Sydney’s accidental MPs who seized Liberal seats when no one was looking

In southern Sydney, David Moncrieff, the new federal Labor MP for Hughes, and Zhi Soon, now the Labor member for the neighbouring electorate of Banks, have two things in common.

Both ran ultra-local campaigns on shoestring budgets in the electorates where they grew up and still live. They are also accidental MPs who seized Liberal seats when no one was looking.

Hughes and Banks were not on the radar for Labor or the Liberals. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Banks, formerly held by Liberal frontbencher David Coleman for 12 years, just once during the campaign and did not set foot in Hughes.

Zhi Soon (Banks) and David Moncrieff (Hughes) on the Como rail bridge, which links their electorates.Credit: Sam Mooy

Former Liberal leader Peter Dutton also stayed away. Neither electorate was on the parties’ lists of target seats. Hughes has been a Liberal seat since the Coalition’s landslide win in 1996, while Banks has been in Liberal hands since 2013, when Coleman turned it from red to blue.

Coleman held Banks on a tight margin of 3.2 per cent, but the Liberals had no reason to think it would be lost. Regarding Hughes, which Jenny Ware held with a more comfortable 7 per cent margin, Labor strategists did not rate it a chance.

Yet Moncrieff and Soon were quietly working away, doorknocking thousands of homes, holding street stalls and persuading voters that nothing beats a homegrown candidate.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at his election night event at Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL club.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Slowly but surely, they convinced voters to oust the Liberals and help Albanese to a resounding win.

For 29-year-old Moncrieff, cost of living was the No.1 issue. In common with so many of his generation, he is living at home with his parents, priced out of the property market.

He has lived in the Shire his whole life, attending local Catholic schools (St John Bosco primary and high schools in Engadine) and the Shire campus of Wollongong University, where he studied economics and finance. He has worked for a Shire state MP (Maryanne Stuart, the Labor MP for Heathcote), and his parents are local public school teachers.

Moncrieff says his strength was knowing so many people in his community, whether from his former schools or cricket club, or through his family.

“I focused on direct community engagement, I campaigned full-time and, being a local, I knew a lot of the issues, and when I would door-knock there was always people I knew, or [who] knew my parents,” he says.

“We have lots of small business owners, and lots of people with technical education such as tradies, so the messages – tax cuts, fee-free TAFE – were resonating with people. I was a teenager in the Rudd-Gillard years, when the Labor brand was toxic, but now people see us as pro business and pro economy.”

Moncrieff is adamant that his win was not a fluke. Rather, it was the result of hard work.

“The fact that Hughes wasn’t being looked at on election night summed it up. People felt that they had been ignored,” Moncrieff says.

Soon, meanwhile, is a former diplomat who was stationed in Afghanistan. He was the youngest ever appointee to the NSW Board of Studies and studied at the Australian National University.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese,m with Zhi Soon (far left), made one quick trip to Banks during the campaign. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Born in Malaysia, Soon moved to Sydney aged three and grew up in Revesby. He went to Hurlstone Technology High and is now raising his young family in Padstow. Apart from his overseas posting and his university studies, Soon has never left Banks.

He has had a long career in public policy, especially education and behavioural economics – but had a calling to politics. Soon unsuccessfully contested Banks for Labor at the 2022 election.

So how did he pull off a task no one thought possible this time? “In my heart of hearts I thought Banks was a Labor seat,” Soon, 39, says.

“I was focused on the hard work, knocking on thousands of doors and generally trying to help people, even with things that had nothing to do with the election. On one of the doors, I helped someone register their Service NSW app, so I just tried to be helpful to every person I met.”

He says Labor’s commitment to roll out more urgent care clinics was popular in Banks – a “tangible” policy, he says – but Soon believes his lifelong ties to the electorate won him the seat.

David Moncrieff is welcomed to parliament on Friday by the prime minister. Credit: James Brickwood

“When people raise roads, I know exactly what they are talking about because I have driven on those roads all my life. I can tell them the best places to park,” Soon says. “Banks is my home, it always has been.”

Moncrieff and Soon had very little financial help from Labor head office, other than the standard allowance to cover how-to-vote cards, corflutes and campaign T-shirts. One senior party operative, who asked not to be named to speak frankly, said: “They were definitely accidental MPs. Hughes and Banks were just not in our sights at all.”

Moncrieff and Soon celebrated their wins on Saturday night, then it was straight back to work. Both were at railway stations first thing on Monday. Moncrieff at Sutherland, Soon at Riverwood – this time, they went to thank voters for sending them to Canberra.