There hasn’t been a great deal of time to dive into the results, but I’ve grabbed the seat-level votes and swings as of this morning.
I’ve put together a couple of maps showing the primary vote swings for the Greens and One Nation, and the two-party-preferred swings. I’ve also grouped seats by region to get a sense of the geography of the result.
10:25pm – I’m going to switch off now. I’ll be recording a podcast in the morning and will hope to get the episode up later in the day. I’m sure there’ll be further analysis next week, but that’s it for now.
10:05pm – Some recent results from north Queensland seats confirm that Labor looks set to hold all their seats in that region, and with that their majority. They are currently leading in a handful of LNP seats in the south-east which will likely give them an increased majority, even if they lose Cooper and McConnel.
9:10pm – So if we stopped the clock here and just took the election day vote, Labor would have won a slightly increased majority with the Greens also picking up a second seat. But in the next few hours we will be seeing a lot of postal and pre-poll votes, and that is what will tell us if this trend will continue.
8:06pm – There’s just not a lot to hold on to. At the moment the overall picture looks like Labor slightly increasing their majority, but there’s a lot of seats still in play, and the whole picture could be overturned when we get more of the pre-poll votes in.
7:39pm – It’s far too early to say anything definitive, but I think Labor is making more gains than they are losing.
7:26pm – We’re seeing some early evidence that Labor will be trading some northern seats for some southern LNP seats. Labor is currently leading in marginal LNP seats Pumicestone, Chatsworth, Caloundra and Coomera, all in the south-east, while the LNP is leading in Townsville and Barron River.
7:18pm – At the moment the only seat which the ABC has called as changing hands is Townsville, which was Labor’s most marginal seat. That should make Labor nervous about the neighbouring seats of Mundingburra and Thuringowa.
6:56pm – We are starting to get some early figures. Michael Berkman is looking good in Maiwar – he is up 11% on primary votes, with Labor down 10%. With no risk of falling behind Labor, he should win.
6:00pm – Polls have just closed in Queensland. Join me as I follow along with the results as they come in over the next few hours.
8:00am – Polls have just opened for election day in Queensland. I won’t be updating regularly today but feel free to use this as an open thread. Check back in at 6pm Queensland time as I will be liveblogging the results.
Ben is joined by Glenn Kefford and Shaun Ratcliff to discuss tomorrow’s Queensland state election.
This podcast is supported by the Tally Room’s supporters on Patreon. If you find this podcast worthwhile please consider giving your support.
You can subscribe to this podcast using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.
Six days after the ACT election, we now have a fairly good sense of the shape of the Assembly. The Assembly will be led by an enlarged Labor-Greens majority, with Labor and Liberal both losing seats and the Greens gaining seats. There are two seats left in play.
I haven’t been closely following the count for this week – you can see how things have moved at Antony Green’s blog or Kevin Bonham’s blog.
Just to quickly summarise the state of the race: the Greens have gained seats from the Liberals in Kurrajong and from Labor in Yerrabi. The Greens have gained a seat from either Labor or Liberal in Ginninderra, while either the Greens or Labor have gained the third Liberal seat in Brindabella. This leaves the Assembly with 10 Labor, 8 Liberals and 5 Greens.
The two seats in play are in Brindabella, in the Tuggeranong area, and Ginninderra, in the Belconnen area.
Brindabella was the only electorate to elect three Liberals in 2016. The Liberals have definitely lost that seat, with the race between a third Labor candidate Taimus Werner-Gibbings and Greens candidate Johnathan Davis. At the key stage in the count, Davis is now 23 votes ahead of Werner-Gibbings. Whichever of them ends up on top will defeat the third Liberal, Andrew Wall. This remains too close to call.
Ginninderra elected three Labor candidates and two Liberals in 2016. The Greens have gained a seat, with the third Labor candidate and the second Liberal fighting to retain their party’s seats. The gap between Labor MP Gordon Ramsay and Liberal candidate Peter Cain is currently 98 votes in favour of Cain. Antony Green suggests the remaining votes to come should favour Cain, although Kevin Bonham points out that a batch of votes added to the primary count but not yet included in the preference count is very favourable to Ramsay and should improve his position.
I suggest paying attention to Bonham and Green if you want to follow the count closely. I’ll return with further analysis once the vote count has concluded. But for now I also wanted to zoom out and look at the overall trends in the five electorates.
The New Zealand electoral system tends to produce a flattening effect on the results. Most electorate results don’t really make a difference to the national outcome so the results analysis tends to just look at the national figures. But there is value in delving down and looking at the geography.
Overall the swings away from National and towards Labour were remarkably consistent. In this post I’ll include some maps and tables showing the swings in different parts of New Zealand, and look at how the swing on the candidate vote tended to be bigger in National seats.
I have compiled an estimate of the 2017 results based on the 2020 redistribution. I don’t believe anyone else has done this in New Zealand. This means it is possible to calculate swings from this data. You can view these 2017 estimates here. Elections NZ did not make it easy to grab all the booth data in one go – the data was in 142 separate CSVs in a messy format, there are no unique booth IDs and the macrons used for many electorate names and booth names were treated inconsistently by my software. But it’s finally finished and will be used in this post.
Ben was joined by Jill Sheppard from the ANU to talk about the ACT election results, and to briefly touch on the New Zealand results.
This podcast is supported by the Tally Room’s supporters on Patreon. If you find this podcast worthwhile please consider giving your support.
You can subscribe to this podcast using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.
10:22pm – I’m going to call it a night here. I’ll be busy tomorrow so may not have any updates then, but will definitely have some posts next week including a podcast. Until then, the summary of the results:
10:04pm – It’s been pointed out to me that I made a mistake when looking at Brindabella. The gap between the Greens and the third Labor candidate is extremely slim, so it’s entirely possible the Greens could win. It’s also been pointed out that we don’t know strong Labor preferences will flow to the Greens if this happens, so it’s possible the third Liberal could win if the Greens get ahead of the third Labor.
9:36pm – So on my quick count I have Labor on 11, Liberals on 8, Greens on 4, with Labor narrowly beating the Liberals in Ginninderra and the Greens narrowly beating the Liberals in Kurrajong. This means Labor probably can’t win a majority, but the overall centre-left position has strengthened tremendously.
9:34pm – Just quickly looking at Yerrabi, at the final point in the count two Labor candidates, one Liberal (Coe) and Greens candidate Andrew Braddock have been elected, with the two remaining Liberals on 0.79 and 0.86 quotas respectively. It seems unlikely the Liberals will poach a third seat from the Greens.
9:33pm – In Murrumbidgee, the sample is worth 59.7% of enrolment, compared to 79.1% for the latest primary vote count. It overestimates Labor by 0.4 and Liberals by 0.5% and underestimates the Greens by 0.4%.
At the key point in the count both Liberals have been re-elected, as has one of the Labor candidates (Steel). The Greens’ Davidson is elected on the votes of ungrouped candidate Fiona Carrick, leaving the two remaining Labor candidates competing for the final seat on 0.74 quota for Bec Cody and 0.85 quota for Marisa Paterson. Paterson wins.
It’s not clear which Labor candidate wins but the party balance seems clear.
9:27pm – So, Kurrajong. 52% of the vote is included in the preference distribution. The sample underestimates the Greens by 0.7% and overestimates the Liberals by 0.9% compared to the latest primary vote count. It also overestimates Labor by 0.2%.
The Greens’ Shane Rattenbury and Labor’s Andrew Barr are elected earlier in the count, and at the key point the votes of Labor’s third candidate Maddy Northam push second Labor candidate Rachel Stephen-Smith over quota. Her surplus favours second Greens candidate Rebecca Vassarotti, putting her on 0.84 quota.
The two remaining Liberals both remain under quota. Elizabeth Lee is on 0.96 quota and her colleague Candice Burch is on 0.79 quota. Thus Vassarotti beats Burch. The gap is only 0.05 quota, or 0.7% of the total formal vote, so this is still in play, although it’s worth noting that the Greens vote has improved significantly since this sample.
9:08pm – Okay, after a short break putting my kid to bed, let’s look at Ginninderra. The current count has 75.9% of total enrolment counted. The preference count is at 58.7%. It overestimates the Liberals by 0.5% and Labor by 0.5% and underestimates the Greens by 0.3%.
At the key point in the count, Labor’s Berry and Cheyne have been re-elected and the third Labor candidate Ramsay is on 0.82 quota. Liberal Kikkert has been re-elected and her colleague Peter Cain is on 0.78 quota. The Greens’ Jo Clay is on 0.88 quota.
Cain is then eliminated and Ramsay and Clay both win. A turnaround of 0.7% would be enough for Cain to overtake Ramsay, so the third Labor seat is still in play. I wouldn’t confidently call the Greens seat but I think Clay is likely to win.
It’s also worth noting that at an earlier point in the count Clay is on 0.56 quotas when her colleague Katt Millner is elminated on 0.4 quotas. I don’t think that gap is likely to change.
8:45pm – Elections ACT appears to have published preference distributions based on a partial count. I’m going to go through these one by one, starting in Brindabella.
In Brindabella the distribution is based on 39,529 formal votes, compared to 50,116 on the latest count. The count slightly overestimates the Liberal vote (by 0.6%), underestimates the Greens by 0.4%, and overestimates Labor by 0.3%.
Greens candidate Johnathan Davis is knocked on about 0.7 quota, and his preferences elect the second Labor candidate and push the third close to the quota. The surplus from the second Labor candidate then elects the third Labor candidate. At this key stage the three Labor candidates have about 20,000 votes while the three Liberals (none of whom has been elected) are collectively on 17,000. Then the third Liberal sitting MP Andrew Wall (who is a long way behind his colleagues) is knocked out and elects his colleagues.
This seems pretty decisive for Labor to win three, but we’ll see as the count continues.
8:00pm – We now have about two thirds of the vote counted in Ginninderra. Labor is on 2.44 quotas, the Liberal Party on 1.56 and the Greens on 0.77. This would put the last two seats in play. The Greens are leading on a per-quota basis, but the Ginninderra effect suggests Labor in particular will be in a stronger position than that 0.44 surplus would suggest.
7:58pm – The Māori Party has gained a seventeen-vote lead in Waiariki. If they win this seat that’s one less seat that’s available for the other four parties in Parliament. It would also make them eligible to win list seats, but their current party vote would only entitle them to one seat anyway.
7:21pm – So at this point there are four districts in the ACT where the Liberal vote is down substantially, while they are up substantially in Yerrabi. By my count I have Labor on ten likely seats, the Liberals on eight, the Greens on three, with Labor and Greens competing for two other seats, with the Liberal scompeting with a centre-left party in the other two. That would translate into an increased number of centre-left seats. But it’s still early and a lot of seats are still in play.
7:19pm – The vote count is much less advanced in Ginninderra. Just 4.3% have been counted. There appears to have been a big swing against the Liberal Party, down to 1.39 quotas. The Labor vote is steady at 2.45 quotas, with the Greens vote up substantially to 0.97 quotas. Interestingly the Greens vote is split very evenly between two of their candidates, which is unusual for the Greens. On these numbers the Greens would have won an extra seat while Labor and Liberal are competing to retain their seats, but the count is quite early.
7:15pm – Yerrabi has bucked the trend in other electorates, possibly due to the presence of Liberal leader Alistair Coe, or a reversion after a light rail-driven swing in 2016. The Liberal vote is up 6% to 2.5 quotas, while Labor has suffered a 9.5% swing, falling to 2.11 quotas, while the Greens are on 0.55 quotas.
Labor looks likely to lose their third seat here, with the Liberal and Green competing for that final seat. If the Liberal Party vote is relatively even that will advantage them against the Greens, but a large part of the Liberal vote is concentrated in Coe.
7:10pm – Almost one third of the vote has been counted in the south-western electorate of Murrumbidgee. Labor’s vote is up 4.4% to 2.26 quotas, while the Liberal vote is down 10.8% to just 1.98 quotas. The Green vote is up to 0.74 quotas.
The redistribution helped the Liberals in Murrumbidgee by adding some strong Liberal booths on the southern slope of Capital Hill. Effectively the Greens seat in this electorate became a notional Liberal seat. But on these numbers the Liberals don’t have much chance of nabbing this seat.
7:07pm – Over a quarter of the vote has been counted in the inner-city electorate of Kurrajong. The Labor vote is steady at 2.39 quotas, while the Greens vote is up 7.6% to 1.63 quotas. The Liberal vote, which elected two members in 2016, is down to just 1.29 quotas. Greens candidate Rebecca Vassarotti is in fourth place on primary votes. It seems quite plausible the Greens could gain a seat here. If they don’t, it’s also quite plausible Labor could gain a third seat. The Liberal Party is a long way away from retaining their second seat.
7:03pm – The Liberal Party currently holds three seats in Brindabella. Their vote is currently sitting on 2.31 quotas, compared to 2.48 quotas for Labor and 0.65 for the Greens. It looks likely the Greens or Labor could gain that third Liberal seat.
7:00pm – At the territory-wide level, the Greens vote in the ACT is up 4.9%, while Labor is up 1.3% and the Liberal vote is down 4%. It is too early to say if this is a fair sample but that result suggests we will see Labor returned to government, possibly continuing in alliance with a strengthened Greens team. I’m going to run through the electorates one by one.
6:55pm – We’re starting to see a drop in the Labour vote in New Zealand as other votes start to come in. Let’s see if that trend continues.
6:47pm – Let’s pause and consider the historic nature of the New Zealand result. It’s been 24 years since the first MMP election in 1996. It’s the ninth election held under the new proportional system. No election in that time has produced a single-party majority, although National came quite close when they won three terms in government in 2008, 2011 and 2014, winning 58, 59 and 60 seats respectively.
There has been a long term decline in the number of seats for minor parties, from 39 in 1996 and 41 in 2002 all the way down to just eighteen in 2017. The current results point to 21 seats for Green and ACT. Single-party majorities become more viable when there are less minor parties, but Labour’s result is still outstanding considering that this election has also been a relatively good one for the Greens.
6:33pm – I can’t see a path to government for National in New Zealand. At the moment Labour is on track for a majority in their own right, but even if they fall short they will be able to govern with a strong Green Party.
6:23pm – About 14.5% of the total enrolment is counted now in the ACT, and it appears that there are small swings to Labor and the Greens while the Liberal vote is steady. Too early to say too much about that.
6:02pm – 20% of the vote is now counted in New Zealand and Labour’s party vote is still over 50%. While that might drift downwards slightly, they are clearly on track to form the next government, possibly with a majority.
The electorate seats tell the story of a landslide – Labour is currently leading in nineteen of National’s 42 seats, with the Green Party leading in one other.
5:20pm – 3.8% of the vote has already been counted in New Zealand, thanks to the advance vote count starting this morning. Labour is currently polling just over 50% of the party vote.
5:00pm – Polls have just closed in New Zealand, and polls close in one hour in the ACT.
I’ll be primarily covering the ACT results but I’m planning some top-level analysis of the results in New Zealand.
Both elections have seen record levels of early voting. More than half of all New Zealand voters had cast an advance vote by Thursday night, and it looked like about 60% of all ACT voters would have cast a pre-poll vote before today.
Pre-poll votes in both jurisdictions are primarily cast electronically, which promises a quick turnaround of results for those votes cast early, but we’ll see how that goes tonight.
Polls have just opened in the ACT election.
I’m not planning to do regular updates through the day. Please use this as an open thread.
I’ll see you at 5pm AEDT when I’ll kick off the liveblog.
Polls have just opened in New Zealand.
I did not do a comprehensive guide to the New Zealand election but I have managed to pull together a bit of data at the last minute. This post contains a map of every election day booth used in 2017. All electorates using the same booth have been merged together (including Māori electorates) and I am just using the party vote, to give a sense of general trends across the country.
You can toggle the map to show which party topped the vote (there were three booths where National and Labour were tied, and one where the Green Party won), and to see the distribution of vote for National, Labour, NZ First and Green.
You can also use this as an open thread to discuss this election today. I will be back from 5pm AEDT (7pm in New Zealand) with results from both New Zealand and the ACT.
