New resilience data reveals the depth of disadvantage in Melbourne’s north, where factories have disappeared, health services have fallen behind and Labor’s once-unshakeable support is crumbling. Victoria’s latest hospital funding pledge has only deepened the divide.

I grew up in Meadow Heights. It sits in the federal seat of Calwell, with Broadmeadows to its south and Craigieburn to its north, in the part of Melbourne that used to build the cars the rest of the country drove. Calwell was named for the man who belonged to a political generation that opened its doors to the world, which is fitting, because the migration program that followed filled this electorate. At first, European migrants moved for work, then followed Turkish and Lebanese families, Iraqi, Assyrian and Chaldean families after them, and Indian and Pakistani families in the new estates of Craigieburn. People came to Broadmeadows for one reason. There was work, across the countless workplaces dotted across the region.

This is a story about what happened when the work left, how the people who stayed have voted, and how the government of Victoria has treated them since. It uses the first resilience index ever built for Australia at suburb level, because the argument about neglect has always been made with anecdotes, and it can now be made with numbers.

How Calwell has voted

For most of its life Calwell was as safe as a Labor seat gets. Andrew Theophanous won it at its creation in 1984 with 68.8 per cent of the primary vote and 72.2 per cent after preferences, and Maria Vamvakinou held it from 2001 to 2025 with a two-party vote that sat in the high sixties for a generation: 69.3 per cent in 2007, 69.7 in 2010, 68.8 in 2019.

It was the sort of seat that was highly sought after within the Labor Party’s ranks, where its activists spent more time stacking its local membership branches than volunteering at campaigns. But whilst they were fixated internally, they turned a blind eye to a political erosion sweeping through its suburbs.

The erosion started on the primary vote, within clusters of families, a network of streets, bound by one experience, taken for granted. Labor polled 60 per cent of first preferences in 2007 and 54 in 2019. In 2022 it fell to 44.9. In 2025, with Vamvakinou retiring and Basem Abdo as the new candidate, it fell to 30.5 per cent, a swing of 14 points against a government that was winning a landslide everywhere else.

The erosion in support has little to do with its incumbents, as their party treated similar seats like it, as political fortresses that never needed renovations. The seat went to a full distribution of preferences for the first time. Three independents polled 29 per cent between them, and the final count was Abdo against Carly Moore, a former Hume mayor, 55 to 45. One voter in 10 cast an informal ballot. Labor still finished 65 to 35 against the Liberals on the notional two-party count, which is why the result was reported as a hold. On the ground it was a seat looking for somewhere else to go.

Our May 2026 federal MRP has Labor on 34 per cent in Calwell, One Nation on 21, the Liberals on 16 and the Greens on 8. Labor holds it, because One Nation cannot build a majority in a seat where one resident in 10 speaks limited English and the Iraqi, Lebanese and Turkish communities will not vote for Pauline Hanson.

But the seat is no longer safe in the way that word used to mean. It is held by the absence of an alternative. Furthermore, on the one measure in the index that best predicts the One Nation vote nationally, the share of people who feel like strangers in their own country, Calwell sits at 52 per cent, among the highest Labor seats in the country. The feeling is there. It has simply not found a party yet.

What globalisation took

Ford built cars at Broadmeadows from the late 1950s. The plant was the reason the suburb existed in the form it took, and the component makers, the panel shops and the clothing factories of Campbellfield, Somerton and Coolaroo grew up around it. For a generation a family could arrive with no English and be on a line within a week. The wages were not high. They were regular, and they came with a house, a life of dignity, rewarding hard work.

Then the tariff doctrine arrived. From the 1980s, the duty on an imported car started to fall, down to 5 per cent by 2010, and the industry that had been built behind it came down with it. Mitsubishi closed at Adelaide in 2008. In May 2013 Ford announced it would stop making cars in Australia, and 1,200 jobs with it. A countless number of young men, who I grew up with, were by then nearing middle age, were greeted with this new world. On 7........

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