Dear John Howard, the AEC has warmed up your old seat for you

John Howard campaigning for Liberal candidate for Bennelong Simon Kennedy at Ryde Eastwood Leagues Club before the 2022 election. Picture: Simon Bullard/NewsWire

Hey, Mr Howard, if you want to make a comeback, guess what? The AEC is putting your old seat back together.

While the abolition of North Sydney is the headline development to come out of the electoral commission’s proposed redistribution in NSW, the changes next door in former prime minister John Howard’s old seat of Bennelong certainly come in second.

Labor faces an enormous challenge to hold on to Bennelong, one of its most marginal seats, with a large swath of traditionally Liberal-voting suburbs in North Sydney to be shifted into Bennelong.

Extending the eastern boundary to include the high-income suburbs of Hunters Hill, Lane Cove, Longueville and Greenwich at the eastern end and losing Labor-leaning Epping and North Epping at the northwestern end would almost certainly leave the seat notionally Liberal at the next election. Ironically, the new boundaries would be much closer to those Bennelong had from 1969 to 1990, including the first 16 years of Howard’s stint as the sitting member.

The shift of Bennelong to the west to take in more of Ryde Council and Epping eroded Howard’s margin and ultimately cost him his seat in his government’s 2007 defeat.

The redistribution, which would affect the boundaries of 39 of the 46 remaining seats in NSW and shift almost 13 per cent of voters in the state to a different electorate, would present challenges for MPs in marginal seats on both sides of politics.

Anthony Albanese visits Meadowbank TAFE in the Bennelong electorate of Jerome Laxale, rear last November. Picture: Jeremy Piper/NewsWire

But Anthony Albanese’s electorate of Grayndler would shed the heavily Greens-voting suburbs of Balmain and Birchgrove, which were added in the previous redistribution, and gain sections of more Labor-voting suburbs of Ashbury and Croydon Park at the western end, reducing the chances of the incumbent Prime Minister suffering a similar fate to that of Howard.