Geraldton changed hands frequently between different members and parties during the early history of the seat in the late 19th and early 20th century. After 1914 however, the seat was held by the
Labor Party for all but three of the next 77 years. The seat's longest serving and most famous member was
John Willcock, member from 1917 to 1947 and
Premier of Western Australia from 1936 to 1945. A fairly safe to safe Labor seat for much of the 20th century, it became somewhat less safe for Labor in the 1980s. The resignation of Labor member
Jeff Carr following his sacking as minister in 1991 triggered
a by-election that was won by the
Liberal Party's
Bob Bloffwitch, the seat's first non-Labor member in more than four decades. Bloffwitch held the seat at the subsequent
1993 state election, when the Liberal Party won government. The seat changed hands with the next change of government at the
2001 state election when Labor candidate
Shane Hill was elected. Hill held the seat for two terms before Liberal
Ian Blayney won it with a change of government at the
2008 state election. In fact the redistribution prior to that election had turned the seat into a notionally Liberal seat. In
2013, Blayney seemingly consolidated his hold on the seat with Labor falling to third place behind the
National Party. Blayney's margin was enough for him to narrowly overcome one of the biggest swings amid Labor's decisive victory at the subsequent election in
2017, with Labor's
Lara Dalton paring back his margin from a seemingly insurmountable 22.8 percent to an extremely marginal 1.3 percent. Blayney's victory marked only the second time since
World War I (Bloffwitch's 1991 by-election win being the first) that Labor had been in government without holding Geraldton. Blayney defected to the Nationals in 2019, but was heavily defeated by Dalton in
2021. Dalton actually won enough votes on the first count to take the seat outright. ==Members for Geraldton==