Politics

Find Out If Your Electorate Is Also Ready To Ditch The Liberals

Until this weekend, Wentworth was a Liberal safe seat too.

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Well, the count’s nearly done, and it looks like Independent Kerryn Phelps has well and truly won the seat of Wentworth. That raises an intriguing question: which other so-called “safe seats” might not be so safe after all?

See, an electorate is considered to be a safe seat when a party holds more than 60 percent of the two-party preferred vote. Wentworth was considered to be an incredibly safe seat then, because once preferences were distributed in the 2016 election, Malcolm Turnbull received close to 70 percent of the vote. That meant the margin — or the percentage of voters who would need to change their vote for the Libs to be defeated — was 18.9 percent.

That’s why Phelps’ victory on the weekend was so impressive — she won the seat with a 19.6 percent swing (at the time of publication) away from the Liberals and towards her. Now, a 19 percent swing is massive, and it was helped along in Wentworth by the dramatic circumstances of Malcolm Turnbull’s resignation. But there are plenty of other Liberal safe seats in this country that are nowhere near as “safe” as Wentworth, and a much smaller swing would be be enough to knock the Coalition out of the top spot there.

Take Warringah, for example, which is the seat currently held by Tony Abbott. The margin there as of the 2016 election is closer to 11 percent, which is sizeable, but still smaller than the margin in Wentworth. Jane Caro has already expressed an interest in running as an independent there next election, and if the Liberals keep doing things that make people hate them, she might just have a shot.

Here’s How You Can Check Out The Margin In Your Electorate

Which leads us to the fun part: it’s time to check out your electorate and see if, just maybe, it could be ready to ditch the Libs as well. If you enter your postcode or suburb here, you can find out the name of the electorate you’re in. Once you’ve done that, head over here and find your electorate in the list (unless, of course, you remember voting in a by-election between the 2016 election and now, in which case the numbers will be different, and you’re probably best to google it).

Once you’ve found your electorate, click through to take a look at the election results. The top bar on that page will show you who won the seat in the 2016 election, and by how much. In the case of Warringah, the graph looks like this:

Warringah election results from 2016 federal election.

Tony Abbott currently holds the seat of Warringah with 61.6% of the vote, or a margin of around 11%. That’s less than the 18% the Libs held Wentworth by, so technically anything’s possible in Warringah too.

Of course, whether or not the Liberals will actually lose a seat depends on much more than just the margin — like in Wentworth, whether a seat changes hands also depends on whether there’s an alternative candidate the public actually wants to switch votes for.

According to polls at the moment, though, quite a few electorates are pretty open to ditching the Libs. The Australian reported yesterday that support for the Libs has dropped in almost every state, and that at the moment the Coalition risks losing up to 25 seats across the country.

At the moment, the next federal election is expected to take place in May 2019, though there’s a chance the government could try to call one sooner. Some time in the next six months, then, your electorate might just get the chance to have its Wentworth moment. If you like to plan ahead, consider this your heads up.

Which Seats Could The Libs Lose If The Wentworth Swing Is Repeated?

If the extraordinary 19 percent swing in Wentworth was repeated, though, how many seats could the Coalition potentially lose?

The answer to that is 70: a swing of 19 percent would unseat the Coalition in 70 of the 75 seats it currently holds. Or in other words, only five seats are truly Liberal “safe seats”, in the sense that they’d need an even bigger swing than Wentworth to fall to another party.

Those five “safe” members are Damian Drum (representing the division of Murray), Andrew Broad (Mallee), Sussan Ley (Farrer), Julie Bishop (Curtin) and Paul Fletcher (Bradfield). Every other Coalition member in the House of Representatives right now could, in theory, lose their seat if the events of Wentworth were to repeat themselves in their electorates. Many of those members would lose their seats with much smaller swings.

For your reading pleasure, here’s a list of the electorates the Coalition is at risk of losing, ordered from least safe to most safe, alongside the percentage of the vote the Government held there at the 2016 election (this data’s from here, if you’d like the Real Deal).

  • Capricornia (50.63%)
  • Forde (50.63%)
  • Gilmore (50.73%)
  • Flynn (51.04%)
  • Robertson (51.14%)
  • Chisholm (51.24%)
  • Dunkley (51.43%)
  • Banks (51.44%)
  • La Trobe (51.46%)
  • Dickson (51.6%)
  • Petrie (51.65%)
  • Hasluck (52.05%)
  • Page (52.3%)
  • Corangamite (53.13%)
  • Dawson (53.34%)
  • Bonner (53.59%)
  • Boothby (53.5%)
  • Swan (53.59%)
  • Pearce (53.65%)
  • Leichhardt (53.95%)
  • Reid (54.69%)
  • Deakin (55.68%)
  • Sturt (55.89%)
  • Brisbane (55.92%)
  • McMillan (56.03%)
  • Casey (56.06%)
  • Stirling (56.12%)
  • Canning (56.79%)
  • Bowman (57.07%)
  • Flinders (57.77%)
  • Wide Bay (58.14%)
  • Hinkler (58.42%)
  • Aston (58.59%)
  • Grey (58.63%)
  • Wannon (58.96%)
  • Fisher (59.06%)
  • Ryan (59.09%)
  • Hughes (59.33%)
  • Wright (59.62%)
  • Bennelong (59.72%)
  • Hume (60.18%)
  • Menzies (60.56%)
  • Higgins (60.69%)
  • Fairfax (60.89%)
  • Moore (61.02%)
  • Fadden (61.05%)
  • Durack (61.06%)
  • Tangney (61.07%)
  • Warringah (61.09%)
  • Lyne (61.63%)
  • McPherson (61.64%)
  • Calare (61.81%)
  • Forrest (62.56%)
  • Cowper (62.58%)
  • Goldstein (62.68%)
  • Kooyong (63.34%)
  • North Sydney (63.61%)
  • Moncrieff (64.94%)
  • O’Connor (65.05%)
  • Parkes (65.1%)
  • Barker (65.19%)
  • Groom (65.31%)
  • Cook (65.39%)
  • Mackellar (65.74%)
  • New England (66.42%)
  • Riverina (66.44%)
  • Berowra (66.45%)
  • Maranoa (67.54%)
  • Mitchell (67.82%)
  • Gippsland (68.43%)

If you see your electorate on that list, especially if it’s somewhere near the top, then the next election may just get real interesting for you.