Federal election 2022
A loss of at least 17 seats for the Liberals after Saturday’s election puts the size of their defeat on par with Labor’s ousting in 2013, but smaller than previous changes of government in 2007 and 1996.
Labor has won at least 75 seats in the new parliament and the Coalition at least 57, with five seats still too close to call.
As at 4.30pm on Tuesday afternoon, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age’s political team called the narrow contest in Bennelong for Labor’s Jeremy Laxale and in Sturt for Liberal incumbent James Stevens, based on the flow of preferences.
The narrowest contest is in Deakin, where former assistant treasurer Michael Sukkar was leading Labor’s Matt Gregg by just 74 votes at 4.30pm.
There’s no legislated trigger for a recount of votes in tight contests, but the Australian Electoral Commission says generally if the margin is fewer than 100 votes it will do one as a matter of course whether there’s a legal appeal or not.
In Gilmore on the NSW South Coast, Liberal candidate Andrew Constance, a former NSW minister, led Labor incumbent Fiona Phillips by 105 votes at 4.30pm on Tuesday. He was ahead by more earlier in the day, but the electoral commission corrected the way some preferences had been distributed.
And in the seat of Brisbane, the primary vote for Labor’s Madonna Jarrett had edged ahead of that for Greens candidate Stephen Bates on Tuesday afternoon. The likely flow of preferences means whichever of them finishes second on the primary vote to Liberal incumbent Trevor Evans should win the seat.
At this stage, 10 Liberal seats have fallen to Labor, including four where the incumbent retired. These are John Alexander (Bennelong), Nicolle Flint (Boothby), Gladys Liu (Chisholm), Ken Wyatt (Hasluck), Katie Allen (Higgins), Christian Porter (Pearce), Fiona Martin (Reid), Lucy Wicks (Robertson), Steve Irons (Swan) and Ben Morton (Tangney).
A further six Liberal MPs lost their seats to independents: Celia Hammond (Curtin), Tim Wilson (Goldstein), Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong), Jason Falinski (Mackellar), Trent Zimmerman (North Sydney) and Dave Sharma (Wentworth).
First-term MP Julian Simmonds has lost Ryan to the Greens.
On the Labor side, at this stage it has lost only two seats it previously held. Kristina Keneally failed to retain Fowler, where incumbent Chris Hayes retired, and independent Dai Le will now represent the seat. And Terri Butler has conceded the loss of Brisbane-based Griffith to the Greens’ Max Chandler-Mather.
A net loss of at least 17 seats for the Liberals means the Coalition has lost 22 per cent of the seats it held in the previous parliament. This is similar to the size of the loss for Labor when Tony Abbott won government in 2013.
The difference this time is the huge expansion of the crossbench, rather than Labor picking up all the seats lost by Liberals. However, the combined count of Labor and progressive crossbenchers that will be in the new parliament will be between 86 and 90 seats, putting it in the realm of Abbott’s 90-seat victory.
The Coalition now holds its lowest proportion of seats as a share of parliament since the Liberal Party first ran at the 1946 election. It needs to get to 60 seats to better it, but that is no longer possible as the count stands.
When Labor’s Kevin Rudd defeated John Howard in 2007, the Coalition lost a quarter of its seats with 22 MPs cleaning out their offices.
And at the change of government when Howard became prime minister in 1996, Labor lost 39 per cent of its electorates, falling from 80 seats to 49.
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correction
The headline was corrected to reflect that the Liberals first contested a federal election in 1946.
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