A Teal candidate on Sydney’s north shore is leading by just four votes in Australia’s tightest election race in more than 100 years.
Independent Nicolette Boele was just four votes ahead of her Liberal rival Gisele Kapertarian in the seat of Bradfield with 100 per cent of the vote counted.
This is shaping up as Australia’s tightest race since 1919 when Labor lost Ballarat in regional Victoria by one vote.
The Australian Electoral Commission automatically recounts votes if the margin is under 100.
A narrow lost in Bradfield, after a recount, would see the Liberal Party lose a seat it has held continuously since 1949.
This would also see the Liberal Party have no federal seats on Sydney’s north shore east of the Lane Cove River, having been wiped out on the northern beaches and the eastern suburbs at the 2022 election.
In an unusual political situation, Labor now has a safe seat on the north shore, Bennelong, while the Liberal Party has been wiped out in its traditional heartland.
Even within the Bradfield electorate, Labor won the primary vote at polling booths on the lower north shore, including St Leonards and Chatswood, giving Ms Boele 60 per cent of the two-party vote.
The Liberal Party now has just five federal seats in metropolitan and outer Sydney – Berowra, Mitchell, Lindsay, Cook and former shadow treasurer Angus Taylor’s redrawn electorate of Hume.
Just eight state Liberal electorates now overlap with a federal Liberal seat in New South Wales, including in Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s seat of Farrer.
Bradfield’s former MPs have included a previous Liberal leader, Brendan Nelson, and a former prime minister Billy Hughes, who had defected from the Labor Party during World War I.
A Teal candidate on Sydney’s north shore is leading by just four votes in Australia’s tightest election race in more than 100 years
