The seat of McEwen,on Melbourne’s northern fringe,(rural Lancefield and Woodend),is held by Labor’s Rob Mitchell. Liberal strategists believe,despite Mitchell’s 5 per cent margin,this seat could be a neck-and-neck contest.

It’s in these outer suburban seats that whatever vote the Palmer candidates attract,and where their preferences ultimately flow,could be decisive in the result.

Green thinks Labor’s troublesome seats this time around could be Dunkley and Corangamite.

While Melbourne’s commuter belt does not feature daily in the national media at the centre of electoral speculation,Labor and the Coalition are throwing everything at these swing seats.

“They’re getting plenty of attention,even if it’s all behind the scenes,” says Jill Sheppard,a politics lecturer at Canberra’s Australian National University who grew up on Melbourne’s south-eastern fringe.

Sheppard says if the poll is close,having two leaders from Sydney,and a lot of major media organisations based in Sydney will “just inevitably draw our attention to seats around their central coast or their south coast seats that are marginal”.

Sheppard says the media have a harder time crafting a narrative for Melbourne seats of the kind provided by western Sydney’s electorally oscillating growth belt,or Queensland as a “constantly swinging state that forms the basis of any electoral battleground”.

In many of Melbourne’s outer-suburban seats,according to one party campaigner,“it will be about how much the government can link Labor’s issues in outer-suburban seats at a state level to federal Labor”. His warning came a day after Morrison was in Melbourne attacking the Andrews government’s coronavirus household contact rules.

The city

The ABC’s Green points out that Labor has gained four seats courtesy of redistributions by the Australian Electoral Commission as the city grows.

“All of Labor’s gains since 2013 have been courtesy of boundary changes,and they’ve lost Chisholm,” says Green.

Chisholm (Burwood,Glen Waverley,Box Hill) is the Victorian seat with the tightest margin. Liberal Gladys Liu won it by 545 votes at the 2019 election and it will be a key focus for both parties. The eastern suburbs seat has a large Chinese community and the poll could serve as a test case for the reception of the Morrison government’s tough anti-China rhetoric among Australians of Chinese heritage,some of whom retain strong allegiances to the Chinese government.

Labor is said to regard Chisholm as the seat it would need to form government in its own right.

Liberal MP Katie Allen’s seat of Higgins – the formerly safe Liberal territory of ex-Treasurer Peter Costello which covers Toorak,Prahran and Glen Iris –is also,remarkably,in play, as demographics change and more younger voters move into apartments in South Yarra and Prahran.

Liberal Party sources,speaking anonymously to detail election strategy,said Treasurer Josh Frydenberg would in effect be the face of the Liberal Party in Victoria’s marginal seats. A Roy Morgan poll published this week found 46 per cent of Australians,and more than half of Victorians,preferred Frydenberg to Scott Morrison,who only attracted 28.5 per cent,as leader,and there is a belief in Labor that Morrison is so unpopular that any visit by him to a Victorian marginal seat during the campaign could turn people towards Labor or the independents.

But Frydenberg faces some problems of his own. His seat of Kooyong is coming under challenge from a climate-focused independent,Monique Ryan,whose signage is proliferating,and who some believe could snatch a piece of Liberal heartland away from the nation’s Treasurer.

In Goldstein,Green thinks independent and former journalist Zoe Daniel is a distinct chance. Liberal incumbent Tim Wilson “is in trouble”,Green says.

Strangio injects a note of caution,saying independent candidates “so often ... don’t deliver ultimately. They tend to talk up their chances endlessly”. That said,he believes Tim Wilson is more likely than Frydenberg to lose.

Zareh Ghazarian,another Monash politics academic,says the organisation of the independents this time around is better than previous tilts where their chances have been talked up.

“They’re mostly centred around metropolitan high-profile seats where they’re pitted against incumbent government MPs – prominent people like Josh Frydenberg.”

“But we’re also in the middle of a pandemic,so we don’t know what effect that will have,it’s a lot more unpredictable.”

Jacqueline Maley cuts through the noise of the federal election campaign with news,views and expert analysis.Sign up to our Australia Votes 2022 newsletter here.