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.
There are 25 federal electorates in the Melbourne metropolitan area. Labor won 16 of these seats in 2016, with the Liberal Party winning eight and the Greens winning one.
There are eight seats I wanted to zoom in on in today’s post, with the map below the fold:
There are 29 federal electorates in the greater Sydney region (including the Central Coast and Blue Mountains) – it’s the most populous region in Australia.
The region contains sixteen Labor seats, twelve Liberal seats and one independent seat.
I’ve identified seven seats that I think are particularly worth watching in Sydney, below the fold.
Ben was joined by Rodney Smith from the University of Sydney to discuss the surge in pre-poll voting and the key races in New South Wales.
Western Australia has sixteen seats in the House of Representatives, and these seats strongly favour the Liberal Party. Labor holds five seats, while the Liberal Party holds the other eleven.
The Liberal Party has dominated Western Australia at federal elections since Kim Beazley’s departure from federal politics over a decade ago. Polling earlier in the current term suggested a reversion towards Labor, but the latest polling suggests Labor is only on track to gain a small swing.
19There are twenty seats in south-east Queensland, stretching from the Gold Coast in the south to the Sunshine Coast in the north.
South-East Queensland currently contains thirteen Liberal National Party (LNP) seats and seven Labor seats. Brisbane proper is dominated by Labor, with five Labor seats and three LNP seats, but the LNP holds the six seats on the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast. The real contest happens on the fringe of Brisbane, both to the north and south.
One of the surprising dynamics of the last week has been the large number of candidates who have been disendorsed by their party.
From last Monday to Friday there were six candidates from three parties who were disendorsed by their party.
Labor’s Wayne Kurnoth was disendorsed as the party’s #2 Senate candidate in the Northern Territory on Monday. He was joined by One Nation’s Steve Dickson, the party’s #2 Senate candidate in Queensland, on Tuesday.
One of the developing stories this week has been the continuing increase in pre-poll voting at this year’s election. The AEC publishes daily updates with the number of votes cast at each pre-poll centre per day, allowing us to track how many people are choosing to vote early. In this post I’ll run through what the stats look like after three days of voting (data up to date as of the end of voting Wednesday).