The battle for Bass

By Catherine Watson

IT TOOK two weeks of counting and recounting after the 2022 election to determine who had won the seat of Bass. Labor’s Jordan Crugnale finally retained the seat by just 202 votes ahead of Liberal candidate Aaron Brown, making Bass the tightest electorate in the state.

Four years on, the race looks very different. While nominally a three-cornered contest between Labor, Liberal and One Nation, the rank outsider of the three is Labor’s new candidate, Chris Buckingham.

Sportsbet is offering $26 on him winning, only marginally shorter than its infamous “Any Other” option. The two front runners, Liberal and One Nation, are battling it out for the finish line.

One Nation has never run a candidate in Bass before, but Nikole Schellekens has come in to $3.25, according to Sportsbet, while Liberal candidate Rochelle Halstead is leading down the straight at a near-unbackable $1.28. 

“For all of the mistakes we've made, we've made mistakes because we got shit done,” he said at the Phillip Island Conservation Society forum on Sunday. “We have delivered schools, we've delivered hospitals, we're delivering the energy transition.”

But voters have short memories. We want shiny new stuff, and there's not a lot on offer this time round from Labor: $5 million for a TAFE Gippsland campus in Wonthaggi, expansion of Wonthaggi Hospital's emergency department, $120,000 for a new scoreboard and solar panels at Dalyston Recreation Reserve, $400,000 for the Phillip Island Bowling Club and $1.6 million for the Inverloch-Kongwak FNC clubrooms.

One Nation's Nikole Schellekens has been critical of the Liberal spending spree. The first priority, she says, is to reduce the Victorian Government's $160 billion debt.

“At no point will you hear a dollar figure promised out of my mouth,” she has frequently stated. “We know that the books are cooked, and we've got to do a full audit.”

Liberal and One Nation are now so far out in front that they seem to have eyes only for each other.

In a final irony, if Ms Halstead, a Bass Coast councillor, is elected to Parliament on November 28, Ms Schellekens could be invited to take her place on the Bass Coast Shire Council through a countback of the 2024 Western Port ward election.

A bit of history

All the candidates – bar Family First candidate Ben Cauneac, who has only just entered the race – admit to feeling weary as they approach the finish line. The Labor and Liberal candidates have both been campaigning since the start of the year.

Bass is a difficult electorate, stretching from Melbourne's fast-growing south-eastern fringe (Cranbourne South and Clyde) through market gardens and farming country (Koo Wee Rup and Lang Lang) to the coastal towns and communities of Bass Coast. It's a sizeable patchwork of places with very different local concerns.

Bass has been a safe Liberal seat, under various names, for most of the past five decades, but it has also played a role in bringing down a Liberal government.

Former Wonthaggi mayor and Liberal Party leader Alan Brown was the MP for the equivalent seat, then known as West Gippsland and before that Western Port, from 1979 to 1996.

Brown's resignation in 1996 to take up the post of Victorian Agent-General in London forced a by-election for West Gippsland. It was considered such a safe seat that Labor didn't bother running a candidate. Instead, a local, Susan Davies, ran as an independent and unexpectedly won.

Ms Davies won again at the 1999 state election. She was one of three rural independents who held the balance of power and opted to support Labor, bringing a sudden and unexpected end to what had seemed a rampant Kennett Government.

The Liberal Party reclaimed the seat, now known as Bass, in 2002 and it stayed in Liberal hands until 2018. It was regarded as such a safe Liberal seat that neither major party paid it much attention. Bass was notoriously absent from the pork-barrelling.

That began to change in 2014 when Bass Coast councillor and former mayor Clare Le Serve stood as an independent, winning almost 12 per cent of the vote and turning the seat from safe Liberal to marginal.

The ALP took notice. Suddenly the money and promises started flowing into the electorate. To their cost, the Liberal Party didn't. 

At the 2018 election, Jordan Crugnale secured a seven-point swing to win the seat for Labor for the first time since Bass was created in 2002. The margin was just 1.8 per cent. At the 2022 election, it was even tighter, with just 202 votes separating Labor and Liberal.

What will we see in 2026?

In Bass, we've learnt the hard way that if we want things to happen, we need to keep the electorate marginal and the parties interested.

Whoever wins Bass on November 28, here's hoping it's not a landslide.