Australia 2013 - Results thread

[Platypus]

Still wayyyyy too early to say.

There are about 8500 votes to go, and at the current rate for postals a percentage of 57% to Mirabella...

She gains 4845, McGowan gains 3655.

That means Mirabella gains 1190 back on McGowan's 1449 lead, for a 259 vote win for McGowan.

[Platypus]

The sunshine coast seats are pretty settled: Mal Brough (LNP) and Clive Palmer (his own party) are very likely to get up.

All the other closest seats I think the Libs end up winning, unfortunately, except Indi.

[Platypus]

Mirabella trails by 1100.

But more importantly, the AEC have released the numbers of Absentee, Provisional etc etc votes still to count. Factoring in a slightly higher than normal rate of informal votes, a figure of 7000 looks about right - that's makes it 3000 more total votes than in 2010 btw - and then assuming Mirabella wins roughly the same percentage of all the other non-standard votes as she is with postals, and...

McGowan wins by 36 votes.

Junk maths obviously but a bit of fun

[Platypus]

Rob Mitchell (ALP sitting member) has pulled ahead by 24 votes in McEwen. With about even numbers of postal (lib favouring) and absentee+provisionals to count, strongly favouring him, it will come down to a shade under 5k prepoll envelopes. In 2010, on somewhat different boundaries, they favoured the libs compared to the seat as a whole by a tiny margin, this time it may well be stronger. It's going to stay close.

[Platypus]

True, but as expected, the largest part of the swing to the coalition in Victoria was in the north and west of Melbourne, seats that are demographically not dissimilar to southern and western Sydney, where the transition to being The Worst People On The Planet occurred 15 years ago. For whatever reason, the coalition of low-income whites and lower-income immigrants voting for Labor has held up remarkably well on that side of the Yarra, even though it's been weakened significantly throughout the rest of Australia.

I think the West and the North, and especially the Northwest, will remain Labor heartland for a long time to come, but the ridiculous margins in seats like Gorton, Lalor, McEwen and Calwell were always destined to fall. The fact that they did so as remarkably as they did in McEwen is a surprise, but while Melbourne's east had the seats that fell, the real cause of Victoria's swing was the safe labor seats. Losing Gillard may have been a factor, and Mitchell also had significant support in the areas lost from McEwen (for a Labor member, anyway; largely due to do with his involvement in the communities there following the bushfires).

If he holds on this time around, he will be highly unlikely to see the margin this close again - but in an election about change, outer suburban areas are often the areas most likely to swing, and there's more room for that swing to occur in Melbourne than in the other cities.

It's not all bad for Labor, though. Higgins and Kooyong, and maybe Menzies, do not like Abbott's version of the Liberal Party much at all. While I think it's no more likely that they'll win those seats than it is that they'll lose Gorton and Lalor, if any of those four was to change hands it'd be Higgins, and if a second was to do so, it'd be Kooyong.

As a final point, the more established middle ring of suburbs saw a reasonable swing too, but are less likely to trend Lib over time, I suspect. Seats like Scullin and Jagajaga, but also the outer halves of Wills, Batman, and Maribyrnong, match reasonably well with seats in Sydney like Reid and Parramatta. But unlike those two, the community isn't at war with itself due to horrific planning over decades, and as long as those communities are still entirely capable of coping with the demands of their population, the politics of fear that a certain side uses so effectively in getting people to vote against their economic interests don't have as much bite. It's my conspiracy theory as to why the state government is doing so little to address concerns about access to schools and public transport in the outer fringe, something which has always seen reasonably srong by-partisan support for spending in the past.

[Platypus]

It's the one thing that makes up for the other 90 things

Labor has also held Parramatta. McEwen and Fairfax still in doubt.

[Platypus]

It's the one thing that makes up for the other 90 things

Labor has also held Parramatta. McEwen and Fairfax still in doubt.

[Platypus]

Indi, Fairfax, and the quite a few seats that the Libs lead in but lost, like my own of Melbourne Ports.

[Platypus]

The Sex Party isn't a joke party as much as the others. they're a left liberal party with a joke name but a valid place on the political spectrum.