The Allan key: Has the state government unlocked fortress Victoria for the Libs?

It seemed so incongruous for so many years that in the lead-up to successive federal elections, pundits and psephologists would disregard Victoria. The second-most populous state. Capital city Melbourne, closing in on Sydney as the nation’s biggest city. Melbourne, which had been crowned the world’s most liveable city for years on end. Melbourne was cool and happy with itself, with its continuous string of sporting and cultural events, its vibrant city laneways that were the envy of Sydneysiders, its infrastructure roll-out and a growing economy built around new knowledge industries. How could Victoria not be crucial to each election outcome?

The simple fact was that for most of the past 45 years, Victoria has been a very reliable Labor state and, at election after election, not many seats have been in play. But that might be about to change, regardless of Labor’s improved performance and rising national poll ratings so far in this election campaign.

Voters are turning away from the Labor state government. Will it sink Anthony Albanese’s re-election hopes? Credit: ARTWORK: Matt Davidson

There are several reasons for this, but the threshold one is the unusual electoral arithmetic produced by the 2022 federal election. At that contest, support for the Liberal Party under Scott Morrison cratered, but there was no corresponding king tide in Labor’s direction. The Labor Party’s position improved only moderately but enough to give it a two-seat majority in the lower house.

Consequently, at this election, while the Coalition needs to win 23 extra seats to take office, Labor needs to hang on to every seat it’s got merely to hold on to majority government. And that’s where Victoria comes in this time.

Victoria is not an altogether happy place. The above references to Melbourne’s vibrancy and confidence applied more to the period before the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020 than to 2025.

Bourke Street in Melbourne during a lockdown in 2020. Credit: Wayne Taylor

During the pandemic, Melbourne became the world’s lockdown capital. Between March 2020 and October 2021, Victorians lived through 262 days of lockdown spread over six periods. The longest single lockdown period was a punishing 111 days in the winter and early spring of 2020.

A post-pandemic sourness persists in Victoria. The Melbourne CBD is patchy. It’s underpopulated during business hours, with a considerable number of boarded-up shopfronts and, like many suburban shopping strips and neighbourhoods, is overrun with graffiti tags.

Youth crime is a serious and persistent problem, as is the organised crime war over illegal tobacco sales. There’s more aggression on the roads, many of which are potholed, and the suburbs are regularly choked with traffic. The pre-pandemic ebullience that characterised Victoria has not been restored.

The post-pandemic unease has already been expressed by voters – twice. Most Victorians either backed or grudgingly accepted the lockdown strategy at the time, but it hit lower-income workers and their families in outer-suburban and urban-fringe growth areas hard. Working from home wasn’t an option for many of them; they had jobs where if you couldn’t turn up, you wouldn’t be paid.

When the 2022 federal election came around, those workers, who live in traditionally safe Labor seats, registered their discontent at the ballot box.

In the outer west, north and south-east, Labor’s primary vote fell big time. These were the numbers: Scullin 14.1 per cent, Gorton 10 per cent, Holt 9.7 per cent, Calwell 9.6 per cent, Fraser 8.7 per cent, Hawke 7.4 per cent, Lalor 7.5 per cent. Bear in mind, this was at a change-of-government election when, more broadly across the nation, there was a swing towards the Labor Party.

Those hitherto safe Labor seats didn’t change hands because the pre-existing margins were high enough for the Labor incumbents to survive the primary-vote fall.

Nevertheless, the numbers reflected a potentially ominous change in voter sentiment. Just to drive home the point, at the state election in November 2022, the same voters gave Daniel Andrews a similar dose of antipathy, rendering once-safe seats marginal. These former Labor voters were unhappy with the Labor Party. In focus groups conducted by pollsters, they said they felt taken for granted and were sick of it.

What this means for the May 3 election is that more seats will become competitive, with less predictable outcomes, as larger numbers of voters unmoor themselves from not just the Labor Party but the Liberals too.

One statistic bears this out. At the 2019 election, 10 Victorian seats – six for Labor and two each for the Liberals and Nationals – were decided without the need to go to preferences. That is, the winners attracted more than 50 per cent of the primary vote. At the 2022 federal election, just one seat – Gippsland, held by the National Party’s Darren Chester – was won with a primary majority.

As this trend continues, the Labor Party has the most to lose because it holds by far the most seats in Victoria. In 2022, it secured 24 of the state’s 39 seats. The Liberals won just eight seats and subsequently lost one of them, Aston, in the outer eastern suburbs, at a 2023 byelection.

It’s not only the lingering resentments and feelings of dislocation induced by the pandemic deaths and lockdowns that are affecting political sympathies. The state is suffering a hangover from being the fastest-growing state for a good deal of this century. The population growth path began in the late 1990s as the state recovered from a national recession and picked up pace in the first 10 years of the century.

More people are good for economic growth, bringing extra demand. But unless physical and social infrastructure keeps pace, problems develop. That’s where Victoria finds itself now: the bills are coming in and, thanks to the extra public spending necessitated by the pandemic lockdowns and an over-ambitious infrastructure program, the state is in arrears.

Between 2014, when the Andrews Labor government was elected, and last year, Victoria’s population rose from 5.8 million to 7 million. Nearly all those extra bodies were added to Melbourne, which grew from 4.4 million to 5.3 million in the same 10-year period.

The rate of growth is incredible. In the 12 months to September 2024, Victoria’s population grew by 146,000, the biggest increase of all states and territories. This is why the metropolitan area keeps extending into new subdivisions on former paddocks in localities that not long ago were not regarded as part of Melbourne.

This growth has been good for the Labor Party; new arrivals have over the decades, all the way back to when the post-war migration began, tended to vote ALP. But it’s crucial that as the population grows that state and federal governments ensure that services and infrastructure keep pace. Otherwise, quality of life suffers and political disillusionment follows.

It can be a stressful existence in the outer reaches of the metropolis, and the long distances between home and work and schools and other facilities make life a slog. Roads are clogged and inadequate.

Train travellers all too often run the gauntlet in the mornings. Unless they get one of the very early trains, they can find themselves standing all the way to the city. And that experience can likely follow a desperate search for a parking space near the station.

Population growth has meant development on the urban fringe has exploded.Credit: Eddie Jim

Judging by recent voting patterns, a decent proportion of voters in these areas are growing tired of the difficulties built into their daily lives. They feel left out, believe the Labor Party’s performance is coming up short, and they’re sick of waiting for things to improve. This disillusionment goes beyond transport. Andrews as premier enthusiastically promoted the number of new schools built by his government in the growth suburbs. But is the education experience in those schools up to standard? Are the schoolyards safe? Are the communities safe?

No consideration of the condition and prospects of the Labor Party in this federal election would be complete without an examination of the Victorian government, now in its third term and led by Jacinta Allan, who took over from Andrews after he retired from politics in September 2023.

The reason for looking at the state political scene is simple: the Allan government has lost the confidence of the public and is hampering federal Labor in this campaign.

According to the Resolve poll, the state government is attracting a primary vote of a meagre 24 per cent compared with 41 per cent for the Liberal and National parties. The toxicity of the premier and her government has led some influential Liberals to wonder if they might be on the verge of a repeat of the 1990 federal election – their best showing in Victoria in recent memory. (In the past 16 federal elections, Labor has lost the two-party preferred vote in Victoria only twice: in 1990 and in 2004, when Mark Latham was its leader.)

In 1990, the state government led by John Cain was, like its contemporary successor, in its third term and suffering serious financial difficulties. In the lead-up to the federal election, tramways workers blockaded the city by welding trams to the rails in protest at a new ticketing system.

At the election, Bob Hawke’s federal Labor government lost nine seats to the Liberals in Victoria, and its primary vote in the state fell by 10 per cent. Hawke, who held on to office because the swing in other states was less severe, was quick to blame Cain. The late Petro Georgiou, then the Liberals’ state director, told me a few days after the election that his research showed that only half of the anti-Labor swing was due to unhappiness with the Cain government. The other half was a protest at double-digit interest rates, which voters blamed on Hawke.

Today’s state government is travelling very badly, but things are much less dramatic than in 1990. That said, it’s clear that the Allan government’s unpopularity is acting as a drag on the Albanese government’s vote in Victoria. The latest Resolve poll showed Labor’s national primary vote was 31 per cent to the Coalition’s 34.

In Victoria, the gap was wider, with Labor at 29 and the Coalition at 35. That would not be enough to deliver the Liberals a 1990-type result, but it could still inflict serious damage on Albanese’s parliamentary numbers.

Jacinta Allan is in deep, deep trouble. Given an armchair ride by Andrews, who anointed her as his successor long before he stepped down, she’s worked in nothing but politics as an adviser and a parliamentarian throughout her adult life. Her numbers to become leader were stitched up through factional arrangements, and Andrews was furious when Ben Carroll, now deputy premier and education minister, upset his plans for her coronation by toying with a plan to force a leadership ballot. Ahead of the succession, little attention seemed to have been paid to the question of Allan’s leadership capacities.

She has been found wanting. Once installed as premier, she simply continued Andrews’ agenda while making no attempt to impress her personality upon Victorians. Andrews’ final 10 months in office after the 2022 election had been a period of unravelling. The government’s infrastructure program started to run out of money. Andrews’ quixotic decision to secure the hosting rights for the 2026 Commonwealth Games turned into a costly, embarrassing fiasco.

The Suburban Rail Loop, a worthy project if not for the financial overhang of the pandemic spendathon, lost friends every day. Allan, as the new premier, passed up the opportunity to pause it.

Many experienced Labor figures were bewildered by Allan’s failure to instantly place her stamp on the government she led. The value of a reset would have been twofold. It would have meant that the state government was closer to living within its means. And it would have enabled Allan to fashion her own public identity as a leader.

Instead, she has trudged through every day, perfunctorily performing her duties, failing to ever capture the public’s imagination and reacting slowly to every issue. Rather than sensing that the community needed to be bound together more closely to get over the sustained trauma of the lockdowns, she effectively absented herself from providing active, inspired leadership. Predictably, Resolve finds her now trailing her Liberal opponent Brad Battin as preferred premier 23 to 36.

A frustrated Carroll has been looking on and has for some time been consulting party elders about what to do, taking advice about which policy measures would constitute a genuine reset.

Construction is ongoing at the Suburban Rail Loop site at Box Hill.Credit: Penny Stephens

A pause in the Suburban Rail Loop would be the key to that, aimed at demonstrating that the state government has some grasp of the need to seriously get its finances in order.

It’s clear that the state does not have the funds to complete the first stage from Cheltenham to Box Hill and neither Labor under Anthony Albanese nor the Liberals under Peter Dutton will provide any more money for it. Allan’s lack of viability has been slowly dawning on caucus members. Should Labor lose even a handful of federal seats in Victoria on May 3, it would provide a trigger for a party room move on Allan.

With two weeks to go in the campaign, three Labor seats – Aston, McEwen and Chisholm – look likely to fall to the Liberals.

Another two are shaky. Wills is in serious danger of going to the Greens and Macnamara could go to the Liberals or the Greens. But in a campaign, things can change.

The wildcard in Victoria is Dutton. Albanese, who parades his No.1 Sydneysider status relentlessly, has never been especially popular in Victoria, but Dutton, addicted to his dystopian descriptions of modern life, is definitely not the type of Liberal leader that most Victorians have warmed to over recent decades. They did not much like John Howard or Tony Abbott or Scott Morrison.

But they did look more favourably upon the urbane Malcolm Turnbull. In fact, in 2016 they saved his government by flipping Chisholm from Labor to Liberal – the only Liberal pick-up at that election. It was just enough: the Coalition held on with a one-seat majority in the lower house.

The problem that Dutton throws up for his own side is that while large numbers of Victorians are reluctant to back the ALP, opting for Dutton, who’s been having a memorably rotten campaign and has watched his and his party’s standings fall every day of it, might be a bridge too far.

History tells us that empires rise and eventually fall. Victoria has incubated and hosted a rich and varied series of political cultures. Since Federation, it has been either the home or breeding ground of arguably the nation’s four most influential prime ministers. Two hailed from the conservative side: Alfred Deakin and the Liberal Party and Australia’s longest-serving PM Robert Menzies.

The others belonged to the ALP. John Curtin was born and raised in Victoria. He had a stint as a copy boy at The Age, moved on to organising for a union and stood for the ALP in the federal seat of Balaclava before moving to Perth in his early 30s. Bob Hawke moved in the opposite geographical direction. He grew up in Perth and moved to Melbourne to make his name as the country’s leading unionist and as federal Labor leader won four elections in a row.

Emeritus professor of politics at Monash University Paul Strangio says that
a feature of Victorian politics has been the inability to sustain two competitive parties of government.

“The Labor Split in 1955, which saw many Catholics leave the ALP and form the Democratic Labor Party, which was the heyday of Menzies, effectively left the Liberals as the only viable party of government in the state for a quarter of a century,” he said.

“And since the beginning of the 1980s, Labor has been the state’s default party of government, barring the relatively brief reign of Jeff Kennett. Labor’s near half-century ascendancy in the state has also been reflected in federal election results. There would have been no Howard era if Victoria’s voting behaviour was replicated nationally.”

So, are we nearing the imminent end of Labor’s golden era in Victoria? Strangio believes it’s possible. “The hold of the major parties is weakening to a point where minority government, power-sharing arrangements, are likely to become the norm rather than the old pattern of the winner takes all,” he said.

Should Strangio’s prediction come to pass, it will be voters as much as the politicians who will be put to the test. It’s not clear how ready they are to accept a federal government that isn’t purely one stripe or the other, even if it’s the voters themselves who have been responsible for electing the parliament that made a minority government unavoidable.

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