6:58 – We have the first two booths from Hobart and the Greens candidate Cassy O’Connor has a big lead with 39.5%, ahead of Labor on 18.3% and independent Charlie Burton on 16.8%. Good start for her.
6:57 – We now have six booths reporting in Elwick, and independent mayor Bec Thomas is leading with 30.5%, with Labor’s Tessa McLaughlin on 28.2%. Definitely still too close to call.
Tasmania’s upper house stands out amongst Australia’s parliamentary chambers with the most unusual constitutional structure. It has single-member electorates – common for lower houses, but unique for a house of review – and those electorates are never all elected at the same time. Instead, two or three seats are elected each year, with the entire chamber refreshed over a six-year cycle.
I’ve got yet another chapter in the long story of Australians’ changing habits in voting. With the final results of the Tasmanian state election, we can look at the Tasmanian trend.
The last Tasmanian state election was held in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, and saw a big increase in pre-poll votes, and a slight increase in postal votes.
Prior to the Tasmanian election I produced a blog post mapping out the relative strength of candidates within the same party ticket in some electorates at the 2021 election. The maps showed which of a party’s candidates topped the vote for that party in each booth in a particular electorate. Today’s post is an update of that post, based on the 2024 results.