Division of North Sydney

The Division of North Sydney was an Australian electoral division in the state of New South Wales from 1901 to 2025.

On 12 September 2024, the Australian Electoral Commission announced that the seat would be abolished at the 2025 Australian federal election, with its electors redistributed to Warringah, Bradfield and Bennelong.

History

The Division of North Sydney was proclaimed in 1900 and was one of the original 75 divisions contested at the first federal election. It originally stretched as far as the Northern Beaches, though much of that area became Warringah in 1922.

At the time of the 2015 by-election, the Division of North Sydney had the nation's second-highest proportion (56.4%) of high-income families.

Prior to its abolition, North Sydney was one of only two (the other being Wentworth) federation divisions in New South Wales to have never been held by Labor. The Liberal hold on the seat was broken in 1990 by "father of the independents" Ted Mack, who had represented much of the area in state parliament from 1981 to 1988. He held the seat for two terms before retiring at the 1996 election, after two terms, for the same reason he previously chose to resign from state parliament after two terms − to avoid receiving a parliamentary pension.

However, during Mack's tenure, North Sydney was always on the stronger side of fairly safe for the Liberals in "traditional" two-party-preferred match-ups with Labor, and it was a foregone conclusion that it would revert to the Liberals once Mack retired. Indeed, when Mack retired in 1996, Joe Hockey reclaimed the seat for the Liberals on a swing large enough to revert the seat to its traditional status as a comfortably safe Liberal seat.