How city voters all but wiped the Liberal Party off the map

In a Liberal wipeout that began with his government, Scott Morrison’s former electorate of Cook could soon be the only inner metropolitan seat in Australia the party has left.

Across the past two elections, city voters nationwide have turned sharply against the Coalition, all but wiping blue from electoral maps and eroding its path to form government.

The wipeout began with Scott Morrison, and was all but completed under Peter Dutton.Credit: James Brickwood

For example, Sydneysiders could soon drive more than an hour from Palm Beach on the northern tip of the coastline to the south-western suburb of Prestons without hitting a seat held by the Liberal Party. In Melbourne, a 100-kilometre journey from Melton in the west to Mount Eliza in the south-east could include a few minutes, at most, passing through a blue seat.

Credit: Matt Golding

Tight contests in the seats of Bradfield, Kooyong and Goldstein – contested by Liberals and teal independents in races deemed too close to call by this masthead – will determine whether there is hope for the Coalition in the cities.

But in Adelaide, there are no Liberal seats left. It is a similar story in Brisbane and Perth, which will count three, or at most four, blue seats between them.

The Liberal Party followed an election strategy that targeted outer suburban voters at the expense of the inner city, but comes away with neither. The worst-case scenario for the Liberals when the vote count is finished will leave it with one inner suburban seat, Cook, and seven in the outer city – a total of eight from 88 metropolitan seats, according to Australian Electoral Commission categories.

At best, the Liberals could pull back three more inner-city seats by winning Kooyong, Goldstein and Bradfield – and one more in the outer suburbs by seizing Bullwinkel, the new Perth seat, for a total of 12.

Either way, the electoral map shows a significant deterioration in metropolitan areas since the 2022 election reduced Liberal holdings from 38 to 20 city seats, leaving it with four inner suburban seats and 16 in the outer suburbs.

The Liberal Party’s review of that defeat said its result in Australian cities was concerning. “The only demographic class where the Liberal Party and National Party have a stronghold is in rural electorates,” it cautioned.

“No party that is seeking to form government has a pathway to a majority solely through rural and regional electorates.”

The next review will carry the same warning. Senator Dave Sharma said as much on Monday as Liberal MPs started unpacking election results.

“There is no way we can ever hope to be the party of government unless we rebuild our appeal and our offering to those populations in the big cities,” he said on the ABC. “That will have to be our mission and will have to be, I think, probably our overwhelming focus as a party.”

If the Liberal Party gets over the line in three teal seats where the count could take weeks, there will be hopes it can rebound. If it doesn’t, it will have no footprint at all in Melbourne or Adelaide, just one seat in outer Perth, two in outer Brisbane, and five across greater Sydney.

Even the seats Liberal MPs retained tell a worrying story for the party. Only defence spokesman Andrew Hastie, in the Perth seat of Canning, and shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, in the outer Sydney seat of Hume, improved their results.

Voters in the six other Liberal-held seats all swung towards Labor: in the Sydney seats of Mitchell (5.9 per cent swing), Berowra (5.6 per cent swing), Cook (4.1 per cent swing), Lindsay (2.8 per cent swing), and the Queensland seats of Fadden (3 per cent swing) and Bowman (2.8 per cent swing).

Labor’s most marginal city seats also swung to the government, putting them farther from reach for the Liberals at the next election. These included Bennelong (9.4 per cent swing), Parramatta (9 per cent swing) and Reid (6.9 per cent swing) in Sydney, and Aston (5.8 per cent swing) and Chisholm (2 per cent swing) in Melbourne.

Senator Andrew Bragg said the Liberal Party needed to show it could govern for all Australians.

“I live in the city, and I think people aren’t all that different, frankly, across Australia with some of their political views ... We’ve got to make sure that we don’t look as if we are supporting extremist positions,” he said on the ABC on Monday.

Bragg cited the Liberal Party’s preferencing of One Nation in 57 seats as an example of where it went wrong. “Whether you are living in multicultural south-west Sydney, or whether you’re living in an inner part of Melbourne, I think that was very jarring to a lot of voters,” he said

“It looks as if we were not learning the lesson that we need to recapture the centre.”

Read more on Labor’s landslide election win

• Inside story: How the Coalition campaign was a catastrophe months in the making.
• Some seats are still too close to call. Here are all the races that remain in doubt – plus every seat that’s changed hands.
• Interactive: See how your polling booth voted in this election.
• Live results: Track every seat in the country.
• Live blog: Albanese mulls new cabinet; races tighten across the country.

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