Labor faces battle for key seats under boundary redraw

Labor faces losing the seat of Higgins in Melbourne’s inner east and a tough battle to fend off the Greens in two other electorates across the city under a proposed revamp of Victoria’s electoral boundaries.

But it may be able to make up these potential losses by gaining ground in Western Australia, where a draft redistribution has notionally given Labor a new electorate and a chance at a seat held by a potential future Liberal leader.

Former treasurer Peter Costello held the seat of Higgins from 1990 to 2009. The Liberal Party held the seat until Katie Allen lost to Labor’s Michelle Ananda-Rajah in 2022.Credit: Bloomberg, Alex Ellinghausen

The Australian Electoral Commission is cutting the number of seats in both Victoria and NSW while adding one to WA due to population changes over the past three years. The proposed NSW boundaries are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

Higgins – held by first-term Labor MP Michelle Ananda-Rajah, who won the seat from Liberal Party incumbent Katie Allen at the 2022 election – was famously held by former Liberal treasurer Peter Costello. Since its creation in 1949, it had always been held by the Liberal Party until the last federal election.

“I am obviously disappointed by today’s announcement of the draft boundaries from the AEC,” Ananda-Rajah said on Friday. “This is a draft proposal, and there is now a process to go through. We will have more to say once that process is complete.”

Labor is yet to decide whether to challenge the draft plan. The last time a draft redistribution was changed was in 2010.

Large parts of Higgins would go into the neighbouring seats of Kooyong, held by teal independent Monique Ryan, and Chisholm, held by Labor’s Carina Garland. Other sections would go into Labor-held Hotham and Macnamara, along with the seat of Melbourne.

The abolition of Higgins would have a major ripple effect across Melbourne’s inner-city electorates.

Melbourne, held by Greens leader Adam Bandt, would cross the Yarra River to take in traditional Liberal-leaning suburbs such as Prahran and South Yarra.

That would have a flow-on impact on Wills, held by Labor’s Peter Khalil, which would absorb Greens-voting areas such as Brunswick East and Fitzroy North. The neighbouring seat of Cooper, held by Ged Kearney, would also take in Greens-leaning suburbs such as Clifton Hill.

ABC electoral analyst Antony Green estimated that under the proposal, Khalil’s margin against the Greens would be slashed from 8.6 per cent to 2 per cent. Khalil was already facing a tough battle after former state Greens leader Samantha Ratnam said she would stand in the seat.

Ben Raue, analyst for The Tally Room website, estimated Kearney’s margin would fall from 8.7 per cent to 7.4 per cent.

While Labor faces a struggle to keep seats, the redistribution plan has also notionally changed the electorate of Menzies. Liberal Keith Wolahan won the northern Melbourne seat with a margin of 0.7 per cent in 2022, but its proposed boundaries would make it a Labor seat on a margin of about 0.3 per cent.

In WA, the new seat of Bullwinkel – named after Vivian Bullwinkel, who was the sole Australian survivor of the 1942 Bangka Island massacre – would be created in Perth’s eastern suburbs and across into the wheat belt areas near Northam.

Large parts of Hasluck, held by Labor, would go into the new seat, as would areas in the Liberal-held Durack, Canning and O’Connor.

Based on voting patterns at the 2022 federal election, when it enjoyed an unprecedented 10.6 per cent two-party preferred swing in WA that helped it net four Liberal-held seats, Labor would hold Bullwinkel on a 3.3 per cent margin.

The margin for Labor’s most senior MP in the state, Resources Minister Madeleine King, would increase in her seat of Brand to 17.1 per cent from 16.7 per cent.

First-time Labor MP Tania Lawrence’s margin in Hasluck would rise to 10.3 per cent from 6 per cent.

Liberal defence spokesman Andrew Hastie, considered by many within the Coalition as a potential future leader, would have his margin in the south-eastern outer-suburban seat of Canning halved from 3.6 per cent.

The proposed boundaries would increase the margins for Zaneta Mascarenhas and Patrick Gorman in the Labor-held seats of Swan and Perth, both of which have been targeted by the Liberal Party.

One of the biggest surprises of the 2022 election was the victory by Labor’s Sam Lim, a former dolphin trainer, in the safe Liberal seat of Tangney in Perth’s southern suburbs. The redistribution would marginally increase his margin to about 3 per cent.

The boundaries of the seat of Curtin, won by teal independent Kate Chaney from the Liberal Party in 2022, would barely alter.

Both major parties regard Bullwinkel as a key target, with some calculations showing while it would be a Labor seat based on the 2022 election results, it would go to the Liberals on the 2019 poll outcome.

Gorman, an assistant minister and former Labor state director in WA, said the proposed new seat was “notionally Labor” and he wanted to ensure it would be safe for Labor at the election.

Contests could tighten

Some Labor sources, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely, said the proposed redistribution might make it more difficult to hold some of their seats, such as Swan and Hasluck, at the next election.

In Melbourne, the sources acknowledged that the seat of Wills would become harder to hold, in part because strong Labor polling booths would move out of the electorate and into neighbouring Maribyrnong, a safe seat held by Government Services Minister Bill Shorten.

“Logic says Wills is now a lot Greener,” one Labor source said.

The seat of Deakin, held by Liberal frontbencher Michael Sukkar, is seen as an even contest between Labor and the Liberals.

One view within the Labor Party is that the overall effect would be to make it harder for the Liberal Party under Peter Dutton to form a government.

The Liberals, however, responded to the redistribution plan by noting the impact the loss of Higgins would have on the government.

The Melbourne seat of Chisholm is now seen as a tighter contest and a target seat for the Liberals, given estimates that the Labor margin in that seat would be whittled down to 3 per cent.

Kooyong was the subject of conjecture on Friday afternoon because of the Electoral Commission’s plan to relocate some relatively safe Liberal areas into independent MP Ryan’s electorate.

While this might improve the Liberals’ chances of reclaiming the formerly blue-ribbon seat, previously held by former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, observers were cautious about how this might play out.

Former Liberal MP Jason Falinski said Frydenberg should reconsider whether to contest Kooyong for the Liberals.

“I think that Josh would be silly not to be looking at the new boundaries and not be reconsidering his decision last year not to recontest,” he told Sky News.

“I think that Kooyong is almost a certain pick-up for the Liberal Party now.”

Objections to both proposals can be made to the electoral commission by June 28.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.