How new electoral boundaries have changed Sydney’s political map

An abolished seat, redrawn boundaries and resignations have reshaped Sydney’s political geography ahead of the federal election.

Most electorates in NSW will be contested under new boundaries in 2025 following a sweeping redistribution last year that cut the number of seats in the state from 47 to 46.

North Sydney, an electorate contested since the very first federal ballot in 1901, has been scrapped ending the political career of Kylea Tink, one of four teal independents to win Sydney seats in 2022.

Sydney’s big population and swag of marginal seats means the city’s voters are always crucial to the outcome of federal elections. In all, 31 electorates are wholly or partially within Greater Sydney, accounting for more than 20 per cent of the seats in the federal parliament.

Researcher Jim Reed, who conducts the Resolve Political Monitor (RPM) published by this masthead, says NSW, along with Victoria, will be especially important in the 2025 election.

Resolve’s polling shows federal Labor’s primary vote in NSW has fallen from 34 per cent in February 2024 to just 24 per cent in February 2025. (Labor’s primary vote in NSW was 33.4 per cent at the 2022 federal election.)

“That puts a lot of seats in play,” says Reed.

“You can get away with a slide like that in a smaller state, but when it happens in NSW, with so many seats up for grabs, it’s a death knell for majority government if Labor can’t pull that back.”

Reed says the combination of high house prices and rising mortgage costs during 2023 and 2024 have been a big factor driving down support for Labor.

“Those cumulative interest rate rises really hurt in NSW,” he says.

Sydney University professor of Australian politics Rodney Smith says the erosion in support for major parties, in NSW and nationally, is set to continue at this election.

“That makes it much trickier for the two-party groups that are campaigning for government because they’re not just campaigning against each other, they’re campaigning for the preferences of voters who don’t particularly like either of them,” he says.

In the 2004 federal election, the Coalition and Labor together received 82 per cent of first preference votes in NSW. The latest RPM poll shows that is now 20 percentage points lower at just 62 per cent.

A new ultra-marginal

The electorate of Bennelong, won narrowly by Labor in 2022, has notionally switched sides; the Liberal Party would have taken the seat last time if the new boundaries were in place by a tiny 0.04 per cent. That makes the division, once held by former prime minister John Howard, the state’s most marginal.

The battle for Bennelong this election will be between incumbent Labor MP and former Ryde mayor Jerome Laxale and Liberal hopeful Scott Yung, who almost defeated then NSW opposition leader and now Premier Chris Minns in the state seat of Kogarah in 2019.

Laxale says community ties will matter in Bennelong. “This year’s contest is between someone who has lived in the seat for nearly 20 years and someone who was parachuted in,” Laxale says. “This election is also a clear choice between a continued roll-out of renewable energy, or the long-term reliance on coal and gas and then risky and costly nuclear.”

Yung, meanwhile, says small businesses have thrived in Bennelong because of its “entrepreneurial community”.

But the cost of living was biting. “Families and young Australians alike are sharing with me that they can’t afford another three years of inflating rents, let alone purchase their own homes,” Yung says. “I’ll be fighting to ensure we build a strong economy and help make housing attainable again.”

Teal test

Sydney’s political map was transformed in 2022 when teal candidates snatched four blue ribbon Liberal strongholds in the city’s north and east.

This year, another heartland north shore Liberal electorate is in danger of falling after long-term senior Liberal frontbencher Paul Fletcher took his party by surprise and announced his resignation.

The Liberals have preselected Salesforce executive and former Liberal staffer Gisele Kapterian, who had been chosen to run in North Sydney before the seat was abolished, to contest the blue ribbon seat of Bradfield.

Teal candidate Nicolette Boele has maintained her campaign office in Lindfield, styling herself as the “Bradfield community independent” since the 2022 election, when she managed to slash Fletcher’s buffer, turning it into a marginal seat after she secured a primary vote of 20.89 per cent. The seat is now even more marginal after last year’s boundary redistribution.

Zali Steggall (Warringah) and Allegra Spender (Wentworth) are expected to retain their seats. Fellow teal MP Sophie Scamps will defend a smaller margin in the electorate of Mackellar against Liberal challenger James Brown, a former president of the Returned and Services League of Australia in NSW. Despite the tighter margin, the state seat of Pittwater, which overlaps Mackellar, last year elected the first teal MP to Macquarie Street, Jacqui Scruby.

The contest for western Sydney

There was an electoral boilover in western Sydney at the last election when independent Dai Le beat former NSW Labor premier Kristina Keneally in the electorate of Fowler, which had been safely in ALP hands since its creation in the early 1980s.

Le, a former Liberal Party member, holds the seat with a slender 1.1 per cent margin after the NSW redistribution. However, Sydney University professor Rodney Smith says Labor will need to overcome Le’s considerable “incumbency advantage” if it is to win back the seat.

“Le seems to have capitalised on that quite effectively,” he says.

Labor has preselected Tu Le to contest the seat. She was overlooked at the last election for Keneally, which turned out disastrously for the ALP.

Labor will be on the defensive elsewhere in western Sydney, where it holds a clutch of marginal seats.

Voters in the traditional Labor stronghold of Werriwa, west of Liverpool, have been hit hard by inflation and higher interest rates, and polling analysis indicates the seat is in the balance. Previous members for Werriwa include former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam (1952-1978) and former Labor leader Mark Latham (1994-2005). The incumbent is Anne Stanley.

In the electorate of Parramatta, held by high-profile economist Andrew Charlton, Labor’s margin was sliced by almost 1 percentage point to 3.7 per cent by the redistribution. Smith says this seat may also be in play.

“The vote in the Parramatta area does move around; we’ve seen that at the state level, the federal level and, for that matter, at local council level,” Smith says.

The Liberals’ most vulnerable Sydney seat is Banks in the south-western suburbs (+2.6 per cent), but the Coalition’s strong polling in NSW suggests it is not under threat.

Will Central Coast and Hunter be decisive?

A band of electorates across the Central Coast and Hunter districts could have a bearing on the overall election result. The ALP holds five seats on slim margins in that region, which has been hit hard by cost-of-living pressures: Robertson, Dobell, Shortland, Paterson and Hunter.

“Labor has only got to lose a couple of seats, and its majority in parliament is gone; that could happen in the Central Coast and Hunter alone,” says Reed.

Smith says electorates in the region have a history of going back and forth between the major parties.

“I think cost-of-living issues will hurt Labor in those seats, so I think it is vulnerable there,” he said.

Since becoming opposition leader in 2022, Peter Dutton has targeted outer suburban and urban fringe electorates like those in the Central Coast and Hunter; analysis of polling indicates the Coalition is doing well in those areas.

The seat of Robertson, which takes in Gosford and Woy Woy, is one of Labor’s most vulnerable seats (margin +2.2 per cent). It has changed hands four times in the past 30 years and has been held by the government of the day since 1983. The incumbent is Gordon Reid.

The ALP is concerned about its prospects in both Paterson (margin +2.6 per cent held by Meryl Swanson) and Hunter (+4.8 per cent by Dan Repacholi), a seat that has been in Labor hands since 1910. Labor was rattled in 2019 when One Nation candidate Stuart Bonds came close to unseating Hunter’s long-term MP Joel Fitzgibbon.

Bond is contesting the seat again. He says sitting Labor MP Dan Repacholi is liked, but the region’s ongoing concern about the future of the coal industry would make it difficult for the Olympic shooter to hold. The Nationals, with candidate Sue Gilroy, are hoping to take Hunter.

“This seat is definitely in play. Those people who voted against Labor in 2019 are not coming back to Labor. People like Dan, but they are suspicious of Albo,” Bond says.

The Liberal Party is also targeting the much safer ALP seat of Shortland (+6 per cent) held by federal Labor minister Pat Conroy. The Liberals believe they could snatch this seat for the first time in history on the back of concerns over cost of living, especially in the south of the electorate.

Labor is also battling to hold seats in the south of NSW. In the South Coast seat of Gilmore, held by the ALP’s Fiona Phillips by 0.2 per cent, Liberal challenger, former NSW transport minister Andrew Constance, is favoured to win after falling short in 2022 by less than 400 votes.

In the neighbouring electorate of Eden-Monaro a boundary change has sliced the ALP’s margin from 8.2 per cent to 6.1 per cent, and some polling analysis shows the seat is in play. All eyes will be on Queanbeyan, which is seen as the area of the electorate which will decide its fate.