Exactly how the federal Liberals lost six heartland seats to independents remains a matter for debate, and how — or even whether they should try — to win them back will be a major challenge for the opposition over the next three years.
Ian McAllister and Nicholas Biddle of the Australian National University are offering a view that might immensely complicate the challenge: based on the ANU’s traditional Australian Election Study, they suggest that “teal independent” voters “appear to more likely be tactical Labor or Greens voters rather than dissatisfied Liberal voters”, according to a media report.
The basis for the report is a paper to be delivered today, and the full data won’t be available until the end of the month. But one snippet is that “among supporters of teal independents 35% voted Labor in 2019, 23% for the Greens and only 19% voted Liberal”.
If independents in seats like Kooyong, Mackellar and Curtin are mainly supported by Labor and Greens voters, the Liberals can do little to recover those seats — they can only try to lure back the relatively small number of Liberal voters who defected.
But there are some threshold questions about the analysis. For a start, 2019 isn’t necessarily a good base for comparison. Many of those seats saw big swings against Liberals in 2019. Josh Frydenberg copped an 8% swing in 2019, with his primary vote falling below 50%. Liberal voters had already begun defecting — to climate independent Oliver Yates, and to a lesser degree Julian Burnside, standing for the Greens.
Celia Hammond in Curtin fared even worse — she saw a swing of more than 11% in 2019. In Wentworth, in Sydney, Dave Sharma, having initially failed to win the seat in the 2018 byelection, barely scraped home against Kerryn Phelps in 2019. Tim Wilson suffered only a relatively benign 3.7% swing.
It was different in Mackellar. A former Turnbull adviser, independent Alice Thompson — running on integrity and climate — took 12% of the vote in 2019, but Jason Falinski’s vote actually increased slightly, while Labor and the Greens went backwards. Trent Zimmerman also increased his vote in 2019 — but so did Labor, which saw an 8% swing.
So what happened on May 21? In Kooyong, Frydenberg’s vote fell another 6.5% — making for a nearly 15% cumulative decline over two elections. But even so, the McAllister-Biddle suggestion appears to hold up: Labor’s vote also fell 10%, and the Greens’ nearly 15%. The total loss of votes for Labor and the Greens between 2019 and 2022 was 24,000. Frydenberg lost 5000 votes as well, but even on top of the 3500 he lost in 2019, it’s still well under what Ryan harvested from the non-Liberal vote.
That could explain why the Liberals appear to be writing off Kooyong, with the view that wresting it back from Ryan will be just too hard. Things look a little similar in Goldstein: there Wilson lost nearly 13,000 votes. But Labor lost 17,000, and the Greens only 7000 in delivering Zoe Daniel victory.
However, things aren’t quite as stark in Sydney. In Mackellar, Falinski lost 10,000 votes; Labor lost 8000 and the Greens 5000. In North Sydney, Zimmerman lost 13,000 votes and the Greens 5000, but Labor only lost 3000 because Catherine Renshaw proved an exceptional candidate.
In Curtin, Hammond lost just 5000 votes this time, and the Greens lost 3000, but Labor’s vote only fell by fewer than 1000. In Wentworth, Sharma’s vote declined by 6000, Labor’s vote barely shifted, and the Greens’ actually went up.
The results suggest McAllister and Biddle are on to something in Victoria, where multi-election declines for the Liberals are only a relatively small part of the explanation for the success of Ryan and Daniel. In Mackellar and North Sydney, it’s more of a fundamental problem with former Liberal voters who deserted Falinski and Zimmerman in droves, meaning tactical voting by non-Liberal voters, while playing a role in the success of Dr Sophie Scamps and Kylea Tink, played less of a role than in Melbourne.
In Wentworth and Curtin the problems are almost entirely with the Liberals, and have been on display over the past two elections, not just on May 21.
None of that is good news for Peter Dutton and the makeshift opposition now in place — but at least regaining Liberal voters is more within their power than convincing Labor and Greens voters to come over the other side.
It all suggests that the libs are in decline. The electorate is moving ever so gently to the centre left at the same time as the libs are chasing the bogan vote in the outer suburbs with right wing demagogory including anti trans dog whistles.
The sooner they evaporate the better. No longer required.
I agree Michael. The libs are in decline. They don’t seem to know how to get back I would suspect. Let’s hope they don’t even try.
It’s not just the Libs that are in decline. Labor didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory either. The trend continues – fewer first preference votes going to the major parties in each successive election. While Labor picked up seats due to preferences flowing from other parties (usually the Greens), in many electorates if the votes had been only slightly different the preference flow would have been from Labor rather than to them.
Labor won this election as the party voters didn’t number last on the ballot paper. The small target strategy meant that while nobody had any reason to vote for them, unlike the Libs nobody had much reason to loathe them. Next election Labor is going to go in having been forced to make all the decisions they avoided being pinned down on while in opposition. They’re not going to be able to scrape in by sole virtue of not being the Liberal Party.
There is no reason to believe that the trend of declining first preference votes for the two major parties is going to reverse any time soon.
And, yet, the people who voted for the Teals were the forgotten people who once voted for the Liberal Party and were repulsed by the rise of the fundamentalist Christian, Alt-Right, neo-con using the stolen “Liberal Party” name and logo.
As for the lying little rodent, he can take part of the blame for the evisceration of the “Liberal Party”.
along with a very biased media
Sorry Michael, I can’t agree, Australia need robust debate, integrity, and better media representation along with a strong opposition, or else in 10 years time the roles will be revered. The Liberal party might think they were born to rule, but have to stand-up for the country rather than just than their cabal of cronies
The Greens and Teals could come to replace the Libs as the strong opposition.
Things are looking *that* good at the moment.
Or you could argue quite convincingly that the left is moving slowly right and as a result capturing more of the middle ground.
Or we could argue that Teals being elected in once-blue ribbon Liberal seats is just the BAU of…rich people who live in rich suburbs electing rich people to represent their rich interests. Just with a new-entrant brand/marketing pitch.
We shall see, I guess.
True. But so is Labor in decline. If they want to be a true Social Democrat party and appeal to a broader center they need to break their ties with the union movement. This would free up unions to actually agitate for better wages and conditions rather than worry how that impacts on Labor polling. And get rid of their $250k a year uni graduate leaders who see it as a stepping stone to parliament and return it to their members. It would be a win win for both Labor and the union movement.
Yes x 4.
Petro Georgiou, Frydenberg’s predecessor in Kooyong, had a primary vote of around 66%. He was a moderate and a thoughtful, informed man. Frydenberg has taken the Liberal vote down a bit further every election since he occupied the seat.
I wonder if an independent would have won if Georgiou still occupied the seat – a la Bridget Arthur in Tassie.
Sorry, that should be Archer.
It’s because people like Georgiou aren’t welcome in the Liberal Party that the Teals were standing in the first place. The parliamentary Libs currently consist of a mixture of evangelical moderates and far-right IPA adherent loons. The party is still recovering from John Howard’s crusade against anybody smart enough to look like a threat to his leadership.
Agree.
Gee that’s a good comment. So much of the Libs 2022 defeat goes back to Howard.
If only Hewson hadn’t lost in 1993?
It always warms my heart to see when tactical voting works. It’s (hopefully) the path to less-bad politicians.
Not covered here, because it was not a teal who won, is the ACT Senate vote. I know normally-rusted-on ALP supporters who put David Pocock first. I did not because, by the time I voted, there was some concern that Katy Gallagher might not make a quota.
But, to rid ourselves of Zed, a lot of tactical voting did occur.
Yeah, Pocock winning was a huge relief, not least because I’m still angry at Zed for voting against rights for the territory he’s meant to represent. But Pocock at least prima facie seems to be saying all the right things, so it’s a huge improvement.
By now it should be blatantly obvious what the liberals stand for, and it’s not liberalism but the reactionary right. Anyone who’s interested in politics and aligns with liberal ideology, one would assume they would not join the Liberal party. Again, Labor is much more aligned with liberal ideology then the libs are. So who would join the libs? Well that’ll be the reactionary right, so even for the future, I can’t see them pulling back to the center. Surely voters will start coming to the same conclusion where any new candidate would stand, is not made of the old school liberals cloth, but firmly within the reactionary right.
Good to see you labelling them the ‘reactionary right’ and not conservative. They are no more conservative than they are liberal. Their ideology is radically destructive of the civil institutions and beliefs, such as the rule of law, that are fundamental to conservatives. Closer to fascists, so far as that label retains any real meaning after decades of being applied indiscriminately to anyone and everyone not agreeable to the far left. The fascism is increasingly obvious in other countries a lot further down the track, such as the Republicans in the USA who are well on the way to overthrowing the constitution and putting themselves in power permanently, and the scofflaws running the UK.
Before we congratulate the Australian people and give them all the credit for not disappearing down that road (yet) we should acknowledge our great good fortune in having mandatory preference voting. It is very significant that the benighted politics of the UK and USA is conducted under voluntary FPTP voting.
Have a Canadian friend who agrees mandatory preference voting helps protect our democracy, and wishes Canada had it too.
Scofflaws – love that word Ratty!
We are seeing the ideological split in the liberal party growing bigger at each election at both state and federal levels, it’s a parallel of the split in labor in the 1950’s that lasted for decades , the extreme right has hijacked the Liberal party and the Menzies like moderates forced out, the moderates will most likely form their own small l party and like the democrats the hard right Liberals will disappear or join Hanson or Palmer in the not too distant future.