After the Country Liberal Party clinched victory over the Greens in the seat of Fannie Bay, the Greens have surprisingly won the neighbouring seat of Nightcliff over former Labor chief minister Natasha Fyles.
The NTEC has only now conducted a preferential count between Labor and the Greens, seemingly with all primary votes now added to the count. With all of those distributed, the Greens beat Labor by 42 votes.
There are two particularly interesting elements here: the Greens managed to leapfrog the CLP from third place, thanks to strong preference flows from the independents, and then went on to win thanks to a very poor flow of preferences from CLP to Labor despite CLP preferences putting Labor ahead of the Greens.
Antony Green has posted the full distribution of preferences on his blog post.
The first part of the explanation comes from the high vote for independents. Progressive independent Mililma May polled 19.3%, not far behind the Greens’ Kat McNamara on 21.9%. Without a strong fourth-placed candidate, it’s hard to have enough votes for someone to leapfrog from third place into second.
Preferences from May and other independent George Mamouzellos flowed 72.6% to the Greens, 14.0% to Labor and 13.4% to the CLP. This was enough to give the Greens a 3CP of 37.5%, Labor 35.8% and CLP 26.6%. Independent preferences not only pushed the Greens into second, but into first.
The second element of the win came from Country Liberal preferences, which were expected to favour the ALP. But just 51.4% of CLP preferences flowed to Labor.
This left the Greens with 50.47% of the two-candidate-preferred vote, and a 42-vote margin.
Third-placed finishes are very rare under compulsory preferential voting (as used in the NT), and almost unheard of under optional preferential voting.
I found this article seemingly written by Antony Green in 2011 around the time of the UK referendum on introducing NSW-style optional preferential voting which lists a handful of examples under CPV, most of which involved multiple conservative candidates leapfrogging Labor, plus the defeat of Pauline Hanson by the Liberal Party in 1998.
I can think of a few more cases that have taken place in more recent years. As our party system has become more complex, with candidates winning on a smaller share of the vote and more seats where there are two candidates in a close race for second, it becomes likely someone who is just behind on primary votes could end up ahead on 3CP and end up winning.
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie first won election in Denison in 2010 from third place, with 21.3% of the primary vote. Greens preferences pushed Wilkie into second, and Liberal preferences then elected him over Labor.
The Greens’ Sam Hibbins won twice from third place in the Victorian state seat of Prahran. In 2014, he won despite trailing Labor by 426 votes. In 2018, the Labor and Greens votes both increased, leading to a comfortable 2CP win, but Hibbins still Labor’s Neil Pharoah by 355 votes on the primary vote.
And Greens federal MP Stephen Bates won the seat of Brisbane in 2022 despite trailing Labor by eleven votes on the primary vote.
The Greens have always found it a challenge to win single member electorates, but they have now won at least one seat in all but one state, territory or federal single-member chamber around the country.
They won their first seat in the House of Representatives at a by-election in 2002, and won their first general election seat in Melbourne in 2010. They won the WA state seat of Fremantle in 2009, but are yet to win a general election seat in the WA Legislative Assembly.
The Greens went on to win their first NSW state seat in Balmain in 2011, their first Victorian state seats in Melbourne and Prahran in 2014, and their first Queensland state seat in Maiwar in 2017. Earlier this year they won the Tasmanian Legislative Council seat of Hobart.
This leaves the SA House of Assembly as the only single-member chamber they are yet to win a seat in, although an ex-Labor member sat briefly as a Greens member in the early 2000s.
This also leaves NT Labor with absolutely no seats in urban seats, and only with four Indigenous MPs in large remote electorates. The Greens have also managed to make the 2CP in three seats, narrowly winning in Nightcliff, narrowly losing in Fannie Bay and losing by a slightly larger margin in the Alice Springs seat of Braitling. A very interesting final element to this NT election story.