One roundabout way of explaining why Labor lost

A modest roundabout in Sydney’s southwest tells the tale of Labor’s failed federal election campaign.

David Coleman at the roundabout in Riverwood, in his electorate of Banks, that he helped deliver to residents.

A modest roundabout in Sydney’s southwest tells the tale of Labor’s failed election campaign.

Located in Riverwood — just 13km from the Labor fortress of Grayndler — in the hitherto marginal Liberal electorate of Banks, the roundabout now under construction typifies how Labor was outmanoeuvred by a Coalition grassroots campaign in seats where the ALP had a fighting chance.

The story of the roundabout — which was singled out yesterday in a withering social media post by former NSW premier Morris Iemma — is further illuminated by a damning piece of electoral data: Labor’s vote decreased in 72 outer metropolitan, provincial and rural seats and increased in only 35.

Conversely, Bill Shorten’s slew of high-taxing policies and populist pitches found support in inner-metropolitan seats where Labor’s vote increased in 26, including Liberal-held seats, and decreased in just 18.

A geographical and philosophical divide lies at the heart of Labor’s electoral woes, a theme picked up in Mr Iemma’s comments. Mr Iemma directed his social media tirade at the supporters of Labor candidate for Banks, Chris Gambian, who dubbed sitting Liberal MP David Coleman the “Minister for Roundabouts”.

Mr Iemma accused them of being inner-city elites who did not understand the concerns of the outer suburbs. “So while the Gambian Army of keyboard warriors from (inner-city) Newtown and Marrickville sat around quaffing their Columbian (sic) bean piccolos, Coleman was out building from the grassroots,” Mr Iemma said.

“While our transients guffawed at Coleman for attending to local traffic problems and getting them fixed with roundabouts, the locals were expressing their appreciation with a massive increase in vote.” Mr Coleman secured a 5.3 per cent swing in Banks.

Retirees Shane and Jenny Dennington voted Liberal in Bass. Picture: Chris Crerar

In Labor’s heartland of western ­Sydney — where days earlier former Labor leader Mr Shorten gave his last public speech in Blacktown, inviting a comparison with Gough Whitlam — one senior Labor campaigner admitted the party had “forgotten the worker”.

“We were so caught up in Melbourne that we lost the working class in western Sydney seats where voters are aspirational. In Sydney, we were attacking negative gearing, but failed to ­acknowledge mums and dads in Fairfield are thinking about buying an apartment to negatively gear,” the Labor campaigner said. “They’re not thinking that’s unfair, they’re thinking we want some.”

Chris Bowen’s electorate of McMahon saw a swing of 5.2 per cent against him, and in Chifley there was a 6.4 per cent swing against Ed Husic.

That inconvenient truth didn’t stop a wave of commentators taking to social media to decry the verdict of voters who live outside inner-metropolitan areas, and who clearly responded to the Morrison pitch to “quiet Australians”.

The great divide is best demonstrated in Queensland, where marginal seats were turned into safe Coalition seats on the back of concerns about Labor’s unclear position on coalmining.

Labor MP Milton Dick says the party needs to address the disastrous Queensland result, where its vote fell to just 27.4 per cent, and wants the party’s next leader to immediately visit mining towns and “look people in the eye and hear their concerns”.

“That is one of the key take-outs from this election. We have got to take the medicine, we have got to hear what people have said.”

 

Capricornia, previously held by the LNP on a margin of 0.08 per cent, was a seat Labor’s internal polling predicted it would easily pick up on Saturday night.

Yet in the mining town of Collinsville in the Whitsundays, the LNP won a primary vote of 48 per cent. In the same booth three years earlier, only 24.62 per cent of people voted for the LNP.

George Christensen was spotted jumping on a table at a pub in Bowen, a town in his electorate of Dawson with an unemployment rate of over 30 per cent, to assure patrons the LNP would green light Adani and create local jobs. He won his seat back with an 11.3 per cent swing after preferences.

ALP's 20 best seats for primary vote swing.

An LNP campaigner told The Australian the results in central Queensland come back to one Labor policy called “Securing a just transition for energy workers” which says the party would legislate “a framework for polled redundancies” in its first term.

The LNP distributed material with paragraphs directly ripped from Labor’s policy, telling the nearly 300,000 voters who work directly and indirectly for the resources sector they would be sacked.

The Nationals ran their own modelling, outlining the number of jobs that would be lost within 18 months of a Shorten government in Townsville and Gladstone.

In Tasmania, Labor’s misread of the electorate was just as disastrous. Labor’s policy on franking credits bit hard with the tens of thousands of retirees across the state’s northern electorates of Braddon and Bass, which are now in the hands of the Coalition. Retirees Shane and Jenny Dennington felt Mr Morrison spoke to the concerns of older Australians, especially in the regions. “He’s fantastic. He’s just positive, a person of the people who comes across as a casual Australian but one you can trust,” said Mr Dennington, who faced a loss of $14,000 a year in franking credits.

ALP's 20 worst seats for primary vote swing.

Labor Victorian MP Maria Vamvakinou said the party’s negative gearing changes would have impacted “middle and working-class Australia”, and was one of the big reasons voters backed Mr Morrison. “We need to look at it from the point of the people who said to us that they cannot afford to lose their retirement savings,” she said.

In many ways the working class is the new middle class, one Labor campaigner said. “It used to be that if you had $120,000 you were rich, but now Queensland couples on a dual income of $160,000 are thinking that’s not enough but they’re defined under our policies as rich.”

The largest swing to Labor across the country was in Cooper, the north Melbourne seat formerly known as Batman, which picked up a 12.74 per cent swing on primary votes for Ged Kearney.

Higgins, the inner-east Melbourne Liberal seat Labor at one point hoped to snatch, saw a primary swing of 9.13 per cent to Labor. A string of inner-urban electorates including Sydney and Grayndler, Macnamara and Wills also delivered Labor swings and in Goldstein, in Melbourne’s southeast, the swing was 6.98 per cent.

In neighbouring inner-city seats retained by Labor, Wills had a swing of 7.13 per cent, Macnamara 6.79 per cent and there were swings to the party of less than 3 per cent in Gellibrand and Jagajaga. Tanya Plibersek saw a 6.81 per cent swing to her in Sydney, Anthony Albanese gained a 5.89 per cent swing in Grayndler, and Linda Burney a 2.26 per cent swing in Barton.