Literally anyone else: Fear for the major parties in Werribee’s result

When Antony Green started covering elections for the ABC more than 30 years ago, one of the major parties would drop out of the two-party preferred count in one or two seats at any given poll. At the last federal election, either the red or blue team didn’t reach the final count 27 times.

In the state byelection for Werribee, no candidate was able to secure 30 per cent of primary votes. Labor’s primary crashed 17 per cent, with candidate John Lister and the Liberal’s Steve Murphy both landing around 29 per cent.

“Very unusual,” muses Green. What is really odd, he adds, is that the Liberal Party couldn’t capitalise on Labor’s losses.

John Lister, the Labor candidate for Werribee, and Premier Jacinta Allan at the party’s byelection event.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

Independent Paul Hopper polled almost 15 per cent in Werribee, but the votes of disaffected, traditional Labor voters otherwise settled with an eclectic group of minor and micro parties. With apologies to Albert Langer, a political activist jailed for ignoring an injunction to advocate informal voting, the overwhelming message from Werribee voters was: none of the above.

Following a protracted count, Lister squeaked home on Friday in a seat comfortably held by Labor for almost half a century. For both Labor and the Liberal Party, which sees outer suburban seats in Melbourne’s west and north as a possible new path back to government, the Werribee result is a reality check.

For Hopper, a local car dealer who plans to launch the West Party and contest 11 suburban electorates at next year’s state poll, the byelection provided a confidence boost to his nascent movement. Werribee voters clearly had enough of the two-party system, he says. They’re angry and frustrated.

“I pretty much started my 2026 campaign on Monday,” Hopper says.

Political operatives don’t expect the fractious vote to be so pronounced at the upcoming federal election or November 2026 state election; byelections are often outliers. But the major parties know – even if preferences tend to come back to them – that the community is increasingly unconvinced.

Paul Hopper, who polled close to 15 per cent at the Werribee byelection, will contest the 2026 election.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

“Both [major parties] have lots of work to do to rebuild this,” one source said, anonymously to speak frankly about the result. More people in Werribee voted for literally anyone than either Labor or the Liberals, another put it.

Results like this leave the “Big Two” vulnerable to an independent or minor party breaking into the final count and, possibly, a messy result at the federal election, due by May.

Climate 200, the fundraising vehicle founded by Simon Holmes à Court, is supporting more than 30 candidates – close to a quarter of all seats – in federal electorates such as Flinders, Monash, Wannon, Casey and Nicholls and incumbents in Indi, Kooyong and Goldstein.

The model partly relies on a theory that independents are more likely to have success in historically safe seats; it’s easier to crack into the two-party preferred count and voters often feel they’ve been taken for granted.

West Australian senator Fatima Payman has launched the Australia’s Voice party, and campaign groups like Muslim Votes Matter are targeting mostly Labor-held safe seats at the federal election.

The Greens have been encroaching but went backwards in Victoria at the Prahran state byelection last weekend, a drought-breaking win for the state Liberal Party.

Election analyst Ben Raue from the Tally Room says new entrants had to organise voters to get a result, with so many voting options that parties were now being assailed on all sides. “The fragmentation is happening everywhere, and it’s often covered up because of our preferential system.”

For a long time, Raue says, it was reasonable to view the two-party preferred result as the meaningful vote. “But that only works to a point, when suddenly all the [minor] votes get big enough and they start poking through into the top two or three.”

Former Liberal senator and state party president Greg Mirabella alluded to this threat way back when the party suffered the 2018 “Danslide” in Victoria, before the so-called teals became a phenomenon federally.

“Putting to one side the effects of the Victorian division’s own recent self-inflicted damage, the fragmenting of the electorate and the rise of the independents is symptomatic of a fundamental change in society ... that is, the effect of social media,” Mirabella wrote in a 2019 discussion paper.

The Liberal Party has a brand problem, he wrote, especially among young people and women, but isn’t offering these demographics anything new.

“Plenty of people who used to belong to us, donate to us, and handout for us, can now be seen in different coloured T-shirts – either orange, yellow, or light blue.”

Splintered votes have happened before in Australia, albeit in three- or four-way contests.

Green harks back to the 2001 West Australian election (where Coalition parties can run against each other) when One Nation was big on the scene.

Even at the 2022 federal election, candidates in Richmond on the NSW north coast and Nicholls in regional Victoria all failed to reach 30 per cent, Raue points out.

And the nationwide vote for the major parties was a record-low, having fallen about 17 per cent since the 2007 election. While Prime Minister Anthony Albanese snuck through with a majority, Labor’s primary vote was pushing just 33 per cent.

Redbridge pollster Kos Samaras, a former Labor Party strategist, said the splintered result in Werribee showed a level of disengagement with politics. “It’s a rejection of the whole system.”

It was all visible at the 2022 state election when Labor’s primary vote collapsed more than 18 per cent in St Albans, Greenvale and Kororoit.

While traditional Labor voters abandoned the party in 2022 and in Werribee last weekend, they slowly came back on preferences. But if the seat had a tradition of switching votes, like some of those in Melbourne’s east, Samaras suspects voters would not have sprayed their first preferences around. They would have flipped to the Liberals.

Labor is feeling it. State MPs, particularly those from the west, want the government to seize the moment and reprioritise focus back to basics: the cost of living, perennial concerns about underinvestment in transport in the west, and crime.

Premier Jacinta Allan pre-empted the byelection with a vague promise to review bail laws, and Transport Infrastructure Minister Gabrielle Williams made the journey to Melton on Wednesday to spruik the level crossing removal project to free up the roads and regional rail line. But she still can’t say when that V/Line track will be duplicated and electrified as promised in 2018.

Byelections are notoriously hard on incumbents, and still, the Liberals converted only 3.71 per cent extra first-preference votes. At the 2022 state election the Liberal candidate got 25 per cent of first-preference votes. But while the party has failed to convince the outer-west, the Werribee result could also give the Coalition justification to campaign strongly where it hasn’t before. After all, the first red brick in the wall came perilously close to falling.

Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is targeting Labor strongholds like Hawke in the outer-west and Bruce in the outer-south-east. Dutton has to flip 20 seats if he is to form a majority or about a dozen to be within reach of cobbling together a minority government – with independents.

Opposition Leader Brad Battin addresses the crowd at the Liberal Party event in Werribee. Candidate Steve Murphy is third from right.Credit: Luis Ascui

More defected Labor votes in Werribee sprayed out to minor parties like the Victorian Socialists, an anti-establishment outfit with an aggressive ground game, which almost doubled its performance from the 2022 election to land about on par with the Greens.

The socialists’ communications manager James Plested argues government failures disproportionately hurt people in the west, where he says he saw lingering suspicions about the Liberal Party at the booths last Saturday.

“People aren’t stupid.”

Legalise Cannabis, too, picked up about 5.5 per cent of first preferences. The micro party is popular in the outer suburbs and tends to be a classic protest vote. As Samaras explains, their ballots say: “They’re all clowns, stuff them, I’m out.”

It’s a momentary decision in the booth, rather than a thoughtful reflection of long-held views.

Legalise Cannabis MP David Ettershank, who represents the Western Metropolitan region that takes in Werribee in Victoria’s upper house, says their voters are often engaged in the drug reform debate and support the party with purpose.

But he has to agree it also represents disengaged voters from both the left and the right.

The people of Werribee, a suburb once synonymous with its local sewerage farm, have long endured jokes about their neighbourhood. Now it’s the major parties on the nose.

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