Victoria is Bill Shorten’s home state. It is supposedly the most progressive state in the country. In the 2010 election, Julia Gillard ran as the hometown girl and Victoria all but saved Labor in a messy election that would end in a hung parliament. Then Labor achieved its highest two-party-preferred vote in Victoria since the second world war – 55.3% – offsetting heavy losses elsewhere. The local party still talks about it with pride.
So what happened in Victoria on Saturday and could it – just possibly – have cost Labor dearly? Labor luminaries at the Moonee Valley racing club scoffed at the suggestion that the state government’s handling of the Country Fire Authority dispute had had an impact.
“The claims about the CFA have been demonstrated to be complete bunkum,” said Victorian senator Kim Carr. He said the state’s most popular newspaper, the Herald Sun, had run 19 front-page stories on the CFA’s bitter dispute with the professional fire-fighters union. “They could have printed them on blank paper, it has had no effect.”
Well, perhaps. It is true that there was little sign of an “army” of 10,000 CFA volunteers campaigning at polling booths, as the newspaper had predicted. And it is true that in seats such as the fire-prone McEwen, Labor did well, with member Rob Mitchell picking up a substantial swing. And Labor increased its vote in seats such as Bendigo and Ballarat, which might have been vulnerable to a CFA campaign.
But whether it was premier Daniel Andrews’ handling of the CFA dispute itself or the massive distraction it became, the party did not have a good result in Victoria. Mitchell had an accident-prone challenger in Chris Jermyn. And the four seats Labor targeted – Corangamite, Deakin, La Trobe and Dunkley – are all likely to be held by the Liberals, at least at this stage of the yet-to-be-completed count.
Corangamite in particular, a massive southern electorate that takes in high fire risk areas down the Great Ocean Road, was a priority for Labor. Malcolm Turnbull campaigned with member Sarah Henderson, promising a re-elected government would protect CFA volunteers from what they believed was an attempted union takeover of their management decisions. Henderson won the seat in 2013 with a 3.9% margin and she retained it. Labor did get swings in La Trobe and Dunkley, but not enough to win on current figures. It went backwards in Deakin.
Carr insists none of this has anything to do with the long-running CFA dispute, in which Andrews has backed the union’s case over that of the volunteers, losing a respected minister during the campaign and sacking the entire CFA board.
He said the result was more about shifting demographics – there are many sea-changers moving down the coast in Corangamite who are more likely to vote for the Coalition, and Deakin had become a richer electorate, too. Nick Reece, who as state secretary of the party in 2010 was involved in the campaign that delivered so well for Gillard, agreed.
“Labor’s community action campaign, which had structured one-on-one conversations with close to half a million Victorians, proved more potent than [the Herald Sun] demonising Labor and predicting its downfall,” he said.
There was a national swing against the Coalition of 3.38% on current counting. In Victoria, the swing was just 1.49%, the smallest swing of any state or territory in the country. Party officials insist that’s because the state is so died-in-the-wool Labor already – 19 of its 37 seats were held by Labor before Saturday, compared with just six in Queensland. They argue there was little room for Labor to improve.
There is truth in that, yet at the last election in 2013, Tony Abbott’s Coalition achieved a 5.5% swing in Victoria, more than the national average. Perhaps that was understandable because Gillard’s hold on Victoria in 2010 was so large that it was not sustainable. But one might have thought that with the country shifting to Labor nationally this time, Victoria might have contributed something.
Labor didn’t win a single extra seat in Victoria, was put under huge pressure by the Greens in Batman and may lose one seat, Chisholm, to the Liberal party. The Andrews’ government mishandling of the CFA dispute – it was daily news in through the campaign – cannot have helped. Indeed, Shorten seemed to avoid the state in the final weeks of the campaign, and whenever he turned up, he was asked about the CFA.
On Saturday night, the party’s supporters gave the hometown boy a huge welcome, cheering him as though he had won the election outright. It did not go unnoticed that Andrews was not there to celebrate a local hero. Shorten had almost pulled off an improbable victory, with so little help from Victoria.
