While the Liberal party managed to hold on to two of the three seats holding byelections on Saturday, it was undoubtedly a bad result and a disappointment, with the seat of Pittwater lost to an independent.
This is not the first time that a party has lost a seat in a byelection to an independent – indeed it’s not even the first time this has happened to the Liberal party in Pittwater – but it is the continuation of a decline in the position of the Liberals in northern Sydney, in an area that was once their heartland.
The Pittwater result was not even close. At the time of writing, Jacqui Scruby has a clear majority of the primary vote and has over 55% of the two-candidate-preferred vote, a swing of 6% compared with her performance in 2023.
It is worth noting that Scruby was likely aided by the decision of Labor and the Greens to not contest the byelection. Under optional preferential voting, there would have been some happy to just vote for one of the progressive parties and then exhaust. Instead they went to Scruby.
While the Liberal party has lost Pittwater before, in 2005, that was an isolated case. The party now is in a lot of difficulty across the northern beaches.
They have lost both of the federal seats covering the beaches – Warringah in 2019 and Mackellar in 2022. They then lost the state seat of Wakehurst in 2023 to independent local mayor Michael Regan, and have now lost Pittwater. They looked to be resurgent in the local council, but administrative issues meant the party failed to nominate at all, wiping the party out of a large council they would have once have been certain to control.
Of course, there were peculiar factors specific to Pittwater that won’t apply in the future. The circumstances of Rory Amon’s departure made the race very difficult for Georgia Ryburn, who by all accounts is a strong candidate possibly hampered by living in a different part of the insular peninsula.
Amon’s criminal charges – which he has denied – would have undoubtedly made some swing voters regret their vote for him and wish they could have gone back and changed their vote to Scruby – the byelection gave them that opportunity.
But there are other factors that should have made life a bit easier for the Liberals. Unlike in 2022, the party is now out of power at both a state and federal level, and is not the focus for anger at the government. Scruby didn’t benefit from the visceral backlash to Scott Morrison that helped power her federal colleagues to their seats in 2022.
But regardless of how it happened, Scruby is now in parliament as yet another crossbencher as part of a growing wave of independent and minor party support.
There will be 13 independents or minor parties on the Legislative Assembly crossbench. Meanwhile independent candidates won seats in the ACT’s Legislative Assembly last night for the first time in a quarter of a century.
There has been a long, slow decline in support for the major parties across Australia, in state and federal politics. But until recently, the electoral system mostly kept those new forces out of the lower houses – you could cast your first preference for a minor party or an independent, but the vote would ultimately flow back to a major party candidate on the final count.
But the vote for the major parties is now dropping to levels low enough that more and more alternatives are making it through. This means that voters disillusioned with the major parties have a bunch of options – Greens on the left, One Nation, Libertarians and many others on the right, and various independents across the spectrum. And there’s no sign that this trend has hit its peak.
The Liberal party will remain a force in northern Sydney, and I have no doubt that many of the seats held by independents will return to the party at some point. But northern Sydney is no longer the rock-solid heartland the party once used to supply so many of its leaders.
And I don’t think those days are coming back.
• Ben Raue is an electoral analyst and blogger who writes about elections in Australia at www.tallyroom.com.au
