In this post I’m looking at the 13 electorates that I have defined as “regional Victoria”. This includes the major provincial cities of Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat, as well as the seats of Casey and La Trobe on the eastern edge of Melbourne (which some commenters have argued should have been included in my Melbourne analysis).
This area includes four Labor seats, five Liberal seats, three Nationals seats and one independent seat.
For this post I’m focusing on those parts of New South Wales to the north of Sydney, including the Hunter region. There are five Labor seats and six National seats in this region.
I’ve identified four seats worth discussing, below the fold.
As of the end of voting on Wednesday night, just over 3.5 million Australians had cast a vote via pre-poll. This broke the record of just over 3.2 million pre-poll votes which were cast in the entirety of the 2016 campaign.
There are five constitutionally-guaranteed seats in Tasmania. Four of these seats are held by Labor, while the fifth is held by independent MP Andrew Wilkie.
Labor came close to a wipe-out in 2013, losing the three northernmost seats to the Liberal Party, before winning them all back in 2016.
There are ten seats in Queensland outside of the south-eastern corner, including central and northern Queensland plus a handful of seats further inland. The Liberal National Party holds eight of these seats, along with one Labor and one seat held by Katter’s Australian Party, but a number of these LNP seats are in play at this election.
There are five marginal seats I’m paying attention to in this post.
We are now three days away from polls opening in the federal election, and I’ve seen a number of commenters posting their broader predictions about which seats they think will flip on Saturday, so I thought it was time to post a thread for everyone to chip in and put their predictions on the record.
Ben is joined by William Bowe and Elizabeth Humphrys to discuss anti-politics and election night – in particular what seats are worth watching and when you should expect results to come in.
Thanks to 2SER radio in Sydney for the use of their studio.
For my next regional focus I decided to split regional New South Wales into two areas: north and south. Today I’ll be looking at the seven seats in southern NSW, plus the three seats in the ACT.
Labor holds six of these seats, the Liberal Party holds three, and the seat of Riverina is held by Nationals leader and deputy prime minister Michael McCormack.
There are four seats that I think are worth paying attention to.
Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party is running a big campaign in this federal election, with a big-budget national advertising campaign. It’s hard to know how well they will perform, but it’d be silly to ignore a party with such a big campaign.
In one sense the party is new, but it’s actually a successor to Palmer’s United Australia Party, who ran in the 2013 federal election. That campaign was similar, with a big-budget campaign spread over the whole country.
We’ve now got one more week before election day and a few people have been asking me for advice about how to plan out their preferences in the Senate.