By Darren Gray
Massive swings in the country cost Brumby crucial seats.
Before the weekend it was often said the state election would be won or lost in Victoria's regional cities. Since the poll, it's assumed that the challenge to Labor flopped in the bush. Both arguments are wrong.
First, not much changed in the regional cities: Labor hung on to seats around Bendigo, Ballarat and Geelong - except South Barwon - and was kicked out of office anyway.
On the second proposition, that Labor won the bush, it should be noted that the Coalition picked up four seats outside of Melbourne: Gembrook, Seymour, Gippsland East and South Barwon. These wins proved decisive.
Over the past three years The Age has covered local issues in every country electorate in Victoria. And here's the rub. Away from the regional cities of Bendigo, Ballarat and Geelong (and the rural seat of Ripon), the Labor brand is badly on the nose.
I have seen dozens of billboards blasting Labor over the north-south pipeline - and that's outside the Seymour electorate where it was built. These include large signs by the Loddon Valley Highway, as well as an eye-catching display by the Midland Highway at Stanhope, where a John Brumby effigy was stuffed into a pipe, two well-dressed legs and shoes dangling out the side.
Labor's two big water projects, the pipeline and desalination plant, smashed its vote in the seats where the projects are and hurt its vote elsewhere, as people questioned their validity and sympathised with others having them built in their backyard.
The Liberals smashed Labor in Gembrook and recorded a comfortable victory in South Barwon. Those seats were marginal and the results aren't a surprise, but what happened in the other two seats gained by the Coalition is telling.
In Gippsland East the Nationals recorded the biggest swing in the state to push out the independent Craig Ingram despite his popularity, profile and record. Some of the vote against Ingram was surely a vote against Labor and some of it a vote against independents after the federal poll result. But the Coalition also implemented a shrewd strategy.
Although in coalition, the two conservative parties each ran candidates in the seat to capture as much of the vote as possible. Confronted on two flanks, Ingram's resources were stretched. When the votes were in, Ingram won only two of 45 polling booths - and both in small centres.
Gippsland East has special meaning for the Coalition after Ingram's support for Labor in 1999. Perhaps the mood for change in Gippsland East crept up on Labor because it didn't hold the seat. Perhaps it was simply powerless, or maybe its gaze was on Bendigo, Ballarat and Geelong.
Before the poll 15 other Labor seats were more marginal than Seymour, which it held by a 6.66 per cent margin. It had been Labor for 11 years but fell after Labor's Ben Hardman was impaled by the controversial north-south pipeline. The $700 million water pipe - which currently carries only air - cut through the electorate, running across farmland and forest and destroyed Labor's chances in the seat.
More proof of the anti-Labor feeling in country Victoria can be seen in Morwell. For 36 years the seat was a Labor bastion thanks to blue-collar Latrobe Valley workers, until it was pinched by the Nationals in 2006.
On Saturday the Nationals had a thumping victory in Morwell. Presumably some of the result reflected anger towards Labor's plan to start closing the Hazelwood power station and uncertainty over the future of the native forestry industry. Labor's candidate collected a miserly 26.1 per cent of the primary vote. In 16 country seats Labor candidates recorded a primary vote under 30 per cent. In five other rural seats Labor's primary vote was between 30 and 37 per cent.
It will be a long way back for Labor in country Victoria.
Darren Gray is Age rural affairs reporter.