There’s a mood on in the west as Labor braces for byelection reckoning

There is a mood on in Melbourne’s west. It is not as simple as people having a gutful of Labor. It is not that people blame Jacinta Allan for everything that makes their lives hard. Those things, even if they were true, would be an easier fix. The problem for Labor and for Allan runs deeper than that. The Werribee byelection may show us how deep.

The best way to understand the mood is to put yourself not in the shoes of people who live in Werribee or Wyndham Vale or Manor Lakes, but behind the wheel of their cars.

Imagine yourself sitting at that wheel, idling in traffic for anywhere between half an hour to an hour most mornings, as you inch towards a clogged freeway on-ramp just to start your daily commute. If you live on a busy road, half the battle is getting out of your own driveway.

A growing queue of cars waiting to leave the Princes Freeway at Werribee’s western exit.Credit: Jason South

It is not merely frustration at wasted time. It is the corrosive, slow-burn resentment of not being able to reliably get to work, of not knowing whether you’ll be able to get to your kids before the childcare centre closes, of having less time and opportunity to build the life you aspire to.

John Brumby, the only living former Victorian Labor leader who has experienced electoral defeat, expects the party to get its right whack on Saturday. “If I had to sit in a queue waiting for 30 minutes just to get on the freeway in the morning, I’d be really, really unhappy with the world,” he says. If Labor loses Werribee, a seat it has won each time it’s been contested since 1979, it will send a seismic shudder through Victoria’s political landscape.

Labor holds Werribee, vacated by former treasurer Tim Pallas, by a margin of nearly 11 per cent. Just two years ago, at the last state election where the Andrews government romped it in to win a third consecutive term, Pallas preserved a solid 45 per cent chunk of first-preference votes.

The overlapping federal seat of Lalor is named after the leader of the Eureka Stockade, a miners’ uprising that Labor icon Doc Evatt described as the birth of Australian democracy. It was the seat held by Barry Jones and Julia Gillard; by Labor for all but one term over 76 years. To describe this part of Melbourne as Labor heartland sells short what it means to the party and movement.

A byelection loss on Saturday won’t mean that Labor will lose a swag of western suburbs seats at next year’s state election, but it would be the first Liberal land-sighting in a red sea that stretches from the Maribyrnong River to the western and northern edges of metropolitan Melbourne.

Former Labor campaign strategist Kos Samaras has been warning since the depths of Melbourne’s COVID winters that a ballot box reckoning is coming from people living on the edges of this city who feel the modern Labor Party no longer understands them or has their backs.

He doesn’t know if Labor will lose on Saturday, and if it does, whether this signals the arrival of profound electoral realignment. But he is convinced one is well on the way. “It has started,” he says. “The tipping point for them to start falling may be one more cycle, but it’s close.”

Labor candidate John Lister greets voters at an early voting poll in Wyndham Vale.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Former Senator Kim Carr, a waistcoated warrior of Labor’s left who began his working life teaching at Glenroy Tech in Melbourne’s hard scrabble north, laments in his recently published book, The Long March, his party’s abandonment of people living outside the centre of cities, services, power and influence.

He has not written off Labor’s chances in Werribee, but he believes that the party, in its determination to build new constituencies based on identity, social politics and grievance, has lost something greater; its willingness to speak for those with low incomes and precarious jobs.

“There is a class issue here,” he tells The Age. “The demographics are changing, but it is still economics. That problem that is facing the Labor Party, federal and state, is this great sense of frustration that people aren’t getting the attention they deserve and more affluent sections of the population are getting the ear of government.”

This is not a new argument within Labor circles, but it goes to the heart of the mood in Werribee and the west.

Liberal candidate Steve Murphy.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

Whether it’s a Saturday morning log jam along Ballan Road; a country lane that now serves as a major thoroughfare between the Wyndham Vale and Manor Lakes housing estates and central Werribee; the electrification of the rail line to Wyndham promised in 2018 and not delivered; a massive commercial development south of Werribee and promise of more local jobs announced with fanfare by the government then abandoned; or a spike in local crime that last year saw the City of Wyndham record a 49 per cent increase in burglaries and break-and-enters, the common thread is neglect.

The timing of this byelection is terrible for the Allan government. According to the results of Resolve Political Monitor surveys taken for The Age in December and January, state Labor’s primary support has crashed to 22 per cent, an unprecedented nadir. If this number is correct – even if it is close – it means voters are not only queueing to get on the freeway, they are looking for an exit ramp from Labor.

A Resolve survey also provides a snapshot of what’s eating voters. The short answer is plenty. Whether it is cost of living, health and aged care, managing public finances, the cost of housing, or crime and public safety, the importance of these issues – and imperative for government to do something about it – is more pressing for more people now than it was 12 months ago.

A fractious electorate is about to have its say on a 10-year-old government. Given these circumstances, Labor HQ will take any win in Werribee as a big win.

If Labor hangs on, the result will also be a reality check for Opposition Leader Brad Battin and the Liberal Party. If the Liberals can’t win this seat at a byelection, what prospect do they have of winning any western suburbs seat at next year’s state election? Until the Liberals learn how to win in the west, it is difficult to find the extra 17 seats they need to return to government on Victoria’s current electoral map.

ALP and Liberal Party strategists agree the Werribee result will likely hinge on how many traditional Labor voters plump for Independent Paul Hopper and where their preferences finish up. Hopper has refused to negotiate preference swaps with any other candidate. Instead, he has been busy working with Joe Garra, a Werribee GP who ran as an independent in neighbouring Point Cook at the 2022 state election, to form a new political party.

Hopper describes The West Party, yet to be registered with the Victorian Electoral Commission, as a group of “local, grassroots activists who are passionate, pissed-off people with skills”. It plans to stand candidates in all electorates across Melbourne’s western suburbs.

Steve Murphy, a local real-estate agent and first-time Liberal candidate at the age of 63, is running on a simple theme that Werribee has been dudded by years of Labor. “Ballan Road should have been duplicated years ago,” he says. “Heaths Road should have been duplicated years ago. Ison Road, Armstrong Road, should have been connected. When you are looking at the map of seats and margins, they look at Werribee, see 11 per cent, and think: ‘We don’t really need to fund this’.”

The population growth soaked up by Melbourne’s west over the last 20 years would have challenged any government to keep pace with the infrastructure and services that new residents need. At the time of the 2001 census, just 85,000 people lived in Wyndham, the local government area that includes the Werribee electorate. By the time of next year’s election, that figure is expected to pass 340,000.

Jacinta Allan argues that some problems being felt in Werribee today are the consequence of the previous federal Coalition government’s refusal to provide Victoria its fair share of national infrastructure funding. A Labor MP says while there is a truth to this, hearing it won’t mollify voters. “Melbourne’s west is ground zero for the infrastructure underinvestment during the Morrison government years,” he says. “That has matured into a resentment within the community and lack of confidence that government is focused on their priorities.”

One bright spot for Labor within this gloomy outlook is that, if the voters of Werribee are preparing to belt them on Saturday, they are being polite about it. John Lister, a former political adviser turned local teacher standing as Labor’s candidate in Werribee, says behind all the doors he has knocked on throughout a steamy summer campaign, he is yet to find much anger.

“Yesterday someone served me iced tea on their front porch because it was so hot,” he says. “There is more that we need to do. I have had lots of ministers with me and I have been in their ear every day about the little things we come across and big things. The mood from people out here is they appreciate seeing me out there. They love the fact we are listening to them.”

Lister presents as a capable Labor candidate. Before he trained to become a teacher, he worked in the Premier’s Private Office as an adviser to former minister for police and emergency services Lisa Neville. He has been a teacher for more years than he spent in politics, but that experience showed him how government decisions are made and who makes them.

He says that once he was pre-selected for Werribee, among the first calls he made were to people in the party to make sure there was more money on the way to complete the road project Werribee most needs: a series of new and upgraded roads, interchanges, and a highway overpass that will more directly connect the western parts of Werribee to the Princes Highway. The $333.5 million Werribee Mains Project, a mixture of old and new, state and government funding, was announced by Allan and Federal Minister for Infrastructure Catherine King two weeks ago.

Since that announcement, the Victorian government has been honing the art of how to campaign with not much money. Its cost-of-living initiatives – such as the Fair Fuel Plan to centrally monitor and lightly regulate prices at the bowser, and an extension of the existing School Saving Bonus, which helps parents pay for uniforms, books and now, camps and excursions – carry little cost to the budget. When asked about major projects for the outer west, the premier points to the downstream benefits people living in those suburbs will get from the massive ones expected to open later this year, the Melbourne Metro and West Gate Tunnel.

The problem for which the government is offering no new solution is crime. Allan’s promise this week of a review of bail laws was soon exposed as hollow. Speaking to The Age before the premier’s foray into the law-and-order debate, Lister made clear that crime is his least-preferred topic. “I think it is very important not to politicise crime,” he says. “We want to make sure that we are supporting people to do that job, rather than dictate what that job should be.”

Samaras says this has been Labor’s stock response to crime since Daniel Andrews first came to power – give police whatever they ask for and change the conversation to something else. There is a clear, well-understood logic behind this. In Werribee on Saturday night, Labor may discover that long-familiar ground is shifting beneath its feet. There’s a mood on in Melbourne’s west. We’ll soon know what it has in store for Labor.

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