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Today’s election will likely prove historic for the Liberal Party’s vote, with seats such as Robertson shaping as new bellwethers. By Mike Seccombe.
Where the election will be won and lost
The Albanese government will be returned with an increased majority, there will be an expanded cross bench in the parliament, and the Liberal Party will win the lowest proportion of seats in the house since its foundation in 1944.
This is the prediction of Paul Smith, director of public affairs and public data for YouGov, on the basis of the company’s final poll before today’s election, released late on Wednesday night.
According to YouGov’s MRP method – MRP standing for multi-level regression and post-stratification, a complex and purportedly more accurate way of measuring electoral opinion that models thousands of simulated outcomes on a seat-by-seat basis – the Coalition has just a 1 per cent chance of forming a majority government.
A Labor majority is a 97.3 per cent probability, and a hung parliament, in which neither party commands a majority, a 2.7 per cent probability.
According to the company, Labor will win 52.9 per cent of the vote after preferences, and the Coalition 47.1.
On those figures, Labor will increase its numbers from the current 77 lower house seats to 84. The number of seats held by independents and minor parties will expand to 19. The number of Coalition MPs will crash from 53 to 47.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton will struggle to hold his own seat of Dickson on the northern fringes of Brisbane. If YouGov is right, he will squeak back into parliament with 50.2 per cent of the two-party preferred vote.
Of course, these are only modelled probabilities, and even the most accurate polls are backward-facing indicators, recording the mood of the electorate at the time they were taken. Things can change in the final, frantic days of an election campaign.
That said, things look grim for Dutton and the Coalition, and YouGov is not the only published poll suggesting disaster for the conservatives.
On Monday, Newspoll had Labor ahead 52-48 after preferences and the Morgan poll scored it 53-47 to Labor. Tuesday’s Guardian Essential poll broke 52-48 to Labor. The same day the Resolve Political Monitor in the Nine media had Labor ahead 53-47.
It’s all the more remarkable because only a couple of months ago YouGov and other major polls suggested the Coalition was close to achieving a result the likes of which has not been seen in this country since 1931, the last time a first-term government was defeated.
Says Smith: “This is the greatest turnaround in voting intention since the rejection of John Hewson and the GST.”
If the Coalition has tanked spectacularly, Dutton personally has tanked even more spectacularly. Anthony Albanese now leads him by 15 or 16 points as preferred prime minister, according to multiple recent surveys.
As to why this has happened, the most common rationalisation offered for the Coalition’s slide is the Trump effect. This holds that the erratic behaviour of the United States president has caused voters to do as they tend to at times of crisis, which is rally around the flag and stick with their incumbent government.
Adherents to this theory point to the example of this week’s Canadian election, where an enormous turnaround in voter sentiment saw that country’s centre-left government rise from the dead and win.
There is something to this view, although, as many commentators on the Canadian result have noted, it tends to absolve the losers from responsibility for their own actions. They argue the problem for Canada’s conservative party was not just Trump but their own adoption of Trump-like positions and policies.
The conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, took his party to the populist right, railed against “radical woke ideology” and promised to shrink government, to slash public broadcasting and to reverse course on climate policy and environmental protection.
He derided his political opponents as “weak” and adopted a style of attack politics not previously seen in that country. Poilievre played politics with race, complained of alleged bias in mainstream media and preferred to engage with right-wing outlets. This week, he lost his seat.
Much of this will sound familiar to Australians. For a considerable period, a similar approach seemed to be working for Dutton.
What perplexes many political analysts is the fact that instead of moderating his positions in recognition of the Trump effect, the opposition leader doubled down during the election campaign. He assailed the ABC and Guardian Australia as “hate media”. He complained – to Sky News – about media bias. He fired up a culture war issue over Welcome to Country ceremonies. Then he and his party cut preference deals with One Nation and Family First.
“I really don’t know how to read it,” says Frank Bongiorno, professor of history at the Australian National University. “Maybe it is responding to feedback they’re getting in focus groups. They seem to have the idea that this kind of thing plays out well in certain outer suburbs, and winning over those constituencies in outer Sydney and particularly outer Melbourne is central to their strategy.”
The reality is that changing political demography is pushing conservatives out of urban electorates. So-called teal independents now hold six affluent, socially progressive seats that were formerly blue-ribbon Liberal heartland in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. In 2022, the Greens snatched two in Brisbane.
The Coalition parties are more reliant on garnering votes in rural, provincial and outer suburban areas as a result.
YouGov’s Smith suggests that on election night people should look to Robertson, on the New South Wales Central Coast, for an early indication of the overall result. Robertson has swung from Labor to Liberal and back again repeatedly, and the ALP’s Gordon Reid now holds it on a margin of just 2.2 per cent.
“It is now a bellwether seat for Australian elections,” says Smith. “Our earlier modelling showed it was going to be won by the Coalition. We now think it will be won by Labor. It’s east coast New South Wales. It will count quick. It will tell you a lot.”
Fifty years ago, 96 per cent of Australians voted for either Labor or the Coalition. As recently as 2007, when Kevin Rudd won government for Labor, the combined major party vote was just over 85 per cent. Since then, the shift away from them has only gathered pace. In 2019 it was under 75 per cent and at the last federal election it was barely 68 per cent. It looks likely Labor and the Coalition will bleed even more votes at this election.
The electorate is becoming not only more fractured but also more polarised. This week’s Essential poll, for example, found One Nation was attracting 10 per cent support. In 2022, it got just under 5 per cent of the first preference vote.
At the other end of the ideological spectrum, the Greens had 13 per cent support according to Essential, a little up on the 12.25 per cent it got at the last election. Other polls have the Greens about 14 per cent.
Another 10 per cent of voters signified their intent to vote for minor parties and independents. These ranged from serious contenders running as teals to the grab bag of chancers running under the banner of Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots.
A host of other factors further complicate the task of forecasting an outcome. Class and income are no longer the predictors of voting behaviour they once were. In 2022, according to the Australian Election Study, the definitive record of Australians’ voting behaviour over time, the vote for the Coalition was lowest among the highest income group, those households earning more than $140,000 a year. Nonetheless, those who self-identified as working class remained more likely to vote Labor than middle-class voters.
Muddying the waters even more is the fact that savvy voters are increasingly inclined to vote tactically, structuring their ballots to defeat a candidate they don’t like rather than to elect the one they like most. This is particularly the case with left-of-centre voters.
All of which makes prediction difficult, Smith acknowledges.
Voters, he says, “have decisively determined to reject Peter Dutton as prime minister”.
“What is less decisive is the way in which the make-up of the vote will go. For there is primary vote, and then there are preferences.”
Given all those caveats, and given
that the political parties have their own, detailed polling that they don’t share publicly, how are the various parties likely to go on election night?
First, One Nation. The consensus is that it will win no lower house seats, despite its unusually high primary vote and the preference deal with the Coalition. The same goes for the other minor right-wing parties.
There has been speculation that the Greens, who currently hold four seats, could have trouble holding them all. Party leader Adam Bandt looks safe in Melbourne, as does Max Chandler-Mather in the inner-Brisbane seat of Griffith.
The electorates of Brisbane and Ryan are shaping as tight three-way contests, and both major parties have put considerable effort into them. As previously noted, however, the Greens’ national vote is up, and the party is confident of holding on. YouGov projects small swings to their candidates.
The Greens also have hopes of taking a few more. Richmond, centred on Byron Bay and now held by Labor, is particularly afflicted by the high cost of housing, which has been a major focus of the Greens pitch. Other target seats are Wills and Macnamara in Melbourne, both held by Labor and both seats in which the Gaza war is an issue. The Greens have taken a strong pro-Palestinian position, which may work against them in Macnamara.
The Labor member for the seat, Josh Burns, is Jewish, as are many of its voters. Because of this, and because of the recovery in the Labor vote over recent weeks, it looks like a long shot for the Greens.
As for the teals, the consensus is that Zali Steggall will be safe in Warringah, the seat she won from former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott in 2019. Likewise, Allegra Spender in Malcolm Turnbull’s former seat of Wentworth and Sophie Scamps in Mackellar are both expected to be safe. The fourth NSW teal, Kylea Tink, has fallen victim to an electoral redistribution.
There is a real prospect that more community independents could take seats in the state. The two strongest prospects are Nicolette Boele in Bradfield, who polled strongly in 2022 and has continued to campaign ever since, and Caz Heise in Cowper.
South of the border, Monique Ryan in Kooyong and Zoe Daniel in Goldstein have been opposed by vigorous Liberal campaigns, as well as third-party campaigners such as Advance.
The sixth incumbent teal, Kate Chaney, has the smallest margin of them all – just 1.3 per cent in the Western Australian seat of Curtin.
YouGov suggests all three will be returned.
Victoria and NSW, simply by virtue of the large number of seats, will be very important to the outcome of the election. The Coalition holds high hopes of doing well in the southern state, which appears to be Labor’s weakest.
Ben Raue, election analyst with the Tally Room, has doubts.
“I could imagine a scenario like what we saw at the Victorian state election, where the Coalition did gain a swing towards them all over western Melbourne,” he says, “but they just turned super safe Labor seats into less safe Labor seats.”
Liberal hopes in Victoria seem to have dimmed, but the party remains optimistic about Aston, Chisholm and McEwen.
Raue nominates a few others in Victoria as “interesting” to watch, including Bruce, Hawke and Holt.
“They were traditionally safe Labor seats. If you went to sleep for 10 years and you woke up, you’d be like, ‘Why is everyone talking about Holt and Bruce?’ But they’ve become more marginal over time,” he says.
Labor could even pick up a couple. Michael Sukkar, the architect of the Coalition’s much criticised housing policy, holds Deakin by a mere 0.02 per cent and is at risk of losing. Menzies, held by Keith Wolahan, which a redistribution has rendered notionally Labor by 0.4 per cent, could also go.
In NSW, the best prospects for the Coalition include Gilmore, held by Labor on 0.2 per cent, Bennelong won by Labor at the last election on 0.4 per cent, and Paterson, on a margin of 2.6 per cent.
Until quite recently, there was little focus on Queensland, traditionally a stronghold of conservatives. Labor’s best hope was Leichhardt in the far north.
“But,” says Raue, “as Labor has done increasingly well in the polls, Queensland is going to be interesting, because it has a number of Coalition marginal seats.”
The most marginal of them is Dutton’s own seat. When Albanese went there at the beginning of the campaign, it was seen as a bit of a stunt. However, as already mentioned, Dickson is now in play.
In the west, Tangney and the new seat of Bullwinkel are shaping as ones to watch, as are Sturt and Boothby in South Australia – held by the Liberals and Labor respectively.
The Northern Territory is expected to maintain the status quo and in the ACT Labor’s hold on three seats will likely be bolstered by the Coalition’s threat to slash the public service.
Tasmania will be interesting. There are just five electorates in the state and two are perennially marginal. Labor holds Lyons by less than 1 per cent. The Liberals hold Bass by just 1.4. Independent Andrew Wilkie is safe as houses in Clark, on a margin of more than 20 per cent, and the Liberals hold Braddon by 8 per cent. The wildcard is Franklin, which on paper looks like an easy hold for Labor. However, since bits of rotting fish began washing up on its beaches earlier this year, due to an outbreak of disease that killed millions of salmon, the politics of fish farms have become toxic and there is a real risk the seat will go independent.
The widely held view is that this has been an uninspiring election, with little in the way of visionary policy on offer from either major party. It may yet prove historic, though.
If the polls and the pundits are correct, Anthony Albanese, whom Peter Dutton long derided as “weak”, will emerge as a new Labor hero, having done what no other prime minister has ever done, increasing their majority in their second term.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 3, 2025 as "Where the election will be won and lost".
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