Australian Capital Territory Politics

Non-federal polls: Resolve Strategic NSW and DemosAU ACT

New polls find the One Nation disruption at full force in New South Wales, but largely only a problem for the Liberals in the ACT.

I am late in noticing the Resolve Strategic poll of New South Wales state voting intention for Nine Newspapers, which follows the pollster’s usual pattern in combining responses from the state from the last two monthly national polls. One Nation is up three points to a new peak of 25%, while Labor returns to 29% after a three-point spike in March-April, the Coalition drops three to a new low of 23%, and the Greens gain one to 11%. Chris Minns’ lead over Kellie Sloane as preferred premier shifts from 38-18 to 36-16. The sample for the poll was 1100.

Also out this week was a rare Australian Capital Territory poll conducted by DemosAU, with results providing little indication that Labor’s 26-year hegemony is about to come to an end. Labor was on 32%, compared with 34.1% at the October 2024 election; the Liberals were on 21%, compared with 33.5%; and the Greens were on 11%, compared with 12.2%. One Nation, who did not contest the 2024 election, were on 14%. A generic independent category accounted for 19%, with 3% designated as others. When non-major party voters were asked who they were favoured to form government, 42% of the independent voters opted for Labor compared with only 18% for the Liberals. Chief Minister Andrew Barr was viewed positively by 33%, neutrally by 29% and negatively by 38%, while Liberal leader Mark Parton respectively scored 26%, 48% and 28%. The poll was conducted July 2 to 16 from a sample of 979.

ACT election and NSW by-elections live

Live commentary on the count for the Australian Capital Territory election and the New South Wales state by-elections for Epping, Hornsby and Pittwater.

Live updated results from the Australian Capital Territory, Epping, Hornsby and Pittwater.

End of Saturday night

To summarise, the Liberals have had a disappointing result in the Australian Capital Territory, looking to have gained only one seat from their starting point of nine out of 25 and not even being assured of that. Labor has held steady on ten seats, despite its vote share being down by three to four points. The Greens have failed to match a best-ever result in 2020, but the cut in the party’s representation from six seats to three (or possibly four if things go their way in Brindabella) reflected only a slight drop in vote share. Of particular note was the election of two independents for the first time since the 1990s, dove-tailing with the emergence of David Pocock on the federal scene. With Labor and the Greens set to retain a combined majority, they face a marginal position in the new parliament.

Another notable independent win was chalked up last night by Jacqui Scruby in the New South Wales state by-election for Pittwater. Scruby fell 0.7% short of being the only teal independent to gain a seat at the March 2023 election, which she has accounted for on my projection with a swing of about 5%. In this she was no doubt aided by the ignominious circumstances of Liberal member Rory Amon’s departure, and also by both Labor and the Greens leaving the field vacant for her. Labor also did not contest yesterday’s by-elections for Epping and Hornsby, respectively vacated by Dominic Perrottet and Matt Kean, where Liberal candidates Monica Tudehope and James Wallace both looked to have scored majorities on the primary vote.

Live commentary

9.46pm. Another update from Brindabella has the Liberals down from 2.58 quotas to 2.57 and the Greens up from 0.54 to 0.55.

9.26pm. The Brindabella preliminary distribution, which was calculated before the weakening of the Liberals’ position, had Labor’s Mick Gentleman, who is fighting for his and Labor’s third seat, excluded with 3708 votes to the third Liberal’s 4218, or 14.3% of the total to 12.6%.

9.19pm. Kevin Bonham can further discern a scenario where Brindabella comes out at Labor three and Liberal two, rather than the other way around. Clearly this is the electorate that will be the main focus of interest in the late count.

9.08pm. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the correction of the Chisholm booth error or a substantial addition of new votes, but the Liberals’ third seat in Brindabella no longer looks secure. The Liberals have a 2.58 quotas (a 9.7% surplus over the second quota), the Greens 0.54 (9.0%) and Independents for Canberra 0.45 (7.5%), leaving preferences from the latter the decisive factor in whether the Greens can yet pull an iron out of the fire here. The preliminary preference distribution has the Independents for Canberra preference going 30.5% to Labor, 19.2% to the Greens and only 13.1% to the Liberals, with 37.2% exhausting. That suggests to me the Liberals will need the fillip they are presumably likely to get from postals to hold out against the Greens.

9.03pm. Nothing in the preference distribution to doubt the earlier assessment of Kurrajong as two Labor and one each for Liberal, Greens and independent Thomas Emerson, the latter taking the Greens’ second seat.

8.55pm. No surprises in the distribution for Brindabella, a clear result of Liberal three and Labor two. Ginninderra is as expected projected as a status quo result of Labor two, Liberal two, Greens on. Jo Clay of the Greens gets the last seat by surviving ahead of Mark Richardson of Independents for Canberra by 13.6% to 10.6% at the decisive point of the late count.

8.46pm. Preliminary preference distributions have been published on the ACT Electoral Commission site, which I’ll now be poring over.

8.45pm. Antony Green on the ABC notes all 900 votes from the Chisholm booth in Brindabella have been allocated to the Liberals, an obvious error. However, its correction won’t fundamentally change the situation there.

7.58pm. So it looks to me like the Liberals are gaining a seat from the Greens in Brindabella, and independents are gaining seats from the Greens in Kurrajong and Murrumbidgee. That would leave Labor steady on ten seats but reduce their coalition partners in the Greens from six to three, while leaving them with a combined majority of 13 out of 25. The Liberals would at least gain parity with Labor on ten seats, but be unable to gain a majority even if the two independents supported them.

7.52pm. Yerrabi looks like a status quo result in every particular, returning incumbents Michael Pettersson and Suzanne Orr of Labor, Leanne Castley and James Milligan of Liberal, and Andrew Braddock of the Greens.

7.49pm. My system is now calling Pittwater for Jacqui Scruby (and I believe that’s despite a glitch in the projection that’s favouring the Liberals by a handful of votes).

7.48pm. A second independent looks like being elected in Murrumbidgee — Fiona Carrick, at the expense of Emma Davidson of the Greens, with Labor (incumbents Chris Steel and Marisa Paterson) and Liberal (incumbents Jeremy Hanson and Ed Cocks) remaining on two each.

7.44pm. Kurrajong, which went two Labor, two Greens and one Liberal in 2020, looks like electing Thomas Emerson, Independents for Canberra candidate and son of former federal Labor minister Craig Emerson. This is disappointing for the Liberals who look like remaining stalled on one seat (Elizabeth Lee’s), with the others going two Labor (Andrew Barr and Rachel Stephen-Smith re-elected) and one Greens (Shane Rattenbury re-elected, Rebecca Vassarotti failing to retain the Greens’ second seat).

7.33pm. Ginninderra looks like a status quo result of two each for Labor and Liberal and one for the Greens. Labor incumbents Yvette Berry and Tara Cheyne will be re-elected, as will the only recontesting Liberal, Peter Cain, likely to be joined by Chiaka Barry. Jo Clay should be returned for the Greens.

7.21pm. Antony Green says the ABC computer is calling Pittwater for Jacqui Scruby. I’ve got her probability at 97.4%, and don’t call it until 99%.

7.18pm. I’ll now go through the ACT seats alphabetically. Brindabella looks like Liberal three and Labor two, with the Liberals taking a seat from the Greens. The only contesting Liberal incumbent, Mark Parton, has a quota on his own, with Deborah Morris (especially) and James Daniel looking good for the other two. Labor’s only contesting incumbent, Mick Gentleman, is coming third on his party’s ticket, behind Caitlin Tough and Tamius Werner-Gibbings, the latter of whom had to fight for preselection.

7.06pm. As my projection suggested it would, a fourth booth from Pittwater has moderated Jacqui Scruby’s lead. We also have, very early, a batch of postals, breaking 743-606 to Liberal. So Scruby will need her lead on the booth results. She’s very well placed, but my system still isn’t calling it.

7.03pm. I believe it was just the one bug, and it’s now fixed.

6.58pm. Bugs in my ACT page: pretty much everything in the summary table at the bottom of the entry page, and the bar charts on the seat pages are misbehaving. Initial impression is that the Liberals are doing very well in Brindabella, but more modestly elsewhere.

6.53pm. Thanks to the magic of electronic voting, a massive influx of results from the ACT.

6.51pm. Three booths in from Pittwater, and I’m projecting Jacqui Scruby with 55.6% TCP when her raw primary vote is 58.7%, so presumably these are from good areas for her. My system isn’t quite giving it away yet though.

6.48pm. Three booths in from Epping, Liberal candidate on nearly two-thirds of the vote.

6.43pm. Two booths from Pittwater look hugely encouraging for independent Jacqui Scruby, her primary vote at over 60% in both.

6.42pm. Sixty-nine votes from Wisemans Ferry offers nothing to disabuse the assumption that a Liberal win in Hornsby is a formality.

6pm. Polls are closed for each of the above-mentioned electoral events, which you can read a lot more about through the election guides at the top of the sidebar. My results page for the by-elections offer booth-matched swings and projections and full results at booth level in map and tabular form. The ACT page is more elementary – no results at booth level and the swings simply compare the current results with the final ones from 2020.

ACT and NSW state by-election guides

Beginners’ guides to next fortnight’s election in the Australian Capital Territory, where the Liberals hope to end a decades-long drought, and three by-elections for blue-ribbon state seats in New South Wales.

With thirteen days to go in both cases, this site now offers a guide to the Australian Capital Territory election, and individual guides to the by-elections for the Liberal-held state seats of Epping, Hornsby and Pittwater in northern Sydney. The former finds Labor, which governs in coalition with the Greens, seeking a seventh successive victory and an extension on its 23 years in office, in circumstances that are seemingly more promising for the Liberals than those that prevailed when it suffered a dismal result in 2020. Labor has forfeited each of the New South Wales by-elections, but that in Pittwater is of considerable interest in offering a second chance for teal independent Jacqui Scruby, who came within 0.7% of winning the seat at the state election in March 2023.

Federal preselection and electoral law developments

Federal preselection news from New South Wales, not all of it about the Liberals, plus plans to lower the voting age to 16 in the ACT and much else.

The mercurial Roy Morgan organisation put out a newsletter this week saying its fortnightly poll had Labor leading 56.5-43.5 and would be published in full within 48 hours, but nothing more was heard. However, there is no shortage of other electoral news to relate, even without getting too deep into the developing situation of the New South Wales Liberals’ federal preselection tangle, which was covered in depth here. Note that I also have a separate post dealing with the imminent Super Saturday of four New South Wales state by-elections.

• The Liberals in New South Wales have at least resolved their dispute to the extent of proceeding with plans for a preselection ballot for Bennelong, which David Crowe of The Age reports is likely to be held in March. The candidates are Gisele Kapterian, former chief-of-staff to Michaelia Cash and current executive at software company Salesforce; Craig Chung, a City of Sydney councillor; and Simon Kennedy, a former partner at McKinsey.

• Labor also has a few loose ends in New South Wales, having yet to choose candidates to succeed retiring members Sharon Bird and Julie Ovens in Cunningham and Parramatta. A membership ballot for Cunningham will be held on February 19 between Misha Zelinsky, Australian Workers Union assistant national secretary and former criminal defence lawyer, and Alison Byrnes-Scully, staffer to Sharon Bird (and wife of state Wollongong MP Paul Scully). Zelinsky has been in the news over social media posts and an e-book he co-authored nearly a decade ago which featured jokes denigrating women. The Guardian reports that Labor is struggling to find a candidate in Parramatta that the party hierarchy considers up to standard, having lately been rebuffed by Cameron Murphy, prominent barrister and son of Lionel Murphy.

• Northern Territory Senator Sam McMahon, a Country Liberals member who sat with the Nationals in Canberra, resigned from the party last week and is leaving open the possibility of contesting the election either for a different party or as an independent. McMahon lost her preselection last June to Alice Springs deputy mayor and conservative media identity Jacinta Price.

Noteworthy matters of electoral law and administration at state and territory level:

• A headache looms in South Australia ahead of its March 19 state election, with no contingency in place for voters put in COVID-19 isolation who are unable to meet the deadline for a postal vote application. A bill to allow for voting to be conducted over the phone in this circumstance was passed by the lower house and amended in the upper, and the lower house had not considered the amendments when it rose in early December. The Advertiser reports that Labor says it would be a simple matter for the house to reconvene and agree to the amended bill, but Premier Steven Marshall says there is not enough time to pass legislation before the government enters caretaker mode ahead of the election. Marshall blames Labor for supporting the amendments, but it appears to me that the government chose to sit on the bill for the last three days of the session.

• The Canberra Times reports Labor has “indicated a willingness” to support a Greens bill to make voting compulsory for 16 and 17 year olds in ACT elections, notwithstanding the local electoral commission’s evident horror at the resulting administrative burden.

• Remy Varga of The Australian reports the Victorian government is taking a stand against the pernicious practice of political parties handling postal vote applications so they can harvest data from them.

Easter eggs

Preselection jockeying for Andrew Laming’s seat of Bowman, a looming state by-election in NSW, and a post-mortem into yet another election defeat in the ACT.

The interruption of Easter means we’re not likely to see any opinion polls this week. A new post is wanted though, so I offer the following loose assemblage of news items. My own efforts have late have been consumed by my Tasmanian election guide, which is currently being buffed and polished ahead of publication later today.

• Lydia Lynch of the Brisbane Times reports the executive of Queensland’s Liberal National Party has voted to reopen preselection nominations for Andrew Laming’s seat of Bowman, by a bare margin of 11 to 10, but for which the position would be assured for businesswoman Fran Ward, the only candidate to nominate against Andrew Laming when he still intended to run. The Australian reports that “conservative forces” were keen that this should happen to open the way for Henry Pike, communications adviser for the Property Council and unsuccessful candidate for Redlands at the October state election. The Brisbane Times report says the preselection looms as a three-way contest between Ward, Pike and barrister Maggie Forrest. Senator Amanda Stoker has ruled herself out, despite expectations she could use the seat to resolve a difficulty where she and James McGrath are in competition for the safe first and loseable third positions on the LNP Senate ticket, the second position being reserved to the Nationals.

• A by-election will be held in the New South Wales state seat of Upper Hunter following the resignation of Nationals member Michael Johnsen after he was accused of raping a sex worker. I will have a dedicated post and election guide up for the by-election hopefully later in the week. For what it’s worth, Sportsbet has Shooters Fishers and Farmers as favourites to win the seat, paying $1.50 compared with $3.25 for the Nationals and $8 for Labor.

• The Canberra Times reports on the findings of an internal review into the ACT Liberals’ sixth successive election defeat in October, finding more effort should have been made to win over “soft Greens voters” who might be persuaded by a pitch targeting the Greens’ “anti-small business bent” and “soft law and order policies”. The review was conducted by Grahame Morris, lobbyist and one-time chief-of-staff to John Howard, Vicki Dunne, recently retired Liberal MP, and Daniel Clode, the party’s campaign manager in 2016.

Australian Capital Territory election live

Live coverage of the count for the Australian Capital Territory election.

Conclusion: Saturday, October 24

What are apparently the final distributions have been posted, so we look to have a final result of Labor 10 (down two), Liberal nine (down two) and Greens six (up four), with 2-2-1 results everywhere except Kurrajong, where the Greens won a second seat to secure a 2-1-2 result. Johnathan Davis of the Greens won the last seat in Brindabella ahead of Labor’s Taimus Werner-Gibbins, resulting in 2-2-1 rather than 3-2, and Peter Cain won a second seat for the Liberals in Ginninderra ahead of a third for Labor by edging out incumbent Gordon Ramsay, resulting in 2-2-1 rather than 3-1-1.

When I last analysed the count in Brindabella a full week ago, Werner-Gibbins led Davis by seven at the key point in the count, which ended up being an 82 vote advantage to Davis. Unsuccessful Liberal Andrew Wall landed 110 votes clear of Werner-Gibbins at this point of the count; if he had fallen behind, his preferences would have decided the result between the other two. In Ginninderra, Labor’s hope of ekeing out a third seat by re-electing Gordon Ramsay disappeared over the week as Liberal candidate Peter Cain’s 271 vote deficit against Ramsay at the key count has turned into a 167 vote advantage.

End of Saturday night

Let’s start with the big picture. Labor’s overall vote appears to be entirely unchanged from 2016 at 38.4%; the Liberals are down from 36.7% to 33.4%; and the Greens are up from 10.3% to 13.5%. It is clear there will continue to be a Labor government relying on Greens support: with two seats still in doubt, the 23 confirmed seats have gone Labor 10, Liberal eight and Greens five, compared with Labor 12, Liberal 11 and Greens two in 2016. Their respective best case scenarios are 12, nine and six.

One of the seats in doubt is in Brindabella, where the Liberals have clearly lost a seat in the only district where they won three in 2016, the question being whether it goes to Labor or the Greens. The other is in Ginninderra, where the Greens have clearly gained a seat, the question being whether it comes at the expense of Labor, who won three seats in 2016, or the Liberals, who won two. One of the two districts that went 2-2-1 in 2016, Murrumbidgee, has done so again this time; in the other, Kurrajong, the Greens have gained a second seat and reduced the Liberals to one. The Greens have won a seat from Labor in Yerrabi, where Labor won three and the Liberals two in 2016.

Breaking it down by district:

Brindabella

With Labor and the Liberals assured of two, the question of the final seat comes down to a seven vote gap between Labor’s number three, Tamius Werner-Gibbings, and Greens candidate Johnathan Davis, who are respectively at 4961 and 4954 at the decisive distribution. The defeated third Liberal incumbent, Andrew Wall, is on 5050 at this point of the count, and the complexion of Liberal preference flows between Labor and the Greens will determine the result if he falls back by 50 votes so and gets excluded before Werner-Gibbings and Davis.

The absence of the Sex Party, who polled 7.9% in 2016, left room for substantial gains for both Labor (up 7.5% to 41.1%) and the Greens (up 5.8% to 10.9%), while the Liberals fell 3.8% to 38.1%. Labor’s two incumbents, Joy Burch and Mick Gentleman, had no trouble getting re-elected, and there was again little to separate them, with both gaining around 3% off similar vote shares from 2016. Taimus Werner-Gibbings polled 6.7% without getting elected in 2016, and is now contention to do so after gaining 1.7%.

The order of the three elected Liberals in 2016 was Andrew Wall, Mark Parton and Nicole Lawder, but it was Wall who went under as his fell from 12.0% to 8.1%, while Parton and Lawder made slight gains. The Greens vote more doubled, from 5.1% to 10.9%, with Davis going from 1.5% at his unsuccessful run in 2016 to 5.6% this time.

Ginninderra

Despite polling a solid 9.2%, the Belco Party did not end up being in contention. Whereas I speculated pre-election that they might give the Liberals a path to victory by poaching a seat from Labor they would not have been able to win themselves, their presence did not in fact do the Liberals any favours, and may actually cost them one of the two seats they went in with. At the point where lead Belco Party candidate Bill Stefaniak drops out of the count, more than half his vote exhausts, with 29.8% going to the Liberals, 12.2% to Labor and 4.6% to the Greens. That leaves two seats and three candidates, with Jo Clay of the Greens in the clear on 5791, and Labor’s Gordon Ramsay ahead for the last seat with 5282 votes to 5011 for Peter Cain of the Liberals. So Cain has a gap of 271, or around 0.6% of the total, to make up in late counting.

The Liberal vote in Ginninderra slumped 6.2% to 25.8%, although Labor were also down 0.8% to 40.6% as the Belco Party muscled into the field, and the Greens were up 3.2% to 12.9%. With three Labor incumbents seeking re-election, Yvette Berry and Tara Cheyne picked up strong swings to dominate the party’s vote, while Gordon Ramsay trod water and lagged behind, to mix a metaphor. The only Liberal incumbent, Elizabeth Kikkert, picked up 2.3% to emerge the clear winner for the only assured Liberal seat. The potential second winner, newcomer Peter Cain, polled 5.3%, and Jo Clay dominated among the Greens with 6.4%.

Kurrajong

The Greens’ success in gaining a second seat at the expense of one of the two Liberal incumbents comes down to Rebecca Vassarotti of the Greens having 5021 votes at the relevant exclusion to 4384 for Candice Burch of the Liberals, which I presume is too big a gap to make up on late counting.

The traffic in the party vote shares was between Liberal and the Greens, with the former down 4.8% to 26.2% and the latter up 5.2% to 24.0%, while Labor held steady on 38.4%. The two re-elected Labor incumbents had little change on their 2016 vote shares, with Andrew Barr on 22.3% and Rachel Stephen-Smith on 5.6%.

Elizabeth Lee emerged the only clear Liberal winner with 9.3%, little changed on 2016; Burch’s likely defeat arises mroe from the overall drop in the Liberal vote rather than her own vote share, which was up 1.6% to 7.5%. Of the Greens, Shane Rattenbury’s 13.2% was little changed on 2016, with Rebecca Vassarotti gaining 3.1% on her unsuccessful 2016 performance to score 6.5%, well ahead of the party’s other two candidates.

Murrumbidgee

Needing a win in an electorate where they had been favoured by the redistribution, the Liberals did no better than maintain the status quo with a particularly weak vote share of 34.6%, down 9.9% on their redistribution-adjusted total from 2016. Labor were up 3.8% to 36.8% and the Greens 1.4% to 12.1%, with most of the lost Liberal vote accounted for by independent Fiona Carrick’s 7.0%.

From the Labor ticket, Chris Steel sophomore surged by 5.0% to 14.1%, but the other newcomer from 2016, Bec Cody, looks set to lose to party colleague Marisa Paterson after dropping 1.7% to 7.0%, while Paterson was on 8.0%. Cody’s 370-vote deficit against Paterson on the primary vote grows to 717 with the distribution of preferences.

Of the Liberals, Jeremy Hanson got 14.3% after losing 8.1% from the vote share he managed as leader in 2016, while the other Liberal incumbent, Giulia Jones, dropped 0.7% to 6.5%, only slightly clear of Liberal newcomer Amardeep Singh on 6.2%. Her 113-vote lead over Singh on the primary vote expands to 528 as preferences are distributed. The new Greens member is Emma Davison, who dominated the party’s vote with 7.2%.

Yerrabi

The outlier of the five districts, with the Liberals surging 4.4% to 40.2% while Labor sagged by 9.2% to 34.7%, for which the DLP’s 4.8% provides only half an explanation. However, it doesn’t appear to have done the Liberals any good, as they remain stuck on two seats, with the Greens instead gaining a seat from Labor after their vote rose 3.2% to 10.3%.

Part of the shift from Labor to Liberal reflects the mid-term retirement of Labor’s strongest incumbent from 2016, Meegan Fitzharris – Labor’s three incumbents, Michael Pettersson, Suzanne Orr and Deepak-Raj Gupta, made only slight gains despite her 15.2% being up for grabs, polling between 7.2% and 9.7%. The other notable candidate factor behind the result was Liberal member Alistair Coe’s rise to the leadership, though his 1.7% gain to 15.9% was quite modest. Liberal newcomer Leanne Castley gained a seat at the expense of party colleague James Milligan, polling 8.6% to Milligan’s 7.0%, the latter being 0.6% down on his vote from 2016. Andrew Braddock dominated the two-candidate Greens ticket with 6.5%.

Live commentary

Continue reading “Australian Capital Territory election live”

Australian Capital Territory election guide

A belated in-depth look at Saturday’s election in the Australian Capital Territory, where Labor is hoping to make it six in a row.

With less than a week to go, I finally have an Australian Capital Territory election guide for your reading pleasure, consisting of an overview and reviews of the contests for the territory’s five five-member electoral districts. Labor has been in power since 2001 and is aiming for its sixth successive victory – a tall order in normal circumstances made quite a lot easier by the local Liberal Party’s determination to tack far to the right of the capital’s ideological median.

That at least is my limited reading of the situation, which is based on a bare minimum of opinion polling. The only credible poll I’m aware of was conducted by uComms for the Australia Institute back in early August, which had Labor on 37.6%, compared with 38.4% at the 2016 election; the Liberals at 38.2%, compared with 36.7%; and the Greens at 14.6%, compared with 10.3%. Clubs ACT published results from an online survey it conducted of 1300 respondents, which you can read about on page 26 of its September newsletter, but it presumably didn’t involve any of the techniques that can make such a poll credible. For what it’s worth, it had similar numbers to the Australia Institute for the major parties – 36.1% for Labor and 38.4% for Liberal – but only 9.6% for the Greens.

The numbers in the 25-member Legislative Assembly are Labor 12, Liberal 11 and Greens two, after the 2016 election gave Labor three seats and Liberal two in the northern suburban electorates of Yerrabi and Ginninderra, the reverse in the southern suburbs electorate of Brindabella, and two each for Labor and Liberal plus one for the Greens in each of the central Canberra electorates of Kurrajong and Murrumbidgee. Labor’s likeliest path to defeat would involve losing seats in any two out of Yerrabi, Ginninderra and Murrumbidgee. The Liberals could perhaps win a third seat in Murrumbidgee with a 2% swing, but Yerrabi and Ginninderra would require major breakthroughs. However, an opportunity could arise courtesy of Bill Stefaniak, a former Liberal MP who is running in Ginninderra under the banner of the Belco Party – albeit that he has not been in parliament since 2008 and memories of his good works will have faded.

Antony Green is tracking the progress of pre-poll voting on his blog, and the numbers are rather startling, with 28.8% of enrolled voters already having cast their vote, compared with 7.3% at the same point in 2016. All of the pre-poll voting centres allow for electronic voting, a contingency all but unique to the Australian Capital Territory, and Antony Green reports that nearly 90% of pre-poll voters are availing themselves of it. This could potentially take some of the drama out of election night, as results from electronic voting arrive in a flood within the first hour after polling booths close.

Essential Research leadership ratings, ACT poll, Eden-Monaro wash-up

Poll respondents continue to rate incumbents generously in their response to COVID-19; an ACT poll points to a status quo result at the election there in October; and the preference distribution is finalised from the Eden-Monaro by-election.

The Guardian reports the latest fortnightly Essential Research poll includes its monthly leadership ratings, showing further improvement in Scott Morrison’s standing. He is up three points on approval to 66% and down four on disapproval to 23%, while Anthony Albanese is respectively steady at 44% and up two to 30%, and his lead as preferred prime minister is at 52-22, out from 50-27.

The small-sample breakdowns on state government performance finds the Victorian government still holding up reasonably well, with 49% rating it good (down four on a week ago, but well down on a 75% peak in mid-June), while the New South Wales government’s good rating is down a point to 61% and Queensland’s up a point to 68%. Results for the federal goverment are not provided, but will presumably be in the full report when it is published later today.

Fifty per cent now rate themselves very concerned about COVID-19, which is up seven points on a fortnight ago and has been progressively rising from a low of 25% in mid-June. Fifty-six per cent of respondents said they would seek a vaccine straight away, 35% less immediately and 8% not at all. Twenty per cent believed that “hydroxychloroquine has been shown to be a safe and effective treatment”.

UPDATE: Full report here. The federal government’s good rating on handling COVID-19 is down a point to 63%, and its poor rating is steady at 16%.

Other news:

• We had a rare opinion poll for the Australian Capital Territory, which holds its election on October 17, conducted by uComms for the Australia Institute. It offered no indication that the Liberals are about to break free of their status as a permanent opposition, with Labor on 37.6%, Liberal on 38.2% and the Greens on 14.6%, compared with 2016 election results of 38.4%, 36.7% and 10.3%. This would almost certainly result in a continuation of the present state of affairs in which the Greens hold the balance of the power. The poll also found overwhelming support for “truth in political advertising” laws, with 88.5% supportive and 4.9% opposed. The poll was conducted on July 20 from a sample of 1049.

• The preference distribution from the July 4 Eden-Monaro by-election has been published, offering some insight into how much Labor’s narrow victory was owed to a Shooters Fishers and Farmers preference recommendation and a higher than usual rate of leakage from the Nationals. The former was likely decisive: when Shooters were excluded at the final count, 5341 (56.61%) went to Labor and 4093 (43.39%) went to Liberal, which includes 5066 first preference Shooters votes and another 4368 they picked up during the preference distribution (including 1222 from the Nationals). When the Nationals were excluded earlier in the count, 4399 votes (63.76%) went to the Liberals, the aforementioned 1222 (17.71%) to Shooters, 995 (14.42%) to Labor and 283 (4.10%) to the Greens. This includes 6052 first preference votes for the Nationals and another 847 they picked up as preferences earlier in the distribution. That would be consistent with maybe 20% of Nationals votes ending up with Labor compared with 13% at the 2019 election, which would not quite account for Labor’s winning margin. At some point in the future, two-candidate preferred preference flow figures will tell us precisely how each candidate’s votes split between Labor and Liberal.

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