Dunkley: PM's by-election litmus test: how do Dunkley's voters rate him

The next month of campaigning for the Dunkley by-election will determine whether Anthony Albanese can salvage his leadership credibility.

Peter Dutton, centre, with Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie, second from right, and the Liberal candidate for Dunkley, Nathan Conroy, second from left, in Frankston on Friday. Picture: David Crosling

It’s noon in Young Street in Frankston and the spiritual heartland of the federal electorate of Dunkley is living up to its battered reputation.

A woman is speed-walking with her partner in the direction of Portsea, towards the cut-price butcher and the gun shop that overlooks one of Australia’s more unpredictable streets.

Aged somewhere between 30 and 60, her teeth are in hiding, as is the wig she is accused of taking from a nearby store on Thursday.

“Give it back or I’ll call the police,’’ another woman shouts while in pursuit.

The shoplifter relents, handing over the hairy loot while yet another woman, maybe in her 30s, is sadly slumped opposite the Frankston train station, crying out hysterically.

Welcome to by-election country, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton. For decades Frankston, crudely referred to as Frankghanistan at the height of its dysfunction, has been unfairly dismissed as one of the outer-suburban dumping grounds for greater Melbourne’s social problems.

While police statistics show parts of Dunkley to be affected by high crime rates, other data shows it to be a socioeconomically diverse, cost-of-living electorate where poverty, wealth and suburban life coexist happily enough.

The Labor-held seat, with a margin of 6.3 per cent, is about 40km southeast of Melbourne’s CBD. Just a few kilometres down the road from Frankston’s mall and train station, a decent bayside home might cost up to $10m, with views of the growing city skyline.

Dunkley screams contradictions. At its southern end, Mt Eliza is the de facto gateway to some of the richest seaside territory in Australia at Portsea and Sorrento, and was once considered reliable conservative ground, until teal-minded voters started flapping their wings and the Victorian ­Liberal Party’s engine mounts slowly rusted.

At Dunkley’s seaside north, there are early but emerging signs of inner-city flight as progressive-leaning, university-educated public servants have started to migrate towards affordable housing, while cashed-up tradies are in the east and southeast.

While the Prime Minister must fight a by-election in the midst of one of modern Australia’s deeper cost-of-living crises, the consensus among the two major parties is that Labor remains the frontrunner to retain the seat, although gauging community sentiment in an era of disengagement is ­complex.

Liberal hurdles

Astrid Shead, 83, has lived in the Frankston area for 60 years; she laments the crime rate (largely not a federal issue) and warns that ­Albanese is on notice. “He’s got to pull his socks up a bit,’’ she says. “He’s made a couple of mistakes. Big ones.’’

For every Labor challenge there is at least one Liberal hurdle. Facing a steep margin, fuelled by an unfavourable redistribution for the Liberals that applied at the 2019 election, it is tough but not unwinnable territory for the ­Opposition Leader.

It is just a 10-minute drive from Frankston CBD to the heart of Mt Eliza, where cut-priced snags make way for restaurant menu boards that promise duck and pinot noir, where top-shelf wine is stacked at the bottle shop and the dogs are designer, like the retiree leisure wear.

It’s a very faintly Noosa vibe in the local village shopping precinct.

“I will not be voting Albanese. He’s no Bob Hawke,’’ says 68-year-old retiree Gail Marks, who deeply dislikes the political nature of the Albanese tax changes, which have been framed to target the less well-off in Dunkley.

Labor headwinds

Despite the relative wealth in Mt Eliza, the old assumptions that the well-off vote Liberal in Victoria are dead.

In 2018, the financially comfortable Mornington end of Dunkley was lost to the Liberals in the redistribution and in the north more Labor voters were added to the seat. At the 2022 state election, teal candidate Kate Lardner secured more than 22 per cent of the vote in Mornington, which is now held by former Liberal member for Dunkley Chris Crewther.

Analysis of the polling booth data in Dunkley shows the extent to which the Liberal vote has tanked since 2013, when former member Bruce Billson won with 48.75 per cent of the primary vote. By 2022, that was down to 32.5 per cent.

In two party-preferred terms, the vote collapsed nearly 12 points over the decade.

The Liberal booths in Mt Eliza or Frankston South (sea views) have suffered two party-preferred swings of up to 24.65 percentage points from 2013 to 2022.

Six booths in the area have delivered double-digit swings, although this by-election, caused by the death of Labor’s Peta Murphy, is being held in volatile economic times and after a stuttering first term by Albanese. It may galvanise some estranged Liberals.

None of the people The Weekend Australian spoke to in Mt Eliza, Frankston and Seaford were effusive about Albanese’s performance.

Former Victorian Labor assistant secretary Kos Samaris said the headwinds facing Labor meant any win for the ALP would be seen as an outstanding result.

Labor privately is hopeful the seat’s demographics will work in its favour, with the seat close to the ultimate litmus test, with a median age of 40 (38 nationally), 1.8 children per family (national average), an almost identical median weekly income and median mortgage repayments. There are 42,852 families but just one in five people holds a bachelor degree or higher, nearly six points below the national average.

The 2021 census also shows Dunkley has a similar share of low-income households to the Australian average, with 16.7 per cent of households earning less than $650 a week, compared with 16.5 per cent nationally. These may well decide the by-election.

Labor’s candidate, Jodie Belyea, who has a son at Frankston High School, is a long-time community worker and holds a masters of business leadership.

She sees the electorate as richly diverse and acknowledges that there is a growing interest in the environment, which poses a threat to the Liberal vote.

“I think people are more engaged in politics and looking at things like the environment and climate,’’ she says, adding that cost of living is the No.1 issue.

Stuffed with cash

Daniel Andrews left power months ago but it speaks volumes that when Dutton travelled to Dunkley on Friday for a $900m rail announcement, including the electrification of the Frankston-Baxter line, that the former Victorian premier’s name was raised.

This was the Liberal leader aiming at his base. More broadly, however, the seat of Dunkley has, for the past decade, been the direct and indirect recipient of many ­billions of dollars of rail and road funding delivered by the state Labor government.

The local hospital and schools also have been stuffed with cash as Labor has tried to inoculate itself against a repeat of the 2010 state poll when five ALP seats on the Frankston rail line swapped to the Liberal Party, ending the Bracks-Brumby era.

This is an almost identical dynamic to last year’s Aston by-election, where state largesse was the kerosene that helped ignite support for federal Labor in a traditional Liberal seat.

With Albanese due to visit Dunkley this weekend and after several federal ministers were campaigning in the seat this week, there is no mistaking the seriousness of the challenge for both sides of politics.

Liberal candidate Nathan Conroy is an Irish-born local mayor who has helped attract infrastructure spending in the area and is considered a “very good candidate’’ by the Liberals.

“We are in it to win it,’’ Mr Conroy insists. But he also knows that, despite Labor’s failures, he’ll need everything to fall his way to get over the line. “I’m still the underdog in this election,’’ he says.