How The East was Lost

Aston in May 2022 vs April 2023. The Red Wave. (Images from pollbludger.net)

It’s been a week now since the Aston byelection. A byelection that will live in history as either a historic low point for the Liberal Party or the beginning of the end for its existence.

With a 6.4% swing, Mary Doyle has overturned 100 years of history to win the Government a seat from the Opposition in a byelection.

How did this happen?

1. The wrong Candidate

Roshena Campbell would be the perfect Liberal politician, and certainly the type of candidate they should be trying to get into Parliament. She is accomplished in her own right, has experience on the Melbourne City Council and doesn’t appear to be captured by ideologues, yet.

The problem is she is from Brunswick. And the culture of Brunswick is not the culture of Boronia. Most pundits did not think this would matter much, but they failed to realise just how much the inner north and the outer east differ from each other.

Labor chose the perfect candidate. While she also doesn’t like in Aston, Mitcham and Knox share much in common and are within easy reach of each other. Mary Doyle was also supported by Jackson Taylor, who has turned the north of Aston into a safe State Labor seat. This helped make Doyle feel even more local.

Roshena did not know the area, and neither did her campaign staff. And this leads on to reason number 2.

2. The wrong Campaign

The Liberal Party campaign was based on ‘build roads’ and ‘hate Albo’. This ignored two things. Firstly, Albanese is actually well liked (something the Liberal Party refuse to acknowledge) and secondly, the Liberal Party had 9 years to build roads and didn’t. Roads, while important, are not the election winning campaign the Liberals thought they were, especially when those in question would only affect one section of the electorate. It was also a broad campaign, with ads appearing everywhere online and on billboards throughout Aston. But it was a campaign without purpose and without the 'localness' needed.

Labor, by comparison, were flush with local knowledge, with Taylor and his staff clearly helping on the ground and targeting the right areas. Albanese even recorded phone messages which went out the night before the election. A popular PM sending a message like this might have ultimately hard a large impact on the vote on election day.

3. The electorate isn’t a single entity

Dutton and Campbell focused their campaign on the parts of the electorate East of Stud Rd and South of Burwood Hwy. This ignored a good proportion of the population of the electorate. Whether this was a gamble that Boronia, Bayswater and The Basin would never vote Liberal anyway, or a miscalculation that those people would want to ‘send Albo a message’ without Liberal Party interference can’t be known.

In the end, this failed spectacularly. Every single booth in the electorate swung against The Liberal Party.

4. This ain’t 2001 anymore

In the last few days before the vote, everyone in Aston received a letter from former Prime Minister, John Howard. His letter made reference to the Aston byelection of 2001 where the Liberals famously won against all predictions. They seemed to think history would simply repeat itself.

But the Aston of 2001 is not the Aston of today.

Firstly, the borders have changed, bringing in the previously mentioned Boronia and Bayswater. Secondly, the demographics have changed. As much as the media harped on about Aston being mortgage belt country, there is much more to the region than that. Renters are increasing, units are increasing and the economy that people know the Liberal Party built is slowly falling apart. John Howard’s ‘battlers’ don’t exist anymore and John Howard himself was humiliated and removed in 2007.

Times have changed, the Liberal Party apparently hasn’t.

5. Dutton is dangerously unpopular

This one is not a secret. Every poll reveals Dutton’s unpopularity. But once again, the Liberal Party seems to want to ignore that fact.

Dutton not appearing during the NSW election might have saved the party from complete embarrassment. Dutton appearing in Aston (although as stated, only in certain parts of the electorate) seems to have had the opposite effect. There seems to be an actual hatred of Dutton around which is once again being ignored by the Liberals

The Labor message, centering on Dutton's unpopularity and untrustworthiness instead of giving any advertising to Campbell, rang a lot truer in people's minds than the Liberals’ attempt to paint Albanese as unpopular.

6. The Liberals do not have a brand

The Liberal Party is currently a rump, with no real policy or purpose. The weeks before the byelection were dominated by the Deeming affair which saw the Liberals fail to actually stand for anything.

The domination of the Dutton faction of the party, that is, the most right leaning faction in the party’s history, has alienated it from the rest of the country.

With the Liberal Campaign focusing only on roads they didn't build and a cost of living crisis which they caused, voters evidently turned off. Their failure to articulate any positive policies meant that voters had no reason to vote for the Liberal Party.

The Liberals failed in Aston for a variety of reasons. It could be a sign of a party in complete decline or simply a party that has ceased to care about the issues real people are facing. But, it was a historic failure, which will have great implications for the foreseeable future. Melbourne was where the Liberal Party was born, it might be where it dies too.