Werribee by-election, 2025

@nether portal realistically once Jacinta Allen loses and likely resigns the liberals could win Bendigo East

@Trent: 1 The 2021 Victorian state redistribution has actually abolished net two seats in eastern Melbourne (Keysborough, Mount Waverley and Ferntree Gully were abolished while Pakenham was created, Ashwood can be regarded as ex-Burwood, Glen Waverley can be regarded as ex-Forest Hill, Berwick can be regarded as ex-Gembrook) and replace them with seats in Melbourne’s outer north and west. Due to the fact that population growth is much higher in Melbourne’s outer north and west than in the east, successive redistributions will continue to shift seats from the Liberals’ traditional heartland in the east to the Labor heartland in Melbourne’s west and north, making it more and more difficult for the Liberals to win government without winning seats in Melbourne’s west and north.

2 There is no indication to suggest that the VIC Liberals have regained support that they have lost since 2010 in their traditional heartland in Melbourne’s east , which include seats like Glen Waverley, Box Hill, Ashwood, Ringwood, Bayswater. There seats are trending towards Labor because of higher density housing, more milllenials and Gen Z voters moving there in search of more affordable housing, and Chinese Australians continue punishing the Liberal Party for the federal Liberals’ hostile rhetoric towards China. It’s possible that the Liberals could lose Hawthorn if John Pesutto is no longer the candidate. Pesutto is about to be defeated in an upcoming leadership spill, meaning he is unlikely to contest the next state election.

Considering Victoria’s political geography and the farce the VIC Liberals are currently in, the VIC Coalition certainly won’t win the 2026 state election. Jacinta Allan will make history in becoming the first woman to lead a party to win a Victorian state election, while also marking the first time Victorian Labor has won four consecutive elections. I wouldn’t be surprised if VIC Labor remains in government beyond 2030.

The current pendulum suggests that on uniform swings, the VIC Coalition needs a 53% 2PP in order to win govt, which the VIC Coalition has not achieved since 1996. I doubt the Coalition would ever win a majority in VIC again. I think the only possible way for the Coalition to win government in VIC is if independents or a new party (such as the West Party) win a large number of seats in Labor’s heartland in Melbourne’s west and north, and successful independent or minor party candidates backing the Coalition to form a minority government.

Last but not least, the “It’s time” factor would not work in an opposition’s favour if the opposition could not present itself as a credible alternative government. This was partly the reason why the Liberal Party was in government in VIC for nine terms and 27 years between 1955 and 1982. Considering declining party loyalty among younger generations, it’s unlikely that any party can be in government for nine four-year terms or 36 years this century, however this is evidence that the “It’s time” factor will not automatically push voters into voting for the opposition.

Great analysis Joseph, I 100% agree with all of that!

@joseph realistically they probably cant achieve that on 2pp basis but that doesnt matter you just need to win a majority of the seats by a fraction. you dont even need to win the 2pp to win government. the liberals likely wont achieve a landslide win this time around but can hopefully force labor into minority with the greens and after 4 years of that slide into government. Victorian seats are also set to be redistributed again after the 2026 election.

The issue is that the a Labor-Greens government is less risky for Labor than in other jurisdictions. Victoria is the most progressive jurisdiction after the ACT. There is not really a resource industry like Coal that can cause a revolt and there are less white working class areas in Victoria compared to the rest of the nation. Plus Victorian Labor is pretty progressive even in a majority for example already committing to 95% Renewable electricity by 2035 effectively ending Coal Power, already committed to Treaty, Net Zero by 2045. If Labor-Greens had a majority Labor does not need to offer much to get Greens support, they may offer funding to bike paths, some expansion of National parks etc, If Teals win Hawthorn for example it does not hurt Labor as it just takes off a Liberal held seat.

The latest Liberal shenanigans will help the ALP BUT the Libs for once might be doing something smart – having their leadership ructions over Christmas will largely keep them out of the public eye and whoever is leading after Friday may have put it behind them by the time the focus comes back on politics at Australia Day. Should John Pesutto lose, he is probably not in a position to keep rocking the boat afterwards. Moira Deeming will probably be let back into the party room but hopefully will not be rewarded with a front bench position. Even if she was, she probably wouldn’t last until the election anyway – everything tells me that she won’t be able to help herself, will overstep and get pushed out – nothing so far also suggests that her political antennae are well tuned.

But getting back to polls … if you look at the latest Redbridge (the others are fairly similar) – the ALP were polling 30% (down 6.5% since 2022), LNP on 43% (up 8.5%), Greens 14% (up 2.5). Using my crude measure of going through every seat and adjusting the seat vote accordingly – it is actually surprisingly accurate – you get a picture where the Libs could get over the line in 2026.
First category is seats they can win with a margin: Ashwood, Bass, Bayswater, Glen Waverley, Hastings, Pakenham, Ripon, Yan Yean – 8 seats.
Second Category is seats they would just win: Bellarine, Bentleigh, Box Hill, Eureka, Melton, Monbulk, Niddrie, Ringwood, South Barwon, Sunbury – 10 seats

That would get the L/NP to 46

Mordialloc and Point Cook are too hard to tell

And then there are four seats where they would fall short – Cranbourne, Eltham, Frankston, Macedon
The Greens could get up in Northcote and Preston if things go badly for the ALP but again not so sure.

There is a path there for the Libs but a lot would have to go right for them.

@Joseph that’s way over the top mate. Labor isn’t gonna be in power forever. If Labor is in past 2030 then they will face a historic landslide defeat like NSW Labor did in 2011.

Speaking of major landslides where something notable happened, there are a few types:

* 1996 federal election: working-class battlers shifted away from Labor
* 2011 NSW state election: electoral shift (Western Sydney became a battleground, ethnic voters turned to be more Liberal)
* 2012 Queensland state election: generic big landslide
* 2013 federal election: generic landslide
* 2021 WA state election: once in 1,000 years event
* 2024 NT general election: heavy defeat of a sitting government causing a wipeout in an entire region key to even being a credible opposition let alone a government (Labor wiped out of Darwin and Palmerston)

John Lister, a high school teacher, is Labor’s candidate.
Paul Hopper is running again as an independent.

@NP – even putting the pandemic aside, double landslides like in WA aren’t as rare as you’d think. Only go back a couple of decades and you had Neville Wran’s double landslides in NSW. Victoria I guess some might count 2018 and 2022 from a seats perspective as opposed to a votes perspective (where Labor got backlash in its heartland/”Red Wall” but kept its seat numbers up by keeping much of the Liberal heartland seats that it gained in 2018 while also gaining the likes of Glen Waverley/former Forest Hill, and swapping Nepean for Hastings). It’s also interesting to note how these double back to back electoral landslides all revolve around larger than life/charismatic leaders to voters – Wran in NSW, McGowan in WA, Andrews in Vic, as normally oppositions would recover after the first one.

@WL it’s not the double landslides that are extremely rare, it’s the fact that the WA Liberals nearly got wiped out in 2021.

@NP: 2018 and 2022 Victorian state elections are also major landslides where notable things happened. In 2018, the eastern suburbs of Melbourne were swept up in a “band of red” and the Liberal Party lost six seats in eastern Melbourne that were formerly its heartland. Labor won the seats of Hawthorn and Bayswater, which Labor had won only once before. Labor won the seat of Box Hill for the first time in 26 years. Labor also won the seat of Bass for the first time in history, when Bass and its predecessors Gippsland West and Westernport had never been won by Labor before. There is a trend of realignment away from the Liberal Party in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.

The trend continued in the 2022 state election, where Labor increased its margin in four of the eastern Melbourne seats it gained from the Liberal Party in 2018 (Burwood replaced by Ashwood, Mount Waverley abolished, Hawthorn recovered by the Liberal Party, Bayswater notionally gained by Labor after redistribution making it notionally Liberal) and gained the seat of Glen Waverley (ex-Forest Hill) from the Liberal Party. The 2022 state election was also notable in the fact that there were large swings against Labor across Melbourne’s outer western and northern suburbs, which were the hardest hit by the pandemic, but Labor did not lose any seats in the area because seats in this area were ultra-safe before the 2022 state election. We will see in the 2025 federal election and the 2026 state election whether the swings against Labor across Melbourne’s outer northern and western suburbs were a one-time phenomenon or a long-term realignment, but I suspect that a long-term realignment is more likely, and the Liberal Party is treating it as such. That’s why the Liberal Party spent more resources campaigning in the west in the 2022 state election.

For the Coalition to win government, it will need to win back seats in Melbourne’s east AND start to win seats in Melbourne’s west and north. One thing is for sure, the trend of realignment away from the Liberal Party in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs won’t be reversed in one election, which should keep the Coalition out of government in 2026.

@NP “ If Labor is in past 2030 then they will face a historic landslide defeat like NSW Labor did in 2011”. There’s no rule that dictates a four or five-term government will automatically suffer landslide defeats at the next election. For state governments, they can even get a swing towards them at the end of their fourth or fifth term if the opposition party is in power federally.

This is exactly what happened at the 2018 South Australian state election. At that election there was a slight 2PP swing towards the SA Labor government despite SA Labor having been in power for 16 years rather than the sort of large swings towards the Liberal Opposition that you would expect for a government of this age. The Liberal Party only won a bare majority with 25 out of 47 seats because the previous redistribution had gave the Liberal Party a notional parliamentary majority (a notional 24 seats and 3 seats held by recontesting independents with underlying Liberal 2PP majorities). If there was no redistribution before the 2018 SA state election, Labor might have still won the election with a minority government and then secured a decisive victory in 2022 after two decades in power due to the Morrison Government’s unpopularity. Now the SA Liberals are back to 16 years in opposition I believe due to the loss of moderates like Steven Marshall and Vickie Chapman.

At the October 2024 ACT election, the ACT Labor government has been in power for six terms and 23 years and it did not suffer a landslide defeat or even loss of seats at the election. The Liberals were simply unelectable in the ACT because the ACT is too progressive. Even a moderate Liberal Party led by a moderate Asian woman like Elizabeth Lee was unable to lead the party to an election victory in the ACT.

The “It’s time” factor will only work if the opposition is electable and fit to govern. If the opposition is unelectable, voters will just drift to minor parties and independents like what’s happening in the ACT, where both the Labor and Liberal primary votes have been declining for three consecutive elections.

So when this being held

As of the last hour or so, Murdoch papers are reporting this will be held on 8 February, same as Prahran.

Bev Macarthur has been given a portfolio, Pesutto on the backbench, Southwick demoted. Leading moderate Jess Wilson has also been been demoted.

Moira Deeming while not yet been given a portfolio has been asked to campaign hard in Werribee

The impression I got from Battin’s announcements were that Werribee will be their priority on 8 Feb. It makes sense because they are competing directly against the government there.

Age reporting that there are 3 Liberals vying for the Werribee candidacy including businessman Rajan Chopra.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/businessman-the-first-name-to-emerge-in-liberal-contest-for-werribee-byelection-20250109-p5l33i.html

Also: https://au.headtopics.com/news/indian-australian-entrepreneur-seeks-preselection-in-64549329

Steve Murphy has been announced as the Liberals candidate for Werribee on Brad Battin’s Facebook.
Announcement: https://www.facebook.com/WerribeeLiberals

Now nine candidates – my page on this and Prahran here https://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2025/01/prahran-and-werribee-by-elections.html

Why are so many candidates running here in a by-election?

Weren’t there lots of candidates in 2018 & 2022 NP?

There were 15 candidates in 2022 and an informal rate of 9.7%. How much is a deposit and what % of the vote do you need to get it back? In federal elections it is 4%. That number of candidates shows that no one is deterred from running – good for democracy BUT it does result in a high informal vote – not good for democracy. Presumably somewhere out there is a piece of research linking informal voting rates to numbers of candidates.

Almost like OPV would solve these types of problems way better than creating a dud system of electoral funding that starves the minor parties/candidates while feeding the majors

@redistributed, if I’m not mistaken I think I recall Ben may have actually posted a blog about that topic on here some time ago! I have a vague memory of seeing a graph plotting informal rates against # of candidates or something. Maybe I imagined it..

Opv is not a good system… in nsw it disadvantages Labor.
The way to go to reduce informal votes is to make a. Vote formal to the extent a voters intention can be identified.
Eg 10 candidates in a ballot
123456887799
This vote is formal up to 6th preference

Sounds like OPV by stealth but sure

There’s no reason to shift away from FPV. The instructions are clear and if someone gets it wrong, that’s on them.

Mick Q, a system is not good or bad based on whether or not it disadvantages your side of politics.

In this case I think OPV is much much better, because there is no possible way any voter can be reasonably expected to make an informed choice about all 9 (or 11 or whatever it will be) candidates, nor should they have to pick the ‘lesser of two evils’. I actually think the first one is a really big issue that I can’t see being solved.

OPV results in “Just vote 1” campaigns that discourage voters from voting for their true preference. For voters to fully participate in the process of making an informed choice and numbering their ballot, it requires a push. This is similar to why we have compulsory voting – because voter participation is a civic duty. OPV encourages a suppression of participation.

What Mick describes are saving provisions which are similar to what exists in the Federal senate – where the instructions are to number at least 6 above the line, but the savings provisions count votes that do not number that far. So it wouldn’t be anything new to adopt this provision for the various lower house votes to reduce informality.

When ever the system has been changed from opv to ppp or visa versa it has been done to advantage one side or another.. Qld under Labor qld under lnp
Qld 1960 under nats. Nsw under wran 1980s and there are probably other examples i failed to mention. Opv tends to benefit the party with the highest primary.
What I suggest with the savings provision.. and full preferences. Allows opv if you think about it. 1 222222

@Adda a voter’s ‘true preference’ may well be for their vote to exhaust before flowing to another candidate

“Here I go into the voting booth, I am going to vote 1 ALP 2 Green cause only one can make the last 2. Hang on, what is this? My ALP HTV says just vote 1 for ALP. OK, well my preference was to put Green 2 but the card says just vote 1 so I will just put 1 ALP.”

I mean that is the exact logic you are suggesting Adda is it not?

I don’t mind that Mick Q, or at least a way of showing ‘no preference’.

A simple fact about democracy is that if you rely on entirely voluntary participation, you do not get representative results. This is why we have compulsory voting in the first place. That same logic extends to preferencing. There exists a significant proportion of people who simply do the bare minimum and when encouraged consistently to vote 1 by political campaigning, will do that without considering what other parties they should preference. Therefore, OPV compromises representative results.

There’s a few obvious examples to show this. One of them is Kiama from the last NSW election – many of Gareth Ward’s voters didn’t bother numbering past 1, which resulted in a lopsided 2PP in Labor’s favour. Since Ward had more than enough votes to win this didn’t matter, but what if he was eliminated? A good portion of his voters would prefer Liberal to Labor but yet that preference wouldn’t be exhibited, and if it came down to a Liberal vs Labor contest Labor would win, perhaps against the true will of the voters.

There’s also another example I’ll borrow from this article by Kevin Bonhamhttps://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-commonest-arguments-for-opv-are.html
“The starkest example comes from the NSW Legislative Council, where 83% of voters voted 1 only for a party above the line in 2015, creating a vote that would exhaust once that party had had all its candidates elected or excluded. But when the same voters started being required to number multiple boxes in the Senate in 2016, over 90% suddenly became able to find six parties they were able to support – and most of these voters were choosing for themselves and not copying how to vote cards.”

It’s pretty clear that OPV does compromise accurate representation of people’s true choices, because people are either unknowing of the need to number more boxes to exhibit such or only doing the bare minimum. And this is exacerbated by the fact that parties see an advantage in messaging that encourages such.

Yep, so the same people who are apparently so disengaged as to not even bother ordering their preferences once every 3/4 years are at the same time perfectly equipped to navigate a list of 6+ candidates and parties and signal their ‘true preference’. Or, they just blindly follow a HTV card – which often reflects the party’s dealings with their rivals rather than an accurate guide to ideological consistency down the ballot.

Mick’s idea is actually the ideal solution, you still get the all important nudge for true democracy that Adda is so keen on, while also counting the votes of anyone who knows how to get around it or who flouts the ballot rules anyway but does indeed show intention.

@Mick Quinlivan after the DLP became irrelevant OPV in NSW started to favour the Coalition rather than Labor.

Also, why are there nine candidates here?

I’d argue that while a voter may not be fully informed about all the random minor and independent candidates, MOST of the time the only preference that matters in practise is where they put the candidates likely to make the 2CP, which they should be more informed about.

So compulsory preferencing with every number is the best way to ensure all the likely 2CP candidates – who voters should have a minimum amount of knowledge about even if it’s just the party recognition – are ranked, even if the uncompetitive candidates end up in a random or uninformed order around them.

Np; think this was brought in by Wran late 70s early 80s in nsw.
My suggestion allows full listing of preferences and overcomes the chief problem increased informality rlitlOpv.in the 2019 election for East Hills. Shows how opv stops the voters intention being reflected in the actual results.
In summary lib outpolled Labor by 2%
12% of left of centre voters. Remained .
But as opv allowed exhaustion of votes.
The result was slightly less than 2%

Closing of the gap and the liberals won

To change full preferential to.opv via a work around is indeed a choice.

A statewide Resolve poll has Labor on 22% statewide. That’s a 14% swing against them from 2022.

Meanwhile for Prahran the Greens are actually up on their 2022 result in the same poll, though the Liberals are way up in comparison (as is the generic “IND” that’s at least partially responsible for the super low ALP primary). Plus risks of low turnout – no “absent” votes to save Greens later in the post count.

I am foreseeing both results being messy enough for long enough to really kick off the election speculation narrative about whether Trumpism and the resentment against incumbents has taken hold in Australia and whether Albo (and Allan of course) is on the nose.

Labor are definitely in trouble in the Werribee byelection I think. A 14% primary swing from Labor coupled with a 7% primary swing to the Liberals could very easily play out, with the added byelection effect against an incumbent government too, making that 10.9% margin very vulnerable.

Prahran is a different story. A 7% primary swing to the Liberals and a 1% primary swing to the Greens alone is nowhere near the 12%+ swing the Liberals need to win there. The Labor vote was already low in Prahran, and any swing against Labor could benefit the Greens as much as the Liberals. Turnout is an interesting point, but the Greens still had a 12% margin with a very low (only 82%) turnout in 2022 as well.

I had most recently predicted around a 52-48 Labor win in Werribee and a 54-46 Greens win in Prahran.

In light of this poll, I’d probably flip Werribee to around a 51-49 Liberal win now (I don’t think the poll changes my Prahran prediction, might just wipe 1% off the margin).

Other note: If that swing is coming from areas like Werribee (and not e.g. middle ring, upper middle class suburbs coming back to the Liberals) then I think that’s the a sign of a true political realignment in Australia. It hasn’t quite surfaced at any state or federal election yet (and Inala/Ipswich West didn’t stick) but it always seems to be a threat. I think there was even a sense that 2022 was a “floor” for these areas heavily impacted by COVID.

There’s also a chance it’s a relatively small swing, no realignment, which means fed Labor have a lot to worry about in Chisholm and Aston. Hence why I think it will be a very important electoral harbinger

TBF, Ipswich West may well have stuck if the new LNP member hadn’t been forced to immediately retire with serious illness.

Pretty sound reasoning that I agree with there Trent

I think Jacinta Allan will struggle to get re-elected really. The government is stale, and although I’m personally of the Pesutto wing of the party and would much prefer him, the voters are starting to pick up their baseball bats for the government by the looks of things.

Battin leading by 10 points as preferred premier is no small feat.

NT election? Massive swings in regional QLD seats like Mackay that Labor held forever?? Can even look at the 4% or so swing in Dunkley. Might not have totally materialised in an election in turns of proper outer suburbia but there is definitely some evidence of the political realignment of Australia’s working class

I think there also some evidence of a swing of the professional classes away from the Liberals.

Remember, for those of us who think thee is a realignment happening, the move of the South from Democrat to Republican took from 1946-2002, so it will happen glacially.