The truth in the booths: The results that reveal the swings behind Labor’s big win

By Shane Wright

May 5, 2025 — 4.45am

Peter Dutton had lost his seat of Dickson even before the polls opened on Saturday.

The former opposition leader held his outer Brisbane electorate of 24 years by just 1.7 per cent going into the election. Labor had been upfront about its designs on the seat, with Anthony Albanese visiting it twice to support his candidate, Ali France.

Peter Dutton visited more than a dozen service stations to spruik his fuel excise policy. It didn’t work.Credit: James Brickwood

Then more than half the voters of Dickson cast a pre-poll vote. The swing to France among those 44,000 ballots was 7 per cent, giving her a near insurmountable advantage over Dutton before AEC officials had laid out the pencils for in-day voters.

Dickson

The suburb of Murrumba Downs on the south-eastern edge of Dickson, which is the sort of place heavily targeted by Dutton throughout the campaign, tells the story of the election in which almost every identifiable demographic or ethnic group turned out against the Coalition.

Across the country, in key marginal seats, there were individual suburbs and polling booths that revealed how the nationwide Labor wave happened and the trends within it.

Murrumba Downs is filled with hard-working Australians in large homes with sizeable mortgages who send their kids to local public schools. They’re more likely to be tradespeople and to have been born in Australia rather than overseas.

Dutton spent much of his campaign talking about the Coalition’s plan to cut fuel excise for 12 months. The policy could have been crafted for the people of Murrumba Downs, a majority of whom have at least two cars in the driveway.

But that was not enough to stop them throwing their support behind France.

Bruce

A long way south in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, a very different demographic was also emphatically backing Albanese and his local representative, Julian Hill.

Bruce had, during recent months, been talked about as a possible Liberal gain from Hill, who held the seat with a margin of 5 per cent.

Outer suburban residents, upset with Albanese’s “woke” agenda and burnt by high petrol prices and the large lift in mortgage interest rates over the past three years, were supposed to turn towards the Coalition and its policy offering.

In the suburb of Berwick, however, the voters shunned it.

Here, many migrants have bought their own little piece of Australia. There’s a sizeable Indian population as well as communities from Sri Lanka, England and New Zealand.

Hill finished election night sitting on a margin 15 per cent. The swings in Berwick were even larger than those recorded in other parts of the seat. In the Berwick Fields booth, where almost 2400 votes were cast, the swing to Hill was 16 per cent.

Seven of the eight candidates standing in Bruce enjoyed a lift in support, led by a 6.2 per cent increase in Hill’s primary vote. The only candidate to go backwards was his Liberal opponent, Zahid Safi, who lost more than 9 per cent after a train wreck of a local campaign.

Parramatta

One of the late issues to blow up in the election campaign was an unsubstantiated suggestion by Liberal senator Jane Hume that “Chinese spies” may be helping Labor and teal candidates.

It prompted Foreign Minister Penny Wong to tell voters on Chinese social media apps that the Liberal Party was questioning their loyalty.

The issue appears to have had an impact in many suburbs with large Chinese populations, such as Carlingford in the Sydney electorate of Parramatta where Labor MP Andrew Charlton was defending a 3.7 per cent margin.

By the end of counting, it was a 13.1 per cent buffer.

In Carlingford, about 20 per cent of the population speaks Mandarin at home. About three-quarters of the population reports that both parents were born overseas, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Peter Dutton attempted to woo Chinese Australian voters, such as at this campaign stop at the Imperial Chinese Restaurant in Melbourne, but they swung against him in some key booths.Credit: James Brickwood

It is also a suburb dominated by professionals, with highly educated residents working in the computer sciences, health or banking. People in those roles are more likely to work from home than average, which may have made Dutton’s abortive vow to force the public servants back into the office unpopular.

In two Carlingford booths, the swing to Charlton was more than 18 per cent. Charlton’s primary vote soared while that of Liberal opponent Katie Mullens dropped by between 3.9 per cent and 18.6 per cent.

Lingiari

The Coalition had been buoyed by success defeating the Voice referendum in 2023, with large opposition in most parts of the country to Albanese’s planned constitutional overhaul. That included the voters of Lingiari, which takes in most of the Northern Territory.

That had given the Coalition some hope that it could build on the Voice result, led by the seemingly popular NT senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

Labor MP for Lingiari Marion Scrymgour held the seat by just 1.6 per cent before Saturday’s election. She gained a 6.1 per cent swing to her, built largely on the seat’s largest population centre, Alice Springs.

Across the main booths of Alice Springs, Scrymgour easily eclipsed her Country Liberal Party opponent, Lisa Siebert, with swings of up to 11 per cent.

Outside of Alice Springs, the many remote voting teams that visit isolated and largely Indigenous communities recorded even larger swings from constituents. In some booths, swings of more than 23 per cent were recorded.

Tangney

Over in Western Australia, which has a history of defying east coast voting patterns, higher-income multicultural communities also turned their back on Dutton.

Tangney was one of the startling results of the 2022 campaign, when Malaysian-born police officer and dolphin trainer Sam Lim gained an 11.9 per cent swing to grab the Liberal-held seat on Perth’s south side.

There had been hopes inside the Liberal Party that this could be reversed. Instead, Lim increased his margin by 3.2 per cent thanks to suburbs such as Bull Creek.

Affluent and multicultural, it has one of the largest Malaysian communities in the country, plus large representations of migrants from countries such as Singapore, China and Britain.

Most are well-educated, the homes are as large as the mortgages, and many people work in medicine or education.

Bull Creek’s suburbs started swinging to Labor in 2019 and have kept moving left. In the largest Bull Creek booth, Lim gained a 6.4 per cent swing.

Six years ago, this booth was a Liberal stronghold at 60-40 to the Coalition. It is now a stronghold for Lim, 60-40.

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