This isn’t the first time I’ve discussed the significant shift away from the Coalition in urban Australia, but in today’s post I wanted to zoom out a little and look at the historical perspective, and look at how much more polarised Australia has become between city and country since last Saturday’s election.
The new Tasmanian premier, Jeremy Rockliff, announced on Wednesday that the government will proceed with long-discussed plans to expand the size of the House of Assembly from 25 to 35.
I had wanted to do some analysis on the demographics of the 2022 election result, specifically looking at how swings correlated with various demographic groups within each electorate. But this is pretty much impossible to do right now, because we don’t have a complete two-party-preferred dataset, with about two dozen seats not reporting 2PP data.
On Monday I wrote about the continuing trend of a declining vote for the major parties, which has been a major topic of conversation since Saturday’s election.
In this post I’m going to look at where the swing has taken place: the swing against each of the major parties, and the combined decline.
First up, let’s look at the statewide totals.
One of the trends I’ve started hearing about over the last day or two, thanks to the very smart commenters on this blog, is that booth swings in a bunch of suburban seats in Sydney and Melbourne were particularly strong in the areas with a large population of Chinese-Australian voters. So I thought I would try and visualise this effect, or see if it was just anecdote.
Prior to the election I wrote about the long-term downward trend in support for the major parties, and how polling suggested that this trend would continue in 2022. Not only has it continued, but it has accelerated.
So I thought I’d show how that vote has declined in 2022, and then look at how that changes the outcomes of House of Representatives races in various ways.
Ben is joined by Kevin Bonham to discuss the results of yesterday’s federal election.
Wow! Okay so where are we at on Sunday morning?
With my work in the Guardian we have called 132 seats. There’s a handful I haven’t called (such as Parramatta and Werriwa) that can probably be called once the pre-poll vote comes in.
Decided
Leading
Total
Labor
70
9
79
Coalition
51
5
56
Crossbench
11
5
16
6:31 – I’ll have the full list on the Guardian liveblog, but there are 11 independents on the east coast included in the TCP. This includes three incumbents, one running against Labor (Dai Le in Fowler) and two regional candidates (Jack Dempsey in Hinkler and Rob Priestly in Nicholls), with the rest typical teal candidates.
I hadn’t been planning to write a substantive blog post for election day – I usually just post an open thread for discussion during the day. But yesterday I had an idea for one more bit of analysis that seems relevant to consider before tonight.