the middle, old Palmerston, is blue collar etc and housing commission socio-economic areas, which is also mostly Blain.
Ironically? actually supporting the incumbancy factor, the seat is held by the CLP.

The two surrounding halves are private home and defence force housing, especially Durack in Drysdale and Gunn in Brennan.

In those seats its big mortgages and manicured lawns with house prices 500k plus.

http://centrebet.com/cust?action=GoSports&ev_type_id=1577

As part of the local government reforms in the NT, as well as the federal intervention, some attempt is being made to have the town camps brought under local government so that proper public services can be provided. But the whole area is a byzantine mess which I can only just understand, and I thought I knew a bit about the Territory.

The Territory has a huge pass-through population, defence personal, commonwealth public servants, who all spend several years in Darwin. It’s why sitting MPs chase up new enrolments, and another reason why the sitting MP factor is important. There’s also the perennial collection of people who end up in Darwin to start a new life, fleeing dud jobs, former partners, etc. If Ernest Hemingway had written a book about Australia, it would have been about some of the characters that wash up in Darwin trying to start a new life.

Inner Darwin is affluent and more conservative voting. It has seen a huge growth in apartment living. It is the old pre-Tracey parts of Darwin and where a lot of lifetime residents live. It’s also where all the tourists are and where tourist related businesses and bars are located. The rest of Darwin is s weep of suburbia segregated from the tourists. The northern suburbs have a few older areas, like the suburbs on the headland at Nightcliff, but the rest was developed in the 60s to the 80 and is older and more established, but not as long established as inner-Darwin.

Palmerston is much newer, and being further inland, misses the slight sea breeze that the coastal parts of Darwin experience. Property prices are cheaper, and it is one area where you can get a vacant block. It is more blue collar, and in any other city in Australia, you’d mark Palmerston down as Labor heartland.

Also dotted around some areas all across Darwin are indigenous town camps and public housing estates, and these tend to be pockets of strong Labor voting.

That’s a set of generalisations, but the overall answer is don’t apply southern classifications of voter types to Darwin and expect them to make sense.

Just curious to know a little about the political demographics of Darwin, since the existing seats all have inflated Labor margins from 2005. It seems like Central Darwin is generally fairly mixed and politically marginal, but why is Palmerston such a good CLP area (affluent? very WASP-ish? mortgage belt?). And are the northern suburbs traditionally Labor’s best areas (more working class? ethnically mixed?).