In a nice appertiser for the federal election year, Victoria has a couple of unusually interesting state by-elections coming up on February 8, which I intend to cover on the night. One is especially interesting because it's a more or less stock-standard test for the theory that the a government is in trouble, the other because of its uniqueness. This is a preview post for these by-elections where I look at some factors that might affect the results; I will add notes on polling if I see any.
Prahran (Green vs Lib 12.0%, 3CP Green vs ALP 5.8%)
ALP not contesting
Vacancy for: resignation of Sam Hibbins (Grn/IND) following personal scandal
ALP not contesting
Vacancy for: resignation of Sam Hibbins (Grn/IND) following personal scandal
Prahran is a unique seat to begin with, and this by-election is even more of an oddity because of the decision of the Allan Labor government to not turn the rock over. Labor cited the fact that they had not won the seat since 2006 and didn't need it as pretexts for not having a go. Winning would have been challenging because the standard anti-government by-election factor would have made it hard for them to get over the Greens even with the loss of Hibbins' personal vote. On the other hand with the government currently not polling well there could have been fear of a really bad result (such as being jumped by some indie and finishing fourth). If Labor could have won the by-election they may well have been in a better position to hold off the Greens at the next general election, but unlikely to happen and not to be.
We don't know anything about how Green vacancy by-elections go, because there's never been one in Australian state or federal elections. There has been one Green vacancy at a regular single-seat election, the seat of Balmain in the 2023 NSW election. In this, the Greens suffered an 8.2% 2CP swing to Labor on the retirement of Jamie Parker, but narrowly retained the seat. What is interesting in the Balmain case is that the Labor ticket received similar swings in both houses in the seat, but in the lower house these came mainly at the expense of the Greens on a 3CP level, while in the upper house primary votes they came mostly off the Liberals and minor parties. This suggests the Greens lost an outsize personal vote on Parker's retirement, and this is also consistent with the evidence that Greens once elected tend to get outsize personal votes, at least on their first re-election attempt. When looking at the way that Hibbins made the seat his own, there is still more evidence that a vacancy could be bad news for the Greens in personal vote terms.
Back Story
The ancient history of Prahran was as a two-party seat that was often marginal and would now and then change hands for a while. Labor broke a 24-year Liberal hold on it in 1979, slightly outperforming the 2PP, but in 1985 the seat was adversely redistributed and vacant; this plus the state swing saw it lost heavily. In 1992 there was a favourable redistribution for Labor but that was the year the Cain Government got crushed, the two things roughly cancelling out. Labor's Tony Lupton won the seat in the 2002 Brackslide and held it for two terms before losing to Clem Newton-Brown in the Liberals' narrow 2010 win.
The size of the swing to Labor in 2014 made Prahran (now on 4.8%) a serious target for Labor but in the meantime the Greens vote had also risen. This set the scene for an incredible postcount in which all of the Labor vs Greens 3CP and the potential Labor vs Liberal and Green vs Liberal 2CPs were extremely close. In the end, Sam Hibbins won the seat for the Greens from third. There was a less incredible but still very interesting sequel in 2018. The seat had drifted away from the uncompetitive Liberals off the state swing against them but there was still a very close fight to make the final two. Hibbins again overtook Labor on minor candidate preferences and won from third for the second election in a row. By 2022 Hibbins' grip on the seat had strengthened and he was not seriously challenged.
Alas for the Greens and all those personally affected, this all ended in tears in late 2024 when Hibbins quit the party following revelations that he, while married, had been involved in a relationship with a staffer that breached party rules. The party's anger seemed to go beyond the simple text of the matter and soon further accusations (denied by Hibbins) surfaced. A few weeks after quitting the party room, but citing other factors including vandalism of his office, Hibbins resigned the seat.
Battle Of The Voids
There are two questions that are central to this by-election. Firstly, where will the Labor vote go, in the absence of an ALP candidate? In 2022 Labor polled 26.6% here. Secondly, how much of the Greens' vote was specific to Hibbins' success in holding the seat and is now up for grabs?
To look at the second first, between his 2014 win and his 2022 win Hibbins gained primary vote swings totalling 11.4%. In the same time the party swing on primary votes in the upper house for Prahran was 4.0% and the party's vote in the Southern Metropolitan region in the upper house overall did nothing. The suggestion is that the Greens are losing a lot of incumbency here.
In terms of a potential Greens vs Liberals 2CP, the margin of 12.0% may appear unassailable, but the loss of Green incumbency is one thing making it closer on paper. The other is that there is no Labor candidate and therefore no Labor how-to-vote card.
In 2022 the follow rate of Labor how-to-vote cards in seven electorates with data entry was around the low 30s. This suggests around 8% of the Prahran voter base would have given automatic preferences to the Greens but will now make up their own minds (if, that is, they bother to vote at all). The 2022 flows suggest that of the Labor voters not following the card, the split was about 3-1 Greens vs Liberals, so the lack of a Labor card could itself cut the in-theory margin by about 2%. Or it may not be that much if many of those who did decide to follow the Labor card only did so after reviewing it and deciding they broadly agreed with it anyway.
Even so, there's a case that Prahran these days is just too left and that somebody will beat the Liberals, whether or not it is the Greens. The personal vote and HTV factors cited above don't seem enough to drive a 12% swing back, and if voters are angry with Labor will they really show this by switching from Labor to the Liberals in enough numbers for the Liberals to beat the Greens? Doesn't seem easy.
The other possibility is that the seat falls to an independent. Some of the Labor vote will go directly to the Greens and Liberals, but if enough of it pools with one independent who also takes votes from at least the Greens, there could be a pathway to an independent win. It is very likely here that any independent who makes the final two wins the seat on the preferences of whichever of the Greens or Liberals is excluded. Are the independents up to it?
Candidates
The vacuum left by Labor's disinterest in running has seen three independents announce tilts so far.
Tony Lupton is the former Labor member for the seat, but just weeks before Hibbins resignation from the Greens he had attacked his former party as preoccupied with identity politics in a way that he alleges enables anti-semitism. (His op ed could be summarised as "my old party has been captured by identity politics and PS I'm a Zionist"). Likely relevant background to Lupton's interest in such culture war items is that Lupton's wife, former Age columnist Julie Szego, was sacked by The Age after publicly criticising its spiking of a piece she wrote about gender transition surgery. Prahran is close to Caulfield which has a high Jewish vote, but does not have a high Jewish vote itself. Lupton is vigorously anti-Green, attacking the party as extremist chaos agents.
The teal independent from more or less central casting that this by-election had to have (yes she's even used "teal" as a hashtag) is the well-credentialled and high profile Janine Hendry, best known as organiser of the March for Justice (starting 2021) against parliamentary sexism and sexual abuse. Hendry, who has a large social media following, is a former senior lecturer in marketing strategy and administration and a qualified architect (!) and has had a range of charity and philantropy involvements.
The third independent is Buzz Billman, a left-wing train driver and actor and former Greens candidate who lost preselection against Clive Hamilton for the Higgins 2009 by-election, which is certainly valid reason alone for quitting the party. (He actually cites the party becoming too top-down as his reason for departing in 2011). Billman has claimed the Greens have not achieved anything for the seat in areas like transport, crime and small business.
There are usually some left-ish micro-parties as well, who I doubt will greatly bother the scorers.
In the hot seat for the Greens is Angelica Di Camillo, an environmental engineer, energy project officer and pilates instructor who was to be the Greens' candidate for the federal division of Higgins before it got the chop. She was also previously the candidate for Rowville 2022 (where the Greens don't do much business even when they don't have an indie trashing their vote) and for the 2023 Aston by-election (a lacklustre result for the party with Labor still in honeymoon mode).
The Liberal candidate is Rachel Westaway, who was a member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal until recently. (Her appointment attracted some attention when it was revealed that under a previous surname she had run as a Liberal ticket-filler in the 2003 NSW Legislative Council election). Westaway is also a former migration agent and rural press director and is long-term President of the Thai Australian Chamber. Westaway was criticised by federal Labor for a low AAT completion rate against benchmarks in 2021 but was nonetheless reappointed by the Morrison government on its way out the door.
Who Will Make The Final Two?
It's a bit weird to be talking about a Greens vs Coalition 2CP result as the vanilla result for a seat when Prahran is one of a handful of seats in the country that has serially finished that way (Maiwar (Qld) and Ballina (NSW) are two others), but there you go. The 2022 3CP for Prahran was Greens 39.1 Liberal 33.3 Labor 27.6. Getting a third of the 3CP guarantees a place in the final two. The Greens will probably lose several points for loss of personal vote, but they would also be expected to gain several for the absence of a Labor candidate. If the Greens make the final two against the Liberals they probably win - the question there is could Hendry especially poll well enough and take enough votes from them to knock them out of the final two.
The Liberals' current 3CP is almost high enough for a guaranteed final two spot, and they will pick up some votes from the Greens and from the absence of the Labor candidate. For them to miss the final two they probably have to lose a lot of 3CP votes to whichever indie makes the final three. That's possible but would be a minor shock at a time when the party is polling reasonably well.
The Greens' preferred 2CP opponent is the Liberals; they are at far greater risk of losing to anyone else. Likewise the Liberals, if they have any chance, would want to face the Greens, as they would be at great risk against either Hendry or Lupton. Victoria at state level however is not an easy campaigning environment for independents - the teal challenge completely failed at the 2022 election, with some quite high profile contenders polling not much at all. It will be interesting to see how competitive they are this time around, and also what is the preference flow from one of these two very different independents to the other.
It will be difficult to read any big state-level message from an obviously weird by-election in the absence of a Labor candidate. A loss for the Greens would be bad, especially if it is to an independent as in that case they might not see the seat again for a while. A large swing against them without losing the seat, however, could be easily written off, as in the case of Balmain.
For the Liberals the seat is on a large margin anyway so if they get a substantial swing but still lose it won't be an obvious embarrassment. Embarrassing results here would include not getting much of a 2CP swing (say, below 3%) or worse failing to make the final two.
I have had one report on the ground that the independent campaigns are close to invisible on the ground as of mid-Jan.
Werribee (ALP 10.9%)
Vacancy for: resignation of Tim Pallas (ALP), Treasurer
Werribee, on the other hand, is the classic case of a struggling incumbent government defending a seat on the sort of margin that would normally be safe, but in a by-election can be tricky. Much will be read into this result - a win for the Liberals will be seen as a huge success for Brad Battin and a sign that Labor is rooned in the outer suburbs come 2026. However if Labor retains it with reasonable comfort, the microscope will turn to the Liberals' recent infighting and the narrative about the next election will take a (quite premature) hit.
The Werribee seat was created in 1976 and won by the Liberals for its first term by 23 votes. Their incumbent MP retired at the 1979 election for health reasons and Labor won the seat and has held it ever since. It was only even marginal in 1996 (the retirement of 17-year incumbent Ken Coghill saw a surprisingly close 50.8-49.2 result).
In recent years Werribee has attracted the attention of independents, including Joe Garra who ran a distant second to Pallas in 2018. The seat was mentioned in dispatches as a target for something called "purple independents" said to be a threat in western Melbourne in 2022; the "movement" (if it existed) amounted to nothing and Pallas thrashed a rabble of 14 (sigh) opponents, of whom only the Liberals cracked double figures.
The 2PP Contest
Although independent Paul Hopper, the Greens' Rifai A. Raheem and the Victorian Socialists' Sue Munro also have their hands up, Werribee looks so obviously a classic two-party contest that at this stage I'm not going into detail on anybody else.
The Labor candidate to replace Pallas was very quickly announced as local high school teacher and CFA volunteer firefighter John Lister. Lister is a relatively young candidate (31) who I haven't found anything unusual about. The Liberals have more recently announced Steve Murphy as their candidate. Murphy is a Werribee-area real estate agent and former town planner, policeman and army trooper. Murphy has a previous history as a Liberal campaign supporter rather than a candidate himself, including of his wife Gayle Murphy who contested Werribee for the party in 2018 and Lalor in 2016 and 2019 (the latter as a replacement for her daughter who ran into a Section 44 issue!)
According to The Age, Murphy "moved to Essendon West to be closer to his children a few years ago, after living in Werribee for almost 30 years.". I found this interesting given that in February 2022 Murphy attacked Pallas for not living in the electorate, even saying at one point "Werribee deserves better than a member who doesn't live in their electorate [..]" Oops! (That said I'm not sure if Pallas ever lived in the electorate).
"Steve Murphy" seems to be a common name in Melbourne political circles. Murphy the candidate is not the same person as Steve Murphy former Kennett/Napthine advisor, or the climate sceptic who ran in the 2009 Higgins by-election.
By-Election Swings
Government-seat by-elections contested by both majors in Victoria are actually pretty rare; quite often the opposition doesn't bother. There have only been nine of them in the last 45 years, with an average 2PP swing that I estimate as 6.6% against the government of the day (often precise figures are not available because of Victoria not throwing counts to completion). This is more or less the same as other jurisdictions. But similar to by-elections elsewhere, swings against are less likely with governments in their first terms and more likely with older governments that have fallen on harsh times in polling. The only loss to an opposition in this period was the Mitcham by-election of 1997 where a 15.8% swing is considered in retrospect to have been the beginning of the end for the Kennett government. The departing member taking a swing at the Premier as he quit can't have helped matters for the Liberals there.
The Allan government isn't polling very well, although the polling has been sparse. Nobody but Redbridge, Resolve and a once-off Resolve spinoff called Wolf + Smith has polled since Jacinta Allan took over as Premier but the recent polls have had Labor trailing about 49-51. Labor is also polling badly in Victoria in federal breakdowns with this widely being considered a case of "state drag" (yes it probably is a bit of a thing.)
Considering that the margin in Werribee is only four or five points above what would be expected in a run of the mill government vacancy, that the government is polling quite badly compared to the previous election, and that the retirement is for a long-serving and high-profile incumbent, the seat is loseable on paper.
What will it mean?
Across all states and federally (I ignore NT here because of its outsize personal votes) there have been ten governments in the last 45 years that lost at least one by-election to the opposition with a double-digit 2PP swing; of these eight then lost the next election. One of the two governments that survived (Queensland 2009) was on a similar 2PP margin to Allan's, so a loss here while not a good sign isn't necessarily terminal either. This is especially so as the current pendulum in Victoria is very strong for Labor and while the Liberals are ahead in current 2PP polling, they are probably not ahead enough to win an election "held now".
My main view of this by-election is a win is a win is a win; whoever claims Werribee won't be that fussy about the margin. The Liberals would really want a decent swing here if they don't win; anything under 6% would be clearly not good enough and would raise doubts: are Labor really going as badly as the polls? Is the outer suburban shift really on? Is the leadership issue fixed? etc. If the Liberals were to overkill the seat and win by more than 4% that would be a bonus that would cause panic in the Labor ranks, but any win would be a good result. In some ways the Liberals have more at stake here because with Labor we know that the seat is vulnerable. The by-election will be seen as having federal resonance too (though the federal implications of state results always tend to get overplayed) because outer suburbs are critical to the Liberal Party's hope of taking seats from federal Labor.
Roll on 8 Feb, will be an interesting election night!
