The results of two state by-elections in the Victorian capital of Melbourne last Saturday have provided further evidence that mounting working-class discontent is fuelling a deep crisis of the present parliamentary order across Australia.
Most significantly, in the outer suburban working-class electorate of Werribee, the Labor Party’s vote crashed by nearly 17 percentage points, from around 46 percent at the last state election in 2022 to less than 29 percent. With vote counting continuing, Labor could lose what media commentators dubbed a “heartland” and “safe” seat it has held since 1979.
That points to a further collapse of Labor’s previous working-class electoral base, yet the main opposition Liberal Party picked up less than 4 percent of that swing, leaving it also around 29 percent. Altogether, the combined vote for the two long-time parties of rule of Australian capitalism fell below 58 percent.
This has triggered further expressions of alarm in ruling circles that the next federal election, which Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government must hold by May 17, will produce a fragile minority government.
An assortment of independents and third party candidates gained 42.3 percent of the primary vote in Werribee—an increase of 12.9 percentage points from the 2022 state election. This indicates that growing numbers of workers and youth are seeking a political alternative to the big business program of ever-greater social inequality, militarism and suppression of dissent.
Households in areas like Werribee have borne the brunt of an historic cut to working-class living standards under both the state Labor government, in office since 2014, and the federal Labor government since 2022. Soaring rents and home mortgage payments have produced an intensifying cost-of-living and social crisis.
According to a recent study, 82 percent of electorates nationally now have a majority of homes suffering household financial stress, that is, having less than 5 percent of their earnings left over after essentials. In 2021, that figure was 8 percent—10 times less.
The City of Wyndham, centred on Werribee, is one of the epicentres of this disaster. Unemployment is well above the national average and about two-thirds of the employed—over 50,000 workers—commute daily out of the council area to work, facing poor public transport and choked roads. The development of schools and hospitals has lagged far behind what is needed. For example, more than half the people requiring in-patient care cannot be treated at the Mercy Werribee Hospital, the public hospital.
Wyndham has one of the fastest growing and highest immigrant populations in Australia. Many of its more than 300,000 people have moved into the area because of impossibly high housing costs closer to the centre of Melbourne. Nearly half the population were born overseas, notably from the Indian sub-continent, China and the Middle East.
Voters who spoke to World Socialist Web Site correspondents at polling booths on Saturday voiced anger over the financial stress caused by housing and food costs, as well as the shockingly poor state of public healthcare, schools, transport and other essential services. They also voiced hostility to the Albanese government’s support for the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza and concerns that the Labor government was now aligning itself with the US President Donald Trump’s ruthless agenda.
For now, the main electoral beneficiaries of the disaffection include a local businessman who postured as a champion of Melbourne’s working-class western suburbs and picked up 14.7 of the vote, up from 5.9 percent in 2022.
The Victorian Socialists, an electoral front of the pseudo-left Socialist Alternative, garnered 7.3 percent of the vote, up from 3.6 percent in 2022. Far from mentioning, let alone advocating, any socialist policies, its candidate asked voters to “send a message to the [state Labor] government that we won’t be taken for granted.”
While the results cannot necessarily predict the outcome of the looming federal election, they point to the possible loss of about 11 seats in the state of Victoria alone, wiping out the Albanese government’s narrow two-seat majority in the House of Representatives.
That adds to media poll indications of a likely hung parliament, with neither Labor nor the Liberal-National Coalition able to form a government without relying on deals with various independents and/or the Greens. One recent statewide Victorian poll found Labor’s primary vote had plunged to 22 percent.
The Werribee result again shows that this discontent is not producing any sizeable shift toward the right-wing Coalition led by Peter Dutton. Media pollster Kosmos Samaras commented: “Despite a massive swing against Labor in Werribee, the Liberals have once again failed to persuade an increasingly disillusioned electorate to back them.”
The alarm among corporate media commentators was typified by Patricia Karvelas, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation program host. “This weekend’s by-election in Werribee also signalled something we know has been growing—the rejection of the two-party system,” she wrote. “With the federal election due within months, we are in genuine minority government territory.”
Today’s Australian Financial Review (AFR) editorial commented: “Albanese is counting on retaining all 24 of 39 seats it currently holds in its Victorian stronghold to help stave off minority government, or a loss, at a tight election that is most likely to end in a hung parliament.”
In the other by-election last Saturday, in the inner city largely middle-class electorate of Prahran, the Liberals were able to wrest the seat back from the Greens, who had held it since 2014. The Greens vote stayed stuck on 36 percent. There was a 4.8 percent rise in the Liberal vote, but the outcome was mainly due to Labor not contesting the seat, depriving the Greens of the second preferences they have needed since 2014 to get across the line.
The by-election results, on top of last year’s defeats of long-standing Labor governments in Queensland and the Northern Territory, point not just to Labor’s electoral implosion but to developing instability throughout the political system. There is widespread unrest over the attack on living and working conditions and the bipartisan Labor-Coalition alignment behind US militarism, including the Gaza genocide, now intensified by their line-up behind Trump.
There is nervousness in ruling circles that a minority federal government, whether led by Labor or the Coalition, could prove incapable of imposing the even greater cuts to public services and living conditions being demanded by the corporate elite in order to match the assault on government jobs and social programs being unleashed by Trump and his fellow oligarchs, such as Elon Musk.
Today’s AFR editorial again demanded the slashing of government spending, corporate taxes, working conditions and government regulations. It accused the Victorian Labor government of engaging in “bigger spending and higher taxing policies” that had “unsustainably expanded the size of the public sector and led to Victoria falling to at or near the bottom of the national league table on a range of key indicators, including productivity, household disposable income, and size of state debt.”
That means intensifying the assault on workers’ jobs, living conditions, public services and democratic rights, provoking intensive opposition and major social and class struggles.