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.
@Whoknows that was the last government they’ve improved now.
@Scart I think Port Darwin should be an easy CLP gain since the Greens vote there last time was only 7.3%. Fannie Bay will be closer since the Greens do well there.
Are you from the territory?
I’m in Queensland, I have friends up there though.
“Indigenous people rarely vote Greens, especially outside the cities.”
Got a citation for that, Nether Portal? I’ve never seen any polling of First Nations people specifically to make such a declaration. Lingiari has an 11% Greens primary, which isn’t significantly below polling numbers for any state overall or the nation as a whole. In the absence of polling, for all we know, that 11% could be disproportionately composed of First Nations, or disproportionately composed of non-First Nations voters. We don’t know.
The results for the “remote mobile team” polling places in Lingiari may give some indication.
@Wilson, the Greens primary in Lingiari’s RMV booths were between 1% and 12%. The average estimate would be like 6% since a few booths were like that (there were 16 RMV booths in Lingiari).
The TPP swings to the Coalition and against Labor were huge at RMV booths which just proves that Indigenous people are moving away from Labor. On primaries that vote mostly went to the CLP with some of it going to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats (now the Libertarian Party).
At the Tennant Creek PPVC the Greens got 9.7% primary (Tennant Creek is an Indigenous-majority town but only just, I think it’s like 54% Indigenous).
Nether Portal, firstly your information isn’t correct as RMT 16 had a 15% Greens primary. Secondly, there is no data to show what ethnicities voted in which RMT booths, and the results may also capture many non-First Nations voters who live remotely. Thirdly, the bulk of First Nations people live in urban areas and may have voted in urban booths rather than in RMT booths. There’s a big misconception fed by people like Pauline Hanson that only people living in remote communities are “true” First Nations people, but that’s not the case.
As for Tennant Creek, how many of those First Nations people were actually registered to vote in 2022? My understanding was that the Voice referendum got a lot of First Nations people to register to vote who previously hadn’t. I’d also argue 9.7% would be an excellent primary vote for the Greens in a rural town of 3000 people anywhere in Australia. It’s safe to say their voter base tends to be in larger cities.
As to the percentage of First Nations population versus vote share, I could just as easily say that Sadadeen has the highest share of First Nations people within Alice Springs, and also had a booth with a 25% Greens primary.
@RMT I was speaking of remote Indigenous people. Someone in Ngukurr won’t vote in Katherine even though that’s the nearest big town. Firstly it’s a long drive and many remote Indigenous people are poor so the cost of petrol would be a burden, and secondly it’s unnecessary since RMT booths go to every Indigenous community in the Territory.
It seems that the RMT booths that moved around had low Greens primaries while the ones at the 0872 postcode had higher Greens primaries. The main towns in that postcode are Hermannsburg (a small Indigenous community on Arrarnta (Western Arrernte) land, southwest of Alice Springs), Ti Tree (an Aboriginal town just north of Alice Springs), Yulara (a resort town near Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park, home to Uluru and The Olgas (Kata Tjuta), about four hours from Alice Springs). Do you have any idea why the Greens vote is so high around the southern booths but not in the northern, eastern and western booths?
Anyway, as for Sadadeen, it is a suburb of Alice Springs (Eastern Arrernte: Mpwarnte) on the eastern side of the Todd River. There is a Charles Darwin University campus there which probably explains why the Greens did so well there.
There are two seats without CLP candidates: Araluen and Mulka. Meanwhile Labor still hasn’t fielded candidates in Araluen, Mulka and Nelson.
At the moment, Yingiya Mark Guyula (independent) in Mulka and Gerard Marley (CLP) in Nelson are running unopposed. The last time a candidate won unopposed at a federal or state election was at the 2008 NT general election, when Labor won the remote seats of Arnhem and MacDonnell unopposed.
I can’t find any CLP candidates running for Arnhem?
@Whoknows former independent candidate Ian Mongunu Gumbula has been announced as the CLP’s candidate for Arnhem. Katherine MP Jo Hersey was with him campaigning in Arnhem recently.