12:01 – Well it turns out the website couldn’t handle the traffic tonight! Hopefully most of you found me at the Guardian. I’ll be back in the morning with a lot of analysis.
7:57 – There’s a lot going on, but some key points right now:
- Labor is trailing in a few of their seats, but leading in a lot more Coalition seats.
- Independents and Greens are doing very well.
6:31 – I’ll have the full list on the Guardian liveblog, but there are 11 independents on the east coast included in the TCP. This includes three incumbents, one running against Labor (Dai Le in Fowler) and two regional candidates (Jack Dempsey in Hinkler and Rob Priestly in Nicholls), with the rest typical teal candidates.
6:13 – I’ll have a blog post on the Guardian liveblog on this topic soon, but the final pre-poll count was just over 5.5 million, up from 4.7 million in 2019, thanks to over 900,000 pre-poll voters on Friday. Meanwhile almost 1.8 million postal votes have been returned.
6:11 – It turns out we received a few votes before 6pm. 302 ballots were received for the seat of Bean from Norfolk Island, which has a timezone ahead of the east coast. The vote was particularly favourable to independent Jamie Christie.
6:00 – Polls have just closed in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory. I don’t expect we will see much in the way of results for the next 30 minutes, but I’ll be back later with some analysis. I will also be participating in the Guardian’s election results liveblog, and I’ll post a link when I get a chance. While you wait for results you could check out the two blog posts I wrote on the topic of how election night works – the rate of votes coming in, and which parties tend to be favoured early on.
Horrific result for Labor in WA and VIC. Deakin and Menzies as well as Moore and Tangney could very well fall.
The seats with the biggest swings to Labor are those with the most Chinese Australians. Chisholm, Moreton, Reid, Bennelong, Tangney and even Menzies are falling with spectacular 7+% swings. This is something that both parties must address. Something like this has happened in the Canadian election last year.
For Labor??? You mean the coalition.
I’ll say this, I am stunned by the result in Menzies, Moore and Tangney even if Labor doesn’t win them. They will be prime targets at the next election if Peter Dutton is the next leader of the opposition. It will be very tough to win back seats from the record number of coressbenchers. And the coalition will be defending a large number of marginals come 2025.
But of course 3 years is a long time in politics and I am not predicting anything especially considering we don’t know the final composition of this election.
My question is though why is Labor struggling to hold Lyons and why are the Liberals doing so well in Braddon? Bass is understandable considering the sitting MP there, however Morrison is unpopular in Tasmania and Gutwein is no longer the premier.
If Labor indeed to lose Lyons they will need to do some soul searching in both that state and QLD and the Tasmanian Labor leaders position would be untenable considering they would have lost 3 seats under her leadership federally. It also speaks for a need for electoral reform because why should a party who wins only 45% of the TPP in Tasmania win 3 seats? That’s not democratic. 3 is more than half of 5. And Labor only winning 1 seat when clearly winning the TPP in Tasmania is bizarre.
That’s it for tonight. I congratulate all those who have been elected and I thank the Prime Minister for his gracious concession and his service to our nation.
I’d say a pretty horrific result in Sydney as well – losing Wentworth, North Sydney and Mackellar, as well as not making any gains in Warringah, and having Bennelong on a knife edge.
This was wall to wall blue before. Now there’s Bradfield left.
The Greens looking like three seats in Brisbane is also huge. Could be very hard for any of these seats to shift back to their previous holders.
@Matt All of those seats mentioned were seen as possible prospects for the Liberals to lose. In contrast, no one expected Menzies to be this close.
Daniel, Labor’s strength in Tasmania is pretty much concentrated to Hobart and the south coast only. The north and central parts of the state are still fairly strong for the Liberals.
I think that is the reason why Labor and Andrew Wilkie are able to rack up huge margins in both Franklin and Clark (Denison); whilst Bass, Braddon and Lyons remain marginal Liberal seats.
Don’t forget that in 2019 the Lib candidate for Lyons was disendorsed, so the Labor candidate pretty much unopposed.
I’m not sure if I agree about the assessment on Tasmania considering Labor has won either 4/5 or 5/5 seats at most elections since 1993 except for 1996,2004,2019 and tonight. It has to be more deep than this, Is Labor failing to cut through with Tasmanian voters, or is this a Tasmanian state Labor problem?
If the state Liberal government was so popular and had an affect. Why did they only win a 1 seat majority at the last state election?
*And 2013 I forgot to mention. But that was because Labor was deeply unpopular in both state and federal in Tasmania at the time. 2004 was due to Lathams forest policy.
2019 and 2022 has no explanation.
Well practically everybody who I wanted out of parliament within reasonable possibility got booted minus Dutton so tonight was certainly fun for me. Quite embarrassing that after all those ads and all that money Craig Kelly (last I checked) came *4th* in Hughes.
For a lot of the dark horse knife edge seats like Moore, Canning, Deakin and Menzies, Labor has basically put in zero effort. If they actually did put effort in them, they would be in majority govt by now. Surely Labor has some regrets now. How did the polling not pick those up or at least pick up the big swing?
@Laine, yes unfortunate Dutton wasn’t booted. Funny that Dickson was the first seat that Antony Green had as changing hands. Too bad that didn’t eventuate.
Dan M
I noticed the exact same thing about the correlation with Chinese communities in both Canada and Australia. When results started coming in and I saw Reid and Chisholm blowouts for Labor, with Bennelong line ball I knew we were watching the same thing with Chinese communities that we saw in Canada, they abandoned the Canadian Conservatives and the Libs here due to anti-China rhetoric.
During the two leader speeches on election night (21 May 22) many audience members were talking loudly or making silly “woo woo” noises. This is rude and makes it difficult, including us watching TV or listening to the radio, to hear what is being said. The new PM even had to ask his audience to behave. When leaders are talking to the nation audience members please just shut up and may I suggest drink less alcohol too. Congratulation to the ALP for this deserved victory.
With so many supporters defeated at this election is the Canberra based Parliamentary Friends of Israel Group now defunct I wonder?
Adrian, Was Dave Sharma one of them? He deleted his Twitter after his apparent loss as well.
Yes Daniel I understand Sharma was one of the defeated along with Frydenberg (likely), Tim Wilson and a few others defeated.
@Adrian Jackson – re audience behavior on leaders’ election night speeches. Bob Hawke’s victory speech was a staged authoritative performance. Dark suits, leader-focused lighting, small audience of journos and senior staffers, and no questions. About the same time all ALP staffers were told to ditch their jeans and get suits before turning up to work on Monday.
Contrast with Albo having to get stern like a school teacher to take control of his big occasion, but presumably not have to tell staffers how to dress now that they were in government.
Times change, and Hawke perhaps had a larger distance to shift his image (from knock-about bloke to PM) than Albo had. One was playing to the TV audience, the other working the grass roots party supporters. I don’t have a view about which was more effective or appropriate, but I was reminded of Hawke’s occasion when Albo had to pull up his crowd.
When ringing government, now opposition parliamentarians, most office clerks who answer the telephone were polite and helpful. The exception was a man at the Foreign Minister office in Canberra who hang up on callers for no reason mid sentence. Fortunately his boofhead will be out of a job now. Lets hope he does not turn up as a Liberal candidate in the future.
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