It looks like the Nationals have retained the seat of Mallee in north-western Victoria, but the race was remarkably wide open, with no candidate polling over 30% and six different candidates topping the poll in at least one booth.
Nationals candidate Anne Webster polled 28.7%, with the Liberal Party’s Serge Petrovich second on 18.4%. Labor’s Carole Hart is on 15.5%, with two independents (Jason Modica and Ray Kingston) polling just over 9%.
The federal election generally went well for the government, but they suffered a big defeat in the northern Sydney seat of Warringah, where former prime minister Tony Abbott lost his seat after 25 years.
Abbott held his seat by an 11.6% margin against the Greens or 11.1% against Labor as of the 2016 election. Once most of the dust had settled, independent candidate Zali Steggall ended up with 57% of the two-candidate-preferred vote.
One of the big surprises in the recent federal election was the performance of One Nation in the NSW electorate of Hunter. This seat covers the more rural parts of the Hunter Valley, stretching from the western shore of Lake Macquarie up to Cessnock, Muswellbrook and Scone. It’s held by Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon, who held it by a 12.5% margin prior to the election.
The Senate count has been progressing for a week now and I thought it was about time to give an update (my previous post on the Senate is here). What is remarkable is how clear the count is. There appears to only be one state where seats are in serious doubt: the last three seats in Queensland are being contested by four parties.
It’s now a week since the election and there are only a handful of seats that are still in play. In this post I’ll run through the counts in each of them.
Last Saturday’s election was not a landslide: far from it. While it appears the Liberal/National coalition has gained a small swing nationally, there are lots of areas which swung in the opposite direction.
So I was interested in zooming out to get a sense of how many seats had swung in each direction, and how they fit into the respective “marginal”, “reasonably safe” and “safe” categories.
I’ve defined these categories as follows:
On Sunday I published a post focusing on the chances for each party in the Senate. Unsurprisingly we are expecting a shrinking of the Senate crossbench due to the half-Senate election and the concentration of low-polling Senate crossbenchers, but it is interesting to examine the trends in how people voted.
For today’s post I’ve put together a detailed map showing the two-candidate-preferred (2CP) vote in every booth across the country.
The map can be toggled between the swings and the total vote in each booth. Most booths are based on a Labor vs Coalition 2CP (red and blue respectively) but in some places the 2CP includes the Greens (in green) or others (Centre Alliance, Katter’s Australian Party, One Nation and independents, in orange).
Ben is joined by Kevin Bonham for a quick podcast reacting to the results of the federal election.
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We largely overlooked the Senate count last night, in part due to the late hour at which votes started to arrive. But we now have a sizeable share of the vote counted and we can make some conclusions about likely winners.