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Super Saturday elections: counting begins in Mayo, Braddon and Longman – politics live
Super Saturday elections: Rebekha Sharkie wins Mayo and Labor on track to retain Braddon – politics live
(35 minutes later)
Labor is performing well so far in Braddon and Longman.
Christopher Pyne just said on the Sky panel that he has heard that the Bribie Island pre-poll booth (one of the biggest in Longman) saw about 70% of votes go to One Nation.
We have twelve booths reporting preferences in Braddon, and Labor’s Justine Keay is up 2.1%.
If true, that is a surprise. Bribie, also known as God’s waiting room, is a very big boomer community which has mostly gone to the Liberals in the past. That would suggest that those One Nation votes would go back to the Liberal party (one of the reasons I am not confident in calling Longman just yet) but you never know with One Nation voters.
There’s also a large 16% primary vote for independent fisherman candidate Craig Garland, which has held up even with one third of booths reporting, but we’d expect that vote to drop a bit as the more urban booths report.
For what it is worth, the Malcolm Turnbull vs Boomer event occurred:
We don’t have any two-party-preferred votes in Longman, but we do have primary votes from six booths. This sample has Labor’s Susan Lamb up 6.4%, while the LNP’s Trevor Ruthenberg is down 10.1%.
Well I don’t think that quite went to plan for @TurnbullMalcolm at Bribie Island Hotel #SuperSaturday pic.twitter.com/qAyy2JZhkg
And in Braddon
Poll refresher
25 of 71 polling places returned in Braddon: the independent Garland has more than 16% of the vote #auspol #SuperSaturday @AmyRemeikis
What have the polls said?
Wayne Swan is at Caboolture (of course) and the volunteers behind him are going nuts as the ABC crosses to him.
We’ve had a rush of local seat polls in these byelections – by my count there’s at least 15 seat polls. Most have been commissioned by media outlets, with a handful published by groups like the Australia Institute and the Australian Forest Products Association.
He says that if Labor’s primary vote hovers around 40% then that’s not only a swing, it could offset the One Nation preference vulnerability.
The polls suggest that Braddon and Longman are both very close, while Rebekha Sharkie has a sizeable lead in Mayo.
You have to understand that at the last election our primary vote was 35. We only won because of those One Nation preferences. If we didn’t get those preferences last time we would have been on 48%. We have to get a solid swing on the primary vote to win the seat.”
Four polls in Braddon have ranged from 52% two-party-preferred for Labor to 54% for the Liberal party. Six polls in Longman have ranged from a 50-50 tie to 53-47 to the LNP.
Results are starting to roll in from the Caboolture booth – that is typically a Labor booth – and Susan Lamb has 600 votes to Trevor Ruthernberg’s 383 (that is first preferences).
Sharkie’s lead in the four Mayo polls has ranged from 58% two-candidate-preferred up to 62%.
Pauline Hanson, who is on a UK cruise, would be able to follow along with tonight’s shenanigans – it is just before 10am in her part of the world.
We’ve also had one Galaxy poll of Fremantle putting Labor on 66% to the Greens’ 34% after preferences.
One of my favourite moments this election campaign has been when Hanson’s advisor referred to the cardboard cutouts of the One Nation leader which have been dotted around Longman polling booths since Friday, as almost as good as the real thing.
We should be careful to not put too much weight in these polls – even repeated polls predicting a close outcome can be off. We saw four polls each in Bass and Macarthur at the 2016 election which predicted extremely close results, and Labor then won each seat by 6% to 8%.
Just further to Ben’s post, United Voice not only volunteered for Susan Lamb’s campaign – they ran it. The left have the numbers in Queensland, which has made national conference fun, while also having an influence on the state parliament – premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is from the right, but her faction doesn’t have control.
How might One Nation preferences flow?
Susan Lamb’s byelection party has a healthy number of volunteers from the United Voice union.
We’re expecting One Nation to be a big factor in Longman. The party polled 9.4% in Longman in 2016, and some polls have predicted a vote of over 20%. That won’t be enough to win, but would make their preferences crucial to the outcome.
UV is rapidly increasing its influence within Labor in Queensland. The party now has seven former members who are state MPs, including a few in the state cabinet. They’re sometimes jokingly referred to as their own wing of the party.
One Nation preferences in 2016 didn’t tend to flow strongly to either major party. Over most of Queensland, their preferences slightly favoured the Liberal National party, but in Longman 56.5% of One Nation preferences ended up with the Labor candidate.
Lamb had been, until her resignation, the lone Queensland federal MP aligned with the leftwing union.
Of course, there’s a difference between what a party recommends and what their voters do. One Nation recommended a preference to Labor in Longman in 2016, but it seems unlikely that many voters would have seen a One Nation how-to-vote. It will be much easier to cover the booths in a byelection, and One Nation has decided to recommend preferences to the LNP. This could lead to a stronger preference flow to the LNP, but One Nation voters are not known for strong preference discipline.
So, keeping in mind that the equivalent of one second of an Oscar speech has been counted so far, my Queensland contacts must have hit the beers, because the messages are starting to roll through.
There’s also a suspicion that many One Nation voters may simply preference the party that they would have otherwise considered voting for, regardless of their party’s recommendations. One Nation’s vote in 2016 was highest in the most Labor-friendly part of Longman. It may be that a surge in One Nation primary votes doesn’t do much to shift the two-party-preferred count.
So far, both the LNP and Labor are saying the same thing - it is close. Labor feels sort of OK, and so does the LNP.
So back to Longman (I am sorry WA, I sort of forgot all about Fremantle and Perth, but really – it is a one-horse race there)
“It’s amazing that we are even in this race, so that’s a victory right there,” one LNP source has just messaged me.
Susan Lamb – 40.54%
To which I told them, and now you, that Longman is a little different to the usual byelection, in that it is not really a Labor seat to start with.
Trevor Ruthernberg – 27.9%
Wyatt Roy lost it in 2016 not because everyone suddenly decided they wanted to support Labor, but because Longman was annoyed Tony Abbott had been dumped – and that Roy had played such a huge role in that.
One Nation – 15.38
In a stroke of genius, one of the unions popped a giant photo of Roy and Malcolm Turnbull happily posing together at the GQ awards on a billboard truck and drove it around Longman for the last weeks of the campaign.
That is with 16 of the 40 booths counted.
It worked. A hell of a lot of One Nation votes flowed to Labor and Susan Lamb won it by 0.7%.
The big story here is the swing to Labor on the primary vote (so far). And before anyone starts yelling at me, I have maintained this whole time that polling of single seats is very difficult (which is why, as Katharine Murphy mentioned in her piece today) neither of the major political parties put too many resources into research polling.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a Labor seat. No matter the result tonight, the general election is going to be a hell of a fight as well.
Rebekha Sharkie has picked up some Liberal votes – but the big swing has come from Labor.
History of Mayo
Labor sources told me at the time they were only running in Mayo to help Sharkie win, so I don’t think they are going to be too sad at that result.
Mayo has traditionally been held by the Liberal party, but has had a tendency to flirt with minor parties of the centre and left on multiple occasions
The Downer dynasty, as predicted, has not been enough to win Mayo.
The seat was created in 1984 and was won that year by Alexander Downer – son of a Menzies government minister and grandson of a colonial premier. Downer held the seat for the next 24 years, but faced strong challenges from the Democrats in 1990 and 1998.
Rebekha Sharkie, who could give the whole parliament a lesson on how to be an excellent local member, has won it – with about a 9% swing.
Downer retired in 2008, and the Greens made a strong challenge for the seat at the subsequent byelection, polling 47% after preferences, but losing to Jamie Briggs. Briggs was re-elected twice and then famously lost in 2016 to the Nick Xenophon Team’s Rebekha Sharkie.
Ben Smee has just told me that Ali France, who is Labor’s candidate in Dickson, Peter Dutton’s seat has rocked up to the Caboolture party.
Geography of Mayo
You may remember from the feature I did not so long ago that Labor was looking at Longman as a test for the general election - win Longman on these campaign tactics, which, as several campaign heads told me was all based on class warfare - and then you have a pretty good shot in Dickson and Petrie.
Mayo is a vast seat covering areas to the south and east of Adelaide. The seat covers most of the Adelaide Hills, the Fleurieu peninsula and Kangaroo Island. Major towns in the seat include Mount Barker and Victor Harbor. While the seat is large, a majority of the seat’s population lies in a spine at the north-eastern end of the seat in the Adelaide Hills and Mount Barker.
Queensland is shaping as one of the most important states in the coming election. It has about 10 seats up for grabs on current predictions. Labor only needs two more for a win. It’s why WA is so important as well - there are quite a few Liberal MPs in trouble in the west.
Sharkie won most booths in the electorate in 2016, but does particularly well in Mount Barker.
We are all being a little more cautious with Longman - the One Nation candidate, Matthew Stephen is polling at around 15% at the moment.
History of Braddon
That is not quite enough to give Trevor Ruthernberg the bump he needs to win, but it makes it close.
The seat of Braddon has effectively existed in a similar form to its current shape since 1903, although it was called “Darwin” until 1955.
Labor appears to have grown its primary vote (I told you single seat byelection polls were often bupkis) but it doesn’t mean the party has won it as yet. Just that things are looking good.
The seat has tended to be very marginal, if with a slight lean towards Labor. Labor’s Sid Sidebottom won the seat in 1998 and held it until 2004, when Labor lost both of the northern Tasmanian seats in a backlash against Mark Latham’s forestry policy. He made a comeback three years later in 2007, and held the seat until 2013.
Murph is hearing the same intel as me:
Brett Whiteley, who is recontesting Braddon as the Liberal candidate, held the seat for one term before losing to Justine Keay in 2016.
Labor folks also sounding hopeful in Longman @AmyRemeikis #auspol #SuperSaturday
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Over at the Caboolture RSL, my colleague Ben Smee, who I bet is not wearing a million layers of clothing, given how many smug posts my Queensland friends were sending me today has confirmed the carpet is quite the sight to behold.
Geography of Braddon
He’s also just told me a Labor volunteer is now doing the Walk Like An Egyptian dance - so it is safe to say, they are feeling pretty good up there right now.
Braddon covers the north-western corner of Tasmania, as well as the whole west coast. There are very few people living along the west coast, so most of the seat’s population lies on the north coast of the electorate. The bigger towns include Burnie, Devonport and Ulverstone.
Labor won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in most urban booths in Burnie, Devonport and Ulverstone, while the Liberal party tended to win most rural booths.
History of Longman
Longman is a marginal seat, but has tended to favour the LNP. The seat was held by Mal Brough throughout the Howard government, but he lost in 2007 to Labor’s Jon Sullivan.
Sullivan lost three years later to 20-year-old Wyatt Roy, who held the seat from 2010 to 2016.
Roy lost in 2016 to Susan Lamb with a swing of 7.7%, well above the average for marginal seats in Queensland.
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Geography of Longman
Longman covers towns on the urban fringe of Brisbane covering the space between Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast. It’s biggest centre is Caboolture, and it also covers Morayfield, Burpengary and a bunch of smaller towns, as well as Bribie Island.
There was a big difference in the 2016 vote across Longman. Labor won large majorities in the booths around Caboolture, with 60% or more of the two-party-preferred vote in every booth in the area. Labor won narrow majorities in the booths at the southern edge of the electorate. The LNP won a majority of the vote in the rural towns in the north-west of the seat, as well as those booths on Bribie Island or close to it.
Having a look at pre-poll, those six booths at Longman were needed – about 40% of voters have already hit the polls before today, according to the AEC.
That is part of a wider trend – pre-poll once and you end up doing it again and again and telling everyone how great it is – and then the pre-poll grows.
Braddon has had about 25% of voters head to the polls early.
You’ll find that data here.
Update – we have seen 0.4% of votes counted in Braddon.
