Liberals left reeling as Victoria delivers knockout blow
Labor entered this federal campaign confronting an electoral reckoning in Melbourne. Instead, it is the Liberal Party facing a historic wipeout in Australia's second-largest city, with no seats gained and its two surviving metropolitan MPs on the brink of losing theirs.
While Keith Wolahan in Menzies and Michael Sukkar in Deakin have yet to concede their seats, they were both called for Labor on Saturday night. These likely losses underscore a disastrous campaign for the Liberal Party.
Elsewhere in Victoria, the once-safe Liberal seat of Flinders on the Mornington Peninsula and the growth-suburb electorate of Casey were also wobbly at the time of writing. By contrast, the Liberal Party, at the time of Peter Dutton's concession speech, had no chance of wresting any Victorian seats back from Labor.
Even Aston, a seat listed as nominally Liberal after a redrawing of its boundaries by the Australian Electoral Commission, stubbornly refused to turn blue. Instead, Labor MP Mary Doyle appears to have picked up a sizeable additional chunk of the primary vote.
Liberal-targeted seats such as Chisholm and Dunkley barely got a mention on election night.
If Wolahan and Sukkar cannot hold on, they will leave the entire area within Melbourne's metropolitan boundaries devoid of any federal Liberal MPs. It is a cataclysmic result for a party that at the start of the campaign saw Victoria as its path back to power.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, a state Labor leader whose face was plastered next to Anthony Albanese's in Liberal campaign ads, climbed a makeshift stage outside Melbourne's Trades Hall Council to acclaim a stunning result.
'We saw that Australians and Victorians had a choice,' she told a crowd of red T-shirted ALP supporters and union members. 'They said no to those blockers. They said yes to the builders. They said yes to the suburban rail loop. They said yes to airport rail.
'These results are not despite what we've done here in Victoria, they are because we have done the all we have.″
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