So it turns out that all the intense media coverage of the last fortnight was insufficient to induce the voters of Dunkley to do something interesting. All they were able to give us was a swing right in the “average” range. It’s currently 3.6% to the Liberals (that might tick up very slightly as the remaining postals are counted), leaving Labor with 52.7% of the two-party-preferred vote.
In my preview last week I had said that for the Liberals to get “within a percentage point … would be very positive,” whereas a good result for Labor would be “confining the swing to around 3% or less.” Not surprisingly, neither of those things happened. You could say the result is a bit closer to the “good for Labor” end of the range than the opposite, but in the big scheme of things the difference between 3.5% and 4.5% is negligible.
The commentary since Saturday has had an air of desperation to it, searching for meaning in a result that just looks supremely ordinary. Labor at least has the consolation that it won the seat, so its partisans have felt a bit less need to make foolish claims – although Paul Bongiorno’s bold assertion that “Labor would be justified in reading the poll as a vote of confidence in the Albanese government” deserves a mention – but a number of Liberals have shown no such restraint.*
Michelle Grattan repeats the misleading claim that “this outer suburban electorate is the sort of seat the opposition leader is targeting for the 2025 election.” As I and others pointed out last week, this is true only in the sense that it’s a very average seat, and of course anyone wanting to win an election wants to win average voters. But while Dunkley looks outer suburban because it’s a long way from the city, it is now mostly established suburbs rather than mortgage belt. It is quite different from the sort of seat that Peter Dutton’s policies are specifically aimed it.
That, however, is a relatively minor point. More serious is the new dogma that the Liberals did best in the most teal-friendly or middle-class parts of the seat – kicked off apparently by an op-ed piece on Sunday by former MPs Tim Wilson and Jason Falinski. Having both lost their seats to teal independents in 2022, they are using this claim as an argument for the party’s need to focus on reclaiming those sort of seats.
In fact the claim is completely false. In the suburb of Mount Eliza, at the more affluent and well-educated southern end of the electorate, the swing to the Liberals was only 1.9%. In the adjacent suburb of Frankston South, the next most teal-like, it was 1.7%. In the least affluent suburbs, Frankston and Frankston North, the swings were 3.4% and 5.1% respectively. (Check out the official results here, or the Poll Bludger’s version, which includes a nice map.)
How do Wilson and Falinski get it so wrong? By picking out a single polling place, Mount Eliza North, which did indeed swing impressively: 10.3%. But other than the size of its swing (and that it happened to be the first one to report on Saturday night), there’s no reason to pick on it; anyone trying to do serious analysis would look at the other four Mount Eliza polling places as well, where the swings were 1.6%, 1.1%, 0.6% and -0.7%.
Why was Mount Eliza North so different? I don’t know; we’re dealing with samples of only a few hundred votes, so some variation is just random. But it’s probably significant that Mount Eliza North scored the sharpest drop of any of the five in the number of votes taken (800 down to 578), and that the nearby Mount Eliza Central polling place has changed its location since the 2022 election; movement of voters from one to the other looks like being part of the story.
It’s not even clear that Wilson and Falinski’s bad analysis (which has gone viral and infected others like Richard Denniss) serves their purpose. If the argument is that the Liberals need to re-focus away from Dutton’s obsession with the outer suburbs and chase teal voters instead, then claiming that the party under Dutton scored well in a teal-like area would seem to undermine it: why change if you’re doing well already?
There is, in fact, no evidence that the affluent and the well-educated are trending back towards Dutton’s Liberal Party. And there’s also no evidence that he cares.
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* That’s without even starting on the volume of commentary that focuses on movements in the primary vote. If it was the inner city, where Greens and maybe teals are a factor, that would be relevant; in a seat like Dunkley it’s completely meaningless. All votes are going to end up with one of the major parties, so there is no conceivable reason (other than to spread confusion) to look at anything other than the two-party-preferred.
The World is Not Enough 