November 2024

SA’s Black By-election, plus why SA needs to update how it counts early votes

(Update 20 November – I did not know when I wrote this post, but two days before polling day for the Black by-election, the Electoral (Miscellaneous) Amendment Bill was introduced into the Legislative Council. Its provisions include allowing the issuing Early votes as ordinary votes, a provision which allows Early votes to be counted on election night. A step forward compared to what happened at the Black by-election.)

Tonight I will be covering the Black By-election at the ABC’s election website.

As my blog receives a massive number of click throughs from Google whenever there is an election, I make sure to provide a link to where I’m reporting the results. So if you want to know Black by-election results, try the Black by-election page at ABC elections.

But it’s also worth me publishing a post on how the South Australian Electoral Act will probably prevent us knowing the winner of the Black by-election tonight.

More than 10,099 ballot papers for the Black by-election, 8,544 Early votes and 1,555 Postal votes, sit sealed in Declaration envelopes at the Electoral Commission waiting to be opened and counted. But the law prevents the SA Electoral Commission from counting these votes tonight. Counting of them cannot begin until Monday.Read More »SA’s Black By-election, plus why SA needs to update how it counts early votes

QLD2024 – Initial Analysis of the Queensland Election Result

The Liberal National Party (LNP) led by new Premier David Crisafulli won the Queensland election on 26 October, a result that had been widely expected for more than a year.

The Labor Party under Premier Steven Miles, who had replaced long-serving Annastacia Palaszczuk the previous December, managed to limit the scale of its defeat compared to predictions of a landslide based on polls published earlier in the year.

But the result was a still a comfortable victory for the LNP and clear defeat for Labor. The two parties virtually exchanged places in seats and votes compared to Labor’s last election victory under Annastacia Palaszczuk.

In 2020 Labor won 52 seats with 53.2% of the two-party preferred vote with the LNP winning 34 seats. In 2024 it was the LNP winning 52 seas on a slightly higher 53.8% of the two-party preferred vote, while Labor finished on 36 seats.

The new government has 16 more seats than Labor and a majority of 11 over all other parties in the new Legislative Assembly. That would be at risk if the LNP suffered the same reverses as it did under Campbell Newman between 2012 and 2015, five members lost in total to defections and by-elections. But the smaller number of ‘accidental’ MPs elected compared to 2012, plus the need to keep the team together with a smaller majority, should give greater focus to the new LNP party room.

The LNP gained 18 seats on a state-wide swing of 7.0%, exactly the result you would have predicted applying a uniform swing of 7.0% to the pre-election pendulum. As usually occurs with pendulums, some of the seats on small margins retained by Labor were cancelled out by the LNP achieving larger swings in some safer Labor seats. Especially in the state’s regional cities.

The state-wide swing masks a big difference between the swing in Greater Brisbane compared to regional cities along the Queensland coast.

I’ve prepared a summary of the results which you can find at this link.

The summary includes two-party preferred analysis of seats and by region, including estimated two-party results for electorates that did not finish as Labor-LNP contests. There’s also a summary of results by region and details of new and departing members by electorate.

Inside this post I’ll augment the results document linked above with some commentary.Read More »QLD2024 – Initial Analysis of the Queensland Election Result