Regional Place-Based Identities and Party Strategies at the 2013 Federal Election

During the prime ministership of Julia Gillard themes of place-based identities were prominent in Australian political discourse. At the 2010 federal election Labor’s two-party-preferred vote reached historic highs in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania but fell sharply in Queensland and Western Australia. During the last year of the Gillard Government observers competed to produce more gloomy scenarios of a Labor collapse both in states such as Queensland and Western Australia and ill-defined regions such as ‘western Sydney’ (Kenny 2013; Shanahan 2012). On election night, 7 September 2013, these predictions were largely unfulfilled. The final result demonstrated a general, rather than regionally specific, estrangement from Labor. The largest swings against Labor were in the states where the Party had performed best in 2010 (see Antony Green’s chapter in this volume, Chapter 23).