Live commentary
End of evening. I missed most of the evening’s excitement, but contrary to my earlier indication that the Greens were well placed, the most likely result looks to be a narrow win for Labor, giving it a fifth seat in parliament and its only foothold in Darwin. There is no doubt that it will come down to Labor and the Greens at the final count: independent Phil Scott is set to bow out first with 17.3% of the primary vote and his preferences will do few favours for the CLP candidate on 20.3%. The Greens lead Labor on first preferences by 33.5% to 28.9%, but preferences have turned this into a Labor lead of 1890 to 1749, and there will only be about 200 postal votes outstanding. A pseudonymous commenter who presumably isn’t making it up relates that Labor got 78% of CLP and 40% of independent preferences, the former marking a decisive return to normality after an almost even split helped deliver the Greens their win in 2024.
7.45pm. The one election day polling booth has reported, but as noted below it only accounts for about a quarter of the vote, together with 158 postals, with the former in on the primary vote and the latter in on the two-candidate count as well. On this evidence it looks to be a two-horse race between Labor and the Greens in which the NTEC have picked the right candidates for the two-candidate count. The postal result suggests preferences are splitting about evenly, in which case the Greens lead over Labor of 395 to 293 would seem to be very good news for them. However, nothing can be stated with confidence in the absence of pre-poll results.
6.30pm. An NTEC media release advises: “907 eligible voters in the Division of Nightcliff cast their vote today at the election day voting centre located at Nightcliff High School. During the early voting period 2,657 votes have been cast at the early voting centre or mobile voting service. 441 postal votes have been issued.” They also have a thorough account of how and when the count will be conducted.
6pm. Polls have closed. Follow the results at the Northern Territory Electoral Commission. I’ll have commentary to offer if something comes through over the next hour or so, but after that I’m going out.
Preview
A Northern Territory by-election is being held today in the northern Darwin seat of Nightcliff, which became the first seat in the territory ever to be won by the Greens at the August 2024 election. That member, Kat McNamara, resigned in early February citing health issues, and a by-election has ensued with swift dispatch. McNamara unseated former Labor Chief Minister Natasha Fyles by 36 votes at the August 2024 election, after an unusually weak flow of Country Liberal preferences to Labor.
Both major parties are fielding candidates, with Labor hoping to add to its meagre haul of four seats out of 25 in 2024, and the ascendant Country Liberals hoping to add to their existing tally of 17. The Greens candidate is Suki Dorras-Walker, a community legal service paralegal and former teacher who ran for the party in Fannie Bay in 2024. Labor’s candidate is Ed Smelt, a Darwin councillor and civil engineer, while the Country Liberals have endorsed Anjan Paudel, a Nepalese-Australian lawyer. Phil Scott, who ran in the federal seat of Solomon in 2025 with backing from Climate 200 and polled 12.5%, is running as an independent.
The post will be appended with commentary on the count after polls close at 6pm local time.
Go Labor!
Ed Smelt will smite all comers!
Carn the Greens, you can do it
Struggling to find any HTV cards, preferences likely to be crucial again
NT gov done well on cleaning up the crazy labor/Greens soft on crime disaster.
One nation not running.
Labor & Greens will be close. CLP &
Teal tailed off. No preference from Scott with CLP putting Greens last
Its absolutely belting down in Darwin today after two weeks of constant monsoon.
Turnout will not be big and those that do will be the true faithful, whatever their colour.
PP Labor/Greens? Greens won their first seat in the NT at the last election
Only things growing under the CLP are the debt, house prices and the prison population
It’s a 100mm+ rain day in Darwin today. It might have some effect on turnout but it’s hardly an unusual event and Darwin people are pretty resilient when it comes to coping with rain. It’s hard to know what will happen and obviously there is no polling to go off. Although Kat McNamara’s resignation came out of the blue, Labor was surprisingly well positioned with a local candidate available with good credentials serving his second term on the Darwin council, with a very strong re-election performance in the 2025 council elections a few months ago. The CLP is behaving in its usual mysterious ways, having pre-selected a very young law graduate who is not well known. Perhaps the CLP believes they will cruise home without much effort due to their tough on crime efforts. The Greens and the independent (Phil Scott) have also been low key, and it looks like the local Greens were caught on the hop by Kat’s sudden departure, bringing in a candidate who came close to winning Fannie Bay in 2024. Labor lost Nightcliff narrowly in 2024 when anti Labor sentiment was especially strong. A couple of years have now passed so this won’t have the same impact now. Kat McNamara had the unusual distinction of winning in 2024 off the back of CLP preferences, having come 3rd on primaries. All things considered, it will be a big blow for Territory Labor if Ed Smelt misses out today.
If Smelt wins Labor gains a foothold in the critical Northern Suburbs, if he loses they will continue to have to make hit and run strikes from their bush electorates. Almost an impossible task in one term.
Crime going down as prison population goes up .I like!
Pre poll numbers?A third?
Just doing the ones I can find
Can’t find Dorras-Walker’s but according to the NT News it’s Phil Scott 2nd, Labor 3rd, and the CLP last.
https://www.ntnews.com.au/news%2Fpolitics%2Fnightcliff-byelection-labor-greens-clp-and-an-independent-make-their-pitch%2Fnews-story%2F618b17148af3dec2549f147793f0f512
Another double barrel Green!!! More double barrel names than a north shore rugby match.
Thanks Omar
The Greens candidate cost Labor Fannie Bay in 2024 because if Labor came 2nd they would have won and for that reason I hope she does not win here.
There’s been two other state by-elections recently where a minor party caused the vacancy: Hinchinbrook (Qld, KAP) and Prahran (Vic, Greens). Both very different circumstances from Nightcliff and each other, but the outcome was the same: the minor party lost. It’s not really comparable, but still not a great omen for the Greens here.
Two things happened at the Darwin council election last year: Ed Smelt topped the vote in Chan ward (3 seats), and the sitting mayor Kon Vatskalis got thrown out with a 36% swing on primary votes, coming third. From that, I guess you could say voters weren’t done whacking Labor after the territory election, but Smelt has a decent personal vote. (Darwin council doesn’t really do parties, but Vatskalis and the new mayor Peter Styles are both former MPs – Labor and CLP respectively.)
Dorras-Walker (Greens not beating the allegations about double-barrelled names) almost won Fannie Bay in 2024, but that’s on the other side of the city. I don’t know how much Darwin folk care about their candidates being local, but she’s gonna look like a bit of a blow-in.
So yeah, gut feeling says Labor win here. Smelt to become shadow minister for anything Darwin-related.
Fannie Bay and Nightcliff are adjoining electorates, with some demographic similarities ie, both are a bit “up-market” by Darwin standards (although in common with most of Darwin, the demographics are very mixed).
Due to the time zones at this time of year polls close at 7.30PM for the Eastern States, 7PM for SA, 6.30PM for the Banana people and 5pm for the people in the West.
They usually count fairly quickly in the NT and only 4 candidates should also help the speed too.
Assuming there’s not going to be any live broadcast of the results for this one?
B.S.:
Isn’t WA two hours behind QLD, not an hour and a half?
Daniel:
Its more than a bit silly to blame the Greens candidate for a bunch of Labor voters choosing to preference the CLP above the Greens.
If they wanted to keep the seat out of the Liberals’ hands, they should have preferenced accordingly.
Results at the Rapid Creek booth in Solomon (the only one in Nightcliff), last year’s federal election: ALP 31.4%, Scott 23.0%, CLP 21.2%, Greens 18.2%, others (mostly One Nation) 6.2%. Labor won the 2pp with 67.2% so the CLP aren’t a threat, but that would probably have been a Labor/Scott top two.
Green prefs went 46-39-15 to Scott/Labor/CLP, ON went roughly half CLP, a third Scott and the rest Labor/Green. Rough 3cp is ALP 39.5 Scott 33.5 CLP 27; Scott needed about 60% of CLP prefs to win the booth, which seems doable.
So, Scott might be a chance here?
CLP going with One-Nation Orange coloured HTV pamphlets???
BoP:
Interesting, thanks. I know nothing about the independent and was wondering whether he had any chance.
Is Nightcliff split between Soloman and Lingiari on a federal level?
A refreshing posts from NT voters. It doesn’t matter which party you belong to, please post more.
I want Labor to win because CLP needs some proper opposition.
Now we are getting to the point where polls are about to close, it will be interesting to see the order in which the 4 candidates finish – apart from the most important question, which is who wins! Also wondering who the NTEC has picked for the 2 candidate preferred count? I reckon it might end up much like last time on 1st prefs, with Labor leading, followed by CLP, Greens and Ind, with Ind preferences pushing Greens ahead of CLP, but this time round CLP preferences electing Labor.
Oh yes, my brain has gone soft because I spent the day. WA is three hours behind.
Alpha Zero:
To be fair, they’ve used orange as their official colour for a long time, I think well before One Nation were ever even a thing.
It can make the election coverage mildly confusing when media outlets gives them a shade of orange that’s just a bit too close to red. Wikipedia is bad with that too.
Ven:
Agreed. I always enjoy getting local insights on elections in areas I’m not familiar with.
The CLP orange is to represent Ochre and has been the party colour since at least the 1970’s.
The NT flag, adopted at self government in 1978, is Ochre and Black with the Sturts Desert Rose.
Asha – Nightcliff is wholly in Solomon. Darwin is wholly in Solomon, along with most of Palmerston. Lingiari is the rest of the Territory, including some parts of Palmerston. Scott had a lot of money backing him in the Federal election and a very visible campaign (Climate 200) but has had nowhere near as much visibility this time. Despite my efforts at making a prediction, there are scenarios in which any one of the 4 candidates end up winning. I really have no idea. If you went on campaign energy, it would be a shoe in for Labor, so it will be crushing for them if they lose today.
Outsider:
Thanks.
I believe the primary results will be Labor, Green, CLP, Independent.
The Peoples Republic of Nightcliff voted against Labor last time, but only towards Green and the Indigenous independent Mililma May.
That will be corrected this time, but it wont be on the first count.
It’s my understanding that pre-polls and polling day votes will be counted tonight. Because of the short campaign, there won’t be as many postal votes as usual. Turnout for by-elections is also lower. And there are no absent votes. There’s also only one polling booth as Nightcliff geographically is a small electorate.
Oh, there’s only a single booth? Does that mean we are only expecting three seperate batches of results coming in? (On the day, prepolls, and postals?) Or would prepolls be counted together with the election day votes?
EDIT: Oh, wait, I suppose we’d also be getting primaries first followed by the TPP count?
The NTEC has put this out:
And this is helpful, if you’re deeper into this whole thing than I am:
https://ntec.nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/1596427/nightcliff-by-election-2026-scrutiny-schedule-information.pdf
Thanks William.
That’s a lot of prepolls!
So thats a 65% turnout at best?
Asha: yep, just the one booth. Look at the booth map for Solomon: every NT seat (it covers a dozen!) corresponds to one or two booths. It’s toy town politics.
Going off of that PDF, it seems like we can expect two sets of primaries to come in (on the day votes from the Nightcliff booth and postals/prepolls from the Darwin one) followed by the TPP from both later on.
Will be a labor pick up, when they finally get around to counting votes.
California does their count quicker.
ALABAMA:
Have you ever witnessed an Australian election count?
All the booths I’ve scrutineered at had had way less votes to sort through than the 900 and over 3000 being counted tonight, and it still took at least an hour just to get the primaries.
That’s a good thing, by the way. Be glad we live in a country where this sort of thing is done thoroughly and properly. I’m sure we can all survive waiting a couple of hours to find out the results of the crucial electoral contest of, um, Nightcliff.
Only one polling booth? That is interesting. Thanks Outsider.
Snooze.
Just chkd the former NT election thread.
Took 90 minuties to get results.
Finochiaro needs to pull her socks up and take on the NTEC.
Obviously a bunch of DEI hires counting.
Not bloody hard to count a ballot paper.
Asha I’m not entirely certain that ALABAMA lives in a country where this sort of thing is done thoroughly and properly.
ALASKA:
You really are a moron.
You’ve ‘logged on’, william at 8.34pm.
DEI hires at the NTEC. Not hard to count a ballot with 4 candidates.
The footy will be finished first.
Bullshit.
It’s only 3km across. if you put the booth in the middle you’d take more time getting into a car and getting out of the driveway than it takes to get to it.
ALABAMA is one of the least educated states in the USA, sounds like the poster here with the same name follows in their footsteps.