Macquarie – Australia 2022

Just to continue to underline the point – some others who were “rejected by the people” include those notoriously unpopular non-entities Robert Menzies (East Yarra 1928), John Curtin (several times), Edmund Barton (1876), Ben Chifley (several times), Gough Whitlam (Sutherland 1950), Malcolm Fraser (Wannon 1954), Bob Brown (several times), Harold Holt (Yarra 1934), Jim Scullin (several times), both Joe and Enid Lyons (Wilmot 1919 for him, Denison 1925 state for her), Dorothy Tangney (1940) and Neville Bonner (1970). Thank goodness their parties never returned to such proven losers! Not only that, but it’s well-recognised that repeat candidates (and especially defeated ex-MPs) can build on personal votes from previous elections.

While looking into this I noticed that of Australia’s 30 Prime Ministers, it seems only 10 have not won an election after at least one electoral defeat (although Bruce and Forde’s comebacks were both post-PM). Out of interest, the 10 are Watson, Fisher, Cook, Hughes, Page, McMahon, Keating, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison.

In the NSW council elections Labor got a massive swing to them in the Blue Mountains while the Liberals got a reasonable swing to them in the Hawkesbury. The boundaries of this seat just make for the most polarised electorate there is in Australia. Blue Mountains likely to swing Labor again but Hawkesbury likely to swing to the Liberals again.

The council elections are interesting and they were conducted differently in BMCC and the Hawkesbury. In BMCC each of the 4 Wards elected 3 councillors. I’m in Ward 4, and I think the factors in play there were:
i. Well-known and generally liked Mayor lives in the ward.
ii. Not saying that the 3rd elected Lib isn’t well-liked, but he benefitted from top position on the ballot last time, while this time there was a “spoiler” candidate who would have drawn off some anti-Labor votes – more than Australia First did last time.
iii. No Greens candidate in the Ward. But Labor added their votes plus some to their total.
In other wards there were minor shenanigans involving the Libs (2 councillors resigned from the party and one was re-elected as an independent while the other gave it a red hot go). The Greens dis-endorsed a candidate for ward 1 but their vote held steady and even increased a bit in a reduced field. Definite pro-Labor swing however.
Council elections are optional preferential, and personalities play a part.

It will be a close contest but Labor likely to hold.

Sarah Richards has now been confirmed as the Liberal candidate for Macquarie in 2022. She didn’t have a large profile last time but took the seat to the most marginal in the country with only 190 odd votes needing to change this time around. A massive result. In this election she has a huge profile with the ShopSmall and Back2Bilpin Facebook pages and Morrison will need her to win to keep government. This will be the hottest contested seat in the country with Getup and the Unions already taking an active role. But the numbers will come down to the seat make-ups. The incumbent Templeman will get good swings towards her in the Blue Mountains. The recent council elections there continued to show a Labor Greens community and a big ALP swing. But the Mountains is only 40pc of the vote. The Hawkesbury is Richards home and where she is very popular. With her leading the council ticket, the Libs got a 5pc+ swing towards them. The combined conservative council vote was up around 70pc. They don’t like the left side of politics and Templeman is a Fabian Socialist which makes her about as left as you can get. Templeman and Labor know the Hawkesbury is where this fight will be won and the social media pages are in full swing accusing Richards of being responsible for everything bad in the local community’s lives. But the more they kick her on facebook, the more popular she becomes locally. The new developments in Pitt Town and North Richmond will be pro Liberal and pro Richards. If Morrison was more popular, Richards would take this seat by 5 to 10pc just because of the Hawkesbury. It will be a nasty campaign and it could just come down to the last woman standing in this Main Event contest. Get your popcorn ready as Templeman will do anything she has to in order to survive and Richards is a future cabinet Minister if she wins. An A Grade battle.

Labor’s environmental appeal in 2019 helped them here bolstering Green preferences, 87% to Labor means that some ‘tree Tories’ gave preferences to Labor. Now Labor is declaring it doesn’t want these votes. If nothing else changed this would be a problem for Labor here, but probably overall swing to Labor will swamp this effect, however if Labor faded overall they could be trouble here.

Labor are paying $1.45 to retain on Sportsbet, ahead of the Coalition on $2.50. Considering how slim the margin was from 2019, the markets are clearly pricing in a big swing to Labor in this area. For comparison, the neighbouring electorate of Lindsay is considered less likely to be retained by the Coalition ($1.50) than Labor retaining Macquarie, despite Lindsay having a margin of 5.0% in 2019 compared to Macquarie’s 0.2%

@DocNutman, you got to be joking mate. You sound like the trolls all over Facebook. All real locals know that Susan has got it in the bag. She’s worked hard and the community want her to keep doing so, even in the Hawkesbury! Unfortunately, the Liberal candidate just appears to be another career politician. It’s a tough seat, but with a strong anti-developer focus and a hard-working sitting MP, I can’t see Templeman losing!

@GlenbrookLocal is right on with this and the big shift that is occurring is people moving into the Lower Blue Mountains from the Inner West looking for a Tree-Change while still being close enough to Sydney. There have been strong swings to Labor in the Lower Blue Mountains where the Liberal Party have had competitive booths (Mount Riverview, Glenbook, Blaxland and Lapstone). Sarah Richards either needs to actually go and campaign there or she is going to have to run some seriously massive numbers up around Richmond/Windsor.

IMO, this seat is won or loss in the Lower Blue Mountains.

Templeman to hold by barely more than she holds it now. Yes the Blue Mountains is trending left with tree changers and the gentrification they bring (ie. more cafes) but demographics wouldn’t have really changed that much in only 3 years. The Hawkesbury area has its own character that is of low density urban and peri-urban residential, overwhelmingly of European ancestry and is very socially and economically conservative. People from the inner suburbs might ask “who on earth would choose to live in Pitt Town (or similar areas) on a block miles from the city, car dependent and on a hot lowland plain?” the answer is locals or conservative minded folk who don’t want to live in an ever changing, cosmopolitan urban environment. They want the “traditional” Aussie lifestyle that their grandparents had and are more likely to detest left/progressive politics. Labor should only concentrate resources on holding their vote in the Hawkesbury, not necessarily increasing it because hell will freeze over before Labor can make real inroads there, regardless of who the Labor leader is.

There comes a point where trying to run up margins in your base leads to diminishing returns. Labor don’t have to win Hawkesbury. They just need to not lose it by hilariously massive margins.

@DocNutman repeats @Roger’s message from the old Macquarie/Lindsay thread. The fact is, fair people on both sides would agree that Susan Templeman has grown support because she works extremely hard and tries to engage with the whole community. I also suspect that these days ‘Fabian Socialist’ is only seen as a hard left position from the right. Not even sure that it’s relevant.

I am not across all the facts, but there has been some discourse about the quality of Labor candidates for Hawkesbury council feeding voter discontent with the Party. I note that Nathan Zamprogno (disendorsed Lib) was voted back as an Independent in position 1. Name recognition, or something else?

Hawkesbury population needs more analysis. Hawkesbury population growth of just under 5% in 5 years, Blue Mountains about 0.6%, but BMCC is still larger. Hawkesbury skews younger, but approx the same % in each would be voting age (high 70’s, extrapolating a bit from ABS stats). But I know 2 families who moved to the Hawkesbury in the past couple of years (to Bowen Mountain and North Richmond respectively) and neither would vote Liberal. Small sample/anecdotal, but is the area, or parts of it, changing? Can’t just be the beneficiaries of Homebuilder grants moving in…

The floods have come into play in this electorate with the Hawkesbury experiencing its second major flood in 2 years. The environment will now move front and centre with the Hawkesbury locals calling for a raising of Warragamba Dam Wall and the upper Mountains talking more about climate change. It is a split seat in so many ways.

There are now 6 candidates – Templeman the incumbent Labor MP, Richards the Liberal who nearly won it last time, the token Greens who is there for Labor preferences plus an anti-vaxxer, a Palmer candidate, and an Animal Justice.

Getup is already campaigning as a third party. The Mountains are full of third-party climate groups. Unions are putting money towards Templeman. So basically it will be Richards with a bit of Palmer versus the rest.

There are risks for all here, especially the bookies favourite Templeman who has called the Dam Wall raising “reckless” and is against the Western Sydney Airport. She will need Hawkesbury votes to win and the majority are for those two big items.

But Templeman has 3 friendly preferential candidates, incumbency, a big union budget, the Getup machine and a friendly media out to get Richards and Morrison for her. She should win in a landslide. However, an unknown Richards beat her by 6,000 FP votes last time and has campaigned non-stop since. She is now well known, has runs on the board and keeps showing up.

It will be a nail-biter and could be the seat that decides the Government.

This seat is fascinating to me. It has such a small margin, but I haven’t seen much discussion, people probably assume Labor will hold on, riding a national swing to them. This is probably true, but I wouldn’t write off the Libs just yet. Hawkesbury seems like exactly the kind of place where the Liberals could improve despite a swing against them more broadly, but on the other hand Labor should gain a lot in the Blue Mountains. Definitely a very polarized electorate with these two completely different communities being thrown in together, which is what makes this such an interesting electorate. One I’ll keep my eye on on Election Night, and I’ll leave it a tossup on my own prediction for now, though Labor is definitely favored.

I’ve checked the current list of candidates for the House of Reps, and so far we have UAP, Greens, Lib Democrats, Animal Justice, Informed Medical Options, Liberal and Labor. Not sure how Musical Windsor Pete construes the Greens as there for Labor preferences (or indeed how he finds 3 “friendly” preferences for Labor out of that lot). Guess he’s commenting in the vein of Doc Nutman and Roger.
We’ll be walking over to the school as usual but I think there will be a lot more postal and pre-poll votes. It will be a very close race. I gather many Liberal voters are wary of Richards’ mistakes and WT moments, such as listing herself until very recently as a solicitor, and claiming her partner’s business is not property development. Whether that will translate into votes for Templeman is hard to pick.

The radio silence about Macquarie is quite interesting. The dislike for the PM in the mountains is palpable, as are the demographic changes around Glenbrook. I wouldn’t discount this seat however. Yes, Labor is in a winning position, but I’d be really interested to see if anyone has any insights about the general sentiment towards the Government in the Hawkesbury?

I’d imagine after all the recent floods in the Hawkesbury, Morrison’s handling won’t be too popular.

Greens having a last minute candidate change will hurt Labor here, though probably not much. Greens underperform here, and really should be getting higher than the teens in the areas dominated by tree changers and hippies.

A fun reminder that the Liberal candidate for Macquarie (Sarah Richards)’s partner runs a property development company – BCM Property – to which Sarah is listed as an employee (under her maiden name) – she conveniently forgot to declare this to the AEC. She’s also on Hawkesbury council where she has pushed for changes to the boundary clearing code to allow for the destruction of 15,800 hectares of native vegetation including some threatened native species – the very same place that BCM Property intends to build a new housing estate backed by Chinese investors.

There are two factors that arise from preferential voting mechanics that might affect the outcome.
1. Susan Templeman is number 2 on the ballot after PHON, and Sarah Richards is at 8. A substantial donkey vote could assist Labor.
2. There are 4 right wing or fringe parties with candidates: PHON, UAP, IMOP, and Liberal Democrats. All of the how to votes for these parties will, if followed by voters, lead to votes being transferred to the Liberal candidate. This is despite many party workers believing that they are not preferencing either of the the “big two” – they demonstrate some lack of knowledge about how 2PP works. While historically the count for each of these parties has been small, it is possible they will draw votes from the majors. A vote taken from the Liberal candidate will tend to transfer back under 2PP of course.

John, I think that Tony Hickey is a strong candidate for the Greens and they won’t do any worse than usual – I do agree that they under perform. The previous Greens candidate (Kingsley Liu not Joel Mackay) is now running for the Australian Citizen’s Party. Possibly this indicates some of the issues.

It seems there has been a huge swing to Labor in the Hawkesbury as well. Maybe the recent floods and the climate concerns have impacted here.

Overall the swing in Hawkesbury booths is of the order of 9.2%
The 3 highest polling booths for the liberals are the same as in 2019 but all of them had big drops:
Pitt Town 1359 69.54 (was 79.29) -9.75%
Maraylya 356 70.81 (was 76.89) -6.08%
Oakville 923 72.72 (was 84.14) -11.42%

As this was the most marginal seat pre-election, I thought I’d check out the polling place swings.

The Hawkesbury Booths, originally strongly Liberal, had the biggest swings and, in some instances, over 10% to Labor 2PP. Think Windsor and Richmond and surrounding suburbs, Grose Wold and Kurrajong. They must have a really popular Labor member or a strong campaigner or the recent floods and bushfires might’ve impacted the vote.

Votante: Susan Templeman is the hardest working Federral MP I’ve seen in forty years of following Federal politics. She was everywhere in the 2019/20 fires (after losing her own house in the 2013 fires), and she was the one who organised the food relief when the west of the river was cut off from civilisation in 2021. She was distributing masks and hand sanitiser at the railway stations in the morning. She helped distribute RA Tests to those in need from a local manufacturer when they were scarce. She sped up the NBN rollout and got better mobile coverage throughout the electorate. She’s been pushing for a third river crossing for nearly a decade. The Liberals ran Sarah Richards, the photogenic partner of a property developer (a relationship she tried to keep hidden). Richards was ubiquitous, like the UAP, but didn’t promise anything for the district. Richards also has a history on council where she has achieved…well, not much in six years. Templeman’s campaign was largely third party endorsements from ordinary people in the district. Hard working local MPs (think Mike Kelly) will win support from people who don’t normally vote for their party if they are seen to be genuine.

Don’t forget Perrottet was MP for the Hawkesbury until a slew of ‘DON’T VOTE PERROTTET’ stickers started appearing over his plans to push a motorway through Grose Wold. Defence was always a big employer in the Hawkesbury bc iof the RAAF base, but contracting means that vote is increasingly diluted by a newer demographic: tree changers from the Inner West.

In many ways Templeman was a Teal “independent” before it was fashionable. Especially given the local Liberal party is joined at the hip with Hillsong and other evangelicals.

It seems like her personal vote and popularity helped a lot. In the Labor caucus meeting today, Albo said that he called Susan Templeman before the election to apologise for not visiting Macquarie. He said as a joke that he wasn’t needed there.

I think that demographics and suburban sprawl helped a bit in the Hawkesbury area. There were some really big 2PP swings (above the seat average, sometimes >10%) to Labor in suburbs that were on the outskirts of Greenway, Chifley, Hume and Werriwa. I’m talking about Riverstone, Schofields and Rouse Hill in the NW and Camden, Narellen, Austral and Kemps Creek in the SW.

During the pandemic, white collar professionals who could WFH as well as first home buyers sought tree change and lower property prices on the outskirts of major cities. I’m guessing that the outskirts became less rural and less conservative from 2020 to 2022 and this may partly explain the big swing to Labor.

The demographic change occurring in north of Blacktown and The Hills LGAs is not occurring in the Hawkesbury.

This is the first time Macquarie on the Blue Mountains-Hawkesbury configuration is a safe Labor seat despite the statewide TPP being around 51.4% compare this to 2007 and 1993 when the statewide TPP was much higher and Labor barely won the seat on these boundaries.

Same happened in Eden Monaro

Is the general consensus that macquarie needs to be split into it’s blue mountains and hawkesbury lgas?

Macquarie is seriously under quota now so needs to pick up voters. If Hawkesbury LGA is taken out then serious numbers have to be picked up somewhere else. Going west is not really an option – inland NSW needs every voter it can get.

@redistributed I’ve demonstrated it can be done.

If the current BM + Hawkes configuration of Macquarie is retained, then there are only 3 options. To take in Emu Plains, Londonderry, or Vineyard/Riverstone. Not one of them would fix up the lack of communities of interest between the sides. I would split them unless doing this will keep Hume’s stupid configuration (Camden + Goulburn) via knockon effects.

For this part of the redistribution I would say (I already more or less sorted out predictions for 6 northern Sydney seats including Mitchell):
Calare = Blayney, Orange, Cabonne, Weddin, Cowra, Forbes, Oarkes, Mudgee/Midwestern Regional, Wellington
Macquarie = Bathurst, Oberon, Lithgow Blue Mountains, Emu Plains
Shift Parkes further into New England instead of moving it into Mudgee/Wellington
Shift New England into Singleton and Muswellbrook
New seat in Hawkesbury (after abolishing Banks and Berowra, and shifting Mitchell, Greenway, Parramatta and a few others south), including Windsor, Riverstone, Richmond, Rouse Hill and possibly Londonderry
And hope this will fix up Hume via knockon effects without making MacArthur stupid.

@leon MacArthur can retreat to a campbelltown based seat. Hume will most likely give up Camden and take in the remainder of wingecarribe from Whitlam with a new werriwa to be a Camden/Liverpool seat.new england taking in more territory from hunter will create a Frankenstein looking seat.and the aec takes into account the shape of the electorate when forming boundaries. And for this reason I think they won’t do that. Parked in my opinion can be solved by taking parkes and Liverpool plain while shedding more plains and the other half of gwydit

Templeman who won her 3rd attempt after the last redistribution will probably face another (3rd) challenge from sarah richards/mcmahon after this redistribution could this be her time? i suspect the redistribution will favour the coalition. if it were a favourable division (its not) she could run in mcmahon and use the McMahon for McMahon slogan

@John Macquarie is one of those seats that would radically change in just one redistribution. The Blue Mountains mostly votes Labor and the Hawkesbury mostly votes Liberal. Katoomba is solidly Labor, Windsor is marginally Liberal and Wisemans Ferry is solidly Liberal.

@np it’s surrounded by liberal voting territory so no matter where it expands it will benefit them add to that the anti govt swing and this could be gettable. I reckon it will most likely take in emu Plains

Macquarie has current sensible boundaries.. a seat based Blue Mountains Bathurst and Lithgow would be strange.The existing Calare. Basically bathurst. Lithgow and Orange is much more sensible

I’ve added emuplains to the current along with oberon

All of Northern Beaches, Willoughby, North Sydney, Lane Cove, Hunters Hill, Ku-Ring-Gai, Ryde, Hornsby LGAs, plus Parramatta LGA west of Marsden Rd and Hills LGA except Nelson, Gables, Box Hill and Maraylya will be basically 6 quota.
Adding the parts of Hills LGA that didn’t make it to the areas above (Nelson, Gables, Box Hill and Maraylya) into Macquarie will put it close enough to a quota and hence that is likely what will happen. Parts of Maraylya (the Hawkesbury LGA parts) is already in Macquarie anyway.

@Mick Quinlivan
I actually like the arrangement of Bathurst-Lithgow-Blue Mountains because there is real transport connectivity. However, on this redistribution, it messes up the rest of regional NSW as I learnt the hard way.

Macquarie is a fair way under quota and all of the seats west of it (except Calare) are also under quots. So whatever happens, it has to go east. Minimal change would have it include Emu Plains to the Nepean. Greater change would have it lose the Hawkesbury and take a lot of Penrith.

My current guess is that if the next election was held on current boundaries and both Susan Templeman and Sarah Richards recontested, Susan Templeman would retain the seat. My take as Blue Mountains local is that Susan Templeman has been doing a good job as local MP and as a policy advocate within the parliament and ALP, and so she should romp home in the Mountains. I’ve got no sense of the mood in the Hawkesbury half of the electorate – we really are two different communities. However, I agree that the redistribution will be the deciding factor, since expansion in most directions would likely be a net benefit for the Liberals.

-Leon agreed so I’ve decided to do it a bit at a time next redistribution hopefully be more favourable.

@redistributed I’ve added oberon from calare as well as emu Plains to bring Macquarie up and then added upper Hunter to calare from new englang

I believe a future redistribution should see it lose territory south of hawkesbury River. Given blackthorn is 2 and a bit quotas combine it with the excess dpfrom there and Penrith to make division

@John, from a community of interest perspective, I’d say Lithgow fits better with the current configuration of Macquarie than Oberon does. Lithgow has stronger transport connections to the Blue Mountains towns via the railway and Great Western Hwy and to the Hawkesbury via Bell’s Line of Rd; is part of Nepean Blue Mountains Local Health District; has people from the Upper Blue Mountains come for work, school, shopping, etc. On the other hand, Oberon is really much more connected to Bathurst than it is to the Blue Mountains, has pretty much no connection to the Hawkesbury. Oberon is also much more rural in character, with a local economy based heavily on forestry and farming, so I think it more naturally belongs in a ‘country’ seat than a peri-urban one. I do acknowledge that Lithgow has about twice the population of Oberon though, so maybe it would take a more dramatic redistribution to get it to fit in Macquarie instead of Oberon (I haven’t looked at the numbers at all).

I wouldn’t argue against transferring Emu Plains into Macquarie. It belongs more naturally with Penrith, but the quota has to be met from somewhere…

@myles that creates 2 problems
1. macquarie would be over quota and,
2. calare would be way under quota, obviously adding oberon also does this but ive added upper hunter from new england in order to compensate for this.

also lindsay is over quota and need to shed voters and emu plains is the obvious choice due to the river acting as a boundary