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.
