The transformation of Australian politics, in large part occurring in Australia’s outer suburbs, is an existential problem for the Liberal Party, writes IPA Adjunct Fellow Bradley Bowden.
In the 1989 film Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner (1955-), creates a field of dreams in an Iowa cornfield. Despite the farm’s precarious finances, whose ownership he shares with a non-resident brother, he builds a baseball field in the hope that paying customers will come from near and far to share a rural experience from a bygone era. Once built, the players who inhabit his field are, moreover, not flesh-and-blood products of the modern era but rather ghosts from Chicago’s 1919 White Sox team; players who are only visible to those who share Kinsella’s dream. When his brother demands the sale of the mortgaged property, a visiting writer, Terence Mann, played by James Earl Jones (1931-2024), tells Kinsella, “They [the public] will come for reasons they can’t even understand”. When streams of strangers do arrive, he predicts, it will “be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters” as they find a perfect sense of peace and security. At the film’s conclusion the predicted stream of customers arrive, rescuing the farm. All ends well. A bygone era is, momentarily, restored.
Collectively, these changes confront the Coalition with existential problems.
Between the 2013 federal election that saw Tony Abbott (1957-) score a decisive victory and the crushing defeat suffered by Peter Dutton (1970-) in 2025, millions of Australians found their own fields of dreams in Australia’s burgeoning outer suburbs. Between the 2022 and 2025 elections alone, Australia’s outer suburban population grew by 550,000. Three-quarters were of voting age. By 2025, more than five million Australians were at home in these suburbs.
In the wake of the Voice referendum of October 2023 the outer suburbs also became a field of dreams for those who identified an historic shift in the political landscape. Whereas the inner-suburbs, including the leafy domains that were once Liberal Party heartland, voted Yes, the Labor-voting outer suburbs typically recorded a No vote. In the lead-up to the 2025 elections it was thus hoped that Coalition gains in the outer suburbs would more than compensate for losses in the inner-suburbs. Instead, the Liberal Party lost virtually every metropolitan seat, whether in the inner- or outer-suburbs.
Many explanations for this disaster were offered. On the Right, most focused on tactical failings: the Coalition had squandered victory through an inept campaign; Dutton’s threat to return public servants to the office had alienated the outer-suburbs (even though, in truth, few public servants live in the outer suburbs); the Liberals had failed to differentiate their policies from those of Labor. On the Left, a myriad of commentators—overlooking the Voice result—argued the Coalition, rather than their own side of politics, was out of touch with ‘mainstream’ Australia.
Looking forward after the catastrophic defeat of 2025, there has also been a temptation to argue that the anti-progressive cause be resurrected without a radical rethink: that victory in the next election is a possibility if the Coalition simply articulates traditional values in a campaign modelled on Abbott’s 2013 victory. The bygone can—as it was in Kinsella’s Iowa cornfield—be restored. This article rejects this proposition. Instead, it argues the Coalition finds itself victim of far-reaching sociological and demographic trends that it itself oversaw between 2013 and 2022, and which have accelerated under Labor’s stewardship.
AUSTRALIA TRANSFORMED AND BOLTED HORSES
It is tempting to lay all the sins of contemporary Australia at the feet of the Albanese government. It is also wrong. The Coalition governments which ruled Australia between 2013 and 2022 are also culpable. As research by the IPA’s Kevin You indicates, the contribution of government spending to economic growth rose from 21 per cent of Gross Domestic Product in 2013 to 40 per cent in 2020 and 48 per cent in 2022. It currently sits at 55 per cent. (Government Spending the Biggest Contribution to Economic Growth IPA Research Note, December 2024.) This fuelled an expansion of public sector employment.
Between 2014 and 2022, as research by the IPA’s Lachlan Clark reveals, public sector employment rose by more than one-third, to 1.918 million. By August 2024 it sat at 2.577 million. (Australia’s Public Sector Surge: Labour Market Analysis of the Public and Private Sectors, 2014 to 2024, IPA, December 2024.) The problem for the Coalition in the 2025 election was thus not the demand that public servants return to the office but rather the sheer number of public servants, few of whom are ever likely to be Coalition supporters.
Immigration policies induced even more profound changes. Between 2013 and 2025, Australia’s population grew by almost one-fifth to 27.6 million. Most of this increase was due to immigration. Under the Coalition, migrant arrivals rose from 464,680 per year in 2014 to 618,360 per year in 2020. In the year to March 2023, 706,570 arrived—many under schemes introduced by the Morrison government (2018-2022) in its final months. Net immigration under the Coalition (July 2013 – June 2022) totalled 1,632,300. Between July 2022 and June 2024, the Albanese government oversaw the arrival of a further 981,160. (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Overseas Migration 2023-2024: Statistics on Australia’s international migration, by state and territory, country of birth, visa, age and sex, released 13 December 2024.)
Increased migration produced a surge in the percentage of the population that was foreign-born. As Figure 1 indicates, the Australian result far exceeded that which occurred in other Western societies. By 2024 the foreign-born represented 31.5 per cent of the total.
Significantly, those who arrived in the decade to 2024 came from different backgrounds and via different pathways from earlier generations of migrants. In order of importance, the top nine source nations for this immigrant wave were India, China, the Philippines, Nepal, Vietnam, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Colombia. Whereas, moreover, earlier migrants arrived as job-seekers on permanent visas, recent arrivals have typically come on temporary visas. Most of these have been held by international students. Even if they did not possess a degree on arrival, most possess one by the time they acquire citizenship. Although many do not obtain work in their field of study, these qualifications leave a mark. Academia is not a foreign land. Rather, it is something with which they have personal acquaintance.
While some recent migrants, notably those from the Philippines and Colombia, come from Catholic societies, most adhere to non-Christian beliefs: Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism. With most of the new arrivals settling in the suburban periphery, this has produced suburb after suburb where adherents of Islam and/or Hinduism easily outnumber the largest Christian denomination, which is invariably a Filipino-bolstered Catholicism. By 2021, 10 per cent of the Australian population worshipped in non-Christian religions. Among those aged between 25 and 39, a third of those who professed religious belief followed a faith other than Christianity. (ABS, Religious Affiliation in Australia: Exploration of the Changes in Reported Religion in the 2021 Census.) Support for Christianity has crashed. In 2021, only 43.9 per cent professed support. Few of those who do ever grace the inside of a Church. According to the National Church Life Survey, in 2022 only five per cent of Anglicans and 11 per cent of Catholics attended services on a weekly basis.
Support for Christianity has crashed.
Nationally, if we look across the political landscape, we detect constituencies that are far more significant than when Abbott was elected. There are more than 2.5 million public servants. Both the Indian and Chinese communities are probably in the vicinity of 1.5 million. There are more than one million Muslim Australians. There are also large communities of Vietnamese, Nepalese, South Sudanese, Somalis, Iranians, Lebanese, and Afghanis.
Collectively, these changes confront the Coalition with existential problems. Support for smaller government alienates public servants. Support for Israel alienates Muslims. Opposition to Communist China alienates many Chinese. Mention of immigration cuts alienates every migrant who wants to sponsor a parent or sibling. Appeals to Australia’s Judeo-Christian heritage alienate non-Christian religions. At the same time, the Coalition has lost its base in the leafy upper-class suburbs. Of the electorates held by the last four Liberal Prime Ministers—Bennelong (Howard), Warringah (Abbott), Wentworth (Turnbull), and Cook (Morrison)—only Cook is still Liberal held.
The scale of the changes that have occurred in Australia since 2013 means that, like it or not, some horses have bolted and are now irrecoverable. One of these is the belief that Australia can be rebuilt upon the basis of Christianity and the metaphysical and cultural values of a Judeo-Christian heritage. Such arguments court political disaster and social irrelevance. I say this not as an enemy of Christianity but as a follower, as someone who attends mass virtually every weekend. Yes, it is true, as Scott Hargreaves and I argue in two recent essays in our How Australia was Made Series—Greece and Rome: the Birth of Western Civilisation (500BC – AD354) and Christianity and the Rebirth of Western Civilisation (354-1274)—that Christianity acted as a transmission line through which the ideals of Greco-Roman antiquity (individualism, democracy, a balanced constitution, equality before the law) were transmitted to us. Australia, however, is a secular country, Section 116 of the Constitution stating:
The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or from prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.
It is this secularism, and Australia’s guarantee in terms of ‘the free exercise of any religion’, that needs to be emphasised if the Coalition is ever to regain federal office. Adherence to a non-Christian religion does not make one any less an Australian. Individualism, democracy, and equality before the law are the heritage of all. Calls for restricted immigration must also be balanced with guaranteed family reunion rights for current citizens. With this proviso one suspects that most recent migrants would support curtailed migration. It is, after all, the most recent immigrant whose job and home purchase prospects are most threatened by the next person off the plane—not those who have been here for generations.
Anthony Albanese at the opening of the newly renovated Khalsa Shaouni gurdwara (Sikh temple) in Plumpton, a rapidly growing suburb 30 kilometres northwest of Melbourne’s CBD.Photo: PM’s Office on X
DEMOGRAPHIC AND POLITICAL CHANGE IN MELBOURNE’S OUTER WEST
Since retiring from full-time employment at Griffith University in 2020, I have regularly driven across the flat basalt plain to the west and south-west of Melbourne’s CBD as I travel between my home in Victoria’s Western District and the unit I share with my wife, Peta, in Melbourne’s Docklands. Accompanied by my pug-dogs—Ted, Bill, and Cuchulainn— I have witnessed a profound alteration in the landscape as paddocks are swallowed by advancing suburbia. Whereas in 2013 virtually all this western region was represented by a single electorate, Lalor, by 2025 the region was represented by four electorates: Lalor, Gellibrand, Gorton, and Hawke.
The scale of the changes I have witnessed make the political knowledge one may have had in 2013 largely redundant. Electoral boundaries have changed. At the various polling booths, old populations have moved out. New ones have moved in. The ripple effects of the changes I have witnessed are, moreover, felt far and wide. In Melbourne’s east, the electorate of Higgins, once held by the Liberal Party’s deputy leader, Peter Costello (1957-), was abolished in 2025 to compensate for western growth. Other electorates have seen a reshaping of their boundaries as Melbourne’s outer-suburban sprawl extends ever outwards.
In driving towards the Western District, I can travel either due west through the suburbs of Deer Park and Sunshine or south-west via Point Cook, Truganina, Tarneit and Werribee. I will take the reader on the latter journey, exploring the shifting political fortunes in two electorates: Gellibrand and Lalor.
If we look at the headline two-party preferred results in Gellibrand and Lalor, along with the Yes/No result in the Voice referendum, as we do in Figures 2 and 3, the referendum result appears as aberration. In Gellibrand, a Yes vote was obtained by a thin margin. In Lalor, the No vote prevailed. Voters then, it superficially appears, returned to their old habits. In both electorates, the two-party preferred vote for Labor in 2025 was virtually identical with that obtained in 2013.
The sense of statis that one obtains by comparing the 2013 and 2025 results is deceptive. As is the case elsewhere in outer-suburban Melbourne, the 2013 and 2025 elections were fought on different boundaries as a new breed of voter flooded the region. In 2013, Gellibrand’s centre of gravity was the long-established suburb of Footscray. In 2023 and 2025, Footscray no longer belonged to Gellibrand. Instead, the electorate’s new centre of gravity lay to the south in the burgeoning suburbs of Truganina and Point Cook. In 2013, Lalor covered 1014 square kilometres, stretching from the borders of Tullamarine airport in the north to the vicinity of Avalon airport in the south. To the west, it stretched almost halfway to Ballarat. By 2023, it was one-third of its previous size, with its centre of gravity located in a trio of suburbs at its southern edge: Hoppers Crossing, Tarneit, and Werribee.
As Figures 4-6 indicate, the propensity to vote No in the Voice referendum and then cast a two-party preferred vote in favour of Labor is pronounced in Gellibrand and Lalor’s expanding southern suburbs.
At the Point Cook prepoll booth, where almost 15,000 voted in the Voice referendum, 55.6 per cent voted No in 2023. Less than two years later, only 37.6 per cent favoured their Liberal candidate—a swing of 18 per cent. Similar outcomes are apparent at the large Hoppers Crossing prepoll and Tarneit booths in the electorate of Lalor. Although in Tarneit a minority (47.3 per cent) cast a No vote in the Voice referendum, this exceeded the subsequent two-party preferred Liberal vote in the 2025 election by 17.6 per cent.
Who were these new voters, who defected to the No cause in 2023 only to return to (two-party preferred) Labor ranks in 2025? In his The Voice: Why Australians Voted to be Equal, IPA Senior Fellow, John Roskam, in seeking explanation for the fact that “a third of Labor voters voted No”, speculated that, “No voters may represent the last vestiges of the party’s old right-wing, working-class constituency”. While this summation is no doubt accurate in places such as regional Queensland and Tasmania, in the Gellibrand and Lalor electorates it is true only in shrinking pockets. Among the many pointers to change, those relating to religious affiliation are perhaps the most instructive. Accordingly in Figure 7 we chart changes in the proportional share commanded by the major denominations—Catholicism, Hinduism/Sikhism (considered together) and Islam—along with those recording no belief, in Point Cook between the 2011 and 2021 censuses.
In Figure 8, we chart changes in Tarneit. Significantly, it is not only Catholicism that has declined in importance. Those indicating no religious belief have also become proportionately less important. Conversely, Islam and, more particularly, Hinduism and Sikhism, have flourished.
The trends charted above, it must be noted, are not confined to Tarneit and Point Cook. Whereas 34.7 per cent of Tarneit’s population were Hindus or Sikhs in 2021, in Truganina the figure was 51.9 per cent. Another 19.7 per cent were Muslims or Buddhists. If I journey westward to my home in the Western District I travel through suburbs experiencing a similar transformation. In Sunshine, almost one-quarter of the population were Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, or Buddhists in 2021. In Sunshine West the figure was 43.3 per cent; a total that one suspects is much higher today than it was back then.
By comparison with voters in the 2013 election, the current residents of Tarneit and Point Cook are also better educated. By the time of the 2021 census, 70.2 per cent of Tarneit’s population over the age of 15 had a degree, postgraduate degree, graduate diploma or advanced diploma. In 2011, only 51.5 per cent boasted such qualifications. During the same period, the share of the total who held a vocational qualification fell from 31.6 per cent to 17.2 per cent. By 2021, there were more postgraduate degree holders in Tarneit (19.6 per cent of the over-15 total) than there were certificate holders.
Further large-scale immigration overwhelms our social infrastructure.
In Point Cook, the disparity between degree and diploma holders on the one hand and vocational certificate holders on the other is even more pronounced. Whereas the former comprised 76.7 per cent of the population in 2021, the latter represented only 14 per cent. When, therefore, commentators such as the former Labor senator John Black (1952-) indicate that the No-voting ‘working-class constituency’ was composed of the ‘lesser-educated’, such observations are only valid in relation to places like Tarneit and Point Cook if we compare them to Toorak or Kew. Trump may well have said “I love the poorly educated” and successfully harnessed their votes in the USA, but there is no similar dynamic in Australia.
Nor is it true—unless, again, we make Toorak and Kew our comparators—that Tarneit and Point Cook are the abode of the poor and the destitute. In 2025, the median house price in Tarneit was $655,000 and in Point Cook it was $770,000 (compared to a State-wide average of $983,000).
A walk down any Tarneit or Point Cook street reveals driveways full of BMWs, Mercedes, and other high-end cars. This is not to say that your typical worker in Tarneit or Point Cook is a BHP executive. In Tarneit, the top-three industries in terms of male employment are transport and storage, construction, and retail. The most important industries in terms of female employment are health and social assistance, retail, and education. For males in particular there is thus a mismatch between qualifications and jobs. Many degree holders are evidently working as truck drivers and construction workers. Rather than bemoaning their plight, however, they are doing what earlier generations of migrants did: take what is available and work hard.
WINNING THE OUTER SUBURBS
Our tour down the Princes Highway through Point Cook, Truganina, Hoppers Crossing, and Tarneit puts to bed the idea that the typical Labor-inclined voter in the Gellibrand and Lalor electorates who voted No in the 2023 Voice referendum is a ute-driving Anglo tradie. Instead, in these electorates, as in many others across outer suburbia, the typical Labor-inclined No voter is a degree-holding immigrant who speaks a language other than English at home and is more likely to attend a Hindu or Sikh temple, or a Muslim mosque, than a Catholic church. The fact that much of this new constituency voted No in the Voice referendum indicates that they have little inherent sympathy for the woke social issues advocated by the so-called progressive Left. Equally, their voting patterns in the 2025 election indicate deep-seated alienation from the Coalition. How then to win their enduring political support?
Sanctuary Lakes, Point Cook.Photo: Joe Bennett
By choosing a suburban life, this new constituency reveals an attraction to the same fields of dreams that attracted earlier immigrants: a life of peace, hard work, and middle-class prosperity in which they can watch their children achieve a decent education and, eventually, a suburban home of their own. In contemporary Australia, all these goals are problematic. Further large-scale immigration overwhelms our social infrastructure. Woke curriculum priorities devalue education measurably. Increased government indebtedness threatens our prosperity. If they have opportunities for family reunion, these new constituencies can thus be won to a liberal economic program that fosters initiative and opportunity.
Socially, these new constituencies are also instinctively conservative. As the Voice referendum reveals, they do not want one social or racial group to have rights that they do not enjoy. Nor, one suspects, do they want transgender boys in the school toilets of their daughters. If one avoids the topic of religion, cultural wars are thus a likely winner for the Coalition. What is not a winner, as we have previously argued, is a misguided effort to link one’s standing as a loyal Australian to either Christianity or a Judeo-Christian heritage. If the Coalition fails to adapt to these changed realities it will continue to experience a world of pain rather than a field of dreams.
This article from the Spring 2025 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Adjunct Fellow Bradley Bowden.
