ALP 4.6% vs GRN
Incumbent MP
Peter Khalil, since 2016.
Geography
Northern Melbourne. Wills covers most of the City of Merri-bek, and north-western parts of the City of Yarra. Key suburbs include Brunswick, Carlton North, Coburg, Fitzroy North, Glenroy, Hadfield, Fawkner, Pascoe Vale and Princes Hill.
Redistribution
Wills shifted south, taking in Carlton North, Fitzroy North and Princes Hill. Wills then lost areas west of Pascoe Vale Road to Maribyrnong. These changes cut the Labor margin against the Greens from 8.6% to 4.6%.
History
Wills was created for the 1949 election as part of the expansion of the House of Representatives. Apart from a period in the early 1990s, it has always been held by the Labor Party.
Wills was first won in 1949 by the ALP’s Bill Bryson. He had previously held the seat of Bourke from 1943 to 1946. Bryson served as a member of the ALP until the split of 1955, when he joined the new Labor Party (Anti-Communist), which became the Democratic Labor Party. He lost the seat at the 1955 election.
The seat was won in 1955 by the ALP’s Gordon Bryant. Bryant served as a minister in the Whitlam government from 1972 to 1975, and retired in 1980.
Wills was won in 1980 by former President of the ACTU, Bob Hawke. Hawke was in the rare position of a politician who was already a significant national figure in his own right before entering Parliament, and he was immediately appointed to the Labor frontbench. Hawke failed in an attempt to replace Bill Hayden as Labor leader in 1982, but was successful in another attempt on the very day that Malcolm Fraser called the 1983 election, and he won that election, becoming Prime Minister.
Hawke won re-election at the 1984, 1987 and 1990 elections, but in 1991 he was defeated in a caucus leadership ballot by Paul Keating, and he resigned from Parliament in 1992.
The 1992 Wills by-election was a remarkable campaign, with 22 candidates standing. The seat was won by former footballer Phil Cleary on a hard-left socialist platform. Cleary’s victory was overturned in the High Court due to his status as a public school teacher on unpaid leave, shortly before the 1993 election. He was re-elected at the 1993 election, and held the seat until his defeat in 1996.
Wills was won back for the ALP in 1996 by Kelvin Thomson, a Victorian state MP since 1988. Thomson was appointed to the Federal Labor shadow ministry in 1997, and remained on the frontbench until early 2007. Thomson retained his seat until his retirement in 2016.
Labor’s Peter Khalil won in 2016, and was re-elected in 2019 and 2022.
Assessment
Wills is a very marginal electorate and a key target for the Greens. The redistribution significantly improved the Greens position, and this will be one to watch.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing | Redist |
| Peter Khalil | Labor | 35,449 | 38.9 | -5.4 | 36.4 |
| Sarah Jefford | Greens | 25,793 | 28.3 | +2.0 | 32.8 |
| Tom Wright | Liberal | 15,771 | 17.3 | -0.8 | 16.2 |
| Irene Zivkovic | United Australia | 3,352 | 3.7 | +0.5 | 3.3 |
| Emma Black | Victorian Socialists | 2,714 | 3.0 | -1.5 | 3.1 |
| Sue Bolton | Socialist Alliance | 3,096 | 3.4 | +3.4 | 2.9 |
| Jill Tindal | One Nation | 2,554 | 2.8 | +2.8 | 2.5 |
| Leah Horsfall | Animal Justice | 1,680 | 1.8 | -1.9 | 1.8 |
| Sam Sergi | Federation Party | 789 | 0.9 | +0.9 | 0.7 |
| Others | 0.4 | ||||
| Informal | 4,855 | 5.1 | +0.8 |
2022 two-candidate-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing | Redist |
| Peter Khalil | Labor | 53,415 | 58.6 | +0.1 | 54.6 |
| Sarah Jefford | Greens | 37,783 | 41.4 | -0.1 | 45.4 |
2022 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing | Redist |
| Peter Khalil | Labor | 69,104 | 75.8 | +0.1 | 77.1 |
| Tom Wright | Liberal | 22,094 | 24.2 | -0.1 | 22.9 |
Booths in Wills have been split into four parts: north-east, north-west, south, and Brunswick, which sits between the other three.
The Labor two-candidate-preferred vote varies enormously across the electorate. Labor won 59% in the north-east and 68.3% in the north-west. The Greens polled 54.5% in Brunswick and 66.5% in the south.
The Liberal Party came third, with a primary vote ranging from 8.3% in the south to 22.6% in the north-west.
| Voter group | LIB prim | ALP 2CP | Total votes | % of votes |
| Brunswick | 9.4 | 45.5 | 15,075 | 15.0 |
| North-East | 14.9 | 59.0 | 13,871 | 13.8 |
| North-West | 22.6 | 68.3 | 10,368 | 10.3 |
| South | 8.3 | 33.5 | 8,746 | 8.7 |
| Pre-poll | 18.2 | 57.3 | 30,486 | 30.4 |
| Other votes | 19.1 | 56.2 | 21,707 | 21.7 |
Election results in Wills at the 2022 federal election
Toggle between two-candidate-preferred votes (Labor vs Greens), two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for the Labor, the Greens and the Liberal Party.
@ AA
Agree i did not want people to take take it the wrong way. Bob Hawke was a centrist Labor leader he was also Pro US alliance, a strong supporter of Israel. At that time Wills was very DLP working class but socially conservative so i am not sure Bob Hawke would fit with Wills today. I mentioned in the Boothby thread with all due respect to Tony Abbott and Nicole Flint Tony Abbott would have fitted better in Cook. He could have lived in Taren Point and gone surfing in Cronulla instead of Manly, and Nicole Flint would be a better fit for Barker than Boothby.
Yeah I didn’t take it the wrong way at all. It’s important to get the right candidate for each seat in politics. Bob Hawke was a great candidate for Wills when he held the seat, but he wouldn’t really fit into today’s Wills.
As an example like how Dan Repacholi is a great fit for the seat of Hunter, being a blue-collar larrikin bloke who supports coal mining, but would hypothetically be a terrible fit for the seat of Sydney. And vice versa with Tanya Plibersek.
Well the DLP certainly did not support Bob Hawke. He got to his position in the ACTU with the strong support of pro communist trade Unions. The DLP if anything supported his boss Harry Souter who he jumped over to get the ACTU presidency. He was later to do the same thing to his Parliamentary Boss Bill Haydn. the DLP did not in any way support Bob Hawke.
Andrew Jackson
When I said DLP I meant demographically Wills used to be an Italian Catholic seat so you would have had a lot of people who supported a Hawkish foreign policy on China etc i did not say DLP supported Hawke
@AndrewJackson, Hawke soon – very soon – went straight over to the Right (Not the first, not the last). he backed Charlie Bali, the DLP candidate, in the Mealworkers Union election in 1981. That caused a brown storm that cost him his first leadership tilt against Bill Hayden. I remember the Macquarie FEC, controlled by the left, trying to direct Ross Free to vote for Hayden over Hawke. Free, part of the Sussex Street right (Which was the DLP!) was having nothing of it. Hawke was George Schulz’s man in Canberra. The Wills ALP branches went ballistic in the mid eighties. Remember the Nuclear Disarmament Party? In the end ehen the old soak and professional litigator retired to his Sydney Harbour views it was firebrand socialist Phil Cleary that won the seat.
Hawke was a lot of things, but a left winger ghe was not. The accord gave us the neoliberalism that has undermined our standard of living for the last forty years. It’s hollowed out the country, and those responsible – largely from the ALP and the Federal Treasury – are either dead or demented or Paul Keating.
Little wonder that in a suburb that named its local swimming pool aftyer a Liberal PM who drowned, there’s a strong left wing community. there always has been since jack Anstey. But Victorian ALP factional deals being what they are, you’ll never get the best candidate, unless by accident, you’ll get whomever the faction dictates is the candidate they want. It almost destroyed the ALP in Queensland and NSW. Victoria is yet to learn the lesson.
And I should add that Maribyrnong belongs to Shorten’s TWU faction, which will have no truck with Khalil getting anywhere close to representing the joint.
If I recall correctly, in 2018 Ged Kearney was the preselected candidate for the state seat of Brunswick (which Labor ended up losing very narrowly that time, and by a much wider margin in 2022) before moving across to contest Cooper in the by-election when it came up.
@BT Ged Kearney still lives in Brunswick AFAIK, which is weird given she’s literally a stone throw away from Cooper but lives in Wills and can’t vote for herself.
In any cases, choosing her to contest Batman (former name for Cooper) was a masterstroke after the disaster that was David Feeney. Not only was it effective in disarming serial challenger Alex Bhathal at the by-election, but it also helped Labor cement that seat and create quite a buffer for them at the subsequent elections. In particular, it’s quite useful for this election given the Green-friendly redistribution and the increasingly volatile demographic changes in Melbourne’s inner north.