Labor headed for comfortable majority after election
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More news: Labor has nabbed a string of seats from the Coalition across the country and is expected to form a majority government. A cluster of key seats remain in play, including that of Greens Leader Adam Bandt.
At 11.15pm AEST, the ABC was projecting 86 seats for Labor, 40 for the Coalition and 10 for others such as independents, with 14 seats still in doubt.
With more than 53% of the national vote counted, the broadcaster said Labor had 34.7% of the vote, while there was a 3.5% swing against the Coalition.
Late on election night, Bandt’s seat of Melbourne remained in play, following projected losses in Queensland, and another close contest in Wills, as part of a massive national swing to Labor.
Some of the seats projected to change hands from the Coalition to Labor include the NSW seat of Hughes, with a 7% swing to Labor, as well as Queensland’s Leichhardt with a 9.4% swing, and the seat of Moore in Western Australia, with a 4.8% swing.
ABC projects Peter Dutton will lose his seat of Dickson
More news: The ABC’s election analyst Antony Green has projected that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton will lose his Queensland seat of Dickson.
What they said: "So there is about 70% of preferences flowing to the Labor Party, independent on the seat, are getting a strong flow of preferences.
"But at this stage, we are saying that Ali France should go on to win that seat and Peter Dutton — I'm naturally cautious — but is almost certain to lose. But we believe Ali France will win.”
Labor has won the election: networks
More news: The ABC, Sky News, Channel 9 and Channel 7 have called the election for the ALP, declaring Anthony Albanese the first Labor prime minister since Bob Hawke to be re-elected.
Sky News chief election analyst Tom Connell said the Coalition was not getting the gains it needed in Victoria, and the swings were going the other way in NSW and Queensland.
“At this stage, we're not sure what flavor it might be. There's positivity within Labor it could be a majority, but Anthony Albanese will again be prime minister,” Connell said.
Connell declared Liberal MP Bridget Archer had lost her seat of Bass in northern Tasmania, the first flip of the night.
Nine declared Labor has also won Griffith in Brisbane from the Greens and Braddon in Tasmania from the Liberals.
Over on the ABC, which has also now officially called the election for Labor, the bloodletting has well and truly begun.
“Big questions need to be asked of the Victorian Liberal Party once again. They continue to find new ways to fail,” said Tony Barry, a former Liberal strategist and now director at pollster Redbridge.
“There is simply no pathway to victory in the near future, in the next couple of elections, unless the Liberal Party can be semi-competitive in Victoria.”
“I cannot see how the Coalition wins from here,” the ABC’s election analyst Antony Green said, even without data.
“They have just gone backwards everywhere ... it is bad news everywhere for them. Seats all over the country all over the eastern states where they are behind, they need to get 19 seats for a majority government they need to gain 10 seats and they are in the process of losing 12 or 15. The trend is all the wrong way and I am limited in the amount of data I can see at the moment but it is impossible to see how this turns around.”
ABC suffers technical issues; Sky says Coalition can't form majority govt
More news: The ABC is currently suffering a server issue that has left the broadcaster’s retiring election analyst, Antony Green, without a stream of data.
He told the broadcast that there “is some kind of server problems” and that he hadn’t received recent polling updates, but that looking elsewhere with “about 13.7% of the vote counted”, the swing is a bit lower than the one he showed earlier.
Meanwhile, Sky News chief election analyst Tom Connell declared the Coalition won’t be able to form a majority government.
With only 8% per cent of the total vote counted, Connell said there was a swing against the Coalition in too many seats.
Connell said while there will be a “correction” when pre-poll votes are counted, there was no path to majority government for the Coalition.
“So the issue is, I’m just not seeing enough good news,” he said.
“This is not saying the election is done yet overall, but this is the starting point for getting a majority. We’re talking about them winning 20 seats, even if the Coalition can win six over in the west of the country, we are just not seeing the momentum clearly.
“There’s not a swing on for them in New South Wales and Queensland. There could be some pickup still in Victoria, but as a result, we’re saying the Coalition will not form a majority government.”
But Coalition campaign spokesperson James Paterson said it was too early to comment on the result, with pre-poll about half of the total vote now and it always significantly favours his party.
What they said: “The swing is a bit lower than the one I was showing earlier with currently projecting to the Labor Party on about 54.8 which is about 0.7 lower on the projection I had earlier because the counting has progressed, but at the moment we are chasing down Jeff Bezos or somebody … to find out what is going on,” Antony Green said.
Early count suggests Dutton may lose his seat
More news: Peter Dutton is at risk of losing his own seat of Dickson with a swing of more than 5% to Labor on early counting.
Dutton’s Brisbane seat, which he held on a thin 1.7% margin, was already the most marginal electorate in Queensland going into tonight.
With 6.1% of the vote counted, the counting was recording a 5.1% swing against Dutton just after 7.40pm.
While it is still way too early to call the seat for Labor, the results confirm Dutton is at serious risk of losing the seat — which Labor had been talking up for weeks.
The Coalition is also behind in the Brisbane seat of Bonner, suffering a swing of more than 7%, which could give Labor another gain in Queensland.
The early counting indicates a worse-than-expected night for the Coalition, with no signs yet of any seat gains off Labor. The ALP is also ahead in the Liberal-held seats of Bass and Braddon in Tasmania, increasing the chance Anthony Albanese could retain majority government.
What they said: “My phone is blowing up over Dickson, and we think the early voting which will come in in huge chunks later in the night will be better for him than on the day but there is a lot of interest, as you can imagine, on that big early number,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers said on the ABC.
“There are two states to determine the election results now. New South Wales and Victoria. The Coalition is getting absolutely hammered in both of them,” RedBridge pollster Kos Somaras said on the ABC.
“Prepolls will need to be absolutely extraordinary, another wonder weapon the Coalition seems to have relied upon in the recent election campaigns including false polling and all of that. So, at the moment, it is pretty clear that they are struggling with diverse communities, they are struggling with young voters in the outer suburbs,” he said.
The ABC’s election analyst Antony Green said the Coalition will need a strong turnout in prepoll to reverse early swings for Labor.
“Either all of the Labor people voted on the day and all the Coalition members have turned up to prepoll — and we won't know until late in the evening,” Green said on the ABC’s election broadcast.
Former Labor leader Bill Shorten lashed the Coalition’s performance over the past five weeks, saying it ran “the worst campaign in living memory”.
“I wouldn’t want to be part of that post-mortem. Good luck,” Shorten said on Channel Seven.
Positive signs for Labor in early counting
More news: The early trend is looking positive for Labor, with no massive swings against it and significant tilts towards it in marginal Liberal seats.
Just after 7pm, there were significant swings towards Labor in the Liberal-held seats of Braddon and Bass in Tasmania, which Albanese will need to win to offset likely losses elsewhere.
With 4.1% of the vote counted, there was a 10.3% swing to the ALP in Braddon. There was also an 8.8% swing towards Labor in Bass, although that's with just over 1% of the vote counted.
If Labor could pick up these two seats from the Liberals, it will prove integral to retaining majority government and would signal a worse-than-expected night for the Coalition.
The Coalition also looks to be failing to pick up the must-win NSW seat of Gilmore from Labor. It's seeing a 4.7% swing towards the ALP with 5% of the vote counted.
At the Labor election party, there were cheers in the room as the early results for Gilmore and Leichhardt were displayed on the ABC.
More than an hour after the polls closed on the East Coast, the Liberal function remains essentially just journalists and a handful of staffers.
The first results coming in from Dutton’s own seat of Dickson suggest a swing against the opposition leader, with Labor candidate Ali France leading him on a 55.8%-44.2% two party preferred basis after five of the seat's 41 booths were counted.
It’s worth noting that Dutton appeared to be trailing France at this stage in 2022 but ultimately recovered to hold the seat.
Vote counting begins as Australia decides
The news: The polls have closed in the eastern and central states and territories, with early counting beginning and Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton awaiting the results in their home cities.
The details: Albanese, who is in Sydney tonight where Labor’s election party is being held at the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL, started his day with live appearances on breakfast television from the Melbourne Cricket Ground at around 7am.
“Today is Grand Final day,” he said.
“I've left nothing on the field. And I'll leave nothing on the field over the next three years if I’m re-elected as Australia’s prime minister.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton began the day in the key battleground city of Melbourne, where he made whirlwind trips to three seats the party is aiming to win.
The first was Macnamara, where incumbent Labor MP Josh Burns is in a three-way tussle with the Liberals and Greens. A result in the seat took days to materialise in 2022, with preferences almost certain to determine the winner this time around.
Dutton travelled to Goldstein to meet with Liberal candidate Tim Wilson, the only former MP who lost their seat to a teal to recontest it again. Liberal insiders believe the seat is their biggest chance to reclaim a teal electorate.
Dutton then made his 17th campaign trip to a petrol station, filling up the tank in Gorton — an outer Melbourne electorate considered on the “optimistic” end of the party’s target list. Gorton is a safe Labor seat, though a combination of cost-of-living pressures and the retirement of long-serving MP Brendan O’Connor mean the gap could tighten.
Then it was a flight to his Brisbane electorate of Dickson, where he cast his ballot alongside his family. Dutton’s election night party is at the W Hotel in Brisbane’s city centre.
The key battleground tonight will be Victoria, where the Coalition is hoping to win a swathe of seats from Labor off the back of cost-of-living concerns and the unpopular Labor state government.
Senior Labor and Coalition sources told Capital Brief late on Saturday that they were expecting a result in line with what most of the published polls have suggested, with the most likely result being Labor re-elected but falling into minority government.
Labor has becoming increasingly worried about the seat of Bean in its traditional stronghold of Canberra, where the party holds all three Lower House seats and one of its two Senate seats. But Labor MP Dave Smith is facing a challenge from Climate 200-backed independent Jessie Price, with initial booths reporting she has made significant inroads into his hold on the seat.
What they said: “As the election has gone on, I think people have understood what tier of government they are voting for,” Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said on Sky News, saying he was confident federal Labor wouldn't be punished over the performance of the state government.
