, the division's namesake 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. Hockey held it easily until 2015, serving as
Treasurer from 2013 to 2015 in the
Abbott government. After Abbott was ousted as Liberal leader and Prime Minister by
Malcolm Turnbull in the
September 2015 Liberal leadership spill Hockey moved to the
backbench, but six days later he announced his intention to resign from parliament, taking effect from 23 October. The
2015 North Sydney by-election was held on 5 December to elect his replacement.
Trent Zimmerman, a former Hockey staffer, retained the seat for the Liberal Party with 48.2 percent of the primary vote after a larger-than-predicted 12.8 percent swing against the
Turnbull Coalition government. Zimmerman became the first
openly LGBTI member of the House of Representatives. He won the seat in his own right in 2016 and 2019. However, in 2022, he lost over 13 percent of his primary vote amid the Liberals' collapse in the North Shore and other "blue ribbon" areas of metropolitan Australia, and was defeated by
teal independent Kylea Tink, the second non-Liberal ever to win it. The swing against the Liberals was large enough to make the seat marginal in a "traditional" two-party contest between the Liberals and Labor for the first time in 60 years; on paper, the Liberal margin over Labor was only 1.2 percent. The most notable member for the seat was
Billy Hughes,
Prime Minister of Australia from 1915 to 1923, and later a minister in the
Lyons,
Page,
Menzies and
Fadden governments. Hughes is the longest-serving parliamentarian in Australian history. He transferred to
Bradfield after it was carved out of North Sydney's northern portion in 1949, and died as that seat's member in 1952. Other notable members include Mack, Hockey, and
Dugald Thomson, a minister in the
Reid Government. As part of its periodic review of electoral boundaries, the
Australian Electoral Commission abolished the division from the
2025 Australian federal election, with its electors distributed across the divisions of Warringah, Bradfield and Bennelong. ==Boundaries==