More Liberal woes in the heartland

The deadline for postal votes to arrive was last Friday, but even so, counting of Australia’s federal election is not quite complete. Most obviously for the Senate, which requires a laborious process of data entry before preferences can be distributed; final results there are still more than a week off, although so far the numbers look the same as they did in last week’s assessment.

The House of Representatives is in better shape. Just two seats remain in some doubt: Bradfield, where the Teal challenger leads the Liberal by 39 votes, and where a recount will be held after the official distribution of preferences, and Calwell, where no two-candidate throw has been conducted because the order of elimination of the two leading independents is uncertain, and it’s therefore possible that one of them could reach the final two and then defeat Labor on Liberal preferences.

Assuming that Teal and Labor retain their respective leads in those two, the lower house will finish with 94 Labor, 28 Liberals, 15 Nationals and 13 on the crossbench (most of them Teals or Teal-friendly). Expressed as a percentage of seats, that’s Labor’s best result since 1943 and the Coalition’s worst result ever – it has never previously fallen below 30% of the House. (As of this morning the Coalition parties are no longer in coalition, but I shall continue to refer to them that way; there have been other short breaks in continuity in its history.)

But it’s not just about the number of seats, or even of votes (which at a combined 31.8% is slightly more respectable, being above the 1943 low point of 30.4%). It’s also the fact that the remaining Coalition MPs are so unrepresentative of the voters they need to win back. They are overwhelmingly white males – only six of the 28 Liberals are women, although that now includes their leader – and very few of them come from the urban areas where most Australians live.

This last point is subject to a fair bit of confusion, so it’s worth spending a moment on. Using the boundaries of the greater capital city statistical areas as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, it’s a simple matter to classify seats as either metropolitan or regional.* It comes out at almost exactly two to one: there are 99 metropolitan seats and 51 regional. Labor’s 94 seats split 76 metropolitan and 18 regional, but the Liberals have a regional majority, 15 against 13, and of course the Nationals’ seats are all regional.

Even those numbers understate the problem. Almost all of the 13 Liberal metropolitan seats are on the fringes of the major cities: places like Berowra (on the northern edge of Sydney), Hume (on its south-western edge), Flinders (Mornington Peninsula), Longman (north of Brisbane, based on Caboolture) and Canning (south of Perth, based on Mandurah). Bowman, Cook, Lindsay and Mitchell are more conventionally suburban, but still a long way out; only Goldstein is anywhere near the centre of a city.

The other thing about these seats is that they are nearly all very marginal. Canning, Cook, Hume and Wright are the only ones with margins above 4%, Wright being the safest on 8.1%. Goldstein and Longman were won by only a few hundred votes, and even Berowra, once one of the safest seats in the country, is down to 1.5%.

After the 2022 election I tried to describe the Liberal Party’s traditional heartland and explain what had become of it. Of the 16 seats mentioned in that story, the party had just gone from holding 14 to holding only three. It now has only two, having won back Goldstein and held Flinders, but lost Bradfield and Menzies.

Labor has not, at least so far, been the main beneficiary of the heartland collapse, although it has certainly made inroads: Chisholm and Menzies in Melbourne, Bennelong in Sydney, Tangney in Perth, Boothby in Adelaide. Ryan went Green in 2022 and they narrowly held it this time; the rest are all Teal, or in the case of Mayo Teal-adjacent. The Liberals are fighting on two fronts, and doing badly on both.

As we noted last week, the Liberals in the last term decided not to worry about the heartland seats and instead pursue gains in outer working-class suburbs. That project was a failure; no such gains materialised, and none of those traditional Labor seats even look marginal for next time. If they could win the Teals back into the fold they would at least have some sort of urban base on which to build, but any proposal to do that would split the party down the middle.

Yet no coherent alternative strategy has presented itself.

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* Simple, at least, for the three big cities, where the electoral boundaries mostly track the ABS lines. The smaller states include a few seats that are debatable; I’m calling Bullwinkel, Franklin and Mayo metropolitan, and Lyons regional.