The buffer in the bush

The electoral map in Victorian has been redrawn by Labor, writes Brian Costar ON 18 SEPTEMBER 1999 the political earth moved in Victoria - or at least that part of it that lay beyond Melbourne, where the Labor Party threw a fifty year old electoral monkey off its back by winning eleven seats in the regional areas of the state. This was a spectacular, and largely unforeseen, improvement on the ALP’s miserable performance in 1996 when it won only three seats beyond the tram tracks - Bendigo West, Geelong North and Morwell. Labor had not always been the big loser in regional Victoria. When John Cain’s father led the party to victory in 1952 his caucus included 13 rural and regional members, one more than the number of Legislative Assembly seats held by the Country Party (now known as the Nationals). All this changed when the Labor Party split in 1955, destroying the Cain government and creating the Democratic Labor Party, which was to play a pivotal role in the state’s politics for the next quarter century. At election after election in the 1950s and 1960s Premier Bolte, the farmer from Meredith, consolidated the Liberal Party’s grip on regional Victoria at the combined expense of the Labor and National Parties. He did so, of course, with the aid of DLP preferences which never went to the ALP and only occasionally to the National Party. This electoral buffer in the bush was handed on to Bolte’s successor Dick Hamer. Even when John Cain jnr ended the Liberal hegemony in 1982 only six of Labor’s 49 lower house seats were outside Melbourne - and three of those were in Geelong. But how the electoral map has changed. On Saturday the Labor Party will be defending 12 of the state’s 22 regional seats and a clutch of others on the outer fringes of Melbourne. That one-time titan of the bush, the Liberal Party, holds only three regional seats - Benambra, South West Coast and Polwarth. What is equally interesting is that Labor’s regional seats are relatively safe. Morwell is the most marginal, on 4.9 per cent, and Bendigo West is the safest on 16.1 per cent. These comfortable margins are the result of the Labor landslide of 2002 which shored up seats won in tight contests in 1999; for example, the ALP won Seymour with just 51 per cent of the vote in 1999 but with 57 per cent in 2002. Similarly, the party’s vote in Bendigo East increased by 10 per cent over the two elections. Ironically, Labor’s five most marginal seats - Evelyn, Hastings, Gembrook, Kilsyth and Ferntree Gully - are all located on Melbournes’s outer fringes and would all fall to the Liberals with a swing of less than 2.3 per cent. The opinion polls are recording a reduction in Labor’s vote in ‘the rest of Victoria’ but regional Victoria does not usually vote as a solid bloc. Though the government might not be as popular with farmers as in 2002, support might well be holding up in the provincial cities of Geelong, Ballarat or Bendigo, which are the core of the ALP’s regional support base. Regional Victoria is diverse, and in some cases the changing electoral geography can produce the sort of results that we don’t see in metropolitan areas. A quick look at two seats that might change hands on Saturday illustrates the point. The electorate of Morwell, created in 1955, was held by the Liberal Party until 1970 and by the Labor Party since then. Labor’s support increased as the La Trobe Valley became the centre of the state’s brown coal industry and the operations of the State Electricity Commission expanded. By the mid-seventies Morwell was a very safe Labor seat, but in 2002 the party was forced to preferences and it is now the party’s most marginal regional seat. This shift in electoral allegiance is largely explained by demographic changes: as the SEC has downsized the “Labor town” of Morwell has been overtaken in population by the less loyal Traralgon. As a result of local party ructions a former Labor member is running as an independent and directing preferences to the Nationals, who have designs on the seat. In the far north east of the state is the seat of Benambra, which was held by the National Party from 1932 to 1976. When the long-standing sitting member retired the Liberal Party, aided by Labor preferences, won the seat and have held it ever since. History may repeat itself, however. The Liberal member, Tony Plowman, is retiring at this election and the Nationals candidate is long serving local Legislative Councillor, Bill Baxter, who ironically was the defeated National candidate in 1976. Incumbency and candidate recognition are more important in non-metropolitan contests than in Melbourne and Benambra could emerge as a much needed Nationals gain. In less than two decades the electoral map of regional Victoria has been re-drawn, with the Labor Party supplanting the Liberals as the dominant force there as well as in most of Melbourne. The big question is: can the ALP defend these twin citadels and for how long? • Brian Costar is professor of parliamentary democracy at Swinburne university of Technology Photo: Scott Cooper/iStockphoto.co