The Liberal Party has retained the seat of North Sydney at Saturday’s by-election despite a substantial swing on primary votes.
At the time of writing, Liberal candidate Trent Zimmerman is on 47.8% (down 13.3%) with independent Stephen Ruff second on 18.8% and the Greens’ Arthur Chesterfield-Evans on 16% (up 0.7%).
While there was a substantial swing against the Liberal Party, it doesn’t appear to have aided the centre-left in defeating Zimmerman. When you add together the vote for Labor and the Greens in 2013, it was almost 1% higher than the combined vote for Ruff and the Greens on Saturday.
Instead, the vote leached to a number of other parties including the Sustainable Population Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Christian Democratic Party and the Arts Party. Having said that, some of those parties can be counted as ‘progressive’ so we’ll probably see a slight uptick in Ruff’s TCP compared to Labor’s TPP in 2013.
I’ve split the booths into the same four areas as in the pre-election guide, based on the four local government areas. We only have two-candidate-preferred vote-counts for about half the booths, so I’ve just focused on the primary votes.
The Liberal primary vote ranged from just under 46% in North Sydney and Lane Cove to 48% in Willoughby and 54% in Hunters Hill.
Independent Ruff got a very similar vote across most of the seat, polling around 19% in Willoughby, North Sydney and Lane Cove, but his vote dropped to 15.5% in Hunters Hill.
The Greens vote ranged from 14% in Hunters Hill to 18% in North Sydney and Lane Cove.
| Voter group | LIB % | IND % | GRN % | Total votes | % of votes |
| Willoughby | 48.2 | 18.9 | 15.1 | 23,877 | 39.8 |
| North Sydney | 45.5 | 19.0 | 18.1 | 14,168 | 23.6 |
| Lane Cove | 45.8 | 19.3 | 17.9 | 14,241 | 23.8 |
| Hunters Hill | 54.1 | 15.5 | 14.0 | 5,817 | 9.7 |
| Other votes | 54.6 | 18.4 | 11.7 | 1,843 | 3.1 |
Below the fold I’ve posted the booth maps showing the primary vote for the three main candidates and the primary vote swings for the Liberal Party and the Greens.
In my opinion a bizarre result. No ALP, new PM honeymoon and a result down over 13%, that must have the Lib’s shaking their collective heads. However a more telling result is the Greens, they haven’t made a dent in the result, proving my belief that the Greens are happy to do the easy things and campaign in left leaning seats to suck easy votes away from the ALP, but they are far too lazy to work hard in conservative seats.
I’d be over the moon if I was the Libs. About a 5% swing on TPP preffered versus anyone but the Libs preferences. With a new candidate, local council amalgamation and a decent Greens campaign.
No evidence Lib voters will vote Green in North Sydney.
No evidence of TPP backlash just a. Significant number 1 protest vote then back on votes 2 through to anyone but the Libs.
They’ll probably have the swing 100% back by the real election.
I should note that Bullet train party in the ACT last time seems to have been largely at the expense of Greens as was Sustainable Population Party.
election was held quickly, lots of money spent by libs, Mr Ruff could have won if had more time, swing roughly 5% to him………. council amalgamations are on the nose and were a local issue despite being a state matter………………….
Meh, they’ll have a substantial swing to themselves here at the Federal election, probably everything they lost at this by election minus one percent.
Its nice to imagine this falling (and perhaps under Abbot we could have imagined a scenario) but they’ve weathered it out so far.
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