johnston

NT2024 Election – Post-Election Blog

This post will track counting in the close seats that remain in play after the Country Liberal Party’s landslide victory.

This post is ordered with the most recent updates at the top of the page.

Wednesday 4 September

4:30pm – what happened in Nightcliff shows up strongly in the table below. The table shows preference flows to the Greens by polling place and count centre. It is ordered by ascending preference flows to the Greens. The higher the vote for Independent Mililma May, the stronger the flow of excluded candidate preferences to the Greens, and the stronger the CLP vote, the weaker the flow of preferences to the Greens.

Percentage Preference Flows to the Greens
Polling Place/Count Centre Votes CLP Primary % Ind May Primary % % Preference Flows
Eaton EVC 1,429 29.8 14.7 40.7
Darwin EVC 464 24.6 18.4 63.5
Absent 649 24.1 19.7 66.6
Casuarina 659 20.3 22.0 65.1
Postal 232 21.6 22.0 64.8
Nightcliff School 1,099 18.0 22.7 73.5
Declaration 35 17.1 31.4 79.2
Total 4,567 23.8 19.3 61.5

On the three way flow of preferences from May and Mamouzellos, preferences flowed 72.6% to the Greens, 14.0% to Labor and 13.4% to the CLP. On the exclusion of the CLP, preferences split 51.4% to Labor and 48.6% to the Greens. I had left the seat in doubt despite my assumption that 60% of CLP preferences would flow to Labor. It turns out I was right to leave Nightcliff in doubt as CLP preferences were weaker than I had expected. CLP voters made up their own minds on preferences with close to half ignoring the CLP HTV recommendation to put Labor before the Greens.

As the result is so close, the NT Electoral Commission will undertake a full re-count of all Nightcliff votes tomorrow. After the cut off for postal votes at midday on Friday, the final handful of postal votes will also be added to the count.

Nightcliff Update 3:45pm: The Labor versus Greens preference count has been released and the Greens are 42 votes ahead. There cannot be many votes left to count so this is bad news for Labor’s Natasha Fyles and the Greens must now be favoured to win.

If the Greens are confirmed as winning Nightcliff, Labor will be left with four seats, Arafura, Arnhem, Daly and Gwoja. Labor will be left with no urban seats, losing all seats they previously held in Darwin and Palmerston.

Nightcliff Update: The Labor-CLP two-party preferred count has disappeared from the NTEC results feed so I presume a re-throw of preferences is underway.
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Greens Preference Against Labor in Johnston By-Election

In what is a rare move, the Greens have chosen to direct preferences against Labor at the Northern Territory’s Johnston by-election, to be held on Saturday 29 February.

In the past the Greens have often chosen to make no preference recommendation, but to actively recommend preferences to conservative parties ahead of Labor is very unusual.

The decision is attracting a lot of attention to an otherwise obscure local by-election in an electorate of just 4,988 voters in the northern suburbs of Darwin. If you are after more information on the Johnston by-election, check my background page at the ABC’s Election website.

The decision has started arguments back and forth between Labor and Green partisans, but i’ll leave it to participants to argue the subjective point of whether the decision is right or wrong in policy and/or strategic terms.

But that leaves plenty of room to examine whether the decision is important to how preferences will flow, to the result of the Johnston by-election, and to the Northern Territory election in August.

Update At the by-election, 56.9% of Green voters gave preferences, around 20 percentage points lower than the usual flow of Green preferences. You can find my commentary on the result and preferences at my Johnston by-election page.
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