There are four by-elections coming up in the next six weeks in Australia’s two largest states.
I posted guides to two of these four by-elections last month, and the other two guides have now been posted. I’ve also added candidate lists for the first two.
I’ve been paying quite a bit of attention to the Inner West Council results. It’s my former council area, but it’s also one of the most interesting councils. The Labor, Liberal and Greens parties all feature prominently, along with a wide variety of independents.
I’ve also written a piece for the Parramatta Sun about the Parramatta and Cumberland council results which I’ll share here when it’s posted.
After a week of counting, we are starting to get final ward results declared in some of the fifteen big councils I’ve been covering. I’m going to use this post to update as we get waves of results over the next few days.
Thursday evening
I’ve pulled together the primary vote totals as of this afternoon and calculated swings for each council and ward in urban NSW.
I’ve restricted my analysis to councils between Newcastle and Shellharbour, as councils outside this area are almost always dominated by independents.
Across this region, here were the total votes for the three large parties:
Party
Votes
%
Swing
In this post I will quickly summarise the state of play in the 14 most populous councils I have analysed (excluding Ku-ring-gai, where no tickets are standing across multiple wards). I’ll be back later today with some analysis of the swings across the councils and over the coming days I’ll do deeper analysis of some of the more interesting councils.
Labor has won a majority in Canterbury-Bankstown and Newcastle, with a chance in Cumberland, Georges River and Wollongong.
7:10pm – Very small vote in all five wards in Northern Beaches currently has Your Northern Beaches on track for 6 seats, Liberal 5, Greens 2, and two other independents. The Liberals look unlikely to be able to stitch together a majority.
6:40pm – Polls have closed forty minutes in councils across New South Wales. Join me as I track the results. We should start to see some data after 7pm.
polls are open today in a bunch of councils across NSW – the new amalgamated councils and those who survived amalgamation attempts.
I’ll be covering the results tonight from 6:30pm. Today I’ll be driving around to some of the polling booths in Sydney, so check out my Twitter account (@thetallyroom) for anecdotes and photos.
I’ll also be on Backchat on FBI radio at 11:15 discussing the elections.
We’re due for two state by-elections in New South Wales later this year, and I’ve just finished guides for both electorates, which you can read now.
Former NSW opposition leader John Robertson has announced plans to resign. Labor should easily retain this seat.
The 2015 Queensland election was very close, with neither party winning a majority of seats. Labor is estimated to hold 48 seats, while the LNP holds 42 seats. There are two Katter’s Australian Party seat, and one independent seat. 47 seats are needed for a majority.
Queensland has recently undergone a redistribution of state electoral boundaries, the first in almost a decade. The existing boundaries were used at three elections: 2009, 2012 and 2015.
The number of seats was increased from 89 to 93. This resulted in the creation of five new electorates, with two seats merged.
The inner-city electorates of Indooroopilly and Mount Coot-tha were merged into the new seat of Maiwar. Maiwar is a marginal LNP seat, with a margin of 3%.