Campbell: Winning Dunkley will give Albanese or Dutton media narrative

The seat of Dunkley is a mixture of rich, poor and aspirational suburbs, which ought to make it a good test of how things are going at the halfway point of this parliament, writes James Campbell.

For the next month the eyes of the political world will be focused on the outer suburban Melbourne seat of Dunkley, where Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton will be desperately vying for an outcome that – fairly or unfairly – will dictate the media narrative for the months ahead.

Albo will, of course, be hoping for a good result in the seat, which the late Peta Murphy retained for Labor in 2022 with 56.3 per cent of the two-party preferred result.

For interstate readers I should explain that, unusually for a Melbourne seat, Dunkley is a mixture of rich, poor and aspirational suburbs, which ought to make it a good laboratory to test how things are going at the halfway point of this parliament. The seat is also, by Melbourne standards, less ethnically diverse than most of the city, which means it more closely resembles the sorts of seats in other states that will decide the next election.

In other words it would be easy for commentators to draw wider conclusions about the implications of this result for the Rest of Australia (ROA).

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at Jodie Belyea's Dunkley by-election campaign launch. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Two things should give people pause about before jumping to wider conclusions, however.

The first is that though Dunkley is more like the ROA, this is still the People’s Republic of Victoria, which is a much more left-wing place than Peter Dutton’s home state of Queensland. The other is that the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party is completely and utterly useless.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton with Liberal Party candidate for the Dunkley by-election, Nathan Conroy, and Senator Bridget McKenzie. Picture: David Crosling

The electoral history of Dunkley over the past 10 years mirrors the decline of the Liberal Party’s primary vote in Victoria.

In 2013, when front bencher Bruce Billson held it, the primary vote was 48.75 per cent. After Billson retired this dropped to 42.7 per cent and has kept steadily falling ever since.

To win, Liberals will be hoping to buck a primary vote trend that’s been running for a decade.

Luckily, they may not have to because, echoing Clive Palmer’s message at the 2019 general election that gave us another three years of Scott Morrison, the conservative activist group Advance is going to be working hard to push the message “Put Labor last”.

Advance was the outfit which, after a bit of argy-bargy among the various players, ended up in the driver’s seat of the No case at the Voice referendum. Established in 2018 and originally called Advance Australia, the group is what seems like the umpteenth conservative attempt to replicate GetUp!, the left wing outfit which, to the bemusement of Labor operatives who regard it as useless, looms large in Liberal imagination.

To Liberals’ intense irritation, by being careful about what it says, GetUp! has managed to convince the AEC it is not a pro-Greens and Labor front group, meaning it has avoided the disclosure regime it would be liable for if it were to be declared an associated entity of a political party.

Advance will no doubt be hoping that its “put Labor last” message will allow it to continue to enjoy the same status as GetUp! During the Voice campaign, Advance created a Facebook page called Referendum News, which just reposted media stories about the Voice. Referendum News has now been rebranded as Election News and has been pumping reposted news stories into Dunkley voters’ Facebook feeds that show things are crook in Victoria.

The aim will then be to use this atmosphere to direct the Dunkley voter towards an action point, that the best way to send the message that they are drowning is to punish Albo next month. This message will be difficult to counter I suspect because, unlike a general election, an anti-Labor vote this time won’t make Peter Dutton the prime minister.

Originally published as Campbell: Winning Dunkley will give Albanese or Dutton media narrative