Division of Flinders

The Division of Flinders is an Australian Electoral Division in Victoria. The division is one of the original 75 divisions contested at the first federal election. It is named for Matthew Flinders, the first man to circumnavigate Australia, and the person credited with giving Australia its name.

Originally a country seat south and east of Melbourne, Flinders is now a hybrid urban-rural seat based on the outer southern suburbs on the Mornington Peninsula, including Dromana, Hastings and Portsea.

It has usually been a fairly safe seat for the Liberal Party and its predecessors, who have held it for all but six years since its creation. However, it has occasionally been won by the Australian Labor Party, notably at the 1929 federal election when Prime Minister Stanley Bruce was defeated. This was the first of two times an Australian prime minister lost their own seat at a general election. The second time was not until Liberal Prime Minister John Howard lost his seat of Bennelong at the 2007 federal election.

The seat's most prominent member was Bruce, who held it for all but two years from 1918 to 1933. Other prominent former members include Jack Holloway, the Labor challenger who ousted Bruce and later a senior minister in the Curtin and Chifley governments (though he was the member for Melbourne Ports by then) and two deputy Liberal leaders Sir Phillip Lynch and Peter Reith