Strangers in their own land: Victorian Labor forgot the suburbs that made it

Victorian Labor’s crisis is not just about leadership, but a decade of governing as though its western and north-western heartland would remain loyal while investment flowed elsewhere. Changing the leader may not be enough.

On the morning of Tuesday 28 July 2026, Jacinta Allan walked into a press conference and resigned as Premier of Victoria, a day after cross-factional delegations of her own MPs told her she had lost majority support in caucus. By that evening Ben Carroll, her deputy and the member for Niddrie, had been elected unopposed, seeing off a late counter-bid from Sonya Kilkenny that had more to do with vanity rather than the state’s future, with Gabrielle Williams elevated to the deputy’s job. Four months out from a state election, Victorian Labor had seen off its second premier in three years. Allan had held the job for two years and ten months and spent most of that time servicing decisions and putting out political fires that she inherited.

The proximate triggers were not mysterious. A Newspoll taken between 23 and 26 July put the Coalition ahead 52–48, recorded dissatisfaction with Allan above 70 per cent, and had the new Liberal leader, Jess Wilson, comfortably ahead as preferred premier.

A week earlier came the leak of an MRP survey commissioned by Trades Hall, that showed something far worse than a bad two-party-preferred number. Labor’s primary vote sat at 26 per cent: third, behind One Nation on 27, level with the Coalition on 26. The model’s own seat projection had Labor losing government.

On top of this sat the compounding weight of the CFMEU revelations and their contested estimate cost to the state’s infrastructure program, debt tracking toward $165 billion, a cancelled Commonwealth Games that still cost $598 million, and a premier whose net favourability had sunk somewhere between minus 37 and minus 42 depending on which pollster you asked. Allan’s parting line, that she had seen off two Liberal leaders and expected her successor would see off the third.

But polls are thermometers, not diseases. The diagnostic report tells you the patient is sick; it does not tell you why. The why? Victorian Labor’s crisis is written in its geography. The collapse is not happening in the seats the party spent a decade courting. It is happening in Melton and Sydenham, in Werribee and Tarneit, and Greenvale: the western and north-western crescent that built the Victorian labour movement and was, until about five minutes ago, considered so safe that no strategist wasted a Tuesday thinking about it. The party of the western suburbs is now fighting for its political life in the western suburbs.

One detail of this week’s transition functioned almost as a confession. In its hour of maximum peril, caucus reached for the member for Niddrie, whose electorate takes in Essendon Fields and Airport West, in the inner north-west. Carroll is the first Labor premier to sit in a seat on that side of the city since John Brumby, the member for Broadmeadows, left office in 2010. It took the imminent loss of the heartland to put the heartland back at the head of the table.

The old map

To understand how it came to this, you have to understand the electoral map Victorian Labor carried in its head for 30 years. In that mental map, elections were won and lost in a band of contested territory running through Melbourne’s east and south-east: the sandbelt seats along the Frankston line, the mortgage-belt marginals out through Glen Waverley and Ringwood, and beyond them the regional cities. That was where the Liberal Party lived, and therefore where campaigns were fought, where candidates were lavished, and, over time and, where governments were almost always built.

The north and west appeared on this map as a different colour entirely: not a battleground but a bank. Safe seats, factional furniture, preselection prizes. No accident this is the part of Melbourne where a lot of the branch stacking occurs. Places that supplied margins, members and money, and asked for nothing because nothing needed to be asked.

The Bracks and Brumby governments operated on this strategic logic too. They fought the Liberals in the east and the regions, and 1999 was famously won in Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong. But there was a corrective built into the leadership itself. Steve Bracks sat in Williamstown. John Brumby sat in Broadmeadows. Whatever the campaign map said, the premier of Victoria spent his Saturdays in the west, held his electorate events in the west, and drove past its infrastructure on the way home. The heartland had, at minimum, an ambassador in the room where the money was allocated.

Daniel Andrews broke that pattern without anyone quite noticing. His seat was Mulgrave, in the south-east. His political apprenticeship was served in the south-east: as an electorate officer for the federal member for Bruce from the mid-1990s, then as an assistant state secretary through the era when Labor’s existential contests were the knife-edge sandbelt and outer-eastern fights of the late 1990s and early 2000s. There is nothing dishonourable in any of that; it made him one of the most formidable campaigners in the country. But one’s early formation and professional development is destiny in politics. The seats you wake up at 3am thinking about are the ones you nearly lost, not the ones you never could. Under Andrews, the government’s cultural centre of gravity settled somewhere along the Pakenham line and stayed there for a decade. Allan, a premier from Bendigo East with her own version of the regional-cities map, inherited that gravity along with everything else.

The decade of the east

Look at the ledger. The signature project of the Andrews era, announced in August 2018, was the Suburban Rail Loop, and the stage that got funded, contracted and tunnelled, SRL East, runs from Cheltenham to Box Hill: 26 kilometres and six stations threaded entirely through Melbourne’s south-east and east. The state has committed roughly $30–34.5 billion to build it. Victoria’s Parliamentary Budget Office costed SRL East and North at $216.7 billion to build and operate out to 2084. Infrastructure Australia, in March 2025, took the extraordinary step of advising the Commonwealth that the project’s costs outweighed its benefits and that an “exit strategy” should be considered. And SRL West, the leg that would actually serve the fastest-growing municipalities in the nation? It remains, in the official language, undefined, with no timeframe. The west’s portion of the state’s largest-ever project is a dotted line on a brochure.

The North East Link, serving the eastern suburbs, was sold at $10 billion and is being delivered at $26.1 billion, the most expensive road project in Australian history, and the overrun alone exceeds everything spent on western rail in a generation. The Level Crossing Removal Project, the government’s proudest and most genuinely popular achievement, tells the same story in miniature: of the 110 crossings slated for removal, the Cranbourne–Pakenham corridor received 22 and the Frankston line 27. That is 49 removals, very nearly half the entire program, on two south-eastern corridors. The Werribee line, serving a growth corridor of some 400,000 people, received five, two of which were achieved by simply closing the road. The Metro Tunnel, to be fair, is a genuine gift to the north-west: it untangled the Sunbury line and connected it through the city core, though the promised Upfield and Craigieburn frequency upgrades were quietly cut from its scope along the way.

And what of the projects conceived for the west? The Western Rail Plan, promised at the 2018 election, with electrification to Melton and Wyndham Vale, new stations at Mt Atkinson and Tarneit West and track quadruplication, was never delivered; the quadruplication was dropped and the plan is now described, without apparent irony, as a work in progress. Geelong fast rail was cancelled outright in 2023. Melbourne Airport Rail, the north-west’s marquee project, was promised in 2018 with $5 billion each from Canberra and Spring Street, paused in 2023, and now will not reach the airport until 2033, a fifteen-year delivery window for a rail line every comparable city on earth already has.

The one mega-project the west did receive this decade, the West Gate Tunnel, arrived as a Transurban market-led proposal: costs ballooned from $5.5 billion to $10.2 billion, and the price of it is tolls on the new road until 2045 plus an extension of tolls on CityLink. The east got the Suburban Rail Loop as a gift from the treasury; the west got a road it will be paying Transurban for until mid-century.

Even the social infrastructure follows the gradient. Melton, a municipality of 231,000 people and the fastest-growing local government area in Australia, was promised a public hospital in the May 2022 budget, six months before an election. It will open in 2029, with “more than 100 beds.” The new Footscray Hospital, a $1.5 billion facility that opened in February 2026, is the genuine exception that tests the rule, and it is telling that it was promised in 2018, at the high-water mark of the government’s confidence, and delivered eight years later into an electorate where Labor can call one of its safest – a telling lesson.

Meanwhile, out west

While all this was being built elsewhere, the west did something no other part of Australia was doing: it exploded. Melton has been the fastest-growing municipality in the country for two years running: up 6.6 per cent in 2023–24 and another 5.8 per cent in 2024–25. Wyndham has been adding around 13,000 people a year, among the largest absolute gains of any LGA in the nation.

The suburbs setting national growth records are not abstractions: Fraser Rise–Plumpton grew 26 per cent in a single year; Tarneit North grew 20 per cent; Rockbank–Mount Cottrell has been adding four and a half thousand people annually. Melbourne’s western region held about 864,000 people at the 2021 census; it is projected to reach 1.47 million by 2046, a 70 per cent increase, the equivalent of absorbing an entire Adelaide. Infrastructure Victoria states flatly that Melton and Wyndham will lead every municipality in the state for population growth over the next decade.

Now hold that against the parts of Melbourne where the money went. The median age in Wyndham is 32. In Melton it is 33. In Boroondara it is 40; in Bayside, 45. More than 55 per cent of Wyndham households speak a language other than English at home; in Bayside the figure is under 20 per cent. The inner south-east holds its wealth in paid-off houses and superannuation: older, whiter, richer in assets and lighter in obligations. The west’s households post respectable incomes, but they are young dual-income families carrying the largest mortgages of their lives on house-and-land packages in Tarneit and Fraser Rise, which is precisely why the interest-rate cycle of 2022–24 landed on them like a piano, and why “cost of living” polls as the top issue in the growth corridors by a mile.

One Melbourne was ageing comfortably at the end of completed infrastructure. The other was young, diverse, leveraged, and stuck in traffic on a two-lane road built for farmers. The government spent the decade building for the first Melbourne.

The collection run

Here is the part that turns neglect into something closer to extraction. Victoria now collects more property tax per person than any state in the federation, at $2,120 per capita in 2023–24 and heading for $2,400 by 2026–27, and land transfer duty plus land tax now make up more than 40 per cent of all state tax revenue. And where is stamp duty generated at volume? At the point of sale. And no part of Australia has been selling more new homes than Melbourne’s west. Every one of those tens of thousands of settlements in Wyndham, Melton and Hume each year dropped tens of thousands of dollars of duty into consolidated revenue. The growth corridors became the treasury’s most reliable engine at precisely the moment the treasury’s spending flowed the other way across town.

The starkest exhibit is the tax designed specifically to prevent this. The Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution is levied exclusively on land in the growth municipalities of Wyndham, Melton, Hume, Whittlesea, Casey, Cardinia and Mitchell, for the explicit purpose of funding infrastructure in those communities. By mid-2016, roughly $176 million had been collected in cash, with more than half a billion in deferred liabilities accruing, and just $7.6 million had been spent. A third of that went on administration. The one revenue stream that was legally earmarked for the west sat banked while the west doubled. It is difficult to design a more perfect symbol: the growth suburbs paid a special tax for their own infrastructure, and for years the principal thing it funded was the cost of collecting it.

A government that rejoiced

It would be one thing if this were mere drift, the accumulated bias of a thousand business cases. But there was a period when the government came close to celebrating it. The 2018 landslide was the vindication of the eastern strategy: 57.3 per cent two-party-preferred, and a band of red across the eastern suburbs: Box Hill, Burwood, Mount Waverley, Ringwood, Bayswater, even Hawthorn, which Labor had won once in the previous 63 years. The Suburban Rail Loop was that campaign’s centrepiece, and its funded first stage traced, with suspicious precision, the very corridor of seats Labor was hunting.

Inside the party, 2018 was read as proof of concept: build where the contest is, and the contest rewards you. The heartland’s loyalty was priced at zero, because it had never once failed to deliver. The west was where the government went to collect. The east was where it went to build. And for one glorious November evening, the returns seemed to justify the model, with a Labor government toasting its capture of Hawthorn while Melton, the fastest-growing city in the nation, did not have a public hospital, an electrified rail line, or a plan for either.

The pivot that came too late

The first invoice arrived in 2022. Labor won the election comfortably, and everyone moved on, but the swings that night were not evenly distributed. They were concentrated in the west and north: Melton was driven down to a margin of 4.6 per cent, Sunbury to 6.4, Point Cook to 8.3, Werribee, Treasurer Tim Pallas’s own seat, from safe to merely comfortable. The government read it as a Covid hangover, lingering resentment from the lockdowns that had fallen hardest, in curfews and case numbers both, on the northern and western suburbs. It was partly that. It was also the first political audit of the decade.

The unmistakable warning came on 8 February 2025, in the Werribee by-election that followed Pallas’s retirement. Labor’s primary vote collapsed 16.5 points to 28.9 per cent. The two-party swing was 10.1 per cent. A seat Labor had held for generations was retained by 693 votes. And the government’s response mid-campaign was the pattern in miniature: a $333.5 million package of Werribee road upgrades, materialising in the four weeks the seat was in danger, after a decade in which it had not been. The voters of Werribee are not stupid. They can tell the difference between being invested in and being paid off.

By then, in fairness, the pivot was under way and had been since roughly 2018: Footscray Hospital delivered, the Melton hospital funded, the airport rail restarted, the Sunbury line through the Metro Tunnel, a $650 million Melton line upgrade and the Sunshine superhub in the works, Infrastructure Victoria now formally recommending Melton electrification by 2030. Much of that list was pushed hardest under Allan, who read the Werribee result as clearly as anyone in the building and moved money west faster than her predecessor ever had.

Every one of these is real. Every one of them is also an admission, and they share a fatal characteristic: infrastructure operates on a ten-year lag, and grievance operates in real time. A hospital opening in 2029 does not treat the resentment of 2026. You cannot electrify a decade of neglect in a single term, and you certainly cannot do it in a four-month campaign. That is not a charge against the premier who finally started. It is a charge against the decade that made starting necessary.

The horse had not merely bolted; it had been gone so long the paddock was subdivided and thousands of homes have been built where it grazes, with one road providing the exit from the new estate.

The bill

Ben Carroll’s first argument as Premier was that the stakes are too high to risk “a Liberal–One Nation government.” He may be right, and he brings assets to the fight: a genuine north-western base, 14 years in the seat next to the airport that still has no train, and the not-small advantage of a clean start with voters who had stopped listening to the government long before they stopped listening to any one leader.

But a party does not solve a structural problem by changing its spokesperson, and Victorian Labor’s problem is structural. For ten years it governed as though its base were a landform, permanent, load-bearing and incapable of movement, while directing the proceeds of that base’s own growth to the contested wealtheir suburbs across town. It taxed the west’s expansion at the highest per-capita rate in the nation, banked the growth-area levies, built a $35 billion railway through the east, and discovered its heartland only when the heartland began returning the favour. Allan was the leader standing there when that discovery was finally made, and she is the one who has paid for it. The authorship runs back much further than her premiership, which is exactly why removing her does not close the account.

The deepest irony is that the strategy worked right up until it destroyed itself. The eastern investments won the east, and in 2018 they won it spectacularly. But the electoral map that logic served no longer exists. The Liberal Party of the sandbelt wars is now led from Kew and polling 26; the real insurgency is coming through the growth corridors on Labor’s own flank, among voters no Liberal strategy ever reached. Labor spent a decade fortifying the front door while the family walked out the back.

On 28 November, the party will learn the price of the last ten years, and it will learn it in Melton and Werribee, in Sydenham and in many other seats, in the suburbs that made it, funded it, and finally stopped believing it was theirs.

 

Editor’s note: Kos Samaris appears a day later than normal this week, he will return to the regular spot next week