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Johnson Mirzai is an Australian citizen with opinions, and whether they reflect a bigger story is unknown a week before the May 3 election. He’s 66, has four children and five grandchildren, and before he retired he was a machine operator. He’s in T-shirt and jeans, chatting over a flat white with mates in the Macquarie Mall in Liverpool, a 50-minute drive from the postcard Sydney of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge.

At one end of the mall is an imposing Westfield shopping centre, and to the side is the historic St Luke’s Liverpool church, where elderly men, many on walkers and mobility scooters, play chess outside and chat in the sun. The strip of shops indicates that this area, in the federal seat of Werriwa in south-west Sydney, is what’s known as diverse: Long Phuong beauty salon, Vietnam food and bubble tea, a discount store (“Never Pay Full Price Again”), Al Afrah Jewellery.

Mirzai lives in a community housing project, but nonetheless his rent has risen to about $240 a week, up more than $100 in recent years, he says. He knows that inflation and high prices are international phenomena, and gets that governments can’t solve everything (although he wishes the government would do something about Coles and Woolworths: “They are ripping people off left, right and centre.”)

“I always voted Labor. I grew up in a tradition with Bob Hawke, Bobby baby,” he says. He ticked the box for Labor at the 2022 election, but this time, for the first time, he’s voting Liberal, mainly as a protest against the shock of high prices. “It’s a big decision for me, but I have already made my mind up,” he says. As for Liberal leader Peter Dutton, it’s a shrug: “Why not give him a go?”

Mirzai’s decision is “bloody oath” due to the cost of food, the cost of medicines. “Thank god” he doesn’t own a car. He manages a self-aware smile when he says that when he meets friends for coffee, he orders no more than one. And he notices people around him. One study commissioned by the ABC found that 93 per cent of those who rent in Werriwa suffer “stress”, meaning at least a third of their income goes towards housing costs. “People are doing it hard, they give you a smile, but I can see it in their faces.”

Voting is as much an emotional as a rational decision. Whether a Dutton-led Liberal government would ease the troubles of people like Mirzai is doubtful,
but he’s lost trust in Australia’s political system and especially in Labor, Australia’s oldest political party and one of the oldest social democratic parties in the world. Werriwa is the heart of the heartland, held continuously by Labor since 1934, although redistributions have shifted its boundaries. Its luminaries include former prime minister Gough Whitlam, Hawke-era minister John Kerin and, less comfortably, former leader Mark Latham.

Whether Liberal candidate Sam Kayal defeats Labor’s MP Anne Stanley in Werriwa or not, or whether Labor’s disciplined campaign rewards it with minority or majority government, it won’t camouflage the slow-moving but inexorable shift across the country over the past two decades. Labor, founded to represent the interests of the unionised working class against the ruling class, has been haemorrhaging support in its once-assumed seats in the outer suburbs of major cities, especially in Sydney and Melbourne. This election will reveal whether it can turn that around.

In 2022, Labor won government and Stanley, 63, who still lives in the house she grew up in Werriwa, was re-elected with a 5.3 per cent margin. It’s now officially a marginal seat where, not long ago, that was unthinkable. Stanley, quietly spoken and thoughtful, understands the frustration about long-neglected infrastructure in the outer suburbs and the pain of rising prices in low-income suburbs. She is well aware that Werriwa is one of the seats the Liberals are convinced is a struggle-town electorate within its grasp, so much so that it held its campaign launch in Liverpool. So it’s getting attention: promises of a new urgent care clinic – bulk billed, no appointment necessary – and a $1  billion upgrade to the notorious Fifteenth Avenue, a road connecting western Sydney to what will be the new international airport.

At the announcement, NSW Premier Chris Minns, whose government will pay half the cost, called the two-lane road a congested “goat track”. Albanese acknowledged the “cracker of a project” had been “sitting on the books for a long period of time”. (The Liberals have matched the promises.) “These poor people spend, you know, so much time on that road,” says Stanley. “Would I like to have seen this road upgraded five or 10 years ago? Absolutely.” Both her parents voted Labor and so did her grandparents. “We’ve changed a little bit as a society. My parents’ generation, you basically chose a party, and that was really the only option, there weren’t a lot of independents or other options. We should just listen to what we can do better.”

Werriwa ALP MP Anne Stanley says the party should listen to suggestions on how it could improve.Credit: Brent Lewin

Look more closely at seats like Werriwa and you can see Labor’s problem. Stanley’s primary vote – where people put a number “1″ against her name – dropped almost 8 per cent at the last election. Support for the Liberals’ Kayal also fell more than 4 per cent, while right-wing parties, such as United Australia and the Liberal Democrats, attracted more than 8 per cent each. Labor spectacularly lost the adjacent seat of Fowler, which it had held since its creation in 1984, to independent Dai Le after it assumed locals wouldn’t care if it parachuted in a northern beaches outsider, former NSW premier and senator Kristina Keneally. The primary swing against Labor there was more than 18 per cent.

‘What has the government done for this area? They’ve done nothing. They take it for granted.’

Look closer still at Werriwa booths in the suburbs of the old Green Valley Housing Estate, built by the state government in the early 1960s during another housing crisis (with echoes of 2025, residents complained bitterly that the estate was built long before the services arrived). The swings were huge. Green Valley East: Labor’s primary vote down almost 18 per cent; Green Valley North, down close to 12 per cent; Green Valley West, down 17.5 per cent.

At the Green Valley Plaza, Mark Xuereb, a former truck driver, keeps an eye on a trolley of groceries while his wife picks up $73 in medicines at the chemist. “I’m 55 years old, and I’ve always voted Labor like everyone else,” he says.

Xuereb’s rent has risen three times in the past year; buying food is about bulk-buying specials to freeze, and he can no longer afford comprehensive car insurance for his 2016 car. He’ll probably vote Labor again, but without enthusiasm.

“If you were to ask anybody around here, what has the government done for this area? They’ve done nothing. They take it for granted.”

Werriwa voter Mark Xuereb, who will probably vote Labor as usual but this time without enthusiasm – especially after copping rent, food and insurance increases.Credit: Brent Lewin

Liberal candidate Kayal, a 52-year-old accountant, arrived in Australia from Lebanon as child – his father worked in a factory, his mother a homemaker. He was once a member of the ALP. “I feel like the Labor Party left the workers, the working class, many years ago,” he says. “The Liberal Party is really the party of the workers, of families, aspirational Australians.”

That view can seem more wish than reality, especially given the party’s poor start to the campaign. The idea that the realignment of Australian politics will one day confirm the Liberal Party as the natural home of “battlers” has been flirted with before – Howard’s western Sydney battlers in the 1996 election, for instance – but........

© The Age