David Littleproud and Barnaby Joyce may be back in Canberra, but little else remains the same after an astonishing Saturday night’s numbers. The polls undersold Labor chances, with the party’s primary vote exceeding any of the multi-poll models on the big night, but Labor’s big win in fact disguised a seismic change in Australian political patterns, with the 68.5% shared between Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals being the smallest ever; it’s worth reminding ourselves that when the current generation of retirees were born those parties shared between them over 90% of the vote. Now the major parties know they are not alone. This change was underlined when the ‘teal’ independents, who largely snapped up Liberal voters at the last time of asking, expanded their numbers in this parliament this time around.
Maranoa was the first seat in the country called, despite Nationals leader and would-be deputy PM David Littleproud dropping 4.39% on his first preference vote, but improving his position on the two-party preferred card. The big gainer was Gerard Rennick People First candidate Rod Draper who appeared to pick up the votes left ‘free’ after United Australia Party did not run a candidate. Labor was up in Maranoa by a percent, not surprisingly doing best at the urban booths in Warwick and Stanthorpe, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation came a creditable third after the big two, with Sharon Duncan picking up 12.32%.
The Nationals leader spoke early in the night Describing the Nationals campaign as “flawless” before the results started spilling in. The numbers on the night bore him out, with the Nationals up 0.65%, but the LNP in Queensland down 1.54% despite the strong showing by the LNP in the state poll last year.
In New England, the two party preferred result also saw Barnaby Joyce strengthen his grip on the blue ribbon Nationals seat, with 67.3% of the two-party preferred split over the Tamworth-based teacher, Labor’s candidate Laura Hughes. Looking down at the minor parties, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation was the big mover, almost doubling its first preference vote to 10.28%. Labor gained a smidgen as well, up 0.31% to just over a fifth of the electorate, and the Greens dropped slightly to 7.45%. In an sobering sidenote to the New England result, Mr Joyce revealed that he had prostate cancer, and was preparing for surgery after a recent scan and biopsy confirmed the diagnosis.
The Nationals had been confident of repeating the pattern elsewhere, in particular Calare, where Andrew Gee, who opted out of the coalition when he split with the coalition position on the Voice was standing as an independent. Mr Gee ended up being vindicated by the electorate. Asked about the broader coalition campaign, Mr Littleproud refused to be drawn on where the blame lay. “Where we’ve made mistakes, we’re a team”.
The nuclear option may well go down as one of those mistakes, having it’s referendum in the Hunter region, with Labor improving its position there. Without nuclear, federal opposition leader Peter Dutton had argued, “if you look at an area like the Hunter, or really any coal mining area, their jobs and that industry, that town is done.” Equally, the “Labor equals wind farms” punches didn’t show up in the polling booths.
In claiming victory, and in accepting defeat, neither of the leaders pointed to the elephant in the electoral room, with Labor’s unlikely victory coming only days after the left-leaning government won in Canada after being down for the count before Donald Trump took centre state in Washington. In Canada, Trump’s shadow was rarely absent from campaigning. Here, Labor numbers also looked grim. Apart from the occasional effort by the coalition to harness the conservative headwinds that saw elected to a second term, Trump acted more as a lead in the Liberal saddlebags, rather than wind in Labor sails.
