Updated 30/05/2025

The outer-Melbourne electorate of Calwell was named “Australia’s most unpredictable seat” by The Age after the election and was – aside from those going to a recount – the last seat to be called. The AEC labelled the counting process for the seat “likely the most complex in Australia’s history”.

The count is complicated because, while Labor led on primary votes, the Liberals, Greens, and three independents each had a significant share of the vote. The AEC had no idea which candidate would make it to the final two alongside Labor, and then if any of them could win from there. In a very rare case, the AEC had to conduct a full count of the seat to an estimate of the final result, which still hasn’t finished (though Labor now seems assured of victory).

Calwell is extra interesting, because it is diverse. It’s one of the handful of electorates in Australia where most people speak a language other than English at home, as well as having one of the largest Muslim populations. Two independents and the Greens candidate made Labor’s response to the genocide in Gaza a significant issue in their campaign.

Despite how interesting Calwell is, most of the die-hard #Auspol fans wouldn’t have been able to find it on a map, let alone forecast it to be so interesting. There was no significant print coverage during the campaign. Even a keen follower of election news would be forgiven for never having heard of the seat, let alone in the context of being one of the election’s most complicated and potentially marginal electorates.

To have had an idea of how interesting Calwell was going to be before the 2025 election, you would have needed to be closely linked to the Calwell community, maybe even living there.

The lack of coverage is likely related to the fact that Calwell has the fewest local journalists of any seat in the country. According to ABS Census data, there are just four journalists living in the entire electorate.

As the table shows, Calwell is far from unique. Australia Institute research found that outer-metropolitan electorates have fewer journalists than even regional and rural seats. On average there are 31 journos in an outer-suburban seat. More than half of Australia’s 8,500 journalists live in the 43 seats classified as inner-metropolitan.

Of course, journalists can and do cover electorates that they don’t live in. But what Calwell shows is that the lack of local journalists, reflecting the lack of local news more broadly, has meant that Australia’s most interesting electoral race wasn’t covered until voting had closed.

This is all the more problematic and surprising because from early on in the campaign, the Liberals identified outer suburbs as key to Peter Dutton’s potential victory. It was the outer suburbs that journalists talked up as Dutton’s saving grace as late as 5:30pm on polling day.

But in the end, it wasn’t the polls that failed to grasp what was happening in seats like Calwell in Melbourne’s north and Blaxland in Sydney’s west, it was Australia’s political class more broadly. And the reason they didn’t understand is that there is no-one adequately telling the stories of these communities and explaining them to the rest of us.

This isn’t just problematic for election watchers; it’s sad for the rest of us. Why don’t we know what is happening in the communities around us? How can we have a cohesive society if we don’t know what’s going on?

Like many big problems, the answer is simple: more investment in local news. The most obvious place to start is properly resourcing the ABC so it can cover all parts of Australia, especially communities, such as Calwell, which are practical news deserts. Australia’s public broadcasters did direct attention to the suburban north-Melbourne electorate, with the ABC writing about local backlash to Labor’s response to the genocide in Gaza, and SBS highlighting local voter alienation (as well as hosting one of its two Election Exchanges there), but there was no significant print newspaper coverage. The ABC and SBS have shown they can serve communities like Calwell, they just need more resources to fully fill the gaps left by other media’s lack of attention.

But the ABC can’t do everything. Supporting and subsidising local news is an important part of the picture. There’s a lot that Australia can learn from Nordic countries, where journalism is treated as a public good in and of itself and governments have implemented measures to protect smaller independent outlets and ownership diversity.

While the result in Calwell shows that the press has lost touch with the people, the result in Australia shows that the people have lost touch with the press. The Federal Government has many possible avenues of reform which would ensure communities like Calwell are properly serviced by Australian journalism. It’s past time for them to intervene and make the Australian media industry one that genuinely represents the country.

Update 30/5/2025:

SBS contacted The Australia Institute to highlight its Federal Election Exchange program was held at Broadmeadows town hall in the seat of Calwell on April 23. On that day SBS conducted over 60 interviews with candidates for the senate and three electorates – Calwell, Fraser, and Maribyrnong. The election exchange resulted in coverage in SBS Arabic, SBS Vietnamese, SBS Mandarin, SBS Turkish, SBS Greek, SBS Italian, SBS Punjabi, SBS Spanish and NITV Radio.

SBS wrote that it ran its Election Exchange in Calwell “specifically because it is one of Australia’s most diverse seats, and serving Australia’s multicultural communities is part of SBS’ mandate.” The Australia Institute acknowledges that we overlooked SBS’s event in Calwell and note that its interviews provided its audience with valuable information about the views and priorities of local candidates.

SBS did valuable work covering Calwell’s candidates for voters in the electorate, but did not highlight the potential for the seat to become a historically complex election result. While no one can predict the future, SBS covered Calwell because of its mandate around multicultural communities, not because it had locally-based journalists that realised the potential for such an interesting election result.  SBS fulfilled its mandate, but so much more is needed to reverse the decline of local news in Australia, particularly in outer suburbs.