NT2024 – Analysis of the Northern Territory Election

Eight years and two terms after Labor defeated the Giles government and reduced the Northern Territory Country Liberal Party to just two seats, the tables were turned on 24 August this year. The Lawler Labor government suffered a massive defeat, swept from government and expelled from the greater Darwin metropolitan area, Labor retaining just four seats, all in the NT’s pastoral and remote regions.

And in another parallel with eight years ago, the 2024 election saw the government swept from office and the Chief Minister lose their seat. In 2016 it was CLP Chief Minister Adam Giles who lost his previously safe seat of Braitling. In 2024 Eva Lawler lost her marginal seat of Drysdale after a massive swing of 20.4%.

Lawler’s predecessor as Labor Chief Minister, Natasha Fyles, was also defeated. Fyles’ seat of Nightcliff had been Labor’s safest seat before the election, but was lost to the Greens who finished third on the primary vote before leap frogging to victory on preferences.

New Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro took office at her second election as leader, having lifted the CLP from two seats to eight in 2020, and going further to win 17 of the 25 seats in the Legislative Assembly at the 2024 election.

For the first time since self-government, Labor won no seats in greater Darwin. The party retained only four seats, Arafura, Arnhem, Daly and Gwoja. All four are rural and remote seats with a much higher than average percentage of Indigenous residents, and all four re-elected Labor members are themselves Indigenous.

The 2024 result is a reversion to Labor’s dire period between 1977 and 2001 when the party mainly held remote districts and struggled to break the CLP’s hold on Darwin seats.

As I wrote in my election preview, Northern Territory elections are won and lost in greater Darwin, and more particularly in Darwin’s northern suburbs. The 2012 election won by the CLP remains the only Northern Territory election where the party forming government did not electorally dominate Darwin. The three elections since, including 2024, have reverted to the long-term trend of Northern Territory politics.

The CLP’s victories in northern Darwin were not as sweeping as elsewhere in the Territory with two of Labor’s losses going to the crossbench, Independent Justine Davis winning Johnston and the Greens Kat McNamara winning Nightcliff. The CLP’s narrow victory over the Greens in Fannie Bay was an oddity with the alternative two-party preferred vote revealing a Labor majority.

I’ve prepared a summary of the results which you can find at this link. The summary also includes alternative two-party preferred counts made available by the NT Electoral Commission.

There is much detail on the results in the results summary, but I’ll go through some of the main points inside this post.

The Party Result

The Country Liberal Party won 17 of the 25 Legislative Assembly seats with 48.9% of the first preference vote and 58.4% after preferences. Labor’s first preference vote of 28.8% was the lowest in the party’s history, lower even than 30.5% in 1974 when Labor elected no members.

The seats that changed party between 2020 and 2024 were –

• CLP gains from Labor (9) – Casuarina, Karama, Sanderson and Wanguri in northern Darwin, Fannie Bay, Fong Lim and Port Darwin in inner Darwin, and Blain (from a Labor turned Independent MLA) and the former Chief Minister’s seat of Drysdale in Palmerston.
• CLP gain from Independent (1) – the CLP gained Goyder on the retirement of Kezia Purick.
• Independent gain from Labor (1) – Independent Justine Davis won Johnston in Darwin’s northern suburbs.
• Greens gain from Labor (1) – Greens candidate Kat McNamara won Nightcliff in Darwin’s northern suburbs. McNamara defeated former Chief Minister Natasha Fyles. It was the first victory for the Greens at a Northern Territory election and was achieved by a remarkable victory from third place on preferences.
• Labor gain CLP (1) – Labor retained Daly, a CLP seat at the 2020 election but gained by Labor at a 2021 by-election.

As seen elsewhere in Australia, there was a decline in the number of seats finishing as two-party preferred contests. There were 15 Assembly divisions that finished as CLP versus Labor contests, seven as CLP versus Independent contests, two as CLP-Greens contests and one as a Labor-Greens contest. That Labor slipped out of the top two in so many seats was down to the collapse in its primary vote.

Thirteen MLAs were re-elected, seven CLP, four Labor and two Independents. Nine members were defeated, eight Labor and one ex-Labor turned Independent MLA. Three members retired, two Labor and one Independent with all three seats being gained by the CLP.

Of the 12 new MLAs, the were 10 CLP members, one Green and one Independent.

A Record Low Turnout

Beyond the result, the biggest story out of the election was the record low turnout. The percentage of electors who turned out to vote dipped to a record low at just 68.5%. Despite a record 153,248 electors, an increase of 8.6% or 12,123 enrolments, there were fewer votes taken than in 2020, down 932 vote to 104,901.

Turnout was down as a percentage across the Territory, but the drop in votes taken was largely due to a big turnout decline in remote and predominantly Indigenous electorates. Turnout fell in the six Pastoral/Remote districts from 61.8% in 2020 to 51.5% in 2024, the total votes down from 37,490 to 35,656. Turnout was only 42.1% in outback Gwoja, 44.6% in Tiwi Island based Arafura, 46.0% in top end Mulka and 52.0% next door in Arnhem. All four seats were won by Labor, while the marginal outback CLP seat of Barkly also recorded a very low turnout at only 50.7%. There is much more detail on turnout in the result summary publication linked to above.

The turnout was lowest in seats with majority Indigenous populations where votes are mostly taken by mobile polling teams. It is impossible to know whether the low turnout was due to ambivalence with local politics after the defeat of the Voice referendum, problems with the mobile schedule and notification, a lack of campaign teams turning out the vote, or the lack of candidates. There were only two candidates on the ballot paper in the six Pastoral/Remote seats.

Turnout at Northern territory elections has always been lower than in other jurisdictions, at best only reaching the low 80s as a percentage of enrolment. Turnout was down all across Darwin, not just in remote districts. More accurate rolls over the last decade have tended to produce slightly lower turnout figures at all Australian elections, but nothing as low as at the 2024 Northern Territory election. The low turnout may be due to the AEC’s enrolment campaign before the Voice referendum, which resulted in the enrolment of electors who could not or would not participate in the NT election.

The Northern Territory’s more transient population, the presence of fly-in fly-out workers, a poorer postal service and the difficulty of delivering mobile polling services to remote communities have always combined to produce low turnouts at NT elections.

But no-one can be happy that the turnout plunged so low at the 2024 election.

Swing by Region

The result publication linked to above includes detailed tables of results by region. Summary points from the tables are –

• The two-party preferred swing from Labor to CLP was 11.7% across the Territory, 16.1% in greater Darwin, but only 2.4% in the rest of the Territory.
• The swing against Labor was greatest at 20.4% in the four Palmerston seats, 17.6% from a much higher base in Darwin’s northern suburbs, and 10.6% in inner Darwin.
• The swing was 8.3% to the CLP in Alice Springs and Katherine seats, but 2.9% to Labor in Pastoral/Remote seats (excluding Mulka).
• There was a massive range in seat swings at the election, from 16.1% towards Labor in Arafura, to 26.2% to the CLP in Wanguri.
• All two-party swing calculations have excluded the Independent-held seat of Mulka where there was no Labor candidate in 2024 and no CLP candidate in 2020.

The New Electoral Pendulum

The results summary linked to above includes a pendulum that tries to show both two-candidate and two-party preferred margins. It also provides details on both two-party and two-candidate preferred results in all seats.

The pendulum version below is restricted to showing margins based on two-candidate preferred results.