Blog CemeteryMcMillan
October 23rd 2007 12:37
Booth Information
McMillan stretches west from the far South-Eastern suburbs of Melbourne along the Princes Freeway and to the verges of the LaTrobe Valley, and from the bottom reaches of the Great Dividing Range at Mount Baw Baw south to the dairy-farming areas of South Gippsland, and to Wilsons Promontory. As the area around Pakenham has become increasingly suburban and undergone a large population increase, its Eastern border has shifted and the large towns of Traralgon and Morwell have been split off into Gippsland.
Detailed Results
After being held by the Coalition from its creation in 1949 to 1980, McMillan has become a key swing seat and has changing hands five times since in the six federal elections since 1990. However the redistribution that saw Labor-voting Morwell and Traralgon transferred to the seat of Gippsland gave the Coalition a swing of around 5% and has made the seat look relatively safe for Liberal member Russell Broadbent. Broadbent won the seat from Christian Zahra in 2004, after he had been unseated by Zahra in the 1998 election.
Booth Information
While McMillan has swung between ALP and Liberal control in recent elections, on its current composition it would have been comfortably won by the Coalition at all elections covered, with the exception of the ALP landslide in 2002. Most booths provide a Coalition majority in most elections, with the strongest support for the coalition coming from the rural areas in the South and West of the seat around Drouin and Leongatha, respectively. The ALP generally get over two-thirds support from the area around Moe, as well as a majority in Wonthaggi and occasionally in Inverloch in the seat's South.
Since 1993, Pakenham has grown in size by 50% to become the second biggest town in the seat behind Moe. The ALP's share of the vote has improved slightly over this period but it has not got over 45% of the TPP vote at any Federal election and it was the one area of the seat to swing significantly towards the Coalition at the 2004 election. The rest of the seat is a mix of regional centres along the Princes, Bass and South Gippsland Highway's and small rural towns. Each of these areas have voted solidly, if not massively, in favour of the Coalition.
Recent federal and state election results invite conflicting prognoses for McMillan in 2007. On House of Representative results, the seat has drifted slowly towards the ALP since 1996, with large swings in the smaller booths in the South and Centre of the Electorate, as well as in the smaller towns on the Princes Highway, and in Leongatha and Warragul. This has seen the Liberal TPP fall from 10% over the state average to 3.7% in eight years from 1996. The swing towards the Liberals in Pakenham helped insulate the Coalition from a potentially much smaller margin. In terms of ranking, the seat has fallen out of the top ten in Coalition TPP after being consistently there from 1993 to 1998, and was ranked 17th out of 38 Victorian seats in 2004.
Booth Information
But at state level the picture couldn't be much more different, with the Coalition support bouncing back above 1999 levels in last year's Legislative Assembly election to be over 10% above the state average for TPP. The seat has risen from 14th among Coalition TPP in 1999 to 7th in 2006 - the seats highest position at any election analysed. Only in the Western booths around Pakenham was there any difference between the 2004 Federal and 2006 State elections to match the difference at the state level. The strength of the Coalition's performance in McMillan 2006 is best signified by the fact that the seat was one of only three Victorian seats to give the Coalition a higher 2PP vote in 2006 than 2004.
Booth Information
The best way to understand these divergent results appears to be to see McMillan's recent results as inherently stable - hardly swinging in the strong political breezes that have blown both to the left and the right in recent state or federal elections. The seat's rural areas tend to strongly support the coalition, with the provincial towns mostly leaning towards the Coalition - though both trending slightly to the ALP - and the Moe area voting heavily for the ALP. Only Pakenham and the other areas to the west of the seat have large groups of voters who shift their vote between state and federal elections and therefore appear the most volatile voting area in the seat. As these are also the fastest growing areas in the seat they do suggest McMillan may become more volatile in the future.
McMillan doesn't appear to be drifting to the ALP in any significant way. The ALP would likely need to gain a majority of the vote in Pakenham in order to have any real chance of taking the seat, although this would appear more likely to happen after they had achieved power. Their only other chance would be a seat wide swing which has not occurred even at strong state Labor performances: even in 2002 the ALP won less than a third of the booths, and would have achieved victory only because of large swings in Warragul, Inverloch and Pakenham. While McMillan may have the second smallest margin of all Coalition-held seats in Victoria at the federal election, it is not the second most likely gain for the ALP.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
The ALP could win if:
-They manage to get a majority of the TPP in Pakenham, OR
-They manage to get 47% of the TPP in Warragul, OR
-They manage to win a majority of booths at TPP.
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