Suburbs with significant Chinese Australian populations in key marginal seats recorded huge swings to Labor of up to 30%, and strategists and analysts warn the Liberal party has failed to rebuild trust with the community.
The Liberal party’s review of the 2022 federal election found hawkish rhetoric on China cost it votes in several seats with high numbers of Chinese Australians. It called for greater community outreach and to rebuild trust before the 2025 poll.
Those efforts, including increased engagment on Chinese social media, appear to have failed. Labor recorded swings towards it in the Melbourne seats of Menzies, Aston and Chisholm, and the Sydney seats of Bennelong and Reid. In all these marginal seats, between 13% and 30% of constituents have Chinese ancestry.
Polling booths in Chatswood and Eastwood – two suburbs in Bennelong where more than 40% of people have Chinese ancestry – recorded swings to Labor of between 15% and 26%. Labor’s Jerome Laxale boosted his wafer-thin margin of 0.1% in Bennelong to almost 10%, with 77% of the vote counted so far.
A senior New South Wales Labor source said the party’s strategy in Bennelong, Reid and Parramatta was focused on undermining the Liberal party’s efforts to restore trust with the Chinese Australian community. One strategist, who requested anonymity to speak freely, said Dutton’s previous comments had made this relatively easy, including his claims that Labor was “weak” on China.
“[The Liberal party] had good candidates in Reid and Bennelong,” the Labor strategist said. “Two young people of Asian heritage [Grange Chung and Scott Yung] who on paper would have been quite compelling. So we made our strategy to link their candidates to Peter Dutton as often as possible.
“If you were at those polling stations on election day, all the material you would have seen from us was ‘Vote Yung, get Dutton’ with oversized images of their faces on corflutes. We were successful in that.”
When asked on Sunday what mattered most to his constituents in Bennelong, Laxale said “Peter Dutton”.
In Menzies, every polling both with a double-digit swing to Labor had a significant amount of voters with Chinese ancestry. The same trend was replicated across neighbouring Chisholm. In Box Hill, where 46% of people have Chinese ancestry, Labor had so far won 71% of votes.
A senior Victorian Labor source said “virtually no resources” went into Menzies and that there was no field organiser on the ground. They said the campaign capitalised on statements from Dutton that appeared hawkish on China.
“When in the final debate Peter Dutton said China was the biggest threat to national security we couldn’t believe it. It all got packaged up for RedBook and WeChat right away,” the Labor source said. “It was yet another huge own goal in a campaign full of them.”
When the Liberal senator Jane Hume claimed some Chinese Australians handing out how-to-vote cards for Labor may have been “communist spies”, the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, recorded WeChat videos hammering the Liberals and speaking in Mandarin.
The NSW strategist said the Liberals’ decision to preference One Nation in seats across the country was not, on its own, “a vote shifter”. He suggested it instead “reinforced a view among the Chinese community that Dutton was anti-China and racist” – and that the same applied for Hume’s comments.
Wilfred Wang, an academic with Chinese ancestry researching Chinese migrant media at the University of Melbourne, lives and votes in Aston and worked in a polling booth during the Saturday election. He also counted votes for a Chisholm outpost centre in the 2022 election. He said the voting intentions of Chinese Australians are not as simplistic as they are often portrayed in the media.
“I suspect many Chinese Australians felt the Coalition was not inclusive enough,” Wang said. “This is very different from the mainstream discourse around ‘pro- or anti-China’: this binary is misleading and misinterprets the community’s sentiment.
“When the Liberal party played up the ‘Chinese spy’ rhetoric and also their very hard rhetoric around ‘immigration’, it made many Chinese voters feel excluded from the so-called mainstream society in Australia and that their contributions to our society have not been properly recognised, let alone celebrated.”
Eric Fu, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne who focuses on citizenship, said “many in the Chinese community felt isolated and targeted by the Liberals on several occasions during the campaign”.
“Their loyalty to Australian democracy was questioned and smeared publicly on TV.”
