Welcome to the Tally Room’s guide to the 2024 Northern Territory election. This guide includes comprehensive coverage of each seat’s history, geography, political situation and results of the 2020 election.
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Table of contents:
Electorate profiles
Seat profiles have been produced all 25 Legislative Assembly electorates. You can use the following navigation to click through to each seat’s profile.
You can also use this map to find an electorate and view the seat guide.
Redistribution
A redistribution of electoral boundaries is conducted before every election.
The 2023 redistribution took longer than planned. A second draft needed to be conducted after a significant amount of growth in enrolment numbers in remote electorates. The process then needed to be restarted due to an error in officially announcing the original process.
No seats were abolished, created or renamed in this redistribution.
There were no significant shifts in electorates between regions – the number of seats in the Darwin-Palmerston area remained the same, and there was no changes to the border between urban and rural regions despite a significant imbalance in enrolment numbers.
The most significant shift was in the increasing population in the Palmerston area. Spillett was redrawn from a seat that was partly based in Palmerston into an entirely Palmerston-based seat, meaning that this city now includes four whole electorates.
There should be a word of caution about how redistribution margins are calculated.
There are very few local polling places used in the Northern Territory. Many seats only have one booth, and some don’t have a single booth. It is rare that a seat has two or three booths. Quite a few electorates have large shares of the vote cast via mobile polling teams, and we don’t have precise data on where those votes were cast. This makes it difficult to precisely determine which voters come from a particular part of an electorate when transferring a share of an electorate to a neighbouring seat.
In addition, the last election was conducted in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than half of the vote was cast via pre-poll, which also makes it hard to geolocate those voters.
So while I have estimated how margins have changed, it is more difficult to be precise than in other elections.
You can see a summary of the changes at this blog post, and the below map shows the changes between 2020 and 2024.
Contact
If you have a correction or an update for a single electorate page, feel free to post a comment. You can also send an email by using this form.
If you’d like me to include a candidate name or website link in my election guide, please check out my candidate information policy.
i think we can conclude there wont be a one term CLP govt this time. this libs overwhelmingly control the darwin seats and the only darwin seat labor will get will be a washed up former Chief Minister whos basically deadwood for NT Labor now. if she retires the green will likely get the seat along with their other probable Darwin seat. it will take NT lbor time to regain a foothold in Darwin especially since 2 of their seats are held by an independent and a green who wont be going anywhere anytime soon. that leaves them only with bush seats and i odubt they will have any influence on darwin residents. if the CLP can fix the crime problem and debt issues without cutting services i can see a 2-3 term govt
Is Labor’s caucus now majority-Aboriginal? This would be a first in Australian history.
@NP 4 out of 5 are indigenous yes
aboriginal i should have said sorry
@Nimalan yes. I think Barkly is plurality Indigenous but not majority Indigenous while Barkly is majority Indigenous. Labor isn’t much better though since only three of their seats (Arafura, Arnhem and Gwoja) are majority Indigenous, as is Yingiya Mark Guyula’s seat of Mulka.
@John so chances are the next Labor leader and thus the next Opposition Leader will be Aboriginal, since Natasha Fyles won’t run for a second tilt after her disastrous first tilt. Chansey Paech will probably be the next leader.
@NP wih Fyles out of the mix and rightly so becase shed get steamrolled by Lia whose last name i wont even try and spell. given both Daly and Arafura MPs are basically first termers it will be either Paech or Uibo
the independent May in Nightcliffe could snatch the election frm Fyles if she finished second she will benefit from CLP and likely Greens preferences and that would leave Fyles loosing easily
This next Parliament will make history in terms of multiculturalism.
There have only ever been two MLAs of Indian descent and neither of them served at the same time, they were both Labor MLAs (June D’Rozario who represented Sanderson from 1977 until 1983 and defeated Casuarina MLA Lauren Moss). There will now be three South Asians in Parliament (including two Indian-born migrants), all CLP members from Darwin.
ABC article: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-30/clp-diversity-south-asian-landslide-nt-politics-election/104281322
I decided to look a bit deeper on Wikipedia to find out about these new MLAs.
Jinson Charls, the new MLA for Sanderson, was born in the Indian state of Kerala. He moved to Australia in 2011 and moved to Darwin in 2015.
Khoda Patel, the new MLA for Casuarina, was born in the Indian state of Gujarat and previously lived in Cyprus before moving to Australia.
Tanzil Rahman, the new MLA for Fong Lim, was born in Canberra and is of Bangladeshi heritage. His parents were born in East Pakistan (modern-day Bangladesh) and he moved to Karama when he was two.
It’s also worth noting that Lia Finocchiaro is the first Chief Minister with a non-Anglo surname, and for the first time in Australian history, the NT Labor opposition is majority-Aboriginal.
I’ve had a few questions about how a certain electorate voted to the Voice, and before I posted the results in only Darwin.
I’ve made a map showing the results of the Voice referendum in the Northern Territory using NT electorates: https://jmp.sh/gOklxlai
Note: this excludes urban prepoll booths and most remote mobile voting centres (unless they were only in a particular spot, i.e the Maningrida one and the Yulara one).
@NP – You forgot about Oly Carlson (Wanguri CLP MP) who is of Indonesian heritage.
Also adding on considering Fyles looks to go in Nightcliff, I think NT Labor may have a full Indigenous caucus (Uibo, Young, Paech, Brown)/
@James oh yeah true.
@James it’s interesting because:
* Eva Lawler lost her seat of Drysdale to the CLP
* Natasha Fyles will likely lose her seat to the Greens
* Michael Gunner’s old seat of Fannie Bay (which was also Clare Martin’s seat) went to the CLP and Labor finished third
* Paul Henderson’s old seat of Wanguri went to the CLP
So every seat held by any Labor Chief Minister in Northern Territory history has been lost.
Anthony Albanese either doesn’t care about the Territory or is too embarrassed to admit Labor failed in the Territory.
He still hasn’t posted on Twitter congratulating Lia for her win or Selena Uibo for her election as Labor leader, in fact I’m not sure if he’s even acknowledged that the NT went to an election. Despite this, Lia has posted on her Instagram story a photo of her and Albo together. It’s the first time she’s met with the PM after her landslide victory at the election.
Now that the election has been finalised, Lia named her full cabinet which includes all the 7 CLP members who served in the previous Assembly, plus two newcomers (Robyn Cahill and Jinson Charls, the two most experienced of the incoming CLP members).
Given that the rest of the CLP members are all new, I wonder if the party will still pick one of them to serve as Speaker or will they do what Labor did post 2001 and appoint a senior independent member (either Robyn Lambley or Yingiya Mark Guyula) instead.
@Yoh An if Yingiya was speaker then the left would have no way of even trying to pass legislation because it would just be Labor and the Greens. He’s not necessarily left on all issues but he certainly is on some issues.
The CLP appointing Yingiya (a left leaning MP) as Speaker does have precedence as Labor appointed independent and ex CLP member Lorraine Braham as Speaker following their 2001 victory. They also retained ex CLP member Kezia Purick as Speaker following their 2016 landslide win.
the CLP will likely appoint one of their own as speaker given they have a commanding majority and can spare one person to be speaker. independents rarely accept the job because it means they cant represent their constituents in parliament by asking questions etc
True John, for other states independent MPs are only appointed Speaker when the government does not have a majority. The one exception is probably Richard Torbay (NSW) who was appointed Speaker after the 2007 election even though Labor had a majority of seats.
Andrew Mackey (MP for Goyder) and Brian O Gallagher (MP for Karama) are the ones best suited to be Speaker as both have prior government experience so would have better command of parliamentary procedures.