The 2010 Federal election was a tale of two nations. North of the Murray and in Western Australia there were savage swings against Labor and the Coalition gained enough seats to bring about a change of government.
That the Coalition didn't form government was because a different election unfolded in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. In the three southern states the Coalition's first preference vote went down and the two-party preferred swing was towards Labor. Labor lost first preference support not to the right but to the Greens on the left.
Victoria was critical to the return of the Gillard government. Labor recorded its highest two-party preferred vote in the state since the Second World War, and the Coalition's first preference vote dipped below 40% for only the second time since the end of the DLP's golden era.
Labor retained its most marginal seats and gained La Trobe and McEwen from the Liberal Party in 2010, ending the chances of a Coalition majority. On the downside for Labor, the loss of Melbourne to the Green's Adam Bandt greatly complicated the formation of government.
The final move against Julia Gillard's leadership came when bad opinion polling for Labor in other states began to be replicated in Victoria. Combined with an indifferent result for Labor in the Lyndhurst state by-election, speculation mounted that Labor was facing major losses in its safest state, a result that would have turned a Labor defeat into a rout.
The problem for Kevin Rudd, having resumed the role of Prime Minister, is that the 2010 Victorian results achieved by Julia Gillard (see below) will be difficult to repeat, let alone improve upon in 2013
For most of Australia's political history, Victoria has been the Liberal Party's strongest state. The Victorian branch of the Labor Party has traditionally been further to the left than its interstate brethren, leaving the Liberal Party and its Deakinite 'small-l' Liberal traditions to dominate the state's political middle ground. The great Labor Party split in the mid 1950s was deepest in Victoria, and the preferences of the breakaway Democratic Labor Party played an important part in Liberal dominance for two decades after 1955.
At the 1969 federal election, when the failure of Labor to make gains in suburban Melbourne prevented Gough Whitlam leading Labor to victory, Premier Henry Bolte dubbed his state "the jewel in the Liberal crown". It also led to federal intervention in the hard-line Victorian branch of the Labor Party in 1970, a move that began to pay dividends for Labor later in the decade.
The graph below plots the Labor two-party preferred vote in Victoria at Federal elections against the same figure for the rest of the nation. As the plot shows, through the 1950s and 1960s, Labor's vote was dramatically worse in Victoria than elsewhere. In part this was caused by Labor's relative strength in New South Wales. If New South Wales has traditionally been a Labor state, than Victoria was traditionally been the Liberal counterbalance.
As the graph shows, the picture began to change in the 1970s, and in hindsight the 1980 Federal election was a tipping point in Victoria's electoral history. After decades trailing its performance elsewhere, the Labor Party in Victoria has outperformed the rest of Australia at 11 of the 12 elections since 1980. It reached a dramatic new highpoint in 2010 when Victorian Labor outperformed its interstate brethren with a gap as wide as when it underperformed fifty years earlier.
The 1980 Federal election saw Labor gain seven seats, winning more than half the seats in Victoria for the first time since the war and pushing into the traditional Liberal Party heartland of Melbourne's eastern suburbs. Two years later, John Cain Jnr led Labor to office in Spring Street for the first time since his father left office in the great split 27 years earlier. In 1985 Cain became the first Victorian Labor Premier ever to be re-elected, and by the end of the decade the Cain government had spent longer in office than all previous Victorian Labor governments put together..
Bob Hawke swept Labor to office at the 1983 Federal election, winning 23 of the 33 seats in Victoria. Labor retained its dominant position at the 1984 and 1987 elections, but when the losses associated with the Cain government's Tricontinental Bank debacle were revealed, the Labor vote collapsed. Labor lost 10 seats in Victoria at the 1990 election, winning only 14 of the state's then 38 seats. 1990 is the only Federal election since 1980 where Victorian Labor performed worse than in the rest of the country and stands out clearly in the above graph.
Labor was fortunate that the 1993 Federal election took place just six months after Jeff Kennett won office and started wielding his fiscal axe. Labor's state-wide vote reverted almost to the levels of 1987. However, much of this swing was in safe Labor seats, a reaction to Kennett's actions in government, while the middle class electorates of Melbourne's east stayed with the Liberals. Of the 10 seats lost in 1990, Labor recovered only 4 in 1993. Labor's revival in its own heartland was repeated at the 1996 election. As the Keating government was decimated north of the Murray River, Victoria was the only mainland state where Labor recorded a majority of the two-party preferred vote. The problem for Labor was that its support was so concentrated in its northern and western Melbourne heartland that Labor could win only 16 of the state's 37 seats.
Labor's poor return of seats for vote was repeated in 1998. Labor won 53.5% of the two-party preferred vote, a better result than in 1984. Yet Labor won only 19 out of 37 seats, where in 1984 it had won 25 out of 39 seats. In Melbourne's middle-class east in the 1990s, Labor was still wearing the opprobrium of the early 1990s, the twin sins of high interest rates and financial collapse still haunting the party. Labor's wooing of middle class seats in Melbourne's outer east was re-buffed until finally winning Deakin in 2007 and adding La Trobe in 2010.
If the 1980 election was a Victorian Federal turning point, the 1999 state election was a turning point in state politics. Having solved the state's debt problem and re-built the Victorian economy, an indulgent election campaign by Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett cost the Coalition office. Instead of the Coalition benefiting from its hard work over the previous two terms, losing the 1999 election left Labor under Steve Bracks to benefit from the start of a booming decade. The Kennett legacy has been an invigorated Victorian economy, but also a Labor Party that has re-built its tarnished image. The Kennett era also damaged Liberal standing in regional centres such as Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong.
The defeat of the Brumby state Labor government in November 2010 came as a surprise after Labor's record Federal result earlier in the year. Yet the tentativeness of the new Coalition government since it took office, leading to Denis Napthine replacing Ted Bailieu as Premier, has helped keep Labor competitive in the state. The disrepute that Federal Labor attracts by association with failed state Labor governments in NSW and Queensland has not translated south of the Murray.
As was seen with Mark Latham in 2004, and perhaps with Tony Abbott in 2010, political leaders raised in the roughhouse traditions of New South Wales politics also don't always go down well south of the Murray.
Kevin Rudd polled well in 2007, but not as well as Julia Gillard in 2010. Now for the 2013 election, the change of Labor leadership may have shifted Labor's concerns away from its safe seats, but Kevin thirteen will still need to do better in Victoria than Kevin-o-seven if Labor is to dream of being returned to government.
The concentration on key marginal seats over the last decade has polarised the Victorian political landscape. Margins in moderately safe seats on both sides of the electoral pendulum have blown out in recent years. That leaves only a small number of seats occupying the political battleground.
At the 2007 election, Labor gained two seats, Corangamite and Deakin, and fell just short of winning La Trobe and McEwen. In 2010 Labor retained Corangamite and Deakin, the first time the party had won both seats at consecutive election, and added La Trobe and McEwen to its tally.
A redistribution since the 2010 election has doubled Labor's margin in McEwen, but Labor's other three recent gains remain tight.
Three of Victoria's most marginal seats lie adjacent to each other in Melbourne's outer east. Deakin (ALP 0.6%) has been held by Mike Symon since 2007, while Laura Smyth gained La Trobe (ALP 1.7%) in 2010. Next door, Liberal MP Alan Tudge has had his margin reduced in Aston (LIB 0.7%). However, it seems unlikely that Labor could win Aston or other Liberal marginal seats in Victoria, even if the return of Kevin Rudd saw Labor back to its polling levels from 2010,
Labor's most marginal seat, Corangamite (ALP 0.3%), covers Geelong beyond the Barwon River as well as the growing Surf Coast further south. It was gained for Labor by Darren Cheeseman in 2007, and in 2010 he became the first Labor candidate to ever win the seat for a second term. As in 2010, his Liberal opponent will be former journalist Sarah Henderson.
Beyond these seats, Labor had been concerned about a band of seats running south-east out of Melbourne. Moving outwards, these seats are Speaker Anna Bourke's Chisholm (ALP 5.8%), then Alan Griffin in Bruce (ALP 7.9%), Attorney General Mark Dreyfus in Isaacs (ALP 10.4%) and Anthony Byrne in Holt (ALP 14.0%). Before the change of leadership, Griffin was freely reported as packing his Canberra office in expectation of defeat. Labor's concerns may have diminished with the change of leader, but it is still likely that any swing against Labor will be greater on the edges of Melbourne.
Labor will also have concerns with Bendigo (ALP 9.4%) where long serving MP Steve Gibbons is retiring. Despite its increased majority courtesy of the redistribution, Labor will also be watching Rob Mitchell's seat of McEwen (ALP 9.4%).
While almost certain to be irrelevant to who forms government after the election, the inner city seat of Melbourne (GRN 6.0% v ALP) will chew up inordinate amounts of coverage. Greens MP Adam Bandt may be helped by now being the sitting MP, but he faces two challenges. If the Green vote declines at the 2013 election, its decline in electorates may be proportional rather than uniform, hurting the party's chance in Melbourne. The Liberal Party is also most likely to reverse its preferences in 2013, directing them to Labor rather than the Greens. This shift by the Liberal Party prevented the Greens winning several inner-city seats from Labor at the 2010 state election.
The April-June quarterly Newspoll saw Labor's vote down in Victoria, but still the only state to record a majority of the two-party preferred vote for Labor. By changing leader, Labor will now be hopping to restore its former polling figures in Victoria.
Note: Phil Cleary was elected as an Independent at the 1993 election.
Source: Stephen Barber, Christopher Lawley, Scott Bennett and Gerard Newman, "Federal Election Results 1901-2007", Commonwealth Parliamentary Library Reserach Paper, December 2008, No. 17, 2008-09, updated with 2010 results.