Published: 27 November 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
"It's been a wild ride," Ms Grasso told Caulfield voters, a mostly Jewish demographic. "Thank you all for accepting and supporting me." That said, Labor did not claim the seat on the night waiting for the pre-polling.
Caulfield came back for the Liberals overnight in pre-polling. On Sunday night, Australian Electoral Commission table showed the Liberals were ahead on 51.82 per cent. A blue ribbon seat will now be marginal, part of a powerful swing that, against all expectations, returned the ALP government of Premier Daniel Andrews with an increased majority.
On election day on Twitter, Southwick was recorded telling Upper House Liberal MP David Davis that reading the results was difficult because more than double the number of constituents had voted early. But The Jewish Independent has not seen any published comments from him on election night.
[gallery columns="2" size="large" ids="24596,24597"]
During the campaign the three candidates for Caulfield - Southwick, Grasso and Greens candidate Dinesh Mathew – faced off at a forum held by The Australian Jewish News and Zionism Victoria (ZV) at Beth Weizmann Community Centre and clashed over the Liberals plan to scrap the Safe Schools program. Some of the people in the audience were not impressed with Southwick who attacked safe schools and he might well have lost votes on that night.
A similar story was taking place in the blue ribbon seat of Brighton, which has a significant Jewish population, which was created in 1856. Never in the seat’s history had the Labor Party come even close to winning it. Brighton had been held by retiring MP Louise Asher on the solid margin of 9.8 per cent.
On Saturday night, Declan Martin, a 19-year-old urban planning student who didn’t even drive, was stunned to receive an 11 per cent swing. But the seat swung back to the Liberals with the pre-polls counted. Australian Electoral Commission figures were showing the Liberals holding the seat by 52.83 per cent. Another safe Liberal seat has become marginal.
The voters were even less impressed with professional agitator Avi Yemini, who led the far-Right Australian Liberty Alliance’s campaign for a seat in the upper house. Preternaturally focused on preventing the “Islamisation” of Australia, the ALA repeatedly attacked left-wing journalists and called for the ABC headquarters to be bombed. Yemini was also involved in the Liberal Party disendorsing a candidate named Meralyn Klein, who was running for the party in the marginal seat of Yan Yean.
[gallery columns="1" size="large" ids="24593"]
Klein appeared in a video calling for a ban on Muslim immigration and told Yemini in the video about being attacked by two teenage boys who “were not so happy with two blond women running their own restaurant. “There are people in this country who are not coming here to get the best out of the country and give the best that they can. I’d like to see us look at immigration,” she said.
The clip ended with #MUSLIMBAN. Klein denied she was anti-Muslim and said her comments had been taken out of context. Yemini told the Herald Sun that he edited it to include the fact that her alleged attackers were Muslim. This was vital to his party’s cause.
During the campaign, he harassed Labor and Green candidates, taking videos of them and accusing them of being anti-free speech when they asked him to stop. He spent more time attacking people than engaging with them.
The day before the election, Yemini was involved in another stunt where he wore a burqa and walked into a Melbourne bank alongside his party’s president Debbie Robinson who wore a black motor cycle helmet.
They created a public scene demanding to know why she had been asked to remove her helmet while he was allowed to keep his burqa on. When the party was formed in July, they claimed they would get 20 per cent of the vote. The Australian Electoral Commission table shows the Australian Liberty Alliance got just 806 votes. That’s 0.03 per cent of the vote.
Labor’s Minister for Trade, Investment and Innovation Philip Dalidakis, who has a Jewish mother, was re-elected for the Southern Metropolitan region, said the result reaffirmed Labor’s policies. “I think it’s a very strong result, an endorsement for many of the policies we implemented over our four years,” Dalidakis said.
[gallery columns="1" size="large" ids="24649"]
Overall, the results show a huge swing towards Labor in traditionally solid Liberal Party heartland in Melbourne’s east
While counting still continues, Labor is on track to gain as many as 60 seats in the 88 member lower house seats, up from its current 45. The Coalition has been reduced to a rump of fewer than 30. As the Australian Financial Review noted, a backlash-sized swing of almost seven per cent, when you’re not even the government, is a terrible rebuke to a political party.
On Saturday night, broadcaster Alan Jones blamed it on Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy. “If a fellow can’t make any in-roads in the electorate, given all the problems in Victoria that we’ve seen articulated and documented — the centre also of significant African gang crime, and that’s just one of the issues — Daniel Andrews has just campaigned this bloke off the park,” Mr Jones told Sky News Australia. “If you don’t get into the ring you won’t win the fight and I don’t think the Liberal party were ever in the ring.”
But shadow attorney general John Pesutto, who could lose his own seat of Hawthorn which had been with the Liberal Party since 1955, said the party had to take a good look at itself.
"Internal issues are a complete waste of time," he told The Age. "They will, as this result is appearing to demonstrate tonight, earn the great wrath of the public. So my advice to our federal colleagues is if you haven't already had enough lessons, you ought to look at Victoria and learn the lessons that we're seeing tonight."
On Sunday night, Pesutto who had held the seat by 8,6 per cent was just 53 votes in front. The prospective loss of Hawthorn, which takes in Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong, is a massive blow for the Liberals.
Victorian Liberal Senator Jane Hume said she had no doubt the toppling of Malcolm Turnbull, who was popular in Victoria, had shaped the election result.
She told the ABC the result had “some implications for the federal team. When both traditions in the Liberal party work well together I think that’s when we work well together overall,” she said. “There are different wings but it takes both wings to fly.”
Main photo: Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews with his family on election night
