Earlier today, the Victorian Electoral Commission ‘pushed the button’ for the eight Legislative Council regions.
Overall the result is:
- 14 – Labor
- 14 – Liberal
- 5 – Greens
- 2 – Nationals
- 2 – Shooters and Fishers
- 1 – Sex Party
- 1 – Vote 1 Local Jobs
- 1 – Democratic Labour Party
In circumstances where the major parties disagree, Labor will need to pick up seven votes from the ten-seat crossbench to get legislation passed. This will need to include the five Greens, and two others. Those other two votes could come from the Shooters and Fishers, or from two out of three of the Sex Party, Vote 1 Local Jobs or the Democratic Labour Party. With the dissolution of the Liberal/National coalition, it’s also conceivable that the Nationals could help Labor pass legislation from time to time.
The result is a record result for the Victorian Greens. The party had previously held three seats in the Legislative Council since 2006, but have gained two other seats in Eastern Metropolitan and South-Eastern Metropolitan. Joined with their first two seats in the Legislative Assembly, this produces a Greens caucus of seven MPs – a record for any Australian state parliament, just ahead of the six Greens in New South Wales since the 2011 state election.
The DLP returns to Parliament after previously holding one seat from 2006 to 2010. This is the third seat the DLP has won since the party was wiped out in the 1970s – the other seat was won by John Madigan in the Senate in 2010, although Madigan has since left the party.
The result was a big success for the Shooters and Fishers. The party first won a seat in New South Wales in 1995, and then won a second seat in 2007. The party won its first seat in Western Australia in 2013, and has now increased their number of state MLCs to five with two wins in Victoria.
The election is the first time the Sex Party has ever won a seat, with its leader Fiona Patten winning a seat, and likely a key position in the balance of power.
The biggest unknown comes from the Vote 1 Local Jobs party. Their new MLC, James Purcell, is the outgoing Mayor of Moyne Shire in the south-west of Victoria. If Purcell can work with the Sex Party and the Greens in passing government legislation, he will be a key powerbroker in the Legislative Council.
Yesterday, I ran through the key races that were still undecided.
At that point, there were six seats in five regions considered undecided.
In Northern Victoria, the Shooters and Fishers won one of the two undecided seats, and Labor defeated the Country Alliance for the other seat. It appears that Labor was only successful because Victorian elections used the ‘Inclusive Gregory’ system instead of the fairer ‘Weighted Inclusive Gregory’ used in Western Australia. Antony Green explains. This variation pushed Labor ahead of the Greens, and so Labor won on Greens preferences instead of Country Alliance winning on Labor preferences. The gap between Labor and the Greens at the key point was only 161 votes.
In Southern Metropolitan, the final seat was a race between the third Liberal and the Sex Party candidate, and it was won by the Liberal Party. The Sex Party needed to stay ahead of the Liberal Democrats at the key point in order to win, but actually fell behind by 5,252 votes.
In South Eastern Metropolitan, the final seat was a race between the Greens and the Sex Party, and was won by the Greens. If the Sex Party stayed ahead of Labor, they would have won on Labor preferences. Instead, the Sex Party fell behind Labor by 223 votes, and elected the Greens.
In Western Metropolitan, the Democratic Labour Party were the clear favourites, but there was a small chance the DLP would lose. The DLP did actually win their seat.
In Western Victoria, the final seat was a very complicated race. Vote 1 Local Jobs won the seat, but they would have lost to the Shooters and Fishers if the Shooters had managed to overtake the Liberal Democrats, but the LDP stayed ahead by 1,230 votes.
