The success of Independents at recent elections has cost the Liberal Party some of its safest seats. They are losses that have toughened the Coalition’s path back to office.
The seats lost, Bradfield, Mackellar, Warringah, Wentworth, Goldstein (recovered 2025), Kooyong and Curtin, have long been bastions of the Liberal Party. They are the sort of seats once held by Prime Ministers, Party Leaders and senior Ministers.
And then there are the losses to Labor in 2025 with the Liberal Party suffering its worst ever election defeat. The losses to Labor and Independents and a near wipe out in the state capitals has left Liberal Party with few of the urban seats traditionally occupied by the party’s leadership.
Of the 13 seats held by former Liberal Party Leaders, only two are currently held by the Liberal Party.
Newly elected Leader Angus Taylor is the Liberal party’s 17th leader since Robert Menzies formed the party eight decades ago.
Of the 16 previous leaders, eight won elections – Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, John Gorton, Malcolm Fraser, John Howard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison. Of those, four won elections that took the Liberal Party from opposition to government – Menzies, Fraser, Howard and Abbott.
Five led the Liberal Party to an election and lost – William McMahon (who was the 9th leader to serve as Prime Minister), Billy Snedden, Andrew Peacock (twice), John Hewson and Peter Dutton.
Three others lost the leadership before having the chance to fight an election – Alexander Downer, Brendan Nelson and the recently deposed Sussan Ley.
At the next election we will learn which list Angus Taylor’s name will be appended to.
The scale of the Coalition’s defeat in 2025 increased the number of former Leaders’ seats that are no longer held by the Liberal Party. Of the 13 seats once held by former Liberal Leaders –
- 5 are now held by Independents (including the Centre Alliance in Mayo)
- 3 are Labor held
- 2 were lost to Labor and later abolished
- only 2 are still held by the Liberal Party
The fate of the 13th leadership seat will be decided on 9 May at the by-election in Sussan Ley’s former seat of Farrer. I previously published posts on the Farrer electorate, and also on whether the seat is more naturally a Liberal or National seat.
The Liberal Party will be under threat from Coalition rivals the National Party, 2025’s second placed Independent Michelle Milthorpe, and surging national polls that give One Nation a chance of victory.
But enough on Farrer. In this post I list the fate of seats once held by Liberal Leaders. I also have a whimsical trawl through the list of seats named after Prime Ministers but now held by representatives from the other side of politics.
| Leader | Seat | Current status | Year/lost | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Robert Menzies | Kooyong (VIC) | Independent held | 2022 | Conservative seat 1901-2022 |
| Harold Holt | Higgins (VIC) | Abolished | 2025 | Lost to Labor for first time in 2022 then abolished. |
| John Gorton | Higgins (VIC) | Abolished | 2025 | Lost to Labor for first time in 2022 then abolished. |
| William McMahon | Lowe (NSW) | Abolished | 2010 | |
| Billy Snedden | Bruce (VIC) | Labor held | 1996 | New boundaries in 1996 moved seat into Labor voting areas. |
| Malcolm Fraser | Wannon (VIC) | Liberal retain | ||
| Andrew Peacock | Kooyong (VIC) | Independent held | 2022 | Conservative seat 1901-2022 |
| John Howard | Bennelong (NSW) | Labor held | 2022 | First lost 2007-10 then again since 2022. |
| John Hewson | Wentworth (NSW) | Independent held | 2022 | Conservative seat since 1901. First lost to Independent 2018-19. |
| Alexander Downer | Mayo (SA) | Centre Alliance held | 2016 | Previously Liberal held 1984-2016. |
| Brendan Nelson | Bradfield (NSW) | Independent held | 2025 | Liberal held 1949-2025. |
| Malcolm Turnbull | Wentworth (NSW) | Independent held | 2022 | Conservative seat since 1901. First lost to Independent 2018-19. |
| Tony Abbott | Warringah (NSW) | Independent held | 2019 | Conservative seat 1901-2019. Abbott defeated 2019. |
| Scott Morrison | Cook (NSW) | Liberal retain | ||
| Peter Dutton | Dickson (QLD) | Labor held | 2025 | Dutton had held seat since 2001. |
| Sussan Ley | Farrer (NSW) | ??? | ??? | To be determined on 9 May. |
Seats named after Prime Ministers
Update I had a counting error in the post published last night which has now been fixed. I originally excluded the four temporary PMs but didn’t put Artie Fadden back in when I reverted to the full list.
First, I’m going to refer to Prime Ministers below as either Labor or Coalition. The Coalition side of Australian politics has not always been a Coalition, but for simplicity I’ll lump together the following parties as Coalition – Free Trade, Protection, Liberal Fusion, Nationalist, United Australia Party (nothing to do with Clive Palmer), Liberal Party, Country Party and National Party. The Coalition we know today did not exist until 1923.
I would have used the term ‘Conservative’ except no major Australian Non-Labor party has ever called itself Conservative. Despite some logical inconsistencies, I think it is less jarring to use Coalition then define the parties as simply ‘Non-Labor’.
Australia has had 31 Prime Ministers of whom eight are alive today. (Paul Keating, John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison, Anthony Albanese).
The 23 deceased Prime Ministers have federal electorates named after them, the two most recently added being Malcolm Fraser in 2019 and Bob Hawke in 2022.
Of the 23, 14 were Coalition Prime Ministers under different party labels, and eight were Labor Prime Ministers.
Prime Minister Billy Hughes, in office from 1915 to 1923, served with both sides. Originally a Labor Prime Minister, he split with the party in late 1916 after the first conscription referendum was defeated. He served as a Nationalist Prime Minister until February 2023 1923 and is classified in this post as the 15th Non-Labor Prime Minister.
Joseph Cook (Liberal) and Joe Lyons (United Australia Party) also served in senior Labor leadership position earlier in their careers but were first elected and served as Prime Minister for Coalition parties.
So which party holds the seats named after Prime Ministers today?
The eight seats named after Labor Prime Ministers are today held by –
- Labor (8) – Watson, Scullin, Forde, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke
- Liberal (1) – Fisher
- Independent (1) – Curtin
The 15 seats named after Non-Labor Prime Ministers are today held by –
- Labor (12) – Barton, Deakin, Reid, Hughes, Bruce, Lyons, Menzies, Holt, Gorton, McEwen McMahon, Fraser
- Liberal (3) – Cook, Fadden, Page
The imbalance in this list is not all the fault of the Coalition. For a start, Deakin, Hughes and Menzies were all Liberal seats before Labor’s huge victory at the 2025 election.
The Liberal Party has also suffered the handicap that the recently created seats of Holt, Gorton, McMahon and Fraser were formed in the rapidly growing Labor voting outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.
On a final note, there are five seats that have never been held by the party of the Prime Minister for whom they were named. These are the Labor seat of Curtin, and the Liberal seats of Holt, Gorton, McMahon and Fraser.
How did “they” name seats after Page and McEwen who were both PM’s for about three weeks each upon the deaths of PM’s Lyons and Holt respectively. This error should be corrected.
COMMENT: When the parliament was expanded in 1984, the three short-term PMs, Page, Forde and McEwen were added as electorate names. Fadden had already been added in 1977.
Earl Page deserves recognition. The seat named after him covers the areas he represented in the House for four decades and he led the Country Party for two decades. John McEwen was a very consequential Minister including 15 years as Minister for Trade and Industry. Artie Fadden was the only Country Party PM to lead the Coalition in preference to the UAP leader. Frank Forde might be the one PM where you would question if a name is deserved. But given Queensland continues to grow, and given a future expansion of parliament, Forde is not going to be removed from the electoral map.
Have there been any PMs who have held seats that have been geographically disparate besides Billy Hughes? He served continuously from 1901 to 1952 but three of them were in NSW and one in Vic. Hughes’ political biography is most unusual but he did serve at a time of great political upheaval with much change.
It is true that Frank Forde never lead a party through and election but he did serve in many important positions over a long period of time including signing the UN Charter. If Parliament is expanded and it likely will be at some point soon more PMs will be added. One doesn’t get to be a PM even a temporary one without a fairly lengthy record.
COMMENT: Not PMs, but Barnaby Joyce could have an interesting record if elected to the Senate from NSW. A Queensland Senator, member for the NSW seat of New England, and potentially Senator for a different state.
One high profile state switcher was Labor’s Nelson Lemmon, Forrest (WA) 1943-49 and later St George 1954-55. He was mentioned as a possible future Labor leader but lost his seat in the great ALP-DLP split. A little trivia, but Lemmon was responsible for selecting William Hudson as the first Commissioner of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Hudson is the grandfather of Angus Taylor.
Wikipedia has a list of members representing more than one state.
Joe Cook was elected at the 1891 NSW election and for a while served as leader of the new party. He disagreed with the solidarity pledge introduced for the 1894 election to stop splits in the Labor caucus. Cook was re-elected as Independent Labor in 1894, the same year Billy Hughes was first elected as a Labor MP. Both moved to Federal politics in 1901.
To this day I still remember Joel Fitzgibbon’s quote at the end of the Sky News 2025 election coverage:
“What do all these people have in common, other than the fact that they’ve led the Liberal Party at some point: Menzies, Gorton, Holt, McMahon, Snedden, Peacock, Howard, Hewson, Downer, Nelson, Turnbull, Abbott and Dutton? They all represented seats the Liberal Party no longer represents.
Thank God they’ve hung on to Wannon and Cook!”
If a person votes 1 above the line and does not preference 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 then is their senate vote valid.
COMMENT: Yes but it has no preferences for other parties, only counting for the chosen party.
No.im pretty sure the instructions state you must number at least 6 boxes.
COMMENT: The instructions do say that, but any vote with at least a valid first preference still counts. It is a saving provisions to deal with the system having instructed to only mark ‘1’ above the line for 30 years. In 2025 5.8% of votes had fewer than six preferences and all those votes would be informal if 1-6 was strictly enforced. Better the votes count than be informal for the absence of preferences when most of the preferences would never have to be counted anyway.