Next Saturday, 8 February, some 80,000 formal votes will be cast in different parts of Melbourne. They will be the first Australian votes counted for 2025 and may serve as a guide to other Australian election results later in the year. The votes in question will come from by-elections for two electoral districts in Victoria’s Legislative Assembly, Prahran and Werribee. Prahran is very markedly south-eastern inner metropolitan and includes the suburbs of Prahran, South Yarra, Windsor and much of Saint Kilda. Werribee is just as markedly south-western outer metropolitan and semi-rural and is based on Wyndham City but includes Werribee and Little River and reaches on to Port Phillip Bay.
My predictions are that Prahran will be won by the Greens candidate, Angellica Di Camillo, while Werribee will be won by the Liberal candidate, Steve Murphy. Runner-up candidates, therefore, would be Rachel Westaway (Liberal) in Prahran and John Lister (Labor) in Werribee.
The way in which these by-elections came about speaks volumes to what Australian politics is like these days. Prahran had a 42-years-old male Greens member, one Samuel Hibbins, known as Sam. He resigned his seat on 23 November. Why? Because his Greens parliamentary colleagues in effect forced him to resign. He had had a brief affair with a staffer. That’s what the moralising Greens are like. A Labor, Liberal, National or independent member would not have resigned his seat for such a reason. In the case of Werribee, the member was Labor’s 65-years-old Tim Pallas who was Treasurer in the Andrews and Allan Labor governments. In the good old days, he would have retired at the expiration of his term as Werribee member in November next year. Instead, he resigned his seat on 6 January 2025 – but the media describe him as having “retired”.
A look at the history of these two seats suggests that both are marginal. Back in the days of Henry Bolte and Rupert Hamer as Liberal Premier, the member for Prahran was the great cricketer Sam Loxton (Liberal) and the member for Werribee was Neville Hudson (Liberal) but when John Cain’s Labor government was in office from April 1982 to August 1990 both went to Labor. During the Kennett years (October 1992-October 1999) the Liberal Party won back Prahran and was highly competitive in Werribee without winning it. Then Ted Baillieu was Liberal Premier from December 2010 to March 2013 and these two seats split. Prahran had a Liberal member, a certain Clement Newton-Brown, but the name “Werribee” was dropped in favour of the more metropolitan name of “Tarneit” for which Pallas was the member. However, the idea that Prahran is more Liberal than Werribee, though historically correct, has been thrown out the window by boundary changes and demographic change. The reverse is now the case.
The Labor Party is in a bad way in Victoria at the moment, so bad in fact that it has decided not even to contest Prahran which seat Labor seems to accept is now permanently in the column of the Greens. So, what about the Liberal Party? According to my current Victorian pendulum, the Liberal Party needs a swing of 12.1% to take Prahran from the Greens and a swing of an even 11% to take Werribee from Labor. Those statistics, however, are misleading in the current context. Werribee covers territory in which the Liberals now do pretty well whereas Prahran covers territory in which the Liberal Party is going backwards.
Nominations for both seats closed on Friday 24 January and the positions on the ballot paper were drawn by lot. Three interesting features were revealed. The first was the number of candidates. There will be 11 candidates for Prahran and 12 for Werribee. Those are high numbers. Bear in mind that the system is one of full preferential voting. Therefore, we may expect yet another very high informal vote of about 10% in Werribee and a higher-than-normal number of informal votes in Prahran.
The second interesting feature applies to Prahran. There is an independent candidate whose name is Tony Lupton. That name rang a bell with me, so I checked my records and found that Tony Lupton was the Labor member for Prahran from November 2002 until November 2010 when he was defeated by Clement Newton-Brown (Liberal). Lupton should get good support reflecting Labor supporters who are reluctant to switch their primary votes from Labor to Greens consequent upon Labor’s decision not to stand a candidate.
The third interesting feature is that the Liberal Party got lucky in the draws for ballot paper positions. In both seats the Liberal candidate is second. In Prahran the Liberal candidate, Rachel Westaway, is just below Nathan Chisholm (independent) while in Werribee the Liberal candidate, Steve Murphy, is just below Raheem Rifai of the Greens. The serious candidate of the left in Prahran, Angelica Di Camilla of the Greens is placed 8th while Labor’s John Lister is at number 11 in Werribee.
Finally, readers may be interested to know I am now predicting that the federal election will be held on 12 April, the last Saturday before Good Friday. In expectation of this date, I have l posted my newest pendulum on my website at www.malcolmmackerras.com. It is the first of my Australian pendulums to appear and is titled “Mackerras Pendulum Federal 2022 Result, Adjusted for Aston by-election April 2023, and for new boundaries in 2025”.