As political victories go, Labor’s win in the seat of Batman on Saturday night will go down as one of the standouts of recent times.



On paper the byelection was the Greens’ to lose. The party fielded a well-known candidate who has stood at several previous elections. Batman was a stronghold in terms of ground game infrastructure and resources, boasting the biggest local branch in the country. The Greens had been gaining on Labor in every federal election since 2004 and almost claimed the seat in 2016.

Batman byelection: Labor's Ged Kearney defeats Greens' Alex Bhathal Read more

But Labor held the seat on Saturday night, winning on primary votes and on preference flows, and recording positive swings in the south of the electorate in suburbs regarded as having already crossed over to the Greens.

Labor is constantly grappling with the challenge of speaking to its two constituencies – the post-materialist swinging progressive voters who defect to the Greens on moral triggers, and its core constituency of working people.

Ged Kearney – unlike her accident-prone predecessor, David Feeney – proved herself a fusion candidate capable of speaking to both constituencies, boosted by a powerful bloc of institutional support and a volunteer army blasting wind in her sails.

Saturday night’s contest demonstrates that the right candidate and the right campaign messages can make a big difference in inner-city contests where Labor is sandbagging against a political insurgency from the left.

It demonstrates that the inevitability of the rise of the Greens based on demographic change in inner-urban Australia perhaps isn’t entirely inevitable.

There was turbulence in the closing week of the campaign for Labor, with a stuff-up in campaign materials that caused deep offence in the Macedonian community, and after Bill Shorten’s announcement that Labor would end cash rebates for excess imputation credits for individuals and superannuation funds – a development that had local strategists fearing a backlash.

While the messages in public from key Labor figures about the party’s prospects in Batman were always cautious, party research indicated the party had a strong chance of holding the seat during the final week – those stuff-ups notwithstanding – although it suggested the result would go down to the wire.

Labor holding Batman is a boost for Shorten, who had braced for the worst, and a blow for the Greens and their party leader, Richard Di Natale.

Implicitly referencing inevitable internal bloodletting after factional infighting put a drag on the Batman campaign, the Greens candidate, Alex Bhathal, said on Saturday night, more in hope than in certainty, that she wished that the party would “be kind to ourselves and each other” in the wake of the loss.

Frankly, that seems unlikely.

So what’s the main wash-up of super Saturday?

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There were two electoral contests in Australia on Saturday night where a third party attempted to go toe to toe with a party of government and, despite registering a healthy protest vote – a trend that certainly can’t be ignored by major-party politics – both insurgencies pulled up short.

Nick Xenophon in South Australia struggled to convince voters he had a coherent platform in a genuine three-way fight, and the Greens in Batman ran a campaign heavily reliant on negative messaging against Labor, which proved something of a drag when progressive voters would prefer a centre-left government to a conservative one.

Kearney attempted to channel that momentum for Labor in her victory speech. She thanked the people of Batman for breaking her way, and she promised she would faithfully represent their interests in Canberra.

“This is a victory for true Labor values,” Kearney told her true believers. “Labor is on its way to a Shorten Labor government.”