By-election preview: Dunkley

Australian readers will probably be well aware that there’s a by-election being held tomorrow for the federal seat of Dunkley, vacated before Christmas by the death of its Labor member, Peta Murphy. The importance of by-elections is nearly always a lot less than pundits make out; every now and then there’s an exception – Aston last year may have been one – but Dunkley is unlikely to join them.

I outlined some general points about by-elections back in 2020, when there was a much-hyped one in Eden-Monaro. It had the further advantage, as I put it, that “it’s scenic and close to Canberra, so press gallery journalists can do fieldwork without having to stray far from home”; Dunkley, in the southern suburbs of Melbourne around Frankston, lacks that attraction, but the rest of what I said still applies.

A lot of the interest this time stems from the fact that the opposition seems to making up some ground and that under Peter Dutton’s leadership it has decided to focus on possible gains in the outer suburbs, implicitly writing off (or at least not prioritising) the more affluent inner-suburban seats where it did so badly in 2022. Dunkley, you might think, is just the sort of seat where it should be hoping for an above-average swing, such as the 6.3% that it needs to win it.

Kevin Bonham, whose preview is essential reading, warns against that line of thinking. In his words, “To try to throw Dunkley into the same ‘outer suburban’ box as western Sydney and north-western Melbourne would be completely mistaken; this seat has not behaved like those in recent elections and even swung to Labor in 2019.”

In fact, demographically Dunkley is very much an average seat. It’s a bit whiter than the norm, but for things like household income and education levels it sits right in the middle of the pack. It voted Labor in 2022 by about four points better than the national average, and did exactly the same thing in last year’s “Voice” referendum. Thirty years ago it was definitely in the mortgage belt, but many of those houses are now paid off and its suburbs no longer feel like the frontier; like Aston, it has joined the mainstream.

Politicians and commentators sometimes talk as if urban seats divide neatly between the outer suburbs, where people are heavily mortgaged, less well-educated and supposedly culturally conservative (and therefore ripe for reactionary politics), and the inner suburbs, where they have the opposite tendencies (and therefore vote for Greens and teal independents). But most seats fit in neither category: they are somewhere in between, established suburbs where people’s attitudes cluster somewhere near the average.

Dutton’s approach carries the risk than by pursuing hard-right policies he will alienate not just the inner-suburbanites behind the tofu curtain but this much larger swathe of mainstream Australia as well. That said, the Liberals seem to have learnt some lessons from Aston: their candidate is a local, and a marginal seat campaigner rather than an ideologue. And with the Albanese government well out of its honeymoon period, the opposition has reason to be hopeful.

As Bonham says, the important thing for Labor is to win and not worry too much about the margin. For the Liberals, on the other hand, while a win would be a major boost, even a narrow loss – say within a percentage point – would be very positive, coming on top of last year’s disaster in Aston and the previous year’s Victorian election. It might even help to quell some of the party’s infighting, although that’s a big ask.

But if Labor wins well, confining the swing to around 3% or less, it will raise very big question marks about the Dutton strategy. After a rough few months for Anthony Albanese, it would be a welcome piece of good news.

If you’re keen, you can follow the results tomorrow with Antony Green at the ABC; William Bowe the Poll Bludger will also have live results and analysis. And as a bonus, you can check out the BBC this afternoon for the Rochdale by-election, where Putinist independent George Galloway is favored to win after Labour disendorsed its own candidate.

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PS (3.30pm Friday): Galloway did indeed win the Rochdale vote comfortably, with 39.7% of the vote, about 5,700 votes ahead of another independent, who had 21.3%. The Conservatives could only manage third with 12.0%, some 19 points down on their 2019 result, followed by the disendorsed Labour candidate on 7.7%. A small consolation was that the far-right Reform UK was well back in sixth place with 6.3%, even though its candidate was also a former MP.

A friend objected to my description of Galloway as a Putinist on the basis that this was unfair to Vladimir Putin. He has a point.