The Division of Melbourne Ports was an Australian federal electoral division in the inner south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It was located to the south of Melbourne's central business district and covered an area of approximately 40 km2 around the north and north-eastern shores of Port Phillip Bay.
The electorate, formerly working class, was much more demographically diverse on its final boundaries, with rapidly accelerating inner-city gentrification and high-density housing developments in later years. It included Port Melbourne, but also included a number of middle and upper middle class suburbs such as Albert Park, Balaclava, Caulfield, Elwood, Middle Park, Ripponlea, South Melbourne and St Kilda. It was notable for having one of Australia's larger Jewish populations, at 9.9%, much higher than the nationwide 0.4%. It also had a high proportion of atheists and agnostics, with 38.8% of residents answering "No Religion" in the 2016 census, compared to 30.1% nationwide.[1] It also had a large gay and lesbian community.
Originally, it was anchored in the industrial suburbs in the west of the electorate, which are part of Labor's heartland in west Melbourne. On those boundaries, for decades it was one of the safest Labor seats in the country, and Labor usually easily retained it even when Labor was heavily defeated nationally. The only times Labor's hold on the seat was even remotely threatened during this era came in 1975 and 1977; even then, Labor's primary vote was enough to retain the seat outright.
After it was extended eastwards to Caulfield and other Liberal-voting areas in the 1990 redistribution, it became much less secure for Labor. Continuing the gradual downwards trend in the Labor primary vote, in the 2013 election, Labor was returned with a primary vote of less than 32 percent. In 2016, Labor actually suffered a primary vote swing of four percent and a two-party swing of two percent even as it nearly reduced the Coalition to minority government nationally.
In 2018, the Australian Electoral Commission proposed renaming Melbourne Ports as Macnamara, after medical scientist Dame Jean Macnamara.[2] The new name was gazetted on 13 July 2018, and was first used at the 2019 federal election.[3]
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