They’d never say it in public, but at every election, both major parties identify a handful of seats they expect to lose.
This time around, Labor is downbeat about hanging on to the Melbourne seat of Aston and the Sydney seat of Bennelong, while Coalition strategists concede the seats of Bradfield (northern Sydney) and Wannon (western Victoria) look tough to hold.
But then there are the seats where everyone expects a proper contest, and by the end of the campaign, even once-safe seats can look chancy if the ground game by the opposition is good.
Here are 12 seats we think are worth watching this campaign.
New South Wales
The seat once held by John Howard has nominally returned to the Liberal column after a redistribution in NSW by the Australian Electoral Commission. That has cut Labor MP Jerome Laxale’s margin from a slender 1 per cent into notional negative territory of -0.04, making Bennelong a top Liberal target.
In Scott Yung, the Liberals have a Ryde local who has worked in a bank, in recruiting and who now runs his own education business.
On current polling, including this masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor, Yung should win this seat easily. But Laxale is a popular former local mayor with a strong relationship with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Also, first-term MPs often get a so-called “sophomore surge” that lifts the personal vote a percentage point or two the second time they stand.
If the Liberals aren’t winning Bennelong easily and early on election night, the swing is not on.
Established in 1949, the seat of Bradfield has only ever been Liberal, and it isn’t about to turn red.
But former cabinet minister Paul Fletcher received an almighty fright in 2022 when independent Nicolette Boele secured 20.9 per cent of the primary vote and 45.8 per cent of the two party-preferred vote.
Boele has been working the seat ever since as the self-proclaimed “shadow member” for Bradfield, and this time, with Fletcher retiring, she will face off against moderate Liberal Gisele Kapterian.
Kapterian is a Liberal candidate from central casting: her glittering CV includes five years in senior roles for Julie Bishop, Steve Ciobo and Michaelia Cash, six years with software company Salesforce and five years as a trade lawyer.
This resume has “future cabinet minister” written all over it, though some voters will prefer a member focused on local issues, which Boele promises to be.
Fiona Phillips is a low-profile local member who won the south coast NSW seat for Labor in 2019 – only the second time the party has held it since it was created in 1984 – after the Liberal vote was split between candidate Warren Mundine and former party member Grant Schultz.
In 2022, Phillips just hung on to the seat in a fierce contest with Andrew Constance, a former NSW Liberal state minister, with fewer than 500 votes separating the pair. This time around, Constance is hopeful of winning one of the most marginal seats in the country.
If Constance fails to win Gilmore, it’s all but certain the Coalition will remain in opposition next term.
Victoria
Zoe Daniel is the only independent from the teal wave of 2022 facing a rematch in 2025.
In former Liberal MP Tim Wilson, she faces a hyper-motivated campaigner as desperate as his beloved Melbourne Demons for a return to the winners’ circle, and he has been working on his comeback for three years.
Love him or loathe him, there are very few people who don’t already have a fully formed opinion of the high-profile former Human Rights commissioner.
In Daniel, voters chose a former ABC foreign correspondent with a storied career and an ambitious agenda for an affluent seat that some Liberals privately describe as “post-capitalist” – that is, home to wealthy people who can afford not to care about high electricity bills and instead demand more ambitious action on climate change. Wilson will argue that he has been, and can be again, a more effective advocate on issues such as climate change from within the Coalition party room.
Dan Tehan, a former diplomat, has been in federal parliament since 2010 and served with distinction in the cabinet and shadow cabinet. But he faces the biggest challenge of his career hanging on to a rural Victorian seat once held by former prime minister Malcolm Fraser.
Alex Dyson, a former Triple J radio host born and raised in the seat, is having a third stab at winning the seat from Tehan. After a reasonable showing in 2019 on a shoestring $5000 budget and then slashing Tehan’s two-party-preferred vote to 53.9 per cent in 2022, the lowest the incumbent has ever recorded, Dyson now has a campaign war chest north of more than $500,000.
There’s every possibility that some of the locals won’t welcome big Climate 200 donors reaching into the seat to help Dyson, but that much money will go a long way towards helping the independent challenger reach switched-off regional voters.
After losing to former Howard government minister Fran Bailey by just 27 votes in 2007, Rob Mitchell has won McEwen at every election since 2010.
And at every one of those polls, the Victorian Liberals have promised victory and failed to deliver. So while his margin is slender once again, and Peter Dutton’s election pitch has been tailored to the suburban fringes, there is a decent chance Mitchell will be returned by voters.
Jason McClintock, an IT business owner who recently started a Christmas tree farm with his family, will be hoping that the resentment Victorians feel towards the ageing state Labor government might mean the Liberals finally claim McEwen.
Queensland
A former retail worker with a Bachelor in Social Sciences, Stephen Bates is one of two Greens (along with Meg Watson-Brown in Ryan) swept into parliament in 2022 on a wave of anti-Morrison sentiment and the savvy on-the-ground campaign work of Griffith MP Max Chandler-Mather.
He has had next to no impact in federal parliament this term, and both Labor and the Liberal National Party believe they can win the seat back from the Greens.
The frontrunner is Trevor Evans, a former LNP MP who served two terms until 2022.
Labor’s Madonna Jarrett finished 0.2 per cent ahead of Bates on the primary vote last time (both were 10 per cent behind Evans), and she is hoping to go one better and reclaim a seat Labor has not held since Arch Bevis in 2010. While Chandler-Mather will probably win and Watson-Brown will probably lose, the seat of Brisbane is too close to call.
The last time Entsch retired, it was October 2007 and Kevin Rudd was about to be swept to power. The Liberal Party lost Leichhardt to Labor’s Jim Turnour, but after a single term out of politics, Entsch returned in 2010 and has held the seat ever since.
As Entsch’s second retirement beckons, Labor has selected former Cairns Taipans basketballer Matt Smith to face off against Jeremy Neal, a paramedic in the Queensland Ambulance Service.
Neal starts the race with a small margin, but it’s worth remembering a couple of peculiarities about the seat of Leichhardt, based around the far northern Queensland city of Cairns.
Much like Herbert, which hosts the regional city of Townsville, Leichhardt is usually a Labor-Liberal contest – rather than a National Party cakewalk – and voters don’t mind sending a Labor MP to Canberra. Entsch’s stranglehold on the seat dates back to 1996 and has been a historical anomaly. Plus, federal Labor’s vote has been in the toilet for so long in Queensland that there are some in Labor who believe it must, surely, finally, start to turn.
Western Australia
The WA Liberals have been optimistic for months about their chances in this most marginal of teal seats.
Candidate Tom White, a local who opened Uber’s first WA office in Subiaco, has run an energetic campaign in a seat that may have been named after Labor’s greatest prime minister, but it has been held by the Liberals for all but six years since 1949.
In independent MP Kate Chaney, an accomplished lawyer and businesswoman who happens to be the granddaughter and niece of former Liberal ministers Fred Chaney Sr and Fred Chaney Jr, White faces a formidable opponent.
The fact that Chaney supported the Albanese government’s live export ban on sheep, due to take effect in May 2028, then opposed it and now won’t give an “iron-clad” guarantee to vote to repeal the legislation (despite the lack of sheep farms in inner-city Perth) suggests she is spooked.
This new seat created by the Australian Electoral Commission is named after Vivian Bullwinkel, an Australian nurse who was the only survivor of a WWII massacre perpetrated by the Japanese in the Dutch East Indies.
Labor’s Trish Cook is, on paper, the favourite to win the seat because of the notional margin, but as a three-cornered contest, it is harder to predict. Mia Davies is a former state opposition leader for the WA Nationals, who are far more independent than their east coast brothers and sisters, and she’s a strong and talented candidate.
But the Liberals have selected Matt Moran, widely known as the “Boy from Boya”, a former journalist, army public affairs officer and press secretary to Malcolm Turnbull. At least some in the party believe that Davies’ preferences, if she finishes third, will slingshot Moran past Cook.
Tasmania
Bridget Archer is the first MP from either major party to hold Bass for more than one term since Labor’s Michelle O’Byrne, who held the seat from 1998 to 2004. First elected in 2019, Archer holds the northern Tasmanian seat with only a slender margin.
The MP has not endeared herself to everyone in the Coalition by criticising her party’s position on various issues – such as its opposition to the Indigenous Voice to parliament, which she supported – but she has remained true to the values of party founder Robert Menzies.
There is, undoubtedly, a “Bridget factor” in Bass that makes the task that much harder for Labor’s Jess Teesdale. Born and bred in Launceston, Teesdale is a teacher who hopes to bring Bass back into the Labor column and while the slender margin has given Labor hope she could succeed, her task is harder than it looks on paper.
South Australia
James Stevens replaced Liberal Party powerbroker and former cabinet minister Christopher Pyne in 2019 and is seeking a third term. Once chief of staff to former premier Steven Marshall, Stevens is now a junior member of the shadow ministry responsible for targeting government waste.
In Claire Clutterham, Stevens faces a formidable opponent who has 20 years experience as a lawyer, is a board member of the Royal Flying Doctors’ Service and a local councillor. The Labor woman also has the support of popular South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas.
