There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days about the merit of Australia’s electoral system. In response to some conservative attacks on our preferential system, sometimes implicitly or explicitly suggesting a first-past-the-post system would be somehow more legitimate.
Tasmania flew under the radar in the lead up to the recent election, because of the lack of state polling in Tasmania. It was a “known unknown” to quote Donald Rumsfeld, and I do remember commenting that we didn’t know how things were going in Tasmania, but still we did not know. This did create space for some fevered commenters on this website to confidently assert that Labor was on track to be badly beaten, but now we know better.
My last few booth maps have been focused on the non-classic races – the Greens in Melbourne, and the teals in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. But a big part of the story was Labor routing the Coalition in traditional urban marginal seats, particularly those on the edges of cities, with the ultimate symbol being Peter Dutton’s defeat in Dickson.
In 2022 I wrote a blog post where I explained the phenomenon of the AEC needing to do more distribution of preferences before declaring election results, and thus needing longer to complete this process. We now have updated information for 2025, and can see that this process has become even more complex this year. When you look at how this has changed over two decades, it is a remarkable transformation.
For today’s blog post, I thought I’d wrap up the remaining urban teal contests in Sydney and Perth.
For today’s booth map we’re staying in Melbourne but heading slightly south-east, to look at the two incumbent teal MPs in Melbourne: Zoe Daniel’s seat of Goldstein and Monique Ryan’s seat of Kooyong. Daniel was defeated in Goldstein, while Ryan narrowly held on in Kooyong.
Ben was joined by Kevin Bonham to run through the close seats and the Senate race that have dragged out, one week after the election.
Throughout this week, and perhaps the next, I will be posting booth maps for interesting seats, or clusters of seats. I will be doing this while also tracking the election results as seats continue to be called. But these maps generally just show the ordinary election day votes, so shouldn’t change much, outside of corrections.
The House of Representatives contest has been a very comfortable win for Labor, and this has also been reflected in the Senate.
One of the biggest deciding factors in the Senate is whether either the left or right can win a “4-2 split”, where their side can win four out of six. Almost all elections are 3-3 splits, although there are some senators (such as Jacqui Lambie) who don’t fit into the two sides.
4:05 – Monique Ryan’s projected lead in Kooyong has shrunk from about 900 votes on Monday evening to just 405 today.
4:02 – In Bullwinkel, Labor’s projected lead has grown from 467 to 608 with more absent and pre-poll votes expected and very few postal votes left to count.