Brent: Who is the next Jackie Kelly?

Who is the next Jackie Kelly? And the next Danna Vale? Or put another way: which seats tomorrow will be the next Lindsay and Hughes?

At the last change of government, in 1996, two Sydney seats shot out of the blue and into the annals of political folklore. While the national swing to the John Howard-led Coalition was five percent, Sydney’s south-west fringe went bananas, and two seats in particular, Hughes and Lindsay, surprised most observers by changing hands.

Macarthur, which borders both, actually swung by more, but as it was the then standard “bellwether seat”, few were surprised when former NSW Premier John Fahey won.

This table shows the swings in the three seats, as well as Greenway and Werriwa, also in the neighbourhood. They too got whopping swings, but were safer to begin with so didn’t change hands.

We heard a lot of silly stories about “battlers”, but it was changing demographics of the area – for example, increasing income – that did it. After every election a narrative vacuum appears – we all need a story to tell – into which the winning side shovels any old tale it thinks sounds good at the time.

Winners are automatically deemed to have done everything right in the campaign; the losing side ran a fiasco of repeated blunders.

So it was in 1996 that Federal Director Andrew Robb explained how clever he and his party were to preselect candidates of the quality of Kelly and Vale: no nonsense women with the common touch, “Howard” kind of people, graduates of the school of hard knocks. And, yes, appealing to those “battlers”.

Events this week showed that after eleven years in office the average Lindsay Liberal remains low on the food chain. And anyone who heard Kelly’s AM performance yesterday knows she is a nong. In reality both women were the sort of person who rises to preselection in seats their party believes they have not a snowflake’s chance of taking.

That is, they were in the right place at the right time. (Greenway and Werriwa’s 1996 Liberal candidates got huge swings too, but they didn’t win and so remain unfamous today.)

If Labor wins big tomorrow (the most likely result), the party will snatch some surprise seats, some they haven’t held in living memory. This happens at large changes of government. But what will be the surprises? If we knew that it wouldn’t be a surprise. But we can have a stab.

Ok, if Labor’s George Newhouse defeats Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth, no-one’s going to pretend his campaign was anything other than horrible. And Mike Bailey in North Sydney is already high profile. But one or two Labor candidates elsewhere – in Peter Costello’s seat of Higgins, in Kooyong, and Peter McGauran’s Gippsland (all in Victoria) and in Blair and Ryan (Queensland), perhaps – who you’ve never heard of, might – just might – do star turns this weekend.

They’ll be the next Kelly and Vale.