Senior Andrews government minister Martin Pakula’s seat in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs is set to be abolished for next year’s state election as part of a proposed shake-up of electoral boundaries released on Wednesday.
In redistributions that will likely favour the Labor government, the independent Electoral Boundaries Commission has recommended the removal of three seats in Melbourne’s eastern and south-eastern suburbs where population growth has not matched the city’s outer areas in recent years.
Senior Andrews government minister Martin Pakula’s seat of Keysborough is set to be abolished.Credit:Simon Schluter
The three to be scrapped would be Keysborough, held by Mr Pakula, who holds the portfolios of tourism, sport and industry recovery; Mount Waverley, held by Labor MP Matt Fregon; and Ferntree Gully, held by Liberal MP Nick Wakeling.
In their place would be three new seats in growth areas: Berwick in the south-east, Greenvale in the north and Laverton in the west. Wednesday’s report also recommends a further seven seats be renamed after their boundaries are significantly shifted.
Labor will likely benefit from the changes because the party typically enjoys support in the outer suburbs and completed a clean sweep of the northern and western suburbs in its convincing 2018 election victory.
At the same time, however, a survey undertaken for The Age this month found support for the Andrews government in those areas had waned recently, particularly in response to lockdowns that disproportionately affect those who cannot work from home.
Victoria’s electoral boundaries are generally reviewed after every second election, meaning the last occurred before 2014. It ensures a fairly distributed number of voters across each electorate as suburbs expand at different speeds, with every seat required to be within 10 per cent of the average.
At the 2018 election, for example, there were 61,814 voters registered in the south-eastern Melbourne growth area of Cranbourne compared to 38,937 in the eastern suburbs seat of Mount Waverley.
Wednesday’s announcement will spark jostling within the major parties to put forward candidates for the new seats and plan the futures of MPs whose seats will be abolished or significantly altered.
A new power-sharing agreement in the Victorian Labor Party signed earlier this year has cut out MPs aligned to the faction linked to the since renamed National Union of Workers (NUW), which includes Mr Pakula and Treasurer Tim Pallas.
Ordinarily, an MP from a faction that is not part of the power-sharing arrangement would struggle to find a new seat if theirs was abolished.
But a long-serving minister like Mr Pakula would probably be accommodated in a different seat – potentially Berwick, not far from Mr Pakula’s current seat – given his seniority.
The Labor and Liberal parties’ preselections will begin in the second half of this year ahead of next November’s election that Premier Daniel Andrews this week vowed to lead his party into.
Tensions have been running high in the state Labor caucus since May when Michael Donovan – secretary of the Victorian Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA), which is part of the power-sharing “stability” deal – said the NUW faction was “non-existent”.
As part of the stability deal, the SDA is set to gain multiple additional seats, prompting fears from MPs excluded from the pact that these additional seats would come at their expense.
Wednesday’s proposed redistributions would transfer 22.8 per cent of all voters to different districts. Eleven seats, mostly in regional Victoria, would remain unchanged.
In the upper house, the district of Eastern Metropolitan is suggested to be renamed North-Eastern Metropolitan with 6.7 per cent of voters to be transferred to a new region.
The Electoral Boundaries Commission will take public submission until July 30, including from the state’s political parties, before the redistributions are confirmed in October.
The Coalition must win 18 seats back from Labor to form government next year after losing 11 in 2018.
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