The postal vote count for the Canning byelection has contradicted the widely held assumption that the change of Liberal leadership helped the member-elect, Andrew Hastie, win the seat by a comfortable margin.
Postal votes, most of which were submitted before Tony Abbott lost the prime ministership to Malcolm Turnbull, show a swing of 5.6% to Labor compared with postal votes at the 2013 federal election. A 10% swing against the Liberals was predicted when Abbott was still prime minister.
On Monday night Hastie was on 59.5% on a two-party-preferred basis and the Labor candidate, Matt Keogh, on 40.5% of postal votes.
By Monday night only 76% of the postal votes submitted ahead of last Saturday’s byelection had been counted. On Saturday the Liberal party defied earlier predictions of a 10% swing to Labor and retained the seat held by the late Don Randall for 14 years.
It was expected that the 11,115 postal votes and a similar number of pre-poll votes would reflect those earlier polls. At a combined weight of 20% of the vote, that would not be insignificant.
But the postal votes showed a strong primary vote of 52.9% for Hastie, compared with 56.9% for Randall on postal votes in 2013. The primary vote for Labor’s Keogh was 31.71% on postal votes, compared with 26.2% for the Labor candidate in 2013, indicating the swing to Labor would not have been sufficient to threaten victory regardless of the change in prime ministership.
Hastie won the seat on a two-party-preferred vote of 55.4% to 44.6%. The swing of 6.4% to Labor from Randall’s impressive margin of 11.8% has been heralded as a win by both the Labor and the Liberal party, with senior Liberals on election night crediting the smaller than expected swing to the change in leadership. The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, released a statement saying that because of Labor’s campaign “a safe Liberal seat has become a marginal one”.
“It is clear that thousands of Western Australians have voted Labor for the first time,” he said. “Matt Keogh has a bright future and still has much to give to his community and to the Labor party.”
That future is likely to include the proposed seat of Burt, which has been recommended by the Australian electoral commission’s redistribution committee. It would centre around the suburbs of Armadale and Gosnells, carving out parts of the Hasluck and Tangney electorates, but the bulk of the voters would be from the northern suburbs of the Canning electorate where support for Keogh was strongest.
On Saturday Keogh said the Canning campaign had “invigorated me even further to make sure that we are sending a strong presence from Labor to Canberra”.
- This story was amended on 23 September to compare the 2015 postal votes with the 2013 postal votes, rather than with the overall 2015 result.
