Votes will start to be counted on the east coast after 6pm, two hours later WA will join the party.
So what are the seats to watch this evening? Daily Mail Australia’s political editor has crunched the numbers, hit the phones to talk to candidates and party officials, and come up with the following as his assessment of the state of play seat by seat in the battlegrounds that matter.
Use this as your yardstick throughout the evening for how the election is unfolding, and we will circle back to these seats as the results come in. As well as any others we might have missed, but that’s unlikely.
Labor held seats at risk from the Coalition:
I think in descending order these are the Labor held seats most at risk of falling to the Liberals, with their margins in brackets.
Gilmore in NSW (0.2 percent)
Aston in Melbourne (3.6 percent)
Bullwinkel in Perth (3.3 percent)
Paterson in NSW (2.6 percent)
Werriwa in Sydney (5.3 percent)
After these five it becomes more difficult for the Liberals to pick up further Labor seats, but I still have them as the narrow favourites in three more, but all three are very close:
Lingiari in the NT (1.7 percent)
Hawke in Victoria (7.6 percent)
McEwen in Victoria (3.8 percent)
After that I can see three 50-50 toss of the coin seats the Coalition are fighting to claim:
Bennelong in Sydney (0.04 percent)
Tangney in Perth (2.8 percent)
Bendigo in regional Victoria (11.2 percent)
Beyond the above there are nine more seats Labor holds that the Australian electoral commission classifies as marginal, but I don’t see Labor losing any of them except maybe Blair but even then I think they’ll just miss out.
Lyons in Tassie (0.9 percent)
Robertson in NSW (2.2 percent)
Boothby in Adelaide (3.3 percent)
Chisholm in Melbourne (3.3 percent)
Parramatta in Sydney (3.7 percent)
Hunter in NSW (4.8 percent)
Reid in Sydney (5.2 percent)
Blair in Queensland (5.2 percent)
Bruce in Melbourne (5.3 percent)
Finally, a few roughies that aren’t even marginal Labor seats to keep your eyes on where big swings might go the Liberal Party’s way, but not by enough to win, unless something extraordinary happens which you never know in one or two of them.
Labor has its eyes on a number of Liberal held seats it hopes to win.
The ones I think they are a chance of picking up (in order) in are:
They should win some of these. If they pick up more than two or three, majority governnent for Labor is well and truly on the cards.
Beyond the above showdowns between the major parties, what out for the following contests.
Labor might get Fowler back off the independent who won it at the last election.
Labor might get Griffith back from the Greens, perhaps even Brisbane too.
But Labor is at risk of losing Richmond on the NSW north coast to the Greens.
The Nationals might lose Cowper to an independent. And Liberals are trying to stave off an independent in Wannon and a Teal in Bradfield.
The Liberals hope to win against teals in Curtin, Kooyong and Goldstein. They want win all three, but that’s the order of likelihood in my view. They might not win any of them.
Liberals will also reclaim the seats of Moore in WA, Monash in Victoria and Calare in NSW. Sitting Coalition MPs in all three seats were elected three years ago but defected to the crossbench. All three are running against their old parties as independents this time around but I expect them all to lose.
So there is a snap shot of what to watch out for this evening. Also, pre poll votes – there were over seven million of them – won’t get added to the count until after 9pm at the earliest. I would expect them to favour the Coalition, because they usually do. So don’t assume results are set in stone until we see what those numbers do, especially in very close seats.
