East Hills
Margin: Liberal 0.2%
Region: South-Western Sydney
Federal: Hughes (44%)/Banks (33%)/Blaxland (24%)
Candidates in ballot paper order
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ASTRID O’NEILL CAMERON MURPHY VIOLET ABDULLA JEAN RUSSELL GLENN BROOKES |
2011 BOOTH RESULTS MAP |
PAST RESULTS |
DEMOGRAPHICS |
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Two-party preferred booth results from 2011 state election showing Liberal majority in blue and Labor in red. New boundaries in thicker blue lines, old ones in thinner red lines. Boundary data courtesy of Ben Raue of The Tally Room.
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The south-western Sydney seat of East Hills was on the list of seats Labor lost for the first time in 2011, when a 14.7% swing to the Liberals narrowly accounted for a margin of 14.1%. Centred 15 kilometres from central Sydney, the electorate is bounded by Georges River to the south and west, and by Salt Pan Creek to the east. The suburb of East Hills is at the south-western end of the electorate, which extends northwards to Condell Park and eastwards to Padstow. The redistribution has added around 3750 voters in southern Georges Hall, formerly in Bankstown, shaving 0.4% from the Liberal margin.
The electorate of East Hills was created in 1953 and held for Labor after 1999 by Alan Ashton, a former school teacher and ministerial adviser. Ashton mostly distinguished himself as an opponent of electricity privatisation, and failed to win significant promotion. He was defeated in 2011 by Glenn Brookes, a former Bankstown councillor succeeding on his third attempt as Liberal candidate.
Labor has a high-profile candidate for the coming election in Cameron Murphy, former president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties and son of Lionel Murphy, the Whitlam government Attorney-General and controversial High Court justice. Murphy won a rank-and-file preselection ballot with 103 votes versus 61 for Nicole Campbell, a former Ryde councillor and veteran of two unsuccessful campaigns against John Howard in Bennelong, along with the even more unsuccessful Ryde state by-election of October 2008.