FED2025 – House Results in Victoria

I felt a certain sense of deja vu ahead of the 2025 election when it appeared the fate of the Albanese government could swing on the unpopularity of a Victorian state Labor government.

At the first Federal election I covered in March 1990, Victoria was Labor’s weak state. It was still eight months until Paul Keating uttered his ‘recession we had to have’ line, but already in March the economic failings of the Victorian Labor government had tipped the state’s economy into recession.

In March 1990 the full scale of the Victorian government’s financial disasters were still months from being known, but the souring electoral mood was to cost the Hawke government ten seats south of the Murray. It took gains elsewhere for Labor to win a narrow re-election.

The narrative ahead of the 2025 election had similarities. As I wrote in my election preview, “The question for 2025 is whether the Albanese government can distance itself from the state Labor government, or whether the Liberal Party can successfully tie the two together. Peter Dutton will also need to rally the factionalised and dispirited Victorian branch of the Liberal Party, not an easy task for a Queenslander.”

Yet it was in Victoria that Labor had gained an extra seat at the April 2023 Aston by-election. It was in Victoria that Labor retained the marginal Labor seat of Dunkley at a March 2024 by-election. At both by-elections, Peter Dutton was perceived as a negative for the Liberal Party with Victorian voters, compounded by on-going fratricide within the Liberal Party’s state branch.

Federal Labor’s wariness of its state brethren could be gauged by the scarcity of joint campaign events featuring Anthony Albanese and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan. It contrasted with high rotation appearances with Labor Premiers Roger Cook (WA), Peter Malinauskas (SA) and Chris Minns (NSW).

But as elsewhere in Australia, election night shredded pre-election perceptions. Labor increased its Victorian vote and number of seats held. Labor’s Victorian two-party preferred vote was higher than in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia. Victoria joined Western Australia at the low end of swings to Labor, but both both states started from a high Labor vote in 2022.

For a decade the the Liberal Party has been losing Federal seats in what was once its eastern Melbourne heartland. The party had lost three seats in 2022, losing Higgins to Labor for the first time, and Kooyong and Goldstein to Independents. Labor also gained marginal Chisholm in 2022 and came close to winning Casey, Deakin and Menzies.

Rather than go backwards in 2025, Labor added Deakin and Menzies to its eastern Melbourne holdings, retained its by-election gain in Aston, and restored its margin in Dunkley. Labor also defeated Greens Leader Adam Bandt in his seat of Melbourne.

Victorian highlights for the Coalition were few. Tim Wilson defeated Independent Zoe Daniel in Goldstein, a victory hailed as a model of how to win a marginal seat. Whether the party can find candidates as willing as Wilson to devote three years to the grind to local campaigning is another question.

Elsewhere frontbencher Dan Tehan repelled an independent insurgency in Wannon, the Liberal Party also retaining Flinders and McMillan against independent challenges. Aaron Viola retained Casey with a rare swing in favour, and the Nationals came close to an upset won in Bendigo thanks to a strong performance by a well-known local candidate.

But the talk of defeating Labor in outer suburban seats such as Bruce, Gorton and Hawke proved to be illusory. As in capital cities across the country, the Liberal Party went backwards in Melbourne.

Lets dissect the numbers.

Seats Won

Labor came out of the 2025 election holding more Victorian seats than ever before, 27 of 39 seats compared to a previous best of 25 from 39 in 1984. For the second election in a row, the Liberal Party was reduced to single digit holdings, just six of the state’s 39 seats of which only Goldstein can be described as an entirely metropolitan seat.

Proving any 1990 comparisons wrong, Labor ‘survived’ the 2025 election with twice as many Victorian seats as it won in 1990. As in other states, the electoral mood changed during the 2025 campaign.

Of the six seats won by the Liberal Party, two were rural/regional seats, Wannon in the state’s western districts and Monash in the LaTrobe valley and western Gippsland. The party also retained the peri-metropolitan seats of Casey in the upper Yarra Valley, Flinders on the Mornington Peninsula, and La Trobe based on Berwick and Pakenham but stretching into west Gippsland. The only seat in metropolitan Melbourne, and the only seat gained by the Liberal Party anywhere in 2025, was inner-city Goldstein where former Liberal member Tim Wilson returned to exact revenge for his 2022 defeat by Independent Zoe Daniel.

The map below shows who won each regional seat. You can hover/click the map to see sitting member, post-election margins and swings.

Once again Labor retained the regional city seats of Ballarat, Bendigo, Corangamite and Corio, though not without a scare from the Nationals in Bendigo. Labor has had a near lock on western regional city seats at both state and federal level since 1999.

Helen Haines easily retained Indi for the local independents movement, the Nationals faced little competition in Gippsland, Mallee and Nicholls, while the Liberals repelled Independents in Monash and Wannon. The peri-urban seats of Flinders, Casey and La Trobe were retained, but with a significant swing to Labor in La Trobe. I’ll deal more with peri-metropolitan seats in discussing the Melbourne results further down this post.

First Preference Results

The chart of Victorian results below reveals the same long-term trend as elsewhere in Australia, a decline in support for both major parties.

It is important to focus on is the trend in support for each major party since the Abbott government’s victory in 2013. Labor’s big decline in support was between 2010 and 2013. Labor was left with 34.8% of the primary vote in Victoria on its ejection from office in 2013, but its vote was a lower 34.0% at its sweeping victory in 2025. In the same period Green support compensated for Labor’s small loss with an increase from 10.8% in 2010 to 13.6% in 2025.

Over the same 12 years, the Liberal primary vote fell from 40.1% to 27.6%, nearly a third of the party’s support lost. The only offset was the Nationals rising from 2.6% to 4.6% in the same period on the back of winning Nicholls from the Liberal Party in 2016, and a strong Bendigo result in 2025.

First preference results and change in vote by party in 2025 were –

• Labor Party 33.9% (+1.1)
• Liberal Party 27.6% (-1.9)
• Nationals 4.6% (+1.0)
• Greens 13.6% (-0.2)
• One Nation 5.8% (+2.0)
• Independents 7.5 (+1.0)
• Family First 2.2% (+2.2)
• Trumpet of Patriots (v UAP) 1.2% (-2.9)
• Others 3.6% (-2.3)

Then there is the influence of preferences. As the chart below, Labor overall won two-thirds of preferences including an astonishing 89.7% of Greens preferences. That Green flow is higher state-wide than the 87.5% of Liberal preferences the Nationals received in Bendigo. These days Labor receives preferences at a higher rate from the Greens, a party it competes fiercely with, than the co-operating Coalition parties can usually achieve from each other. One Nation flows to the Coalition have risen at recent elections, 75.0% in 2025, but a lower primary vote than the Greens, weaker preference flows, and a concentration of support in safe rural seats makes One Nation preferences less helpful for the Coalition than Green and Independent preferences are for Labor.

If you compare preference flows to 2013, the Greens flow has risen three percentage points and Independent flows by 6%. Family First were 7% higher to the Coalition in 2025 and One Nation preferences 25% higher than the Palmer United Party flows in 2013. Overall preference flows were 66.1% to Labor in 2025, 67.9% in 2014, but critically the third party votes was up from 22.5% in 2013 and 33.9% in 2025.

The first preference drift away from the Coalition has largely been to minor parties, but two thirds then leak across to Labor as preferences.

The most significant trend has been the rise of Independents, support up from 1.6% in 2013 to 7.5% in 2025 with 70% of those votes flowing as preferences to Labor. And the fact the highest polling Independents were contesting Coalition seats has amplified the swing against the Coalition in the seats it has to defend.

Two-Party Preferred Trend

Labor’s 56.4% two-party preferred result was the party’s best ever in Victoria. The chart below shows that Labor’s two-party vote has risen in 1.5% increments at the four elections since 2013. That the gap has narrowed between Victoria and the rest of the country over that last two elections reflects the rest of the country converging on Labor’s support level in Victoria.

The sequence in the chart goes back to 1958, the first election where every seat had both a Labor and Coalition candidate. When you look at the full sequence from 1958 to 2025, you can see how much the politics of Victoria has been upended over time.

Once known as the ‘jewel in the Liberal crown’, Victoria’s Liberal lustre dimmed long ago. In some circles a new name has been coined drawing on themes of US politics, Victoria nicknamed the Massachusetts of Australia politics.

The chart reveals a turning point in 1980. That was when electoral rewards finally flowed to Labor after the previous decade’s Federal intervention into the Victorian state branch. A left-wing cabal had led the Victorian branch inro irrelevancy since the 1950s DLP split.

Given how badly the Liberal Party did in so many states at the 2025 election, it will be interesting to see if the Federal Liberal Party can engineer similar interventions against underperforming state branches.

The Liberal Party’s Metropolitan Disaster

One glance at the map below tells you almost everything you need to know about the Liberal Party’s disastrous result in Melbourne.

You might accuse me of bias by drawing a Melbourne map that includes Labor held Hawke and McEwen but not Liberal-held Casey, Flinders and La Trobe. My defence is that there is no getting away from the fact that the Liberal Party had a terrible result in Melbourne. Including those three Liberal-held electorates would add a huge swathe of blue to a map and shrink the size and visual importance of the 23 entirely metropolitan seats won by Labor. There is only one Liberal-held seat in the broad plain of the Melbourne metropolitan area and the above map demonstrates that.

Including those three Liberal seats as part of Melbourne, Labor’s two-party preferred result in Melbourne was 60.0%, a 2.4% swing towards Labor. West and north of the Yarra Labor polled 66.9% 2-party preferred (swing 1.8% to Labor), and east and south of the Yarra 55.6% (swing 3.1% to Labor).

The Liberal Party has been losing seats in its former eastern Melbourne heartland for more than a decade, a trend also evident at state elections.

In 2025 the Liberal Party went backwards again as shown by the cross-hatched changing seats in the Melbourne map. Higgins had been abolished in the redistribution, weakening the Labor margin in Chisholm and weakening the Liberals in Deakin and Menzies.

At an election where the Liberal Party needed to gain seats, Chisholm swung to Labor as did the rest of eastern Melbourne, Labor having a rare win in Deakin, winning Menzies for the first time, and even reprising its victory in Aston.

Labor’s other victory was in the seat of Melbourne, a surprise but much enjoyed victory for Labor over Greens Leader Adam Bandt. Bandt’s vote base had been weakened by the redistribution, but a further decline in Greens support along with the absence of left-wing parties directing preferences to him delivered Labor victory. The Greens did much better in neighbouring Wills, boosted by a stretch of Green heartland transferred from Bandt’s seat, but fell narrowly short of victory.

Labor ended up with a much narrower than expected victory in Calwell due to an Independent challenge. The Greens moved into second place in the inner-western seat of Fraser cut Labors margin in Wills, though neighbouring Cooper improved for Labor. The Greens primary vote declined in Macnamara removing a much-feared three cornered contest for Labor.

But what of all the outer suburban Labor seats that the Liberal Party talked up as possible gains? In short, nothing happened.

In outer-western Gorton and Hawke there was virtually no swing, as was the case in nearby Lalor and McEwen. This despite the importance of Gorton and Hawke being highlighted with a final week visit from Peter Dutton. Perhaps the reports of inaccurate internal polling explains why the Liberal Party constantly mentioned these seats during the campaign.

Outer eastern Melbourne was much worse for the Liberals. Despite talking up Liberal prospects in Bruce, the seat recorded a 9.3% swing to Labor, the Liberal campaign hampered by controversy around both its candidate and campaign manager. The neighbouring mortgage belt seat of Holt swung 6.9% to Labor, and another neighbouring seat in Liberal held La Trobe swung 6.4% to Labor.

Across Melbourne the Liberal highlight was winning Goldstein. But if winning back what was once one of your party’s safest seats is an election highlight, then it demonstrates how far the Liberal Party has fallen in Melbourne.

Is there anything we can learn for the November 2026 State Election?

In trying to come up with something pithy to say about November’s Victorian election, my mind kept turning to Oscar Wilde’s epigram of fox hunting as the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.

Unfortunately I’m not witty enough to come up with a similar line for the state election, but I’m sure I might inspire others to try.

The Albanese government may have been able to avoid blame for actions of state Labor, but clearly the Allan government cannot.

For a party that once rarely occupied the government benches in Spring Street, by November Labor will have governed for three-quarters of the period since the election of the Cain government in 1982, 33 of 44 years. Labor will have governed for 23 of the 27 years since the election of the Bracks government in 1999.

By next November, Victorian Labor will have governed the state since 2014, three terms or 12 years. It will be asking for a fourth term in office, the hurdle that John Brumby couldn’t vault for Labor in 2010.

Like all governments more than a decade in office, the Allan government is shop-soiled by the passage of time and weakened by the departure of well-known ministers from the government’s early years.

Having lost the loved/reviled figure of former Premier Daniel Andrews, the greyish government led by Premier Jacinta Allan struggles to enthuse the electorate, though terrifying the public about the opposition alternative has been a useful distraction.

The Allan government faces a tough financial position brought about by past expenditure commitments. Labor is struggling to retain eastern Melbourne’s band of marginal seats, and testing the loyalty of Labor’s base west of the Yarra.

But as election year begins, the long delayed Yarra road tunnel and the new cross-city metro rail tunnel are finally open. Will it lead to a change in fortunes for the government?

Aiding Labor over recent years has been the Liberal Party decision to parade its leadership offerings on a Lazy Susan, or perhaps the game of circular Russian Roulette is a more apt metaphor.

With the Liberal factions having finally hammered out a compromise to make Jess Wilson leader, the real battle to win the 2026 election has begun.

Where will the Victorian Election be Decided?

The Liberal victory in 2010, and Labor’s return to office in 2014 was a game of hand-to-hand combat in a thin band of seats running along the Frankston rail line. Two landslide victories for Labor have given seats like Frankston, Carrum, Mordialloc and Bentleigh double digit Labor margins, meaning the initial electoral battle must start elsewhere.

There are few gains available for the National Party, so the Liberal Party must do the heavy lifting required to defeat Labor. Fifteen seats are needed for a Coalition government, a swing of around 7.5% with only half the seats in that range east of the Yarra.

The Liberal Party needs to win seats in the following areas –

• Eastern Melbourne where the party went backwards in 2022 and where the Federal Liberal Party lost seats in May.
• South-east Melbourne where there were swings to Labor in May, and where the state Labor government’s capital investment has improved transport links.
• Western Melbourne where capital expenditure seems to have lagged south-east Melbourne. There is an emerging band of marginal seats where there was a significant swing against Labor in 2022.
• Break into regional cities in western Victoria where Labor has invested heavily in improved rail links.

But on the last two categories, the Liberal Party has failed to win a seat west of the Yarra since 1996, or around Ballarat or Bendigo since 1999.

Following the resignation of Treasurer Tim Pallas, the Liberal Party had a golden opportunity to win his western Melbourne seat of Werribee at a February 2025 by-election. It didn’t. Both major parties polled under 30% of the primary vote. Labor’s primary vote was down 16.5%, but the Liberal Party vote was up only 3.7%. After preferences the swing was 10.1% and Labor’s John Lister won with 50.8% of the vote.

In the end the voters were cranky with Labor but didn’t embrace the Liberal alternative. That the Liberal Party nominated the sort of candidate who’d been loosing western Melbourne seats for decades didn’t help.

Will it be any different at the state election? Everyone expects the Labor vote to be down on its Federal result, but by how much?

Polling shows the Coalition trending to the high 30s, the Labor Party to the low 30s and sometimes the high 20s. Two-party preferred estimates have the Coalition trending towards 51%, Labor at best reaching 50%. Such results don’t point to a clear outcome with Greens and Independents strongly positioned to win seats. The Greens gaining seats would increase chances of Labor would falling short of majority government.

A Liberal victory requires harnessing anti-Labor sentiment, something the party was unable to do in 2022. The emergence of the Freedom Party and other parties opposed to Dan Andrews scattered the anti-Labor sentiment and preference flows of people who might otherwise have voted Liberal.

The abolition of group voting tickets for the Legislative Council may cut back on the growing number of minor parties contesting the election. If so the Liberal Party needs to lure them into a broader anti-Labor Coalition.

With the new Yarra road tunnel and metro rail tunnel now operating, perhaps Labor will sooth antipathy in western Melbourne. A bigger danger for Labor in the region is local Independents.

But 28 November 2026 is still far away and all sides of Victoria have work to do.