Vote Compass: Australia's most left-leaning and right-leaning seats revealed

Updated

The Melbourne electorate of Batman is the most left-leaning in Australia, with Maranoa in outback Queensland retaining its 2013 title as the most right-leaning seat, according to data from the ABC's Vote Compass.

Some of the key findings include:

Queensland emerges as the country's most conservative state: nine out of the top 10 most right-leaning electorates in Australia are all in regional Queensland.

Victoria sits at the other end of the spectrum, making up five of the top 10 most left-leaning seats.

Labor's most right-leaning seat is Blair in Queensland.

Barton in Sydney is the most left-leaning seat with a sitting Liberal or National MP, although that reflects the fact there has been a redistribution, which now makes the seat marginally Labor.

That makes Deakin in Victoria the Coalition's most left-leaning seat once the new boundaries are factored in.

The most left-leaning seat, Batman, has been held by Labor since 1934 (except for a sitting Labor MP switching to independent in the 1960s), but sitting MP David Feeney is facing a strong challenge from the Greens this election.

Maranoa's sitting member, the LNP's Bruce Scott, is retiring. His replacement on the ticket, David Littleproud, is almost certain to retain the safe seat.

Explore our interactive chart, which ranks every seat in the country from the most left-leaning to the most right-leaning.

* With Clive Palmer having announced his retirement, Fairfax reverts to being a safe LNP seat.

Vote Compass determines how left-leaning or right-leaning electorates are based on the strength of responses, by people in each electorate, to the 30 main questions in the survey. The results shown are relative to other electorates - with Batman at 0 and Maranoa at 1 – and are not intended to represent left or right in absolute terms. These results are based on 297,891 respondents who participated in Vote Compass from May 8 to June 7, 2016. The data has been weighted to ensure the sample reflects the Australian population. [Read the Vote Compass data FAQ]

Topics: political-parties, federal-parliament, federal-government, federal-elections, australia

First posted