They called it the comeback trail. Instead, Melbourne became a political graveyard for the Liberals

Labor entered this federal campaign confronting an electoral reckoning in Melbourne. Instead, it is the Liberal Party facing a historic wipeout in Australia’s second-largest city, with no seats gained and its two surviving metropolitan MPs on the brink of losing theirs.

While Keith Wolahan in Menzies and Michael Sukkar in Deakin have yet to concede their seats, they were both called for Labor on Saturday night. These likely losses underscore a disastrous campaign for the Liberal Party.

Elsewhere in Victoria, the once-safe Liberal seat of Flinders on the Mornington Peninsula and the growth-suburb electorate of Casey were also wobbly at the time of writing. By contrast, the Liberal Party, at the time of Peter Dutton’s concession speech, had no chance of wresting any Victorian seats back from Labor.

Even Aston, a seat listed as nominally Liberal after a redrawing of its boundaries by the Australian Electoral Commission, stubbornly refused to turn blue. Instead, Labor MP Mary Doyle appears to have picked up a sizeable additional chunk of the primary vote.

Liberal-targeted seats such as Chisholm and Dunkley barely got a mention on election night.

Michael Sukkar and Peter Dutton during the campaign.Credit: James Brickwood

If Wolahan and Sukkar cannot hold on, they will leave the entire area within Melbourne’s metropolitan boundaries devoid of any federal Liberal MPs. It is a cataclysmic result for a party that at the start of the campaign saw Victoria as its path back to power.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, a state Labor leader whose face was plastered next to Anthony Albanese’s in Liberal campaign ads, climbed a makeshift stage outside the Victorian Trades Hall building to acclaim a stunning result.

“We saw that Australians and Victorians had a choice,” she told a crowd of red T-shirted ALP supporters and union members. “They said no to those blockers. They said yes to the builders. They said yes to the Suburban Rail Loop. They said yes to airport rail.

“These results are not despite what we’ve done here in Victoria, they are because we have done all we have.”

For the Labor Party, it is a result beyond imagining five weeks ago, when Anthony Albanese called the election, and as recently as last week, when internal party polling conducted in the final days of the campaign predicted a statewide, two-party-preferred swing of between 2 and 3 per cent against Labor.

This had left party hardheads resigned to the loss of some seats but no longer holding fears for an electoral bloodbath.

Liberal MP Keith Wolahan is in danger of losing Menzies.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

As the night went on, Labor figures were astounded at the numbers coming in. By 8.30pm, when ABC analyst Antony Green called the election for Labor, the only ALP seat at risk of being lost was Wills, in Melbourne’s north, where MP Peter Khalil was locked in a close battle against the Greens.

In Melbourne’s west, Labor MP Sam Rae turned the seat of Hawke from marginal back to dead red, after rebuilding his primary vote back to 40 per cent. In neighbouring Gorton, an electorate Dutton had driven through on Saturday for his final, performative visit to a petrol station, Labor candidate Alice Jordan-Baird also increased her already safe margin.

To the city’s north, the electorate of McEwen again confounded Liberal strategists. Labor MP Rob Mitchell first won the uber-marginal seat in 2010, and on Saturday night appeared to have extended his margin, with a 3 per cent swing in his favour after preferences.

In the south-east, voters made a mockery of Liberal designs on the seat of Bruce and the Liberal Party’s choice of candidate against Labor MP Julian Hill. After one-third of the vote was counted, Hill had recorded a 6.6 per cent swing to him on first preferences and a whopping 12.1 per cent swing to Labor on two-party preferred.

Labor’s statewide share of the vote, with a third counted, was sitting on 33.8 per cent. This is a marginal improvement on 2022, when the party recorded its low watermark primary vote of 32.6 per cent in Victoria. The Liberal Party primary vote collapsed to a new low of 30.9 per cent.

Once preferences flows from the Greens, independents and other candidates were taken into account, Victorian Labor was the beneficiary of a healthy 3 per cent swing in its favour.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles.Credit: Justin McManus

This result is a triumph for the formidable Labor campaign machine and lays bare the ineptitude of the Victorian Liberal Party. What it means for the beleaguered leadership of Allan is not immediately clear.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, Labor’s most senior Victorian federal parliamentarian, noted during the ABC’s election night coverage that voters tended to distinguish between state and federal issues once they walk into a polling place to cast their ballots.

While this is true, it is also beyond argument that dissatisfaction with an 11-year-old state Labor government and Allan’s personal unpopularity was a drag on the federal Labor campaign in Victoria. This was made explicit in what voters told federal and state MPs, campaign workers and Labor strategists throughout the campaign.

To help understand what this result means for state politics, this masthead spoke to Labor powerbrokers across the right-left factional divide. Their comments suggest that, whatever the final tally of seats, the results will be treated with caution.

One senior ALP figure suggested the looming state budget, and how it was publicly received, would be of equal and perhaps greater importance to Allan’s future than this result. Another urged against making snap judgments from the federal poll.

For now, Allan can breathe a little easier.

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