Labor looks set to regain the vacant South Ward seat it previously held, but the more revealing story in the numbers is how sharply the Liberal vote has fallen since 2024 in a low-visibility, hard-edged by-election.
The first thing to say about this result is that it should not be overstated. Labor looks set to regain the vacant South Ward seat, but that is not the same thing as “winning South Ward”. This was a by-election for one casual vacancy only, not a full re-run of the ward. NSWEC makes clear that only South Ward electors were voting in this contest.
The second thing is that Labor’s result is solid without being some dramatic new breakthrough. At the 2021 ordinary election, the NSWEC page shows Labor’s South Ward group total at 21,696 votes, or 37.23%. Munjiza’s current by-election tally is 16,973 votes, or 37.21%. So on primary vote, Labor is basically back at its earlier South Ward level.
The sharper movement is on the Liberal side. In the 2024 South Ward councillor count, the tally credited to Labor’s Dr Betty Green was 17,528 (29.82%), while the tally credited to Liberal’s Fiona MacNaught was 22,747 (38.70%), from 58,781 total first-preference votes. Ned Mannoun is listed as withdrawn in that councillor count after winning the mayoral contest.
Those figures come from a grouped councillor election, so they are not a perfect like-for-like match with a single-candidate by-election. Even so, set against Dabbagh’s current 10,152 votes (22.25%), the scale of the Liberal drop is hard to miss.
That is why this by-election looks less like a Labor surge and more like a rejection of the Liberal project that sat behind the campaign. The Liberal push was heavily wrapped around the idea of “Ned Mannoun’s team” and the prospect of building a chamber majority. South Ward voters do not appear to have embraced that vision. On the numbers so far, they appear to have declined to endorse it.
There were other factors at work as well. This was an out-of-cycle by-election in just one ward, so many residents were simply not tuned into it in the way they would be for a full council election. NSWEC’s election-night tally showed 49,018 ballot papers visible in the count at that stage, from 84,632 electors, although part of the early-vote picture, including Casula Pre-Poll, was still not yet reflected in the published tally.
The timing did not help either. Coming at the end of the school holidays, the by-election lacked some of the usual polling-day community atmosphere. By local accounts, some school P&Cs were not in a position to run the usual democracy sausage stalls and election-day activity. That may sound like a small thing, but it is part of what gives polling day a sense of local presence and momentum. This by-election often felt quieter and flatter than a normal local vote.
And the tone of the campaign seems to have played a role too. In a race like this, negativity can energise a rusted-on base, but it can also turn off everyone else. Looking at the numbers, that appears to have hurt the major parties more than it helped them, and especially the Liberals. That is an interpretation rather than something the count can prove on its own, but it fits the broader pattern.
So the deeper read is fairly simple. Labor looks set to get back a seat it previously held. But the bigger political message is that the Liberal vote has fallen sharply in a contest that was sold as part of a broader governing project. If that trend holds through the rest of the count and the preference distribution, the lasting story of this by-election will not be that Labor found a new ceiling. It will be that South Ward voters declined to endorse the Liberal push for a majority in the chamber.
While the result now appears politically settled, the formal count is still continuing. Local Pulse will keep following the numbers as the remaining votes are processed and preferences begin to flow, with further analysis to come as the final margin and broader voting patterns become clearer.
Sources: NSW Electoral Commission; Australian Election Company.
