Albert Park – Victoria 2026

I’ve always felt that if the Liberals had a moderate leader, a moderate, high-profile candidate, and better boundaries here (remove St Kilda, add in South Yarra), this seat could be a surprise win. This seat has somewhat-winnable demographics closer to the beach, but the Southbank and St Kilda areas tend to be quite unfavourable. There is also the fact that Nina Taylor could get a sophomore surge, unless a local on here has a differing opinion of that.

Libs almost won in 2010 and 2014. Port melbourne has been trending liberal for a while now

I’m local in the sense that I’m in St Kilda (but in Prahran electorate) so I see a lot of activity on local Facebook groups and things like that.

There is some very vocal anti-ALP commentary against Nina Taylor and state Labor in general that seems to be the loudest voice online but it’s just a small, rusted-on minority and mostly people who are aligned with the right-wing ‘Residents of Port Phillip’ (RoPP) group.

The Albert Park & Port Melbourne areas had above-average (for Victoria) swings to Labor at the federal election, and at least year’s council elections, Port Phillip was one of the few councils where Labor ran fully-branded and officially endorsed candidates.

So overall I think the Labor brand will hold up pretty well in this seat, although I don’t know how much of a sophomore surge or personal vote Nina Taylor will have. I expect a small swing against Labor but still a comfortable retain (high-50s 2PP).

The Liberals got very close here in both 2010 (2.1% margin) and 2014 (3% margin).

If the Liberals were more moderate on Social issues they could potentially win this over two elections say they form government narrowly but end up being popular and moderate like the NSW Government focus on sound fiscal management and service delivery but if the Libs end up being like the DLP/Moira Deeming they will be toxic here. People here prefer Tealish Liberals (Economically Right/Socially moderate or atleast Agnostic)

A Teal based Liberal Party would be competitive, both in Albert Park and the overlapping federal seat, and this is perhaps the ultimate irony in the realignment theory, since going right has achieved very little in seats gained, while areas like Albert Park offer a real chance of being won, if only the Liberals could see it.

Agree Nimalan/Pencil, moving to a class war rhetoric instead of a traditional economic based narrative has not served the conservative parties (Coalition/Liberals) well for Australia due to a large proportion of voters residing in major cities unlike other western democracies (mainly UK and USA) where old town industrial and rural areas still carry significant weight.

Voters in the urban areas often work in white collar, service-based industries and these individuals are put off by the class war, anti-woke rhetoric that the right faction of the Liberal Party has embraced.

@Pencil, it’s no coincidence that the Liberals’ best performance in Albert Park was under Ted Baillieu in 2010; and the Liberals’ best ever federal performance in Melbourne Ports / Macnamara was under Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 when the seat actually swung to the Liberals while most of the country swung away.

This was discussed as a potential Greens prospect in recent years.

The main problem is that Major party votes are too close to each other. I would have traditionally thought the Greens best path up would be to overtake Labor with Liberals out in front, but Liberals were actually the closer 3CP rival last time (and would have preferenced Greens to victory at that particular election).

Greens also seem to have lost some local strength. They were wiped out from council in 2024 and looking at booths in MacNamara they seemed to lose primary votes to Labor particularly badly here.

Given they’re now in a fight to win back Prahran that they might not win, and need to sandbag all their other seats, I expect Greens to campaign very little here. The result being a primary vote to drop back to the teens and they could be overtaken by a teal.

The Greens seem to have always really under-performed here at a state level compared to the federal level (or that could be framed at over-performing at the federal level).

The Greens went backwards significantly at the federal level, but due to the large gap between state & federal here, I don’t necessarily think that will translate to a significant swing against at state level. Their vote might hold up there because the ~20% range they tend to average at state level is probably just a core of rusted on support, and the sometimes-Green swing voters have been more likely to vote Greens federally than at state level.

In short, no hope in the current environment that they improve to a high-20s primary that would be required to win. They’ll remain in distant third place, probably still with a primary vote around the ~20% mark.

@ Trent
Macnamara is more winnable at a Federal level because the entire St Kilda-Elwood area is in one seat at at a state level split between (Cauflied, Albert Park, Brighton and Prahran). I think Greens put less effort into Albert Park for that reason

Port Melbourne and South Melbourne are not so favourable to the Greens. Both favour Labor or Liberal. It’s difficult for the Greens to win a bayside seat since St Kilda, St Kilda East and Elwood are all split up.

This could throw up an interesting result now with Wilson as Liberal leader and a Labor government on the nose who are focussing strongly on housing density. I don’t know to what extent to which Labor’s plans for higher density applied to this seat but I do wonder if the Greens have a unique opportunity to re-court the affluent progressives they lost so emphatically in May and make serious inroads into the ALP vote, to the point where this may become a GRN vs LIB contest.

Gotta be backing Labor to hang on at this stage but if things begin to take a nasty turn and Wilson starts winning over moderates I wouldn’t rule it out entirely

There are many seats which Wilson could help make the Liberals competitive in 2026, Albert Park is not one of them. The Greens vote will be high enough to keep Labor above the 50% mark and the Liberals won’t win over people who are renting and living in high-rises as they’ve been outright opposed to densification in affluent suburbs.

I think here there will be:
– Moderate primary vote swing against Labor;
– Small primary vote swing to the Greens (mostly due to Labor being less popular);
– Small primary vote swing to the Liberals

The order may flip back to being LIB, ALP, GRN on primary votes again (which had been standard prior to 2018), but the Greens will remain in third place. They are coming from too far behind both of the major parties and St Kilda & Southbank are really the only two Greens strongholds in the seat.

I’m guessing Labor’s margin will reduce from double-digits to about the 5-7% range but still a comfortable hold.

The local Liberals – Liberal aligned councillors and the federal candidate – have put quite a focus on “heritage” and opposing development. That will appeal to the cohort most likely to already vote Liberal (home owners in Middle & Albert Park) but not the majority of residents who rent and/or want dense inner-city living and affordable housing to be build.

The Age’s recent seat-by-seat analysis of the results of a Liberal values survey was also pretty bad for the Liberals in Albert Park.

Not as bad as Prahran whose results were basically the same as the block of inner-north ALP v GRN contests, but about -10 worse for the Liberals than all the nearby Liberal seats like Caulfield, Brighton, Malvern etc.

Prahran is a seat that’s gonna be lost to the libs up till after the next next redistribution (2036) so they might as well write that off

At least

Labor at least know they’re can’t win country seats so that’s why they just dump solar and wind farms there.

Link to the article please.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/the-numbers-that-show-the-victorian-coalition-is-not-yet-in-the-game-20251127-p5niv6.html

There’s quite a focus on Prahran in the article, highlighting how it’s nothing like the other “Liberal held” seats, including quotes & photo of Rachel Westaway. Like most of the media commentary it misrepresents the byelection as just a “fiercely contested win” and completely ignores that Labor didn’t run in it.