Conventional wisdom says that Australian state politics is not necessarily a barometer of federal affairs. Sometimes, this is true. At others, though, the woes of a disliked federal government spill over into state politics. A sure sign is how much a federal leader stays away – or is kept at arm’s length – during a state election. You can be sure WA premier Roger Cook is, politely or otherwise, asking Anthony Albanese to keep well away as his state goes to the polls next month. As more than one wag has noticed, you are more likely to see Albanese’s face on the Liberal opposition’s campaign material than Labor’s.
Following the weekend’s by-election results in Victoria, it’s honestly hard to tell who’s hated more: Labor and Premier Jacinta Allan, or Labor and PM Anthony Albanese. You can be sure neither are sleeping well after last weekend. The Greens will be tossing and turning, too.
The swing against Labor in the weekend’s Victorian state by-election in the party’s heartland of Werribee will be sounding alarm bells in the national campaign office […]
The swing against the Allan Labor government was horrific in Werribee, in Melbourne’s south west, at almost 16 per cent on primary vote.
This is huge, even if the swing wasn’t quite enough – at latest count in the cliffhanger – to unseat Labor. That this could happen in Labor’s heartland, in a seat which has been solidly Labor for all but the first three years of its creation in 1976. The seat represents everything ‘traditionally Labor’: working-class, huge percentage of migrants and young families as first-home owners in an outer suburb. In 2025, though, those are fatal weaknesses for Labor. The cost of living crisis is disproportionately hammering new homeowners and lower-income groups, while turbocharged mass migration is a red-hot issue for even migrant groups.
Werribee also overlaps or is adjacent to suburbs with high concentrations of African refugees, with violent crime almost out of control. The crime rate in parts of Werribee are the highest in Melbourne.
The key issues were cost of living and crime – the latter being an issue Peter Dutton has successfully engineered into a national issue. And it is those issues that will feature as the top order ones in every other seat at the next federal contest […]
The implications for Labor at a federal level from the Werribee by-election would be inconsequential without a federal election just around the corner. But it matters for one simple reason.
That reason is that Victorians have, apparently, finally woken up from the decade-long spell of the Dan Andrews cult of personality and realised just how screwed their state and their country are at the hands of Labor governments.
Crime has rarely had such a profile or a level of concern among voters in the context of a federal poll.
Combine this with the collapse in living standards for most Australians and Albanese is facing the perfect storm […]
if this is the level of hostility Victorians have against Labor in this region, one can only imagine what it’s like in more contestable electorates.
Werribee wasn’t the only by-election in Victoria last weekend though. The other was in the inner-city suburb of Prahran – and the result will have the Greens sweating.
The Liberals won the seat with a two-party-preferred swing of nearly 14 per cent. Some Greens are publicly trying to downplay the result, arguing that a former Labor candidate running as independent and directing preferences to the Liberals ahead of the Greens made the swing look bigger than it was. This is true enough, but, even on primary votes, the Liberals’ Rachel Westaway narrowly outpolled sitting Green Angelica di Camillo, winning a five per cent swing in her own right.
This is a devastating result for the Greens. Prahran is their absolute heartland: a long-gentrified inner-city suburb where once-working-class terrace homes command upwards of a million dollars. It is wealthy, hipster and Melbourne’s ‘Poof Central’ (it literally has a gay nightclub called Poof Doof).
If the Greens are losing in Prahran, they really are deeper in the poo than a Prahran top on poppers and Viagra.
