Lib swing, Labor win and a big Greens loss
If there is such a thing as a result that has everything then the Dunkley by-election delivered. Obviously Coalition supporters will be disappointed by the result and there has already been plenty of Monday morning quarterbacking.
You will hear plenty about how it was actually a good result for Peter Dutton, puts Labor on notice, sets them up for next time and all the rest.
And then you will hear plenty more about how the strategy was all wrong and if only they’d done X, Y and Z, like I told them.
The truth is, as all the real political operatives know, it was a profound loss. Indeed, in the bloodsport of politics – where a win is a win is a win – there is no other kind.
Labor won and the Libs lost and that’s all there is to it.
Forget those trying to apply byelection swings to future general elections – which is essentially a game of opposites. By-elections always swing against the government because voters know it’s an opportunity for a protest vote without the risk of any real change.
Oppositions openly encourage this, as the current opposition did here.
In other words, a by-election result is typically as good as it gets for any opposition and in this one the best wasn’t good enough. Far from being a harbinger of future change, the pendulum usually swings back.
This is why when Kim Beazley’s opposition got a 3.66 per cent swing against John Howard’s government in the 2001 Aston by-election it was the beginning of the end of his leadership.
Not Howard’s, that is, but Beazley’s.
Based on the latest figures from the AEC the swing against the Albanese government in Dunkley is even less than that. Moreover Labor won with a primary vote well over 40 per cent and a 2PP of about 52.5 per cent.
Thus it has lost a local member with great personal popularity and with a cleanskin candidate retained a seat held by the Liberals for almost a quarter of a century from 1996 until 2019 with a 5 per cent gap.
And Labor’s 41 per cent-plus primary was even higher under Jodie Belyea than under the beloved Peta Murphy. This compares to an overall primary of around 32.5 at the 2022 federal election.
And so anyone painting this as any kind of Labor loss needs to go back and check their maths.
But you also don’t need to be a rocket scientist – or microbiologist – to see that just one thin layer below the final result lies a seething petri dish of activity that holds serious lessons for both parties.
The first is that no electorate more than Dunkley is perfectly emblematic of the sort of seats a Dutton-led Coalition needs to win to regain government. Most, if not all, of the Teal seats are lost to the Liberals for the foreseeable future and there is even the threat of more to come.
The good news for the Libs is that would-be Teal votes seem to have come back to the party in the Tealtinged suburb of Mount Eliza, at the gateway to the old-moneyed Mornington Peninsula.
The bad news is that no Teal candidate was running. Likewise with One Nation and Palmer United or whatever it’s called now – both softright and hard-right votes came back to the Liberal party because there was nowhere else for them to go.
And in a Teal-liberated Liberal party the only pathway to survival is to win seats like Dunkley, classic outer-suburban “Howard battler” communities filled with aspirational tradies and middle-class mortgagees.
Dutton knows this and this is why Dunkley was so important, not just as a by-election for a government with a wafer-thin majority but as a bellwether for other similar seats, like Sydney’s ever mercurial Penrithbased powerhouse of Lindsay.
These seats are not bellwethers in the old political parlance of ones that change with the government at each election, but rather totems of where mainstream Australians are at.
In other words, if you can win and hold them you don’t just win government, you win the nation.
Make no mistake, this is the mission of the Albanese government: to seize and hold the centre at all costs and to sandbag middle Australia against a new, earthier Liberal party that has lost not just well-heeled seats but well-heeled donors.
And the most welcome sign of this is the best result of all: a complete collapse in the Green vote.
The most brutal swing in Dunkley was not against the ALP but against the minor party, which went from more than 10 per cent of the vote to just over six – a 40 per cent drop.
As the ever sober and sensible pollster Kos Samaras observed on the night, this was in keeping with a clear and steady decline in Greens’ popularity since October 7 last year, with their incessant obsessions over Palestine and seeming sympathy with Hamas clearly irrelevant or abhorrent to mainstream Australians.
Personally I would love nothing more than for the Greens to continue their quixotic crusade of hatred and be wiped from the map, but the lesson for the broader left is clear: yield to the extremes and you will find nothing but political death.
The only road to success runs straight through the middle.