So What's The Deal With Macnamara 2025?

I don't normally do articles about specific seats outside of my home state in federal leadups, but this one is a very special case.  The seat of Macnamara has seen excitement in the post-count at two of the last three federal elections.  First there was 2016, when Labor always looked most likely to retain but there was both a narrow margin to the Greens to make the final two and a narrow margin to the Liberals after doing so.  But that was just an entree to 2022 where the seat hung in the balance for over a week.  In this case the Liberals had no hope of victory but Labor needed to beat either the Liberals or the Greens at the three-candidate point to win the seat.  All three parties were astonishingly close at the tipping point and Labor's Josh Burns survived by just 594 votes.  The 2025 campaign for Macnamara again sees an unclear exclusion order which is leading to some strategic voting arguments.  One of them isn't very good.

The seat of Macnamara has become a commentariat obsession since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, soon followed by Israel's ongoing invasion of Gaza.  Attributing blame for and condemning these events is outside the scope of this article; if anyone must know my views, ask me somewhere else.  The resulting Gaza/antisemitism issues set is seen as extremely significant in Macnamara where 10% of residents describe their religion as Judaism.  Some others would be ethnically Jewish without self-describing as religious.  Given that there has been a rise in strong criticisms of Israel and also in antisemitic behaviour (the two are far from always the same thing) since October 2023 the line has been that Jewish voters will turn heavily away from the Greens for their pro-Gaza position.

A lot of this stuff is simplistic.  Much of it is written as if every voter in Macnamara is Jewish instead of a substantial minority.  The narrative tends to reduce Jewish voters to a single narrative about home nation issues and their voting salience (as does a similar narrative about Muslim campaigns in Western Sydney).  It also tends to ignore the fact that claims the Greens are too "antisemitic" to represent Macnamara have been common at a lower level at recent elections (former Labor incumbent Michael Danby even tried to hand out how to vote cards recommending preferences to the Liberals over this).  There is a perception that Labor voters in Macnamara are different in their attitudes to Greens than Labor voters elsewhere because of the Jewish vote factor, but up til now this has absolutely not been born out by electoral facts.  My perception is that those who cared in the past mostly voted Liberal.  For instance in 2022, the proportion of above the line Labor Senate votes that placed the Greens second in Macnamara (68.9%) was the fourth highest in the country, not far behind Higgins (now abolished), Melbourne and Grayndler.  Only 7.7% voted 2 for the Liberals. This partly reflects that Macnamara is a densely populated electorate that is easy to cover with how to vote cards.  Nonetheless if Macnamara Labor voters circa 2022 were some different breed who were unusually averse to the Greens this would have been reflected and it wasn't.

There has been a view that the Greens vote while overall holding steady in polling is "spreading out" and becoming less concentrated in inner urban areas, in part because of a backlash over their position on Gaza, but also because of other factors (for instance in Macnamara specifically a decline in rental availability has been cited).  The Queensland state election may have boosted this view, but in that case Labor strongly competed with the Greens by running policies attractive to their supporters, which isn't really happening in the federal contest.  The Prahran by-election (state seat that covers a large part of Macnamara) is also seen as consistent with this (and fair enough, the Greens should not have lost that seat), though causes of the swing against the Greens there also included a scandal affecting their previous MP.  In the absence of an endorsed Labor candidate, the now semi-estranged former Labor MP for the seat Tony Lupton ran as an independent and recommended preferences to the Liberals, who won.  However Lupton's was not an obviously "independent Labor" style campaign, and in booth terms his votes tended to come from the stronger Liberal areas.  

The reason the impact of the Gaza/antisemetism issue set on Macnamara is not easy to predict is that it could potentially hurt both "left" parties.  If the Greens lose some votes to the Liberals over the issue that assists Labor, but there is a weird dynamic in which if Labor voters switch to the Liberals over the issue this could knock Labor out and cause the Greens to win, which is the last thing those voters want. The Gaza issue is also not one-way traffic because the Greens may be gaining some votes from voters disillusioned with Labor's response to Israel's invasion too; if this is supposed to be a threat to Labor's very hold on Wills then it's not going to be totally benign everywhere else in the inner city. There is also the background of the general damage to the Labor brand in Victoria from its struggling state government, and the possibility that that could drive Labor votes to the Liberals.

Labor Open How To Vote Card: What Impact Could It Have?

Labor has issued an open how to vote card recommendation in Macnamara, simply asking their voters to vote 1 for Josh Burns and make their own decision regarding the rest.  They have also left the Greens off their Senate card for the seat. In my view given the sensitivities involved in this specific seat this is a reasonable decision by Labor; preferencing the Liberals would not have been.  

We don't have a House of Reps preference flow from Labor to the Greens in this seat as they have never been eliminated.  They were eliminated in Melbourne 2016 (81% to Greens) and Kooyong 2019 (83.4% to Greens) but these were seats Labor wasn't trying to win.  In a seat where Labor was making a major how to vote card effort this could rise to over 85%, though this should be slightly tempered by Macnamara's huge rate of postal voting.  It was between 82% and 84.5% in the three Brisbane seats won by the Greens in 2022, and Queensland tends to have slightly weaker flows between left parties generally.

In general, the share of major party voters who copy how to vote cards is slightly less than half, and it may be slightly higher for the Liberals than for Labor.  There is more evidence on Liberal follow rates from state-level cases where they have changed their recommendations.  Assuming Labor's general rate is similar, arguments could be made either way on whether Macnamara would be higher or lower than average - higher handout rate at booths and prepolls, higher effort, low rate of booth voting, highly educated voters more likely to make their own decisions.  Say it is 40%.  In the absence of a how to vote recommendation, those voters who would have copied the card will make their own decision, and I suspect they wouldn't split remarkably strongly between the two parties.  I would think it would knock about 20 points off the flow to Greens. That flow might also be naturally lower to some degree because of the impact of the Gaza/antisemitism issues mix, but all up I'd expect about 60% of Labor preferences to go to the Greens over the Liberals.  (Antony Green's estimate is slightly higher.). I should note there is some thought that this issues mix will have a large impact on flows among Labor voters making their own decisions (whether they would normally follow the card or not) and that the flow would be much weaker, which would give the Liberals a strong chance if Labor was knocked out.

In 2022 the Labor primary was 31.8, the Liberals 29, the Greens 29.65.  A gain rate for the Greens of .2 votes/preference off a presumably slightly lower Labor primary (since Labor isn't getting knocked out off 31.8) would see the Greens gain something like 5.5%-6% on the Liberals.  The Liberals gained about 1.5% on the Greens in minor party preferences so their notional lead is just under a point.  (The redistribution had very little impact here).  If my estimate is correct then in the event of Labor getting knocked out the Greens have a notional lead over the Liberals of about 5%.  So if the Liberals pull enough votes from Labor and the Greens to get a 2.5% net swing from the Greens on primaries (a 5% increase in effective lead), the Liberals might win.  There's a case then that if Labor does get knocked out,  the Liberals are competitive.  On the other hand, Labor issuing an open HTV card is by no means guaranteed to stop the Greens from winning.  It does however mean they can't take victory for granted, and could credibly lose.

As I have written and thought about this article I have become more puzzled by the betting odds which for instance have the Greens 2.40 to the Liberals 5.75. A win for the Greens requires Labor to be excluded. If Labor are excluded it is not obvious to me that the Greens are more than twice as likely to win.

It should also be noted that the Liberals' baseline is particularly bad.  In 2022 they lost their candidate at short notice and the replacement was controversial, and there was a 9.7% swing against the party on primary vote.  That said there was a 7% swing against them in the Senate as well, so a lot of this would have been the Liberals' 2022 inner-city malaise, plus a sophomore vote for Josh Burns.  Nonetheless there is potential for the Liberal vote to improve for non-issue-related reasons.  

Liberals: Worst Flier Ever!

My thanks to Twitter user @Michelle_Rent for tweeting these images of a Liberal flier for their candidate Benson Saulo.  (Their candidate has an interesting backstory and may have crossover appeal to Greens voters but that is another matter)  This flier is not just one insult but multiple insults to the intelligence of the voters in this seat.

Firstly, this just doesn't make sense.  If a voter's order of preferences between these three parties is 1 Labor 2 Liberal 3 Green, then they should simply vote like that.  If Labor is eliminated, their preference flows at full value to the Liberals and helps to STOP THE GREENS at least as much as if they'd voted Liberal.

But in fact switching from 1 Labor 2 Liberal 3 Green to 1 Liberal 2 Labor 3 Green is not just completely unnecessary for a voter who wants at all costs to STOP THE GREENS, it's stupid!  The reason is that by switching their vote from Labor to Liberals, any voter following this instruction could cost Labor a vote Labor needed to stay ahead of the Greens and ... cause the Greens to win!  

The Liberal Party deserves to be severely punished by voters and the commentariat for this flier.  Not only is it clearly misleading the voters about the consequences of their vote by implying that a 1 Labor 2 Liberal 3 Greens ranking of these parties will not "stop the Greens" (an implication that I'm not even sure is legal under Section 329 (1) of the Commonwealth Electoral Act) but they are also contradicting their own messaging.  They have been saying that stopping the Greens winning is so important that Labor cannot preference the Greens.  Labor has complied with this demand to the extent of issuing an open ticket, but now it is the Liberals who are raising chances of the Greens winning by asking Labor voters to engage in dishonest tactical voting for no reason!   They could have instead campaigned along the lines of 'Labor Voters - Preference The Liberals To Stop The Greens!"  I guess they might object that if they are struggling to make the top three themselves, they need every vote they can get from Labor, but if this is the case then they're going to lose anyway.  And also if that is the case, the poll they're posting to argue that Labor cannot win is nonsense. 

Indeed, far from it being strategically sensible for a voter who is determined to STOP THE GREENS at all costs to switch from Labor to Liberal, the reverse is true!   A voter who normally prefers the Liberals but overwhelmingly at this election wants the Greens to not win should rank Labor above the Liberals, then the Greens.  The reason for this is that if Labor are over the Greens Labor wins, but if Labor is not over the Greens it isn't clear the Liberals do.  If the Greens now win Macnamara, the Liberals can be blamed forever.  

(There is a genuine strategic dilemma for a voter whose preference is Liberal-Labor-Green with daylight between all the options, do they risk their worst option winning to try to get their best?   Ditto also for Green-Labor-Liberal with daylight between the options, as putting the Greens into the top two over Labor could cause the Liberals to win the seat.)

There is also the question of the source material.  I don't know how the Liberals think that they will sucker more than a handful of Labor voters with "Opinion Poll, Herald Sun". The Herald Sun is a serial purveyor of poll-shaped objects that in 2022 credulously published a street team exit poll that may not have existed, with a laughable sample size, that was supposed to show Daniel Andrews losing his seat 42.8-57.2 to the slug guy.  It was wrong by 18%.  Why should anyone believe a poll so vaguely attributed as this one, as opposed to believing something from a stated and known to be credible poll of a sort the Liberals could have easily commissioned themselves?  In fact the poll numbers in question come from a poll commissioned by the anti-Green lobby group Advance and conducted by a pollster called Insightfully.  Some people I know speak highly of Insightfully's internal polling but its limited public output has not lived up to that billing so far, including a Voice poll of Tasmania that while right about the overall result had differences in support level between seats that were so small that anyone who lives in Tasmania knew that they were nonsense.  

In any case the sample size of this poll was a mere 600, meaning that even if seat polls were reliable and even if this was a quality seat poll, it would still be within margin of error that Labor would get over the Greens (to say nothing of movements in the campaign).  So to say "Labor can't win from here" about a single seat poll from weeks ago with a tiny margin is ridiculous,   The only other specific poll of Macnamara I've seen was by Redbridge in June 2024, with Labor easily making the final two with a nine-point lead on the Greens.  None of the many MRP models about have had Labor falling to third.

I may well find more to add on this one as the campaign progresses.  That's all for now!  

UPDATE: I have seen a how to vote card being circulated by Michael Danby and Tony Lupton with a STOP THE GREENS message but Labor ranked first, in Labor colours.  

It should be noted again that the Greens can only win Macnamara if Burns is below the Greens and the Liberals at the 3CP stage.