The Division was proclaimed in 1900, and was one of the original 65 divisions to be contested at the first Federal election. Kooyong has been held by the Liberal Party of Australia and its predecessors for its entire existence. It is one of two original electorates in Victoria to have never been won by the Australian Labor Party, the other being Gippsland. For decades, it has been one of the safest Coalition seats in metropolitan Australia. For example, even during Labor's landslide victory in 1943, Menzies still won comfortably with 62.5 percent of the two-party vote. The seat's best-known member was Sir Robert Menzies, the longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia. From 1922 to 1994, it was held by only three members, all of whom went on to lead the non-Labor forces in Parliament — former Opposition Leader and future Chief JusticeJohn Latham, Menzies, and former Opposition Leader Andrew Peacock. Peacock's successor, high-profile Liberal backbencher Petro Georgiou, saw off a challenge from Josh Frydenberg for Liberal Party preselection in April 2006. On 22 November 2008, Georgiou announced his retirement at the next federal election. Frydenberg won preselection as the Liberal Party's candidate for the seat for the 2010 election, and won despite a small swing against him. In 2019, high-profile Greens candidate Julian Burnside received the highest two-party preferred vote against the Liberals or their predecessors in 90 years, at 44.3%. The Liberals had anticipated a strong contest and doubled their campaign funding to Kooyong earlier in the year, raising their initial cost of $500,000 to $1 million in campaigning. Frydenberg retained the seat, despite suffering a significant negative swing of 8.81% and the Liberal Party receiving its lowest first preference vote in the electorate in 76 years. It was also only the second time in 76 years that the major non-Labor party didn't win the seat outright on the first count. The swing was actually large enough to drop the Liberal margin in a "traditional" two-party contest with Labor to 6.8 percent, the closest margin between the parties in decades.
Name
The Division is named after the suburb of Kooyong, on which it was originally based. However, the suburb of Kooyong has not been in its namesake electorate for some time, being instead in neighbouring Higgins. Nonetheless, the seat has retained the name of Kooyong, primarily because the Australian Electoral Commission's guidelines on electoral redistributions require it to preserve the names of original electorates where possible.
