NSW local government elections: has western Sydney turned right?

Pointing to swings of 10-20 per cent in parts of Western Sydney to Liberal candidates standing in the September 8 local council elections, media commentators are claiming traditional working class areas have deserted Labor and rejected the Greens, instead choosing to shift rightwards.

The Sydney Morning Heraldheadlined its September 10 edition: "Change in the air as Libs take over Labor strongholds." The previous day's Sunday Telegraph argued "Urban voters dump Greens." Seemingly drawing a similar conclusion, Greens NSW MP David Shoebridge said on September 9 "the electorate's mood was clearly conservative".

Such views fail to take into consideration the deeper trends underway in these working class and largely migrant areas. Rather, these claims are part of a campaign to further push politics to the right, and lay the basis of a new wave of attacks by the Liberal state government.

Liberals consolidate anti-Labor vote

There is no doubt the Liberals made important gains in Western Sydney, symbolised by the big victory for their mayor candidate in Liverpool, a traditional Labor area.

With a swing of 23.6 per cent, the Liberal candidate for Liverpool Mayor more than doubled the party's 2008 local council election result to 38,292 votes. But to argue that the rise in votes was due to a desertion of Labor voters has little basis in facts.

For one, the swing against Labor was much smaller (5.2 per cent) which in real terms meant it lost less than 2,000 votes. Clearly most of the new Liberal votes in Liverpool did not come from Labor. Instead, the votes mostly came from those who had previously voted for independent candidates.

The combined vote for the five independent candidates who stood in the 2008 mayoral elections surpassed Labor's vote, but this year the vote for independent mayoral candidates fell by more than 16,000.

A similar pattern was repeated elsewhere in Western Sydney.

The starkest example is Auburn, which despite the huge overall swing to the Liberals in the last state election, remained one of the safest state Labor seats. There, the Liberals council election vote more than doubled, from 3,734 votes to 7,709, in the process overtaking the Labor vote. But Labor's vote actually slightly increased from 6,827 to 6,993.

The rise in votes for the Liberals is largely explained by the implosion of Unity's vote, which fell by more than 3400.

The main factor behind the rise in the Liberal vote was its ability to consolidate the existing anti-Labor vote that was previously dispersed among other independents or centre/centre-right groups.

In some places, such as Liverpool and Auburn, this was enough to overtake the Labor vote, but the Liberals still trailed in most of Western Sydney, such as Blacktown, Bankstown, Campbelltown, Fairfield and Penrith - although Fairfield and Penrith has no officially endorsed Liberal candidates.

Moreover, the Liberal vote fell well short of representing a majority of votes cast on the day. Forty per cent of overall votes in Liverpool were for the Liberals, 20 per cent in Auburn and less than 30 per cent in Holroyd.

Where did Labor's votes go?

However, this is not the sole explanation. In some areas, falling Labor votes did contribute to the rise in support for the Liberals. But the results were uneven and did not take place across Western Sydney.

In Blacktown, the Liberal vote rose, but not enough to outpoll Labor. Some of the higher Liberal vote can be put down to a fall in the vote for independent candidates, but some of the growth was also due to Labor voters shifting over.

Most of this seepage seems to confirm that the Liberals have consolidated its vote among the mainly white, aspirational voters - the so-called "Howard battlers" - that have congregated in the new growth centres of outer Western Sydney, as well as the northwest where the Liberals have been strong for some time.

The Liberals' rampant attacks on refugees and the carbon price, among other policies, have helped this process along. But these votes only represented a fraction of the overall number of votes Labor lost on September 8, and accounted for almost none of the seepage away from Labor in the more migrant areas of Parramatta, Holroyd and Fairfield.

One section of Labor's votes went to informal vote, which rose as high as 10-18 per cent in migrant, working class areas such as Granville and Fairfield.

The largest block of votes, however, chose to leave Labor without going over to the Liberals.

In Fairfield, where there was no officially endorsed Liberal candidate for mayor, Labor was safely returned. However, they lost more than 15,000 voters in the process (roughly 25 per cent of its previous vote). Sitting independent Councillor Nhan Tran scored almost double the votes of the unofficial Liberal candidate.

In the stronger Labor areas of Parramatta Council the ALP vote dropped sharply. It fell 65 per cent in the council's Arthur Phillip ward and 20 per cent in the Woodville ward. The Liberal vote stayed the same in Arthur Phillip and only rose slightly in Woodville. Instead, independent candidates of different stripes picked up some of these votes.

Another beneficiary in Arthur Phillip ward was the Greens who polled 9.3 per cent in their first campaign for Parramatta council. After preferences were distributed, the Greens candidate Phil Bradley came within three votes of winning the third councillor position for the ward which last time had gone to Labor.

Greens went backwards?

What about the Greens more generally? Again, there is little evidence that the Greens went backwards in Western Sydney.

These elections represented the first election outing of the Greens in many parts of Western Sydney. But even when compared to the 2011 state election result, it can be argued that in many places the Greens vote grew.

While in Blacktown they went backwards, the Greens' got there first councillor elected in Penrith, where their vote ranged from 3.97 per cent to 7.76 per cent across the three wards. This compared with 4.1 per cent in the one ward they contested last time.

In Parramatta, where the Greens stood for the first time and contested three of five  wards, it picked up between 8.7 per cent and 10.79 per cent of the vote - higher than the 8.5 per cent result it received last year in the state seat of Parramatta.

In Liverpool, it appears many of the voters that deserted Labor, voted Greens when they were given the option. The Greens candidate received 4.08 per cent of the vote for mayor, or 3,601 votes, which was greater than the number of votes Labor lost compared with 2008.

The Liverpool Greens candidates for council also received 5.54 per cent in the northward and 5.43 per cent in southward. This compares favorably with the 5.7 per cent and 3.9 per cent that Greens candidates received in the state seats that cover these areas.

The Greens were in with a fighting chance to pick up its first seat on Fairfield Council in the Parks ward. They polled 9.66 per cent and a preferences count was underway to decide the final outcome.

The Greens won 6.6 per cent in the state seat of Fairfield last year. In Auburn, the Greens lost about 130 votes in second ward compared with 2008, and failed to re-elect their sitting councillor. However, a candidate further to the left took the Greens' place on council: local activist and Communist Party of Australia member Tony Oldfield, whose vote rose by 500 to outpoll the Greens.

The need for a working class alternative

So what can we conclude from all this? First, that there is little evidence to back up the assertions that Western Sydney has swung to the right or turned on the Greens.

The rise in the Liberal vote can be largely attributed to its ability to coalesce the existing anti-Labor vote, winning over those that had previously voted for independents or centre/centre-right groups.

A smaller, but not insignificant number of new Liberal voters represent the further consolidation of its base among the mainly white, aspirational voters in the new growth centres of Western Sydney.

In more migrant, working class areas, the rise in the Liberal vote was far less than the fall in Labor's vote. A significant amount of voters in these areas are clearly fed up with Labor but refused to hand their vote to the Liberals.

Many of these votes went to a variety of independent candidates, but where the Greens presented themselves as an alternative, they too saw their vote rise, although arguably less than it could have.

Rather than a change in the air, what we have is a continuation within Western Sydney of the disillusionment with the neoliberal agenda of the two major parties, one the Greens have only partially been able to tap into.

The corporate media and Liberal politician's talk of a big right-wing swing obscures the reality that the Liberals are a long way from convincing most Western Sydney residents of their racist, anti-working class agenda. Instead, they hope to use this campaign to give legitimacy to further attacks by the NSW Liberal government against working class people.

This would seem to be case with the state government's announcement of massive cuts to education in the days after the elections. The public reaction against the move also shows how out of step the campaign is with reality.

A further element in the media campaign, one that has been strongly echoed by Labor leaders, is the attempt to portray voters as having rejected the progressive policies of the Greens.

While Labor's response demonstrates their continued belief that to regain support requires shifting the party further to the right, the actual evidence shows why the Greens should take the opposite approach.

Building on their successes to sink deeper roots into working-class, migrant areas is key not only to increasing the Greens overall vote, but to consolidate it as a genuine left-wing alternative to Labor.

Whether the Liberals succeed or not in carrying out their attacks will depend on the left's ability to unite the dispersed forces that oppose the Liberal agenda and reject Labor's continued drift to the right.

The election results show this not only requires campaigning in the unions, universities and communities, but taking up the task of building a real political alternative capable of challenging the major parties in the streets and at election time.