Blog CemeteryHotham
October 8th 2007 11:48
Booth Information
Although Hotham takes in some areas with strong Liberal support, it is one of Labor’s safest seats in Victoria. The seat borders the Dandenong train line between Carnegie and Springvale, and spreads south to Moorabbin Junction, Southland Shopping Centre, Moorabbin Airport and Dingley Village. In many ways, Hotham is an especially artificial seat, as there are major differences between its Western suburbs, from Carnegie to Cheltenham and the Eastern suburbs from Clayton to Dingley, and because the seat shares a number of suburbs with other seats.
Detailed Results
The division between West and East is shown by the stark difference in voting patterns between the two areas. While the areas in the West of the seat have given the ALP small majorities in TPP terms, the areas to the North and East of the seat are among Labor’s strongest. In Clayton South, Clarinda and Springvale the ALP’s vote has stayed over 70% at almost all booths. As these areas represent one-quarter of the seat’s voters this sizeable majority has been the backbone for the ALP’s comfortable control through the Howard years.
Booth Information
This is also reflected at the state level, where the seat includes over half of Bentleigh (which tends to follow the party in government) and parts of Sandringham (comfortably Liberal), and Oakleigh (Liberal held from 1992 to 1999 but strongly Labor since) in the West, but over half of the strong Labor seats of Clayton and Lyndhurst in the East and South. The strongest area of support for the Coalition is in Dingley in the seat’s South-East corner, which gave over 63% of the TPP to the Coalition in the 2004 Federal Election, and also represents the area where the State Liberals lag behind the Federal party’s results the most.
Booth Information
Any chance of success for the Liberals in Hotham would come from those booths in the seat’s west which border the southern areas of Goldstein and make over half of the seats. But the area has been immune to the swings towards the Government that have spread across similar areas in Melbourne’s East. In 2004, Hotham mirrored the statewide swing of around 3%, but this was concentrated in the western booths with only Moorabbin and Bentleigh showing any real swing. As the map shows, the Liberals won only the two western booths closest to Goldstein and lost the vast majority of them by less than 5%.
Booth Information
This area did match the state average at the 2002 and 1999 state elections but at the federal level it drifted out to almost 4% above the state average at the 2004 House of Representatives election. But in reality the strong Labor support in the seat’s east is always likely to get them across the line, and in the present political climate 2007 should be no different.
WHAT TO WATCH
Not much to offer here really, although any swing in the seat’s West could be the sign of a more general swing in Melbourne’s East.
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