digit margins that will swing very hard but seats like Bayswater and Bass which you’d expect Labor to lose on any uniform swing will hold with strong incumbents and less unfavorable voter demographics.

That’s some well informed analysis though Expat. Labor winning back a coal area seat would be a big moral victory with federal implications. The SEC announcement seems targeted here.

But looking at federal results, Darren Chester won all the Morwell booths. Broadbent still lost Moe but tiny swings compared to large swings in other parts of Monash.

A seat to watch. The count will be messy but if VEC looks at Nats vs ALP we should know on the night who won.

Morwell is 54% alp on new boundaries..alp candidate is strong.
This area votes for Darren Chester because he has a personal vote.and is better than
Your average nat.
This will be an alp seat at the election

The Resolve poll earlier this week indicated that Labor were in trouble in Eastern Victoria. If that is the case, then the ALP might just very well tank here. If the Labor primary is under 35% they are in deep trouble as they have few sources of preferences – the Greens do particularly badly here. That leaves them only the Shooters.
Sharon Gibson is the recipient of a lot of preference flows. If her vote is anywhere above 15% she could definitely be in the final two. A wild card here is One Nation – they do poll well in the Valley and they are running the same candidate that they had in May. I would not be surprised if their vote is nudging 10% and their #2 is Sharon Gibson. I could see her building up from a low base and if she is final 2 against a Coalition candidate she is probably in. If she comes #3 – it will be a coalition win.
The Libs and Nats are helped by being right at the top of a very long ballot paper. I agree with others, it will be a messy count.

Expat – where do you get your hypothesis that there are significant refugee populations in the Valley? The 2021 census doesn’t bear it out and having been on the ground there many times – there seems to be no indication of anything but a small non Anglo population.

@redistributed the One Nation candidate is Allen Hicken, who ran for Monash federally. It was Greg Hansford who ran in Gippsland, who is now the Freedom Party upper house candidate.

@redistributed

From my family members living and working with them in Morwell. Maybe not “a lot” of refugees compared to e.g. Dandenong South or other parts of the metro area, but they’re there.

Nats should win this back. Labor is wasting time here and is better served trying to defend Melbourne marginals.

Daniel t

Disagree Labor has a margin of 4% a good candidate and a similar climate to 2018.. will
Win… look at the bookies too
Think shows alp.1.70.labor win

Mick I hope you are right, but it certainly doesn’t look like it. The redistribution was favourable but this area is trending away from Labor. And with Labor looking at losing seats, they are solely focused on retaining their seats, perhaps only targeting 1-2 Liberal seats in Southern and Eastern Melbourne.

Bookies should never be cited as a reason for a seat outcome (not to mention $1.7 is very much “tossup”). The seat hasn’t gotten attention from media networks so there’s been no liquidity in this seat market. It’s still at the default price set early on in the campaign (although that might change very soon when someone starts betting on the Coalition).

I don’t think it’s true to say that Labor hasn’t bothered here, Andrews wearing a SEC jacket everywhere and coming up with the ‘bring back the SEC’ policy is clearly a play for Morwell.

I also don’t see how you can say the climate is ‘the same’ as in 2018.

@Daniel Moe still seems to lean Labor pretty comfortably, if their vote starts dropping there then they might struggle to hold this seat.

@North East that being said, Broadbent managed to win Moe booths in 2019 so they are becoming more conservative, just more slowly than the rest of the Valley.

@Entrepenuer Fair pooint, i hadn’t looked at or remember the 2019 Moe booths so had just seen the 2022 results where i believe Labor won all the Labor booths.

Labor barely even won the Moe and Morwell booths this time around.

Imagine telling someone 15-20 years ago that a seat consisting of nothing but Moe, Newborough, Morwell and Traralgon would be a comfortable Coalition win….

Agree Mark Mulcair, this shift of voting patterns over 20 years has been phenomenal. I cant think of another area in Victoria where Voting patterns have shifted so dramatically in a single generation. To look closer in 2002 Labor got 82.1% of the TPP in the Newborough East while in 2022 they only 51.4%. Also Churchill, a town built by the SEC to house workers from the Power Plants now voted Just over 50% for the Nats. I am not sure if Labor will ever campaign here. Maybe in 8 years there will be no Red booths left. I would compare this shift to the area around Bathurst/Lithgow in the electorate of Calare.

@Mark Mulcair I wonder if Labor will even bother with the SEC revival given the results in Morwell. That pledge was specifically targeted there.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-13/latrobe-city-councillor-sharon-gibson-questioned-letter-drop/103767916

A bit odd to see this story pop up on the ABC almost 18 months after the election about a fake newsletter called the ‘National Party News’ apparently inserted in some letterboxes during the campaign. Presumably it had a go at the Nats candidate and his pre-selection runner-up.

Any locals with some insight on what this is all about or who was behind it?