Australia 2025 – Wrap-up of the night

Good morning, I have been writing this blog post after getting home to wrap my own head around the scale of the count. I expect I will have some issues with the website’s accessibility today, so some of this may also be posted over on Tally Room in Exile, my backup blog.

Firstly, it appears that there has been a significant increase in the number of contests involving minor parties and independents, but it will be some time before we can say how many seats are now non-classic.

Right now, 116 seats appear to be classic contests, 15 are Coalition vs Independent (including Katter and Sharkie), 10 are Labor vs Greens, 8 are Labor vs Independent, and one is Coalition vs Greens (Ryan).

But there are 19 seats where it is not clear at this point which parties should be in the 2CP, and it will require further counting to make that clear. I’m sure some of these seats will require a 3CP. That isn’t to say all these seats are in play – in some cases there is a clear winner and two parties competing to come second.

In theory as many as 43 seats could be non-classic, but at the moment 34 are leaning that way. As a reminder, the 27 non-classic seats in 2022 was an enormous jump. It’s hard to see the number not being higher this time.

I’m going to introduce a term I haven’t used much in the past: “Maverick”. The AEC uses this term to apply to seats where their initial chosen 2CP turns out to be wrong. This year, an enormous 22 seats were declared Maverick, although the Maverick status of Macnamara was later overturned. I think there’s three others where they could arguably do the same, and resume counting the initial 2PP count.

The Maverick status also covers two seats in WA where they picked the wrong party out of Liberal and Nationals. Ten of these 21 seats continue to be unclear as to what 2CP pairing will apply. There is thus a further 9 seats where it is unclear which parties make the 2CP, but since the likeliest pairing is the current pairing, they will continue counting until they decide otherwise.

The main reason for all of this complexity is the closeness of the second-placed and third-placed candidates. There are 30 seats where that gap is less than 5%.

I previously analysed these gaps at the 3CP level, which is not quite the same thing but is usually similar, and I have found the gaps have kept getting smaller. Well it looks like this trend is continuing in 2025. It is getting harder and harder to know which two candidates are the top two.

As for the seat outcomes, my current estimates are:

• Labor winning 86, leading in another 7
• Coalition winning 36, leading in another 4
• Independent (including KAP and CA) winning 10 and leading in 5
• Greens leading in 2

I won’t go into what those seats are now. Right now it looks like five of the six urban teals, plus Sharkie, Katter, Dai Le, Wilkie and Haines have all been re-elected. Zoe Daniel is leading in Goldstein, as are independents in Bean, Calare, Bradfield and Cowper, with the Calare candidate being ex-Nationals MP Andrew Gee. The total vote for independents (not including CA or KAP) has surged again to 7.8%.

The historic scale of Labor’s victory and the Coalition’s defeat forced me to collate some data on previous results, and this chart shows, as a proportion of the House, how many seats the government, opposition and crossbench have held after each election.

The exact record will depend on the final results, but it seems likely that this election result will produce more seats than the 90 seats won by Tony Abbott in 2013. There’s a chance Labor could surpass John Howard’s result in 1996, although I don’t think they’ll quite get there. As for Labor results, this is their best result in seat terms since 1943, and I don’t think any other result before that was any better.

For the Coalition, this looks like the worst result for any major party since 1943, even producing a lower seat proportion than Whitlam’s Labor in 1975. Of course the ballooning size of the crossbench means the defeat of the Coalition is a bit more impressive than Labor’s victory – an exaggerated version of the mismatch we saw in 2022.

For this whole campaign we have been looking at the declining major party votes, and what is amazing is that Labor has achieved this enormous victory while barely raising their primary vote.

The combined major party vote has continued to drop, currently sitting at 66.4%, just below two thirds of the total vote. The Coalition has also broken their own record for their lowest vote share since 1943. And the combined vote for the minor parties and independents has now passed the Coalition, and is over one third.

The final point I want to touch on is the Greens’ performance. At the moment it looks like they will scrape by in Melbourne and potentially win other seats like Wills and Ryan. Their result wasn’t particularly impressive, but I want to emphasise how much they are victims of the electoral system. Nationally the Greens vote is steady, just over 12%, and part of the story is that the Greens suffered primary vote swings in many of their best seats while gaining votes elsewhere. The map at the end of this post makes this very clear in cities like Melbourne and Brisbane, although you don’t see it in the same way in Sydney.

But in a number of their seats, their defeat did not primarily come due to a dropping primary vote, but a rearrangement of their opponents. In Brisbane and Griffith, the rising Labor vote pushed the LNP into third, and thus LNP preferences will elect Labor.

It’s a perverse part of our system that the most conservative voters decide who wins in some of the most progressive seats. Elizabeth Watson-Brown likely will survive while Max Chandler-Mather will be defeated because she represents a more conservative seat where the LNP is the main opponent.

And this is a challenge for the Greens because so many of their best seats are now Labor vs Greens contests where Labor will easily win the 2CP on Liberal preferences.

And finally, this map shows the swings for Labor, Coalition, Greens and One Nation on the primary vote, and a 2PP swing for the 124 seats with 2PP counts at the moment.

Amongst those 124 seats, the biggest 2PP swings were again in Inner Metropolitan seats, averaging 5.08%. Outer Metropolitan averaged 4.07%, Provincial 2.55% and Rural 2.12%. The urban-rural divide is growing even now.

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