As my first post today I thought I would summarise the state of play in the House of Representatives.
As of last night I had called 141 seats as part of my analysis at the Guardian. This includes 72 Coalition seats and 63 Labor seats, as well as six crossbench seats – the five won at the 2016 election plus Warringah.
6:00 – Polls have just closed in 123 electorates on Australia’s east coast. Polls will close in 12 electorates in South Australia and the Northern Territory in 30 minutes, followed ninety minutes later by the remaining 16 electorates in Western Australia.
I will be regularly dropping in her to post broad updates on the results, but you can also find my analysis on the Guardian’s live blog.
Polls have just opened on the east coast in the 2019 Australian federal election. The handful of Australians who are yet to cast a pre-poll vote will be voting today in an election expected to be relatively close.
The latest polls have Labor in the lead, but not by much. The most recent Ipsos and Galaxy polls both give Labor 51% of the two-party-preferred vote, with Essential on 51.5%. Finally Newspoll has given a small boost to Labor, giving them 51.5% of the 2PP vote.
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.