The suburbs that could swing Dutton or Albanese to power

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Kangaroo Valley is a picture postcard piece of NSW. Surrounded by forests and waterfalls, it attracts visitors with its collection of antique dealers and cafes from nearby Sydney most weekends.

But the 600 or so voters of Kangaroo Valley will be pivotal in the battle for the ultra-marginal seat of Gilmore where sitting member, Labor’s Fiona Phillips, is trying to fend off the Liberal Party’s Andrew Constance.

Picturesque Kangaroo Valley has defied the voting trends of the seat of Gilmore at the past two elections.

What sets apart Kangaroo Valley residents is that, unlike much of Gilmore which stretches along the NSW South Coast, support for Phillips has grown sharply over the past two elections.

Phillips won Gilmore by just 373 votes last election, with that support in Kangaroo Valley proving critical.

The community is an example of suburb or small population in many of the nation’s 150 electorates that could dictate Saturday’s poll. Voters in one suburb might turn against a party while another group of voters 10 minutes up the road may be unmoved.

Kangaroo Valley illustrates the importance of these swings within seats. In 2019, the swing to Labor in the valley was 9.2 per cent. At the last election, they moved even further to the left, with a swing to Phillips of 7.9 per cent.

From being a relatively safe Liberal booth, Kangaroo Valley and its 600 voters have become a safe Labor booth.

The cumulative swing to Phillips in Kangaroo Valley over the past two elections is the largest of any part of Gilmore.

By contrast, just 20 minutes away in Bomaderry voters swung sharply away from Phillips after backing her in 2019.

Political parties have developed sophisticated tools to reach these clusters of swinging voters, says former Labor campaigner turned pollster Kos Samaras.

The Coalition is targeting the Labor-held seat of Hawke in Melbourne’s west. Samaras said the parties might want to get their message to older, more commonly white voters in the established suburb of Melton who felt more disenfranchised than newer, mostly Indian migrants.

“You would want to focus on the older, more economically strained constituencies that have been there longer. They’re less multicultural, more likely to dump the Labor Party,” he says.

Parties pump ads into specific postcodes, on programs watched by those more established voters on apps such as Netflix and TV channel on-demand services.

Because the target voters are slightly older, they would be more likely to watch programs such as Married at First Sight rather than listen to podcasts.

This is an issue in the Melbourne seat of McEwen.

Peter Dutton has spent much of his time targeting outer suburban seats such as McEwen, where long-time Labor member Rob Mitchell suffered a 2 per cent swing against him at the 2022 election even though Labor enjoyed a 1.7 per cent swing to it across Victoria.

The emerging suburb of Doreen in McEwen’s east has seen its population more than double over the past decade to 30,000.

At the 2019 and 2022 elections, the booths in Doreen became increasingly supportive of the Liberal Party. Two of its three booths showed swings of more than 5 per cent against Labor.

Unlike the usual story told of multicultural Melbourne, more than three-quarters of Doreen residents are Australian-born.

Peter Dutton campaigning in the Labor-held seat of McEwen, which the Coalition is hoping to win.Credit: James Brickwood

This is aspirational suburbia, where 95 per cent of residents live in a separate house with 46 per cent of them with at least 4 bedrooms. One in five homes has at least three cars in the driveway.

It is also mortgage-belt central. Almost 60 per cent of the population has a mortgage, higher than the seat average (52 per cent) and the national average (32 per cent). And those mortgages are about $500 a month higher than the Victorian average.

This is the type of area ripe for targeting by the Liberal Party, according to Samaras.

“You just focus on the areas where there is volatility,” Samaras said. “I wouldn’t advertise in the stable areas, it’s a waste of money.”

Kangaroo Valley is country roads and bed-and-breakfasts. Doreen is the urban fringe sprawl.

But pivotal communities are spread across the country. One of them is the western Sydney suburb of Westmead, where apartments and townhouses are the norm.

Westmead sits in the seat of Parramatta, won by Labor’s Andrew Charlton in 2022 with a moderate swing of 1.1 per cent. The most recent redistribution has reduced his margin to a notional 3.7 per cent against Liberal opponent Katie Mullens.

The suburb has three booths, which have successively increased support for the Liberal Party. The combined swings away from Labor range between 6 per cent to 15 per cent.

This is a young part of Sydney (the median age is just 34) that is also highly educated, with more than half its residents holding bachelor’s degrees.

Around 76 per cent of people live in a unit or apartment, most of them renters.

Andrew Hughes from the ANU’s research school of management said political parties delved deeply into data such as the census to get a grasp of the demographic characteristics of particular parts of the country.

“Campaigns like ‘Slip, Slop, Slap’, or ‘Dumb Ways to Die’ in Victoria, work over a long period of time. The major parties are trying to change behaviour over just five weeks – it’s crazy,” he said.

Hughes said the swing away from major parties was due to individuals and communities ditching the traditional way they identified themselves.

“In the past, I might have identified with my parents and the life that they had. That’s just gone,” he said.

“People don’t identify like that. They want answers to problems. Voters don’t tolerate parties like they used to, and if you don’t deliver as an MP then you’re gone.”

Individual suburbs can swing the result of an election. In some places, just parts of a suburb may be enough.

Liberal Keith Wolahan fended off a 6.3 per cent swing in the eastern Melbourne seat of Menzies in 2022. But a redistribution since then has notionally made the seat a Labor electorate on a margin of 0.4 per cent.

That means every vote will be pivotal for the well-regarded Wolahan to hold on against Labor’s Gabriel Ng.

He may have to spend time in the suburb of Bulleen, which is sandwiched between the Eastern Freeway and Yarra River.

At the 2022 election, there were two booths in this suburb. One showed just a 0.4 per cent swing to Labor. But the other registered a 9.4 per cent move away from Wolahan.

Much is made of the large China-born population of Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, but Bulleen is different.

A fifth of the suburb’s residents say they have Italian heritage (compared to 8 per cent for Menzies as a whole).

Voters are more likely to have Greek, Vietnamese or Malaysian heritage compared to other parts of Menzies There are more Greek and Italian speakers than Mandarin speakers.

Bulleen is far more Catholic than the seat, or the state, with a third saying they are of the Catholic faith.

The Liberal campaign on mortgage interest rates may not play as well in Bulleen as other parts of the seat. Almost half of the suburb’s residents own their homes outright.

If Bulleen residents can’t be swayed to support Wolahan in great numbers, Peter Dutton will struggle in other parts of the country.

One of the biggest surprises of the 2022 election was the way Labor’s vote soared 7 per cent across the Perth suburbs while the Liberal vote crashed by almost 11 points.

The seat of Tangney, held by Labor for just two of its 50-year history, had been considered safe Liberal territory to the south of the Swan River. That was, until former Malaysian police officer and dolphin trainer Sam Lim won the seat with a near-12 per cent swing.

The suburb of Bull Creek had already given an inkling that Lim could take the seat.

There are three booths in the suburb, and each moved towards Labor at the 2019 election, in which the rest of Tangney shifted towards the Liberal Party.

In 2022, the three booths swung again – hard. In the Bull Creek North booth, for instance, Lim achieved a 25 per cent swing while there were also out-sized swings of 14 per cent and 16.2 per cent at the other two booths.

It’s a suburb of big homes. About three in five houses have four or more bedrooms – that’s 4 points above the seat average and 26 points above the national average.

But it differs in other ways. About 13 per cent of the population speaks Mandarin at home, while 8 per cent of residents were born in Malaysia. Lim was born in Malaysia and served in its police force.

Anthony Albanese with his partner Jodie Haydon and Labor member for Tangney, Sam Lim, at a barbecue during a campaign stop in the seat.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Bull Creek had been a canary in the Liberal Party coal mine before the disaster of 2022. If the residents back Labor this election as they have in the recent past, Sam Lim will remain Tangney’s MP.

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