Ashburton Votes in the 2025 Federal Election

Solway booth with APS just above it (courtesy of The Age)

Now that the dust is settling on the 2025 Federal Election results, I can go back to following the trial of the poisoned mushroom lunch lady in Gippsland and enjoying this unseasonal warm weather.

But before I start contemplating whether Beef Wellington will ever be the same again, let’s look at how the results of the 2025 Federal Election shook out in Ashburton. For the record (this blog is now archived by Boroondara Library so I’m not just saying that!), the Australian Labor Party was re-elected for a second term.

On a local level, you’ll remember from my last post on this topic that:

1. Ashburton was previously in Higgins but is now in Chisholm.

2. The Ashburton Primary School voting booth always voted Liberal until 2022.

3. The movement of the polling booth on the south side of Ashburton from Craig Centre to Solway Primary School in 2013 caused a fundamental shift in the voting results away from Labor.

   
   

If you want to know more about all the history behind this, check out my previous post.

So how did things shake out this time?

Carina Garland’s velvet grip on Chisholm turns to iron

Carina Garland celebrates (courtesy of her Instagram page)

Carina Garland of the Labor Party previously held the seat with a 6 per cent margin. Pundits predicted that the Liberal Party would gain 3 per cent because of the inclusion of Liberal-leaning former Higgins voters and the loss of Labor-leaning Box Hill voters in the newly drawn electorate. This did not occur. In fact, votes swung to Garland by nearly 5 per cent, pushing the seat into “safe” seat territory.

Let’s take a look at what the hard-working folk at the AEC have to tell us:

First preference votes for Chisholm (57 polling places, 122,795 registered voters)

What this tells you – aside from that 1,309 people in this electorate voted for a “party” run by a billionaire Queenslander who refused to pay the workers in his defunct nickel mine for eight years and spent $50 million on annoying text messages and ruining the colour yellow for all time – is that Labor now holds this seat very firmly without the assistance of preferences.

Congratulations must go to Carina Garland who I have never met but seems like a genuinely nice lady because she follows me on Instagram. It will be a battle for any other party or candidate to take Chisholm now.

Now, let’s look at things at the local level.

Pre-polling at Ashburton Scout Hall

The gauntlet at 8.30 am. By COB there was a 2.5 hour wait.

One new element to this election was the unprecedented level of voting undertaken before the election date of 3 May. If you voted at the Ashburton Scout Hall during late April, you would’ve discovered it was like being attacked by a pack of primary-coloured grey nurse sharks. That’s because Ashburton Scout Hall hosted just over 18,000 voters from Chisholm, Kooyong and Menzies in the two-week period. Let’s see how they voted:

First Preferences at Ashburton Scout Hall for Chisholm

Number of voters: 12,214

First Preferences at Ashburton Scout Hall for Kooyong

Number of voters: 3,824

NB: At time of writing, the seat of Kooyong is leaning towards Monique Ryan but is yet to be called.

First Preferences at Ashburton Scout Hall for Menzies

Number of voters: 1,966

NB: At time of writing, the seat of Menzies was called for Labor but a re-count is underway.

Pundits speculated that pre-polling favoured the Liberal Party and this was certainly the case at the Ashburton Scout Hall.

Results show that 10 per cent of the Chisholm electorate voted before election day and 90 per cent of them at the Ashburton Scout Hall.

For reference, 888 Chisholm voters voted at the Blackburn pre-polling station where Carina Garland romped home with nearly half the primary vote. 245 Chisholm voters battled the traffic and Corflute Signage War to vote in Kew, where only five votes separated the Labor and Liberal candidates.

Now over to Election Day and let’s see what happened then.

First preferences at Ashburton Primary School

Number of voters: 1,669

First preferences at Solway Primary School

Number of voters: 1,494

Once again, more Ashburton Primary School votes go to Labor and more Solway Primary votes go to Liberal. But it’s certainly not a landslide either way. The Greens polled strongly in the area, 4% higher here than in the rest of Chisholm but over the mid-term, they’re bleeding votes. Let’s see how these results compare to the last few elections:

Ashburton election results, 2016-25

Now lets see it as a graph, because why not?

Ashburton and Solway election results 2015-25

How Ashburton compared to our neighbours, particularly in Glen Iris and Malvern East:

Voting around Ashburton in the 2025 Federal Election

So there you have it. Next year is a Census year so we’ll be able to see this with some demographic data and delve into it all more deeply.

Now back to more important things… I have it on good authority that women prefer poison as a form of murder so did she deliberately try to poison her in-laws with wild mushrooms or was it an accident?