Lockdown casts long shadow over seats in west and southwest Sydney
Scars left by harsher lockdowns in Sydney’s west and southwest over the pandemic fuelled swings against the Perrottet government.
Scars left by harsher pandemic lockdowns in Sydney’s west and southwest fuelled swings against the Perrottet government as residents and small business owners remain distrustful of the Liberals.
The Coalition lost the seats of Penrith and Parramatta and on Sunday were clutching to the seat of Oatley, which has yet to be called, by 0.4 per cent of the vote in the two-party preferred count.
The outgoing Perrottet government also suffered swings against it in seats such as Campbelltown in Sydney’s far southwest, with first-preference votes falling more than 10 per cent although the count is yet to be completed.
Incumbent Campbelltown MP Greg Warren said the sense that the west and southwest had been treated differently and unfairly had never left people’s minds.
“The second lockdown occurred in the eastern suburbs and we were all in lockdown in the west and southwest,” he said. “There were helicopters in the air while we could see people in the eastern suburbs going to the beach on Instagram and Facebook.”
Mr Warren said he was devastated when he couldn’t see his two children for weeks due to the lockdown restrictions and he couldn’t imagine how hard it had been for the elderly who had been barred from seeing grandchildren.
The local government areas of Canterbury-Bankstown, Bayside, Blacktown, Burwood, Campbelltown, Cumberland, Fairfield, Georges River, Liverpool, Penrith, Parramatta, and Strathfield were segregated by harsh lockdown restrictions not applied to the rest of Sydney in 2021.
Former Labor strategist Kosmos Samaras said a pandemic lens could be applied to the election results but said it concerned health workers, who tended to live in suburban seats such as Parramatta, and the cap on public sector wages.
They’re exhausted and the former Coalition government has spent the last 12-months insisting they’re going to cap their wages after they’ve done the hard yards,” he said. “We’re talking about 400,000 people. They’re across NSW but they are in greater numbers in the seats they lost.”
Mr Samaras, the founder of polling company Redbridge, said health workers would have voted for former premier Gladys Berejiklian in large numbers while trust in the Liberals would have been eroded by the lockdowns in the west and southwest.
“The uneven application of lockdowns would have made it harder for the Perrottet government to convince these voters they were the best choice,” he said.
“It wouldn’t have been the only determining factor but it wouldn’t have helped.”
Labor increased its margin by about 12.7 per cent in Granville and 9.2 per cent in Canterbury.
Former Liberal Party official Matthew Camenzuli lived in the locked-down state electorate of Parramatta and said he remembered the sense of being ostracised.
“It was definitely socially scarring, very offensive, hurtful and scary,” he said.
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