LIB 0.5%
Incumbent MP
James Stevens, since 2019.
Geography
Sturt lies in the eastern suburbs of Adelaide. The southern part of the seat covers most of Burnside LGA, while Campbelltown and Norwood Payneham and St Peters LGAs cover the centre of the seat, and parts of the Port Adelaide Enfield and Tea Tree Gully LGAs cover the north of the seat.
Sturt stretches north to Grand Junction Road, and key suburbs include Glen Osmond, Burnside, Magill, Felixstow, Campbelltown, Klemzig, Gilles Plains, Rostrevor, Newton, Norwood, Stepney, Paradise, Athelstone and Highbury.
History
Sturt was created for the 1949 election, and has almost always been held by the Liberal Party. Indeed, except for two terms when it was held by the ALP, the seat was held by the same family from its creation until 1993.
The seat was first won by Keith Wilson in 1949. He lost the seat in 1954 to Norman Makin. Makin had served in the House of Representatives from 1919 to 1946, during which time he served as Speaker of the House of Representatives and a Minister in the Curtin and Chifley governments, before becoming Ambassador to the United States.
Makin abandoned the seat in 1955 for the safer Bonython, and Wilson returned to the seat. Wilson retired in 1966 and was succeeded by his son Ian. Ian served as a junior minister in the last term of the Fraser government before going to the backbench after the election of the Hawke government.
Wilson was challenged for preselection in 1993 by 25-year-old Christopher Pyne. Pyne held the seat for the next 26 years, serving as a minister in the Howard government and as a senior minister in the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, before retiring in 2019.
Liberal candidate James Stevens won the seat in 2019, and was re-elected in 2022.
Assessment
Sturt is now a very marginal seat. If the Liberal Party is unable to rebuild its support with its former urban base Sturt could be vulnerable.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| James Stevens | Liberal | 48,579 | 43.1 | -7.4 |
| Sonja Baram | Labor | 34,528 | 30.7 | +0.8 |
| Katie McCusker | Greens | 18,454 | 16.4 | +5.2 |
| Stephen Grant | United Australia | 3,008 | 2.7 | +0.3 |
| Alexander Allwood | One Nation | 2,893 | 2.6 | +2.6 |
| David Sherlock | Animal Justice | 1,531 | 1.4 | -0.3 |
| Thomas McMahon | Liberal Democrats | 1,147 | 1.0 | +1.0 |
| Inty Elham | Democratic Alliance | 1,007 | 0.9 | +0.9 |
| Kathy Scarborough | Federation Party | 755 | 0.7 | +0.7 |
| Angela Fulco | Labor | 457 | 0.4 | -0.1 |
| Chris Schmidt | TNL | 251 | 0.2 | +0.2 |
| Informal | 6,541 | 5.5 | +0.1 |
2022 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| James Stevens | Liberal | 56,813 | 50.5 | -6.4 |
| Sonja Baram | Labor | 55,797 | 49.5 | +6.4 |
Booths have been divided into three areas: central, north and south.
Labor won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in the centre (52.4%) and north (53.6%), while the Liberal Party polled 50.4% in the south. The Liberal candidate won thanks to a stronger performance on the pre-poll and other votes.
The Greens came third, with a primary vote ranging from 14.8% on the pre-poll to 19.6% in the south.
| Voter group | GRN prim | LIB 2PP | Total votes | % of votes |
| South | 19.6 | 50.4 | 27,652 | 24.6 |
| Central | 16.9 | 47.6 | 16,291 | 14.5 |
| North | 15.8 | 46.4 | 12,575 | 11.2 |
| Pre-poll | 14.8 | 51.9 | 31,193 | 27.7 |
| Other votes | 14.7 | 52.6 | 24,899 | 22.1 |
Election results in Sturt at the 2022 federal election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for the Liberal Party, Labor and the Greens.
@Yoh An, Kingston had different boundaries, as did Makin but I still think it could be won. Adelaide is a bit trickier now because the boundaries are different from 2004 when the Liberals lost it but you never know, the then-moderate state party won the state seat of Adelaide in 2010 despite not winning the election and held onto it until 2022.
@Nether Portal There’s no way in any sane world that Kingston and Makin could be won by the Liberals in the foreseeable future. Even during the 2013 Liberal landslide both seats stayed red with daylight to spare. Adelaide won’t be won by the Liberals for as long as that strip of western suburbs remain in the electorate, as many of them have something like 70-80% 2PP coming out of this election. The Greens are more likely to emerge as the next big contender for Adelaide in the future than the Liberals ever becoming competitive here.
This election demonstrated that outer suburbs have become surprise hunting grounds for Labor, Greens and independents (and One Nation lol). The Liberals aren’t even remotely appealing in these areas despite the supposed anger and outrage that’s being perpetrated by the media.
If you Ask Sky After Dark they will say the Libs can win Spence a seat libs did not even get 20%in
The Liberals thought they had a real chance of causing an upset in Spence. Senator Alex Antic, Tony Abbott and Ben Hood all campaigned strongly in Spence. I didn’t expect a 2PP swing of 10%+ anywhere. I was wrong because it actually happened in Tasmania but in Labor’s direction. I didn’t expect normally safe Labor seats to flip to the Liberals.
Moving over from the Reid topic…
I don’t see any situation where Sturt will be won back by the Liberals in a very long time. The seat is decidedly inner-city/middle-class, there’s a bunch of apartments being built around Kent Town and Norwood which will increase the progressive vote as renters move in, the boomers in the south are dwindling and they’re the old fashioned Liberal voters. Labor’s got a stranglehold of the north with Greens making ground. I don’t see how Sturt will flip back, even at a really bad election for Labor.
Not even redistributions will favour the Liberals in any way either as the entirety of Adelaide is painted red north, south, east and west. Whichever way the AEC draws it will still be advantage Labor.
Tommo9,
Sturt shouldn’t be seen as safe, if the Liberals start preselecting millennials, and as the government ages and if they don’t address housing affordability, and if A.I. starts replacing jobs then Sturt would be one of first seats to fall.
@Pencil – Sturt may become swingy again, but probably not until 2031. That is the earliest (realistically) that the House will be up for grabs. The Liberals need 33 seats to form government. The last time they achieved a swing of that magnitude was in 1996. That is when the crossbench was 5. The Liberals will need an entire paradigm shift in their offer by 2031, where millennials and Gen Z will constitute most of the voter pool. Labor will also have to deal with some division in their voter base as the Greens seemed to have largely ceded the environmental portfolio to the teals and concentrated on cost of living issues. That could provide the Liberals with an opening to run up the centre right, but they will have to abandon Abbott/Dutton-style politics.
@Craig I’d agree with your assessment. I’m not saying Sturt is bulletproof forever, just that it’ll take a number of cycles for it to become competitive again given the current state of the Federal Liberals who seem hellbent on waging culture wars over economic ones (this seat is a very economically-sensitive one given the demographics living here) and the state Liberals being overrun by Christian nutters (FYI, I’m a Christian myself but I deplore the brand of hardline religious influence that has overrun by these guys led by Antic).
Any ‘millennials’ that they manage to recruit might be one of those types from the Futures/Influencers’ Church which is essentially the Hillsong equivalent in Adelaide. Hard Pass on that. James Stevens was arguably the last moderate left standing in recent times, and you need to be a moderate to win this seat (The Wilsons, Pyne, Stevens etc.) The only possibility if whichever one of Vincent Tarzia or Jack Batty loses their job next year in the state election and decides to put their hand up to run in 2028, they might run a closer race than expected but I don’t expect the pendulum to swing that hard unless something absolutely unforgiveable happens to Labor.
Sorry grammatical error here: Should write as ‘overrun the Liberals by the guys led by Antic’
The problem is if the Liberals dont win Sturt/Boothby it means they have issues in Teal seats as well so to win government they need to win Red Wall seats that they have either never won before or did not win in 2013 like McMahon/Gorton to have a chance at goverment without these better educated moderate liberal areas.
Liberals are not going to win the next election, and they could go through several leaders before the next Liberal PM emerges, and that next PM might well be millennial, and they won’t necessarily be from the right. If we look back to the ALP during the Howard years, Rudd lost his first attempt to enter parliament in 1996, and wasn’t on anyone’s radar until he became leader, and he won by presenting as a fresher version of Howard, and the same in Britain, the Conservatives tried beating Blair from the right, before being forced back to the centre with Cameron.
@ Pencil
interestingly KR won by being Howard Lite, he scapped Latham’s hit list to Private Schools, Tasmanian Forestry policy and called himself an economic conservative David Cameron often said he was “heir to Blair”. Chris Minns was also Perrotte lite. He did not offer a stark contrast but focused on a few areas of difference such as the wage cap.
https://www.afr.com/politics/nsw-election-a-bleak-choice-between-flat-white-and-a-latte-20230314-p5crux
Agree Nimalan, Albanese as Labor leader was a contrast from Bill Shorten as he did not explicitly campaign hard on ‘socialist’ type policies such as negative gearing and other tax changes. Although Albanese in his 2nd term has signalled that he is more open to pursuing those types of policies, including superannuation imputation.
It appears that Sturt would be the hardest seat for the Libs to win back out of all their 2025 losses. It was their last inner city seat. There’s also a sizeable buffer.
@ Votante
Bass/Braddon have bigger margins but they have a tendency to swing big and maybe won back in 2028. We could say Goldstein is an inner city seat they won back as it was a former Teal seat, so Goldstein is their last inner city seat.
@Nimalan Bass and Braddon tend to be mixed seats which rely on a combination of community sentiments and personalities. Gavin Pearce was really popular and defied the national trend in 2022 but as soon as his personal vote went Anne Urquhart won it with a double digit swing. Both are considered popular in Braddon which may have contributed and amplified the swing. Ditto with Bridget Archer who in any other year (including 2025) would’ve been swept away but held on in 2022 largely due to her ability to cross the floor and support progressive legislation.
Sturt on the other hand is more demographically-aligned as an inner-city/middle suburb seat. It will favour progressive social policies and centrist/centre-right economic policies. On that basis it’s hard for the Liberals to win it back in its current form. Maybe when the Liberals get a Turnbull-like leader they’ll have a better chance like they did with Melbourne Ports and Chisholm.
@ Tommo9
Agree there for the Libs to win Sturt they need to focus on economic differentiaion rather than culture wars but i agree Libs are not going in that direction.
PS i posted on the Sunbury thread to respond to you 🙂
It is very interesting that every on-the-day voting booths had Labor leading in TPP in the southern part of the seat which normally is strongest for Liberals as they are wealthy but I think similar to Bradfield and Kooyong (until it moved the south), it is a pretty Tealish Area alongside a sizeable Chinese Community there that abandoned the Federal Coalition and then SA Labor is so popular at the moment.
Demographic changes explain some of the changes in Boothby/Sturt. BUT The rest of the horrible vote for the liberals in
Metro Adelaide
It is probably a good time for Tony Zappia (Age 73) and Steve Georganas (Age 66) to retire for young front bench contenders. Liberals may not even contest
The swing was so big in Sturt that the current margin is 6.62%. It’s not even classified as marginal.
@Nimalan, by inner city, I was thinking of seats that either have a capital city name or are one of its neighbours. Goldstein could be classed as inner-city as the distance from Melbourne CBD to Elsternwick, the northern end of Goldstein, is only 10km.
Good point Votante
Reason i classfied Goldstein as Inner city is due to its demographics, Mackellar is far from the City but very affluent.