We haven’t had an update from the count in Wills since Sunday night, but there are some interesting patterns emerging in this once rusted-on Labor seat in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
As the election campaign got underway, ABC election analyst Antony Green noted that while media coverage concentrated on areas like Brunswick and Coburg, where the demographic shifts have been most pronounced, the electorate went a long way beyond “the quinoa curtain along Bell Street”.
The quinoa curtain is a term long used to describe the cultural and political divide between inner-city Greens’ strongholds south of Bell Street, and Labor’s working-class base north of it.
That appears to have lost some of its importance, with shifts in voting breaking down the once-reliable split.
The drift to the Greens, largely from Labor, in what were once its strongest booths in Fawkner and Glenroy in the north of the seat, was stark.
At John Fawkner Secondary College, Labor MP Peter Khalil lost 20 per cent of his primary vote compared with the 2022 result, while the Greens’ Samantha Ratnam saw her primary vote at the school go up 26 per cent.
At Glenroy College, Labor’s primary vote fell 16 per cent while the Greens picked up 22 per cent more primary votes than last election.
And at Belle Vue Park Primary School, also in Glenroy, Labor’s primary vote dropped by 11 per cent and the Greens’ jumped 15 per cent.
These were the areas where Muslim Votes Matter campaigned hardest against Labor. The group targeted Wills, neighbouring Calwell (including Broadmeadows, Roxburgh Park and Craigieburn), and Bruce in the south-east (which includes Dandenong, Narre Warren and Berwick).
While the impact in Bruce and Calwell remains difficult to read, in Wills the group was claiming a big influence on Monday.
A Muslim Votes Matter sign in front of Brunswick’s Davies Street pre-polling centre.Credit: Clay Lucas
Roughly 10 per cent of voters in Wills are Muslim, and their numbers congregate in the electorate’s north.
Ghaith Krayem is the national spokesman for Muslim Votes Matter. He said the results were “an indicator of our ability to mobilise the local community and their openness to respond differently to how they have voted historically” in these areas.
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“We had an impact on the day,” Krayem said.
The group looks to tap into dissatisfaction in the Muslim community about how it perceived the Albanese government’s response to Israel’s actions in Gaza after the October 7 attacks and on rising Islamophobia in Australia.
The count is tight, but Khalil looks well-placed to retain the seat.
That’s because while Labor did worse in some parts of this electorate, which stretches from North Fitzroy and North Carlton in the south to Fawkner and Glenroy in the north, it did better at some of the booths further south in the seat.