The vibe shift hits Melbourne...sort of...

At the Werribee by-election on the weekend.

I spent Saturday night arguing with a bunch of 19-year-olds. I was a scrutineer for the Liberal Party at the counting of the votes at the by-election for the seat of Werribee in the Victorian Parliament. Candidates can have scrutineers watch the count of ballot papers by the staff of the Victorian Electoral Commission. If scrutineers spot something wrong, like a vote in the wrong pile, scrutineers can ask for the mistake to be corrected. Scrutineers can watch the count but they can't touch the ballot papers. Sometimes votes do get put into the wrong pile. More common are disputes between party scrutineers about what's written (or scribbled) in the squares next to the candidate's name on the ballot paper. On Saturday two sets of numbers took up most of my time - 1s and 7s (if we used the European-style 7 things would be much easier); and 5s, 6s, and 8s. So there I was at 10.30 pm on Saturday debating a Young Labor staffer and trying to convince a VEC official that what Labor claimed was a 6 was really a 5. Every vote counts and I'd like to think I won most of my battles.

We started at 6 pm and finished around 12.30 am - which included a delay of about half an hour following what looked like a water leak from the air-conditioning that caused a panel from the ceiling to fall to the floor. Quick-thinking VEC staff put a bucket under the dripping water surrounded the space with plastic bollards and then taped off the area. I hadn't seen that much safety tape since the council sealed off the seesaw at our local playground during Covid.

As of today (Monday) the result of the Werribee by-election is too close to call. On Saturday there was another state by-election in Melbourne in the inner-city seat of Prahran. In a good result for the Liberals, the party won it from the Greens.

The reasons for the two by-elections tell you everything you need to know about the condition of politics in Victoria in 2025. The Werribee by-election was caused by the resignation from parliament of the state's treasurer. He'd been a Labor politician for 18 years, treasurer for 10, and he sent Victoria broke. The resignation of a Greens MP caused the Prahran by-election. As the ABC put it, the MP 'who is married with two children' quit 'because [of] a short-lived extra-marital relationship he had had [that] breached party rules.' That relationship was with one of his staff members.

The contest in Prahran was a one-off because Labor didn't stand a candidate and the person who had held the seat as a Labor MP before the Greens ran as an independent and got 13% of the vote. He had resigned from the ALP over the party's failure to fight anti-Semitism, and he directed his preferences to the Liberals. His intention was to help defeat the Greens - and he succeeded. Good on him. The Liberals got 36.24 % of first preference votes and the Greens 36.18%. Only 64% of voters in the electorate bothered to vote. At the 2022 state election, turnout was 83%, and of the of first preference votes the Libs got 31%, the Greens 36%, and Labor 27%, with the Greens winning on Labor preferences.

A state by-election of 42,000 voters in Werribee in Melbourne is certainly not a federal election with its 17.9 million eligible voters. As always, there were local factors at play like the lack of state government spending on roads and a surge in crime that the Victoria Police seem entirely unable to deal with. It was amusing to see the Labor candidate promise that if he was elected the first thing he'd do would be to go and speak to the roads minister. As the Liberals pointed out the ALP has held the seat since the 1970s - there's been a quarter of a century to have that conversation. And Brad Battin, the state Liberal leader has had the job only a few weeks. Peter Dutton on the other hand is relatively well-known. Still, what happened in Werribee provides some pointers for the federal contest between Labor and the Coalition.

30km west of Melbourne, Werribee is the sort of outer suburban area that will need to swing to the Liberals if they're to come close to winning the 18 additional seats they need to get to 75 seats in the parliament. In the council area that covers Werribee according to the most recent census data, 48% of the population were born overseas, 12% of whom have arrived in Australia in the last five years, and after English the main languages spoken are Punjabi, Hindi, and Mandarin. 46% of residents have a mortgage (cf the national average of 35%) and the median household weekly income was $2,023 (cf the national figure of $1,746).

The seat of Werribee is in the federal seat of Lalor. At the Voice referendum the vote was 53% No.

At the moment the first preference vote in Werribee is Liberal 29.04%, Labor 28.71%, an Independent 15%, the Greens 7%, the Socialists 7%, and the 'Legalise Cannabis' Party on 6%.

At the 2022 state election the first preference vote was Liberal 25%, Labor 45%, the Greens 7%, and the Socialists 4%. Werribee was a very safe ('dead red') Labor seat. Up against Labor's electoral machine, the Liberals had an excellent local candidate. On one estimate the ALP spent at least three or four times as much on advertising in Werribee as the Liberals. Labor threw everything at Werribee. At the council offices with the broken ceiling there were ten scrutineers for the Liberal Party (including me). I counted at least 30 Labor scrutineers.

Three things stand out about Saturday's result:

• the Labor vote fell by 16 points compared to the 2022 state election, while the Liberal vote increased by 4 points

• the combined first preference vote of the two major parties was 58%

• the hard left vote was 20%.

To take the last point first. As much as a vote for one of the hard left parties can be regarded as a 'protest' vote, nevertheless, it's obvious a large proportion of the population feel disconnected from mainstream politics. They don't feel they have a stake in the community, and they never will have. Not without reason, they don't think they'll ever afford their own a home and they should adjust to life as permanent renters. Meanwhile the message from the Labor Party (and sometimes from the Liberal Party) is that ever-higher taxes and ever-more government spending are the solution to the country’s challenges.

On the second point, there’s clearly a percentage of Australians who don't feel represented by either of the two major parties. At the 2022 federal election the combined first preference vote for the ALP and Coalition was 69%. At Werribee on Saturday it was 58%. Despite all the advantages the major parties give themselves via fundraising and electioneering laws and taxpayer funding, the two-party system in Australia is straining, just as it is in the UK. The first preference vote for the Liberal Party (including the LNP in Queensland) at the last three federal elections has been 37%, 37%, and 32%. John Howard famously called the Liberals a 'broad church' - but it's a church that at the moment is relevant to only a third of the population.

On the first point, the media's assessment of the result - ‘Labor voters don’t much like Labor, but they don’t like the Liberals much either’ - is about right. But stated as baldly as that misses a key point. There is a huge opportunity for the Liberals to get the support of unhappy Labor voters. The first part of getting someone to vote for you is getting them not to vote for someone else. The next part is giving them a reason to vote for you. And that's the challenge for the Liberals. Too many Liberals think a vote against Albanese and the Labor Party will be a vote for Dutton and the Coalition.

Recommended reading

The story of Bud Light is well-known. What happened is often presented as the decision of a marketing manager at the company, signalling their virtue. In fact, as this excerpt in The Free Press a few days ago from a new book reveals, Anheuser-Busch InBev the maker of Bud Light deliberately adopted organisation-wide 'woke' policies to appeal to its shareholders.

In 2021, the company introduced 'diversity dashboards.' These dashboards showed the race and gender makeup of each team. They were initially supposed to be used for 'informational purposes' only, but they were soon used to judge managers whose teams were not 'diverse' enough. Diversity meant race and gender. Diversity of thought wasn't even on the dashboard. Having a 'diverse' team soon became an unwritten prerequisite to receive a mover rating.

The pivot to wokeness was not driven by pure conviction. Anheuser-Busch did it in no small part to curry favour with some of the largest institutional investors on Wall Street, led by BlackRock, that were pushing companies to achieve DEI goals. If companies satisfied their investors, they could be included in ESG-focused mutual funds and more people would buy their stock, theoretically pushing up the price.

One of DEI's chief proponents was Alissa Heinerscheid, who Doukeris [company CEO] had promoted to vice president of marketing… Alissa had never made a secret of her progressive politics. But despite (or perhaps because of) her far-left outlook, she was promoted to lead marketing for Bud Light - the world's largest beer brand at the time.

Bud Light has slipped to the third best-selling beer in America, trailing Modelo and Michelob Ultra. On March 31, 2023, the day before the Mulvaney campaign launched, AB InBev stock was $66 per share with a market capitalisation of $132 billion. Today, the stock price is $49 a share with a market cap of $87 billion, a loss of over $40 billion in value. Alissa Heinerscheid was placed on leave in April 2023. According to her LinkedIn profile, she now works with LIV Golf, the professional golf league underwritten by Saudi Arabia.

Thank you for your support.

Kind regards John