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

Even though Melbourne's suburban growth has long since spilled onto the peninsula, Flinders is still counted as a rural seat.

[1] 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 incumbent Australian prime minister lost his 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.