‘Work from home’ cancellation hurt Dutton and Liberals in family zone

Peter Dutton made a fatal mistake at the federal election, costing him and the Liberal Party a slew of seats in the nation’s crucial outer-suburban ‘family zone’.

David Tanner and Sarah Elks

New Labor MP Kara Cook with her husband Joshua Creamer and their children Eden, Arlo, and Rita, and dog Milton. Photo: Renae Droop/RDW Photography

4 min read

8:30PMMay 09, 2025.

Updated 12:18PMMay 10, 2025

Voters in Queensland’s outer-suburban family zones punished Peter Dutton and the Liberal Party for an electorally toxic plan to cancel public servants’ working-from-home arrangements, driving big swings to Labor.

Analysis by The Australian shows last Saturday’s electoral rout has left the Liberals nationwide holding only eight “family zone” seats, where the percentage of voters in the key demographic aged 30 to 49 is higher than the national average.

Across the past two elections, the Liberals have surrendered two-thirds of their seats in areas where voters of prime working age are most heavily clustered, many raising children. After the 2019 election victory, the Liberals held 25 of these electorates.

Labor now holds 19 of the top 20 seats for voters aged 30 to 49 – and 56 of the 67 above the national average that have a confirmed winner from last Saturday. Two “family zone” seats, Bean and Calwell, remain in doubt.

The family rebellion against Mr Dutton and his party was strongest in his home state of Queensland, where the Coalition lost five seats to Labor – Forde, Bonner, Dickson, Petrie and Leichhardt. All five have above average numbers of voters aged 30 to 49.

Queensland Labor’s election winners Emma Comer (Petrie), left, Madonna Jarrett (Brisbane), Kara Cook (Bonner), Ali France (Dickson), Renee Coffey (Griffith) and Julie-Ann Campbell (Moreton) on the morning after the election. Picture Lachie Millard

The Liberal Party’s five worst primary vote swings in Queensland were also in seats with this demographic profile, reaching as high as 9.6 per cent against new candidate Jeremy Neal in Leichhardt in far north Queensland, where long-time member Warren Entsch retired, and 9 per cent against MP Ross Vasta in Bonner in Brisbane’s east.

Labor and Liberal National Party strategists privately agree that the former opposition leader’s promise to cut 41,000 public service jobs and force bureaucrats back to the office was toxic for the Coalition in these seats, despite a mid-campaign about-face on the flexible work threat.

Counting continues in the LNP-held seat of Longman, where sitting MP Terry Young has a two-party-preferred lead of just 298 votes over Labor challenger Rhiannyn Douglas.

Nationally, 33.4 per cent of voters on the electoral roll for this election were aged 30 to 49. The only seats above this mark that the Liberal Party still holds are La Trobe in Victoria, Hume in rural NSW, Lindsay and Mitchell in Sydney’s west and northwest, Durack in rural Western Australia, Townsville-based Herbert, Wright in southern Queensland and McPherson on the Gold Coast. However, the Liberals still recorded large primary-vote swings against them in Wright (8.4 per cent), McPherson (6.8 per cent), Lindsay (6.4 per cent), Mitchell (5.6 per cent) and La Trobe (5.3 per cent) – all significantly worse than the 3.7 per cent swing the Liberals suffered nationally.

Only one of the Nationals’ 15 electorates, the mining seat of Capricornia in central Queensland, is above average for family-age voters and even then only fractionally. New Labor MP for Bonner Kara Cook beat LNP’s Mr Vasta – who has held the seat for all but three of the last 21 years – by securing 55 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote.

Ms Cook is a former Brisbane City councillor and domestic violence lawyer, who has three children – aged 10, eight and four – with her husband, barrister Joshua Creamer. She and her campaign team knocked on more than 7500 doors and made thousands of phone calls since she was endorsed in January. And this time, more than any other campaign she’s worked on, people were working from home on weekdays.

“The work-from-home issue was enormous ... and from not just women, but also men in that demographic, who had kids in school, kids in daycare, and were feeling the pinch of the cost of living, but then to have this extra hurdle of ‘we’re not going to support you to work from home anymore’. That combination of factors just spoke to that entire demographic from 30 to 50. And many Liberal Party voters said to me, look I just cannot support the party,” Ms Cook said.

“When you’re doorknocking people who are home during the week and they’re saying to you, ‘my entire lifestyle and work arrangements are under threat’, that impacts a really large group of people, and particularly people in those outer-suburbs who have an hour or two of commuting a day.”

Ms Cook said the demographic in Bonner had shifted post-Covid, with families moving out of the inner city into the outer suburbs for lifestyle and cost reasons.

New Dickson Labor MP Ms France the morning after the election. Picture: Lachie Millard

Freshly elected Labor MP Ali France – who beat Mr Dutton on her third run in Dickson – said the Coalition’s campaign had been “chaotic”, particularly on public service issues.

“I have a lot of public servants living in my electorate, I doorknocked lots of them. To say … 41,000 public servants are going to lose their jobs – lots of them live in Dickson,” Ms France said the day after the election. “The reason they were home when I was doorknocking them was they work from home three days a week. (For Mr Dutton to) say we’re going to take away your flexible work arrangements, that was just crazy.”

Since 2019, the Liberals have lost a swag of other “family zone” seats: Reid, Wentworth and Bennelong in Sydney’s inner rim; Hughes in Sydney’s outer south; Brisbane and Ryan in the Queensland capital; Pearce and Swan in Perth; two that were abolished at this election; and Stirling, which was abolished at the 2022 election.