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Eden-Monaro byelection results: too close to call in tightly fought NSW contest – follow live
Eden-Monaro byelection results: too close to call in tightly fought NSW contest – follow live
(32 minutes later)
Follow all the results, news and analysis as Labor’s Kristy McBain attempts to retain seat for ALP and the Liberal party’s Fiona Kotvojs hopes for a once-in-100-year upset. Latest news
Follow all the results, news and analysis as Labor’s Kristy McBain attempts to retain seat for ALP and the Liberal party’s Fiona Kotvojs hopes for a once-in-100-year upset. Latest news
We’re going to hear from the Liberals after this.
Fiona Kotvojs finishes with this:
But there will be no result
Here is where postal votes end so far
And no concessions.
Counting has finished for the night but data is still being slowly uploaded to the AEC site.
I have never felt more sympathy for King Sisyphus
Still, we won’t be getting a result tonight.
The Labor leader is at the Labor campaign party.
Fiona Kotvojs:
He’s gone with no tie.
Kotvojs also thanks the 13 other candidates – “each one wanted to serve” – and acknowledges that each one has given up a lot to run.
Anthony Albanese:
Fiona Kotvojs:
Sussan Ley says Labor, which is a smidge ahead at the moment, has failed in its campaign to “send the prime minister a message”
(Before 2016, Eden-Monaro was represented by an MP from whichever side of politics won government. So for a good portion of that time, the Coalition had stewardship over Eden-Monaro.)
The prime minister currently has a (Newspoll) approval rating of 68% - so it’s not as particularly strong an endorsement, using that metric, as Ley might point out.
Fiona Kotvojs has taken the stage. She has gone for a blue(ish) scarf over a grey(ish) suit, thrown in quite the jaunty fashion (but you also know someone spent time getting it to sit “just so”).
Right, so we have the Queanbeyan City pre-poll count in.
Anthony Albanese gives her three cheers and then tells the room to have a good night.
Labor suffered an almost 8% swing there, while the Liberals were down 1.3%.
The results now have Labor, on the two-party preferred measure, ahead 51% to 49%.
The Nationals were the winners there, with a rise of 5.1%
Kristy McBain gets a little emotional at the end of her speech, as she says this:
But you are not going to see a result tonight.
Binders and binders of women here, at least from this angle.
Good God.
The Nationals have moved back to 6.1% of the vote (about where they were at the last election) so Larry Anthony has to be breathing a sigh of relief there, at this stage.
We have another 30 minutes to go.
Sky News has also moved to “no official Eden-Monaro result tonight”.
I think everyone should just have the “good grace” to let this night end.
That is because there will be no official Eden-Monaro result tonight.
Sussan Ley just asked Kristina Keneally to “have the good grace” to recognise how well Scott Morrison has handled Australia’s pandemic response:
Kristy McBain, the former Bega mayor, says the last time she addressed a room like this it “was New Year’s Eve and I had a roomful of people and I was telling them that if they didn’t live here they to leave immediately, and for all of those people that could not protect their own homes, they had to make decisions about where to go, whether it was an evacuation centre, whether that was to stay with friends and family, whether that was to make some decisions about whether they were best place to protect their own property.
Keneally fires back that Ley should have the “good grace” to recognise Labor supported all the pandemic measures:
“The way I felt that night is much bigger than the one I feel tonight.”
Sussan Ley is now pointing out that Labor put out election materials for Nationals voters, saying if you vote Nationals 1, then put Labor 2.
McBain:
The handout at some of the booths did look like it could come from the Nationals party, but the small print on the authorisation said it was from the Labor party.
Ley says the Nationals might have a look to see there is any recourse for that.
Given that the courts already ruled there was no recourse for Liberals advertising during the federal election, in Chisholm, which mimicked AEC advertising, saying put the Liberals first ( in Chinese), I am going to go with saying an authorised handout is probably not going to have many issues.
Over on the ABC, Kristina Keneally and Sussan Ley are still arguing about whether or not there is a preference deal between Labor and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party.
I mean, really – does anyone care at this point of the night? And when Victoria is on the verge of a state lockdown, and a deadly pandemic is our lived reality?
And that arguing about preference deals four hours and 20 minutes after polls closed doesn’t actually do anything?
And the Coalition has taken One Nation preferences in the past?
Ugh.
The Nationals vote has dropped to 5.5% – which is where the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party is also sitting. It had been at 6% about an hour ago.
We are still waiting on the pre-poll count though. There is not enough to confidentially call it.
Even the Sky News ticker has gone from “Barilaro says Liberals have won” to “too close to call”.
Nope, wait, it’s gone back to “loss could test Albanese’s leadership”.
Antony Green* has Labor ahead with a 0.4% swing on the two-party-preferred measure, with 54% of the vote counted.
*This previously said Antony Albanese. Apologies. It has been a long four hours.
The Liberals are feeling good because Labor has not had a runaway win.
But the margin at the beginning of all of this was 0.9%.
A government hasn’t won a byelection seat from another party for about 100 years.
Which is why there is a sense of excitement about a seat which will do nothing to materially change the parliament. Or anything, really.
Labor, which has been careful to manage expectations from the beginning, given that the seat, until 2016, went with whoever was in government (and Mike Kelly only just hung on at the last election because of his personal popularity), points out that this is also a one-in-100-year pandemic.
And before any pundits get excited about what this would mean for Anthony Albanese’s leadership, they need to remember that the leadership spill rules have been changed, and the Victorian branch, which is most likely to agitate for change, is in administration and in the control of the federal executive.
Also, and I am pretty certain of this, given the scores of people I talk to each week, no one is really focused on politics right now.
Once again, it is – as they say in the biz – too close to call.
Over at the Tally Room blog, Ben Raue has this breakdown:
On the first count of postals (3,000):
The ALP has won 34.3%
The Libs have won 42.2%
Nats are on 4.3%
SFF are on 5.2%
and the Greens have won 4.9%
We are all running out of ways to say “we have to wait to see what the pre-poll is doing” but Ben Raue has this breakdown of what we do know:
Yup.
With the AEC results showing 72 of the 86 booths being counted, Labor is *just* ahead – but not even by a full percentage point.
It is all going to come down to the pre-poll, and no one has a handle on what those trends are yet because we don’t have enough of them.
Labor is pessimistic, the Liberals are cautiously optimistic, but really no one has any idea.
The Liberals are cautiously optimistic because over the weeks the pre-poll was opened, the Labor branch-stacking scandal broke in Victoria. Scott Morrison, meanwhile, had (and still does) record-breaking popularity.
Postal votes tend to favour the government.
But the fact is, no one knows. If it breaks towards the Liberals, I don’t think it will be sending the message that a byelection in normal times would send. If Labor holds on, nothing changes.
