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| Adam Carr's Election Archive
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Australian federal election, 2025
Division of Gilmore, New South Wales
Named for: Dame Mary Gilmore (1865-1962), poet and author
New South Wales South Coast: Batemans Bay, Berry, Kiama, Nowra, Ulladulla
Enrolment at 2019 election: 122,536
Enrolment at 2022 election: 127,603 (+04.3)
1999 republic referendum: No 57.5
2018 same-sex marriage survey: Yes 62.0
2023 Voice referendum: No 61.4
2007 Liberal majority over Labor: 4.1%
2010 Liberal majority over Labor: 5.3%
2013 Liberal majority over Labor: 2.6%
2016 Liberal majority over Labor: 0.7%
2019 Labor majority over Liberal: 2.6%
2022 Labor majority over Liberal: 0.2%
2025 notional Labor majority over Liberal: 0.2%
Status 2022: Very marginal Labor
Labor two-party vote 1984-2022
2022 results
Statistics and history
Announced candidates:
 |
 |
Andrew Constance
Liberal Party |
Fiona Phillips
Australian Labor Party |
Division of Gilmore
Gilmore was created in 1984, originally as a country seat running inland from the coast to Goulburn. The 1993 redistribution
turned it into a coastal seat based on Nowra and Kiama. On those boundaries it was a marginal seat, which Labor won in 1993,
but it grew safer for the Liberals after 1996. It is now mainly a farming, tourism and retirement seat, with the country's
third-highest proportion of over-65s and low levels of median family income, families with dependent children and dwellings
being purchased.
Joanna Gash, who won Gilmore for the Liberals in 1996, made no impact in
Canberra, but was very popular locally and held the seat without difficulty until she retired in 2013. She then arranged for one of her staffers,
Ann Sudmalis, to gain Liberal
endorsement. This provoked some local opposition, and the result was a 2.7% swing to Labor in a year when the Liberals were
winning government. The 2016 redistribution improved the seat for the Liberals by removing the Labor stronghold of Shellharbour
and adding Batemans Bay and Moruya, which are politically marginal. Despite this, there was a further 3.1% swing to Labor in 2016,
making Gilmore once again a highly marginal seat.
In September 2018 Sudmalis announced that she would not recontest the seat. Local Liberals elected Grant Schultz, a Milton estate
agent and son of former Liberal MHR for
Hume,
Alby Schultz, as the new candidate. But in January 2019 Prime Minister
Malcolm Turnbull
installed
Warren Mundine, a defector from Labor, as the Liberal candidate.
Mundine (who was ALP National President in 2006-07), lived in Sydney and was not a member of the Liberal Party. His imposition on the
seat provoked a local backlash, with both Schultz and the Nationals contesting the seat. The predictable result was the loss of the
seat to Labor, one of only two Labor gains at the 2019 election.
Fiona Phillips, Labor MP for Gilmore since 2019, was a tutor
at the University of Wollongong's Shoalhaven campus before her election. Since she owed her election in 2019 mainly to the divisions
in the Liberal Party and the unpopuarity of Mundine's candidacy, she was expected to lose in 2022 to
Andrew Constance, state MP for Bega since 2003 and a minister in the
NSW Coalition government. Instead she survived by 627 votes, leaving Gilmore as the most marginal seat in the country. Constance will
again be her opponent in 2025.
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