Election 2025: Liberals’ women problem likely to hurt most in Monique Ryan’s Kooyong

The crash in female support since the start of the election campaign has the potential to hurt the Coalition’s chances most acutely in one of the seats it is most desperate to win back: Kooyong.

Monique Ryan campaigning outside an early-voting centre at St George’s Hall in Malvern on Tuesday. Picture: Nadir Kinani

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The crash in female support for the Coalition since the start of the election campaign could hurt its chances most acutely in one of the seats it is most desperate to win back: Kooyong.

An estimated 460,000 women voters nationally shifted their voting allegiances away from the Coalition in the first three weeks of the election campaign.

Newspoll’s demographic analysis, published in The Australian on Wednesday, showed primary vote support for the Coalition had slumped: from 38 per cent in the first three months of the year leading up to the election being called, to 33 per cent across the first three weeks of the campaign.

Although national trends are not necessarily uniform across individual seats, the flight of women from the Coalition could have the greatest effect in Kooyong, held by teal MP Monique Ryan, out of all 150 electorates being contested at the May 3 election.

The inner-east Melbourne electorate, formerly held by Liberal deputy leader Josh Frydenberg, has the highest concentration of women.

For every 10,000 voters in Kooyong, 5305 are women, according to the Australian Electoral Commission’s count of electors. In all, there are 66,061 women due to cast a vote in Kooyong and only 58,308 men – a difference of 7753.

If 5 per cent of female voters in Kooyong – equivalent to 3303 women – have moved their primary votes away from the Coalition in line with the national polling trend, that could be crucial in a seat where Ms Ryan holds a notional margin of just 2739 votes.

Amelia Hamer is contesting Kooyong for the Liberal Party.