The Australian Electoral Commission is dampening expectations about the progress of the count:
The initial sorting and collation of postal and other declaration votes already received by the AEC will finalise on Monday. The AEC will also check every declaration vote against the electoral roll and other requirements in order to include them to the count. Once this examination process is complete, the counting of declaration votes recently included in the count will begin. This is expected to be on Tuesday. Postal and other declaration votes will continue to be received, sorted and included in the count up until the deadline for receipt on 15 July.
What this amounts to is the AEC taking extra special care to ensure there are no repeats of the Senate fiasco from Western Australia in 2013. Many will grumble about the slow progress, but you can’t have it both ways. So no counting yesterday or today, which I’m personally relieved by as it’s giving me a chance to wrap my head around a complex situation. Here’s how I described it in response to a commenter’s query on the previous thread:
Barring some freaky late count development in a seat currently off my radar, I have the Coalition home in 70 seats, Labor home in 65, others home in five, and ten up in the air (though I haven’t yet absorbed Kevin Bonham’s notion that the Liberals could theoretically win Melbourne Ports, as may the Greens, although a Labor win seems most likely). So they would need to break 8-2 to Labor for them to win more seats than the Coalition (UPDATE: I beg your pardon — make that Coalition 69 and Labor 66, and Labor needing a break of 7-3). Out of the ten, I would, in descending order of degree, rather be in the Coalition’s position in Dunkley, Chisholm, Gilmore and Capricornia, and Labor’s in Herbert, Cowan and Hindmarsh. There are three seats I don’t even care to speculate about:
Flynn, because the LNP would make it home if they did as well on pre-polls and postals as last time, but that was apparently because they did well from fly-in fly-out workers, of which the electorate now has fewer with the end of the mining boom. It’s also possible that Labor has run a stronger postals campaign this time after abandoning the seat as a lost cause in 2013.
Forde, because there looks like being so very little in it.
Grey, because we don’t know enough about the preference flow yet, but the early indications are encouraging for the Liberals.
I’ll have a more detailed paywalled account of the situation in Crikey later today.
Martin B
Sorry. No list. (William did a run through on Sunday morning on Bludger which you can access. Here is the text of William’s Crikey article. I have put it all in. I hope William does not mind.
‘At the end of an election night that began disappointingly for the government and then grew steadily worse, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s effective declaration that he would secure a parliamentary majority had many scratching their heads.
With the Coalition parties having no more than 64 seats out of 150 bolted down, by the reckoning of the Australian Electoral Commission, two possibilities suggested themselves.
One was that Turnbull had, as he claimed, been briefed by party strategists that there was very good reason to think late counting would save the government’s bacon.
The other was that he was being loose with the truth, perhaps through a desire to influence the psychology of Coalition MPs ahead of a potential leadership stoush, or crossbench members who might ultimately hold the fate of his government in their hands.
[Stability? Forget about it — strap in for a wild ride]
Exactly what might be achieved by making such a claim and then being proved wrong about it may well he hard to discern, but desperate situations have a way of bringing forth desperate measures.
To further emphasise the point, unidentified Liberal sources — presumably not friends of the Prime Minister — were putting it about yesterday that a hung parliament was “likely”.
What is clear is that the Coalition casualty list is well beyond the pre-election consensus of journalists, betting markets and both major parties.
The first clear sign of trouble on Saturday night came from northern Tasmania, where the Liberals had gained Bass, Braddon and Lyons on double-digit swings in 2013.
The general view that Labor would recover Lyons but fall short in the other two was the first of many items of conventional wisdom to go under through the course of the evening.
In a brutal demonstration of Turnbull’s limited appeal to to blue-collar voters, all three are now back in the Labor fold, with Bass again recording a double-digit swing. Similarly, the scale of discontent on the fringes of the capital cities was underestimated even by Labor optimists.
Louise Markus was an unanticipated casualty in the Blue Mountains region electorate of Macquarie; an anticipated close result in Macarthur on Sydney’s south-western fringe instead turned into a rout for two-term Liberal member Russell Matheson; Fiona Scott was evicted after a single term in the seat of Lindsay; and Wyatt Roy was defeated in the outer northern Brisbane seat of Longman, even as party colleagues in more marginal seats closer to central Brisbane survived unscathed.
The pattern of stronger performances nearer the city was also borne out in Sydney, where the Liberals retained the seats of Banks and Reid, which had once been reliable for Labor.
Barring late count miracles, the Coalition has lost no fewer than four seats in New South Wales, one in Queensland, the Darwin-based seat of Solomon, and the aforementioned three seats in Tasmania.
Also gone is the South Australian seat of Mayo, the one clear gain for the Nick Xenophon Team.
[Three-party preferred: up all night with Liberals, Labor and the Greens]
The Liberals also emphatically failed in the new seat of Burt in southern Perth, which had a notional Liberal margin of 6.0% and $500,000 of Liberal campaign money spent on it, but delivered Labor a thumping margin of 8.4% — another thing to keep in mind the next time anyone tries telling you about the unique insights of party strategists.
Coming off a post-redistribution starting point of 88 seats, that brings the Coalition down to 77, to which they can add the gains of Fairfax on the Sunshine Coast, formerly held by Clive Palmer, and most likely the Melbourne seat of Chisholm.
Then comes the election’s very wide zone of uncertainty: nine seats that may or may not fall to Labor, with four being sufficient to cost the Coalition its majority.
Minor complications aside, the count so far encompasses all the votes cast on polling day, plus those from pre-poll voting centres within the division where they were cast.
The results stand to be decided by postal votes, of which there should be around 7000 per seat; pre-poll votes cast outside the electorate, around 5000 per seat; and absent votes, cast outside the electorate on polling day, around 4500 per seat.
Postal votes favour the Coalition, being most popular among older voters, as well as those away from large urban centres.
Conversely, absent votes are most commonly cast by younger voters and accordingly lean to the left, and particularly to the Greens, while pre-poll votes are broadly neutral on two-party preferred.
Taken together, late counting usually favours the Coalition, with Labor rarely winning seats where they trail at the close of election night.
This suggests the Liberals should maintain their narrow leads in the Melbourne seat of Dunkley and Gilmore in regional New South Wales, and are a slightly better-than-even chance of chasing down a 991-vote deficit in the central Queensland seat of Capricornia, which Labor wouldn’t normally expect to lose at an election as tight as this one.
However, it’s going to be difficult for the Coalition in the Townsville seat of Herbert, Cowan in Perth’s northern suburbs, and Hindmarsh in Adelaide’s west.
[Election 2016: what we know so far]
Then there are three that are all but impossible to read, for one reason or another.
In the seat of Flynn in central Queensland, Liberal National Party member Ken O’Dowd would just overhaul his 2058-vote deficit if he did as strongly on postals as last time, which come overwhelmingly from rural areas.
However, Labor would have run a better-organised postals campaign on this occasion as they had written the seat off in 2013, but had high hopes this time around.
One undecided electorate where late counting made little difference in 2013 was Forde at the southern edge of Brisbane, since Labor’s weakness on postals was cancelled out by strength on absent votes.
The reason for this is that Labor is stronger at the electorate’s urban northern end in Logan City, and weaker in the semi-rural outskirts to the south. Consequently, many voters at the Labor-voting end stray into neighbouring suburbs and cast absent votes in the seats next door.
Labor currently holds a tiny lead of 149 votes in Forde, and it’s anyone’s guess if this will remain after late counting.
The other imponderable is a potential second gain for the Nick Xenophon Team in the South Australian seat of Grey, where Liberal member Rowan Ramsey is on 41.6% and NXT candidate Andrea Broadfoot is on 28.5%, well clear of Labor on 21.2%.
Broadfoot needs nearly three-quarters of the 30% of the vote that went to Labor and other parties to break her way on preferences.
The AEC conducted an irrelevant Liberal-versus-Labor two-party count on election night, and is now in the very early stages of conducting the decisive Liberal-versus-NXT count.
Early indications are that the flow of preferences to the NXT will be insufficient, but it’s still too early to tell.
In short, neither Malcolm Turnbull nor his naysayers have any cause to make confident assertions one way or the other about the status of the government’s majority — not that it should come as any surprise that they aren’t letting that stop them.’
I hope this helps you.
Rossmore
Labor has certainly learned its lesson: buckle to Greensmail and die.
Martin B
Here is the full text of William’s Crikey article. It should be read in conjunction with what William put in on either Saturday night or Sunday morning. Also several posts William has put in in various strings since. There is no list as such.
‘At the end of an election night that began disappointingly for the government and then grew steadily worse, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s effective declaration that he would secure a parliamentary majority had many scratching their heads.
With the Coalition parties having no more than 64 seats out of 150 bolted down, by the reckoning of the Australian Electoral Commission, two possibilities suggested themselves.
One was that Turnbull had, as he claimed, been briefed by party strategists that there was very good reason to think late counting would save the government’s bacon.
The other was that he was being loose with the truth, perhaps through a desire to influence the psychology of Coalition MPs ahead of a potential leadership stoush, or crossbench members who might ultimately hold the fate of his government in their hands.
[Stability? Forget about it — strap in for a wild ride]
Exactly what might be achieved by making such a claim and then being proved wrong about it may well he hard to discern, but desperate situations have a way of bringing forth desperate measures.
To further emphasise the point, unidentified Liberal sources — presumably not friends of the Prime Minister — were putting it about yesterday that a hung parliament was “likely”.
What is clear is that the Coalition casualty list is well beyond the pre-election consensus of journalists, betting markets and both major parties.
The first clear sign of trouble on Saturday night came from northern Tasmania, where the Liberals had gained Bass, Braddon and Lyons on double-digit swings in 2013.
The general view that Labor would recover Lyons but fall short in the other two was the first of many items of conventional wisdom to go under through the course of the evening.
In a brutal demonstration of Turnbull’s limited appeal to to blue-collar voters, all three are now back in the Labor fold, with Bass again recording a double-digit swing. Similarly, the scale of discontent on the fringes of the capital cities was underestimated even by Labor optimists.
Louise Markus was an unanticipated casualty in the Blue Mountains region electorate of Macquarie; an anticipated close result in Macarthur on Sydney’s south-western fringe instead turned into a rout for two-term Liberal member Russell Matheson; Fiona Scott was evicted after a single term in the seat of Lindsay; and Wyatt Roy was defeated in the outer northern Brisbane seat of Longman, even as party colleagues in more marginal seats closer to central Brisbane survived unscathed.
The pattern of stronger performances nearer the city was also borne out in Sydney, where the Liberals retained the seats of Banks and Reid, which had once been reliable for Labor.
Barring late count miracles, the Coalition has lost no fewer than four seats in New South Wales, one in Queensland, the Darwin-based seat of Solomon, and the aforementioned three seats in Tasmania.
Also gone is the South Australian seat of Mayo, the one clear gain for the Nick Xenophon Team.
[Three-party preferred: up all night with Liberals, Labor and the Greens]
The Liberals also emphatically failed in the new seat of Burt in southern Perth, which had a notional Liberal margin of 6.0% and $500,000 of Liberal campaign money spent on it, but delivered Labor a thumping margin of 8.4% — another thing to keep in mind the next time anyone tries telling you about the unique insights of party strategists.
Coming off a post-redistribution starting point of 88 seats, that brings the Coalition down to 77, to which they can add the gains of Fairfax on the Sunshine Coast, formerly held by Clive Palmer, and most likely the Melbourne seat of Chisholm.
Then comes the election’s very wide zone of uncertainty: nine seats that may or may not fall to Labor, with four being sufficient to cost the Coalition its majority.
Minor complications aside, the count so far encompasses all the votes cast on polling day, plus those from pre-poll voting centres within the division where they were cast.
The results stand to be decided by postal votes, of which there should be around 7000 per seat; pre-poll votes cast outside the electorate, around 5000 per seat; and absent votes, cast outside the electorate on polling day, around 4500 per seat.
Postal votes favour the Coalition, being most popular among older voters, as well as those away from large urban centres.
Conversely, absent votes are most commonly cast by younger voters and accordingly lean to the left, and particularly to the Greens, while pre-poll votes are broadly neutral on two-party preferred.
Taken together, late counting usually favours the Coalition, with Labor rarely winning seats where they trail at the close of election night.
This suggests the Liberals should maintain their narrow leads in the Melbourne seat of Dunkley and Gilmore in regional New South Wales, and are a slightly better-than-even chance of chasing down a 991-vote deficit in the central Queensland seat of Capricornia, which Labor wouldn’t normally expect to lose at an election as tight as this one.
However, it’s going to be difficult for the Coalition in the Townsville seat of Herbert, Cowan in Perth’s northern suburbs, and Hindmarsh in Adelaide’s west.
[Election 2016: what we know so far]
Then there are three that are all but impossible to read, for one reason or another.
In the seat of Flynn in central Queensland, Liberal National Party member Ken O’Dowd would just overhaul his 2058-vote deficit if he did as strongly on postals as last time, which come overwhelmingly from rural areas.
However, Labor would have run a better-organised postals campaign on this occasion as they had written the seat off in 2013, but had high hopes this time around.
One undecided electorate where late counting made little difference in 2013 was Forde at the southern edge of Brisbane, since Labor’s weakness on postals was cancelled out by strength on absent votes.
The reason for this is that Labor is stronger at the electorate’s urban northern end in Logan City, and weaker in the semi-rural outskirts to the south. Consequently, many voters at the Labor-voting end stray into neighbouring suburbs and cast absent votes in the seats next door.
Labor currently holds a tiny lead of 149 votes in Forde, and it’s anyone’s guess if this will remain after late counting.
The other imponderable is a potential second gain for the Nick Xenophon Team in the South Australian seat of Grey, where Liberal member Rowan Ramsey is on 41.6% and NXT candidate Andrea Broadfoot is on 28.5%, well clear of Labor on 21.2%.
Broadfoot needs nearly three-quarters of the 30% of the vote that went to Labor and other parties to break her way on preferences.
The AEC conducted an irrelevant Liberal-versus-Labor two-party count on election night, and is now in the very early stages of conducting the decisive Liberal-versus-NXT count.
Early indications are that the flow of preferences to the NXT will be insufficient, but it’s still too early to tell.
In short, neither Malcolm Turnbull nor his naysayers have any cause to make confident assertions one way or the other about the status of the government’s majority — not that it should come as any surprise that they aren’t letting that stop them.’
Albert Twoman,
Fair enough. I was too harsh, I apologise.
Thanks for that. : )
test
Bum. Sorry for the double post of a too long post.
Frydenberg points out the obvious: the Greens have done poorly in this election.
“Could you please not be so rude ”
I’m pleased that rudeness is now frowned upon in here. I’ll have to come back more often 😉
But I will be off now: thank you to all who have responded to, if not answered my questions. (I am, of course, unfailingly polite. :-p)
Question,
“Sohar,
You are missing out on the shadenfreude.”
That’s a small price to pay to avoid Tony Jones.
Thanks, B. I’m trying to work out whether BB and AG are fundamentally at odds over a seat, or if there is a typo/miscount here, so it’s not actually the undecideds that I’m worried about here, it’s the clear calls.
Sohar, perhaps I’m just enjoying the schadenfreude, but Jones isn’t bothering me tonight.
Pretty much status quo for Greens. Senate looking about as good as could have been expected. Overall, could have been worse, could have been better.
Really going. Night.
There is nothing wrong with engaging with One Nation MPs/ voters. They are usually ordinary people who lack education/life experience outside of a fairly mono-cultural norm. Concentrated in rural areas with a high level of poverty/disadvantage.
Just the people who should be supporting progressive political change and not right wing opportunists and LNP. Saying things like they are not welcome in Parliament just reinforces their attitudes to “elites” etc. At such time as they adopt anti-democratic policies and practices then that might change. Democracy requires a battle of ideas and the opportunity will be there over the next few years to win over many of the ON voters.
c@tmomma @ #1143 Monday, July 4, 2016 at 10:07 pm
Hmmmm agree with Mr Twoman actually.
Confessions is legendary for her dumb questions.
People don’t come to the blog to spoon feed Confessions.
Did we work out if Toby Akers is Piers Akermann in disguise?
For goodness sake
Sky News Australia
44m44 minutes ago
Sky News Australia @SkyNewsAust
Bronwyn Bishop says she weeps for Australia: More http://bit.ly/29kHFtY http://snpy.tv/29bampr
Thanks C@t. 🙂
boerwar @ #1147 Monday, July 4, 2016 at 10:11 pm
Loved his line that “it takes two to tango and we’re not on the dance floor”.
Filed away in my brain for future use.
Vic, we’re all going to drown in mascara.
Jeremy Corbyn coup designed to stop him ‘calling for Tony Blair’s head’ after Chilcot report, says Alex Salmond
‘It would be a mistake to believe that Chilcot and current events are entirely unconnected. The link is through the Labour Party’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-chilcot-report-latest-news-alex-salmond-a7116926.html
Q
Cracker!
Bemused
Enough already. Confessions works and has less time than many of us to absorb detail in comments.
It doesn’t hurt others to just post the information she asks for.
Your comment belittles the good contribution you’ve been making to the site.
Bemused
The Greens need to understand that ‘No!’ means ‘No!’
Question
Too true!!
Apology accepted. Let’s get back to discussing issues and I’m good with that.
Schadenfreude
raaraa @ #1173 Monday, July 4, 2016 at 10:32 pm
Qanda is once again viewable on ABC24. First time for ages.
Question, “Jones isn’t bothering me tonight”. Good. Perhaps he is waiting to see who his new master/mistress is?
Sceptic
Maybe. It is far more likely that Brexit is the main driver.
Ta Boerwar.
Jones has kept his interruptions to a low count. This is partly because, apart from SH-Y, the politicals are not interrupting each other and are giving short, pithy answers. Jones lets Holly and Kelly bloviate to their heart’s content. They go on and on and on.
bh @ #1172 Monday, July 4, 2016 at 10:31 pm
I simply expressed my true feelings. If you don’t like it then too bad.
Many others, myself included, are not on PB all day and stick to what we have time for without seeing ourselves as some kind of celebrity needing special treatment.
Evening all
Re the discussion tonight of “what if Labor is in Opposition but gets the numbers to pass a Bill through both Houses”:
The NZ precedent, about it being more likely that the GG would sign a Bill passed by the Parliament, despite Government advice to the contrary, is likely to be more relevant than reference to the US Presidential veto.
Reason: the Presidential veto is explicitly provided for in the US Constitution. (Checks and balances and all that. They had 1776 and what followed, not just 1689.)
As is what happens next – the President’s veto gets communicated back to Congress with reasons. If Reps and Senate pass the Bill again it’s law anyway. This last has happened about 100 times out of about 1000 Bills vetoed.
Quite different from our system you see. On this one (despite having a written constitution that is modelled on the US on some things) we are more UK than US.
Quick summary of US position at http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/thepresidentandcabinet/a/presveto.htm
Went to check the mail today and realised I had received a letter purporting to be from the Prime Minister himself. Amongst other things it told me that I ‘live in one of 14 seats where just a few hundred votes could change the outcome of the election’. So that kind of contradicts the claim that internal polling indicated a different result. I’ve only just moved and the only government agency that I informed of my new address so far has been the AEC, so they must have used enrolment information to mail one of these to everybody in the electorate. It’s quite an ironic read in hindsight as it also attempts to appeal to fear of a hung parliament. Anyone else get one of these?
boerwar @ #1174 Monday, July 4, 2016 at 10:32 pm
‘No’ is too polite.
Boerwar:
Tonight’s Qanda hasn’t been too bad.
blanket criticism @ #1185 Monday, July 4, 2016 at 10:39 pm
So politicians can access the electoral roll? Who would have thought.
There you have it again. SH-Y stated that Labor had been relatively silent on global warming. It is simply untrue.
C
Agree.
B
No letters here.
Where was Mark Kenny before the election…
Bill Shorten became the first mainstream leader in a generation to actually propose higher taxes and higher spending. Some voters perhaps many, said yes.
So when Turnbull faces conservative dissenters, he might do well to cite that fact. Taking his government further to the centre is about the only clear mandate he is left with.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016-opinion/australian-federal-election-2016-doughnut-nation-the-election-that-left-a-hole-in-the-country-20160704-gpxzga.html#ixzz4DRYGGI7b
Jesus. SHY’s party conspired with the Turnbul Liberal to deliver the election result we currently have. Sorry, SHY but you have zero credibility whingeing about the failure of the incoming parliament to address AGW.
zoomster @ #1012 Monday, July 4, 2016 at 8:41 pm
I thought a recount only begins after a full complete count is done in the first round, including preferences and a TPP result. I’m sure the focus would be on the close seats first before wasting resources on seats with clear results.
Hey Bemused – what do you bench?
‘You are missing out on the shadenfreude.”
That’s a small price to pay to avoid Tony Jones.’
Not to mention Paul pontificator Kelly.
nina661 @ #1195 Monday, July 4, 2016 at 10:46 pm
Huh?
nina661
Hey Bemused – what do you bench?
Couldn’t help thinking of this.
https://youtu.be/IP7hzKoNLR8?t=1m21s
Blanket
The parties get access to the electoral rolls, and a regular ons and offs listing. This gets fed into the databases where information is aggregated and cross matched against other datasets – like phone numbers.
Bemused, you come across like a strong & handsome man, confident, intelligent, somewhat gifted with the ladies – just wondering, what do you bench?