Ben is joined by Stewart Jackson and Sinead Canning to wrap up the NSW election result (and discuss the ongoing upper house count), the role of One Nation preferences in the federal election, and the likelihood of the federal election being called this week.
Thanks to 2SER radio in Sydney for the use of their studio.
We’re now in the second of three weeks of counting for the New South Wales Legislative Council and we’re getting a decent chunk of votes counted.
As of Monday evening, over a million votes have been counted in the check count (the one that includes below-the-line votes and all groups’ above-the-line votes). I estimate this is about 21.6% of the final count, assuming the same turnout we saw in 2015.
Lismore has turned out to be one of Labor’s only gains at the recent state election. Labor outpolled the Greens on primary votes by 1.42%, which is expected to be enough to hold on after preferences, producing a two-party-preferred outcome of 51.5%.
The neighbouring seat of Ballina was also interesting, although it didn’t end up being close. Greens MP Tamara Smith increased her margin to 5%, thanks to a 1.8% swing.
The Shooters had a really good election result, but didn’t do it thanks to a big sweeping vote across the state. At the moment they are on track for about one quota in the upper house. Yet thanks to the kinds of seats they won, Shooters will now represent more than half of the land mass of NSW in the lower house.
The inner west of Sydney has been a key battleground at NSW state elections since at least 2003, when the Greens first made a serious attempt to win the seats of Port Jackson and Marrickville. Yet something has changed this year, with the focus shifting elsewhere. There was some (incorrect) speculation about Balmain being in play, but the Greens’ marginal seats were all on the north coast.
One of the defining moments of the New South Wales election campaign was Labor leader Michael Daley’s recorded comments from 2018 about people in Sydney being squeezed out by Asia migrants.
The Legislative Council count is going to take a long time, and we are missing a lot of vital information we will need.
It is far too early to assess the impact of any party on the upper house, in particular parties like Sustainable Australia and Keep Sydney Open who have not yet had a single one of their upper house votes counted. Even for other parties like the Greens we can’t judge how big the “swing” will be until we know how many of the ‘others’ votes are below the line or informal. But we can answer some questions about their impact.
At the end of Saturday night I had a list of seven seats which I hadn’t called. I have now done some further analysis with the extra votes that have reported today, and I am now ready to call a couple more seats and provide an analysis of the state of the count.
This morning I spoke to Osmond Chiu about the results of yesterday’s NSW state election.