So we end the night with Labor ahead by a bee’s nose.
But there are still a lot of votes to be counted.
There are about 13,000 14,000 postal votes to be counted, plus the preferences from the pre-poll (which was above 40,000).
Given that the electorate only has just over 114,000 voters, that’s a pretty big slab of unknown.
The only thing I am sure of is that the result, whatever it is, has nothing to do with the AAA credit rating, but I am sure Sussan Ley will get another gold star for getting that into the ABC coverage.
Is Labor worried?
Yes.
Has Labor been worried the entire campaign?
Also yes.
Are these normal circumstances to be holding a byelection in?
Absolutely not.
Will the result change anything?
No.
Does the focus actually need to be on the people in Eden-Monaro who don’t have a roof over their heads six months after the summer bushfires?
All of the yes.
Katharine Murphy has filed her report, because she never stops, so keep an eye out for that.
We’ll keep you updated on the count as it happens over the next couple of days, so stay tuned to the Guardian’s coverage.
And thank you, again, for joining us tonight. It means a lot. We’ll also be back with Covid-19 blog from early tomorrow, where we will have all the news on what is happening in Victoria. We’re all thinking of you, and we’re so sorry, Melbourne. We’ll have more on the situation on the public housing towers which have been put into police lockdown as well.
Get some sleep and please, take care of you.
Updated
The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, has put out a statement:
I want to thank our fantastic candidate, Cathy Griff, and the wonderful members and supporters of the NSW Greens, especially in Eden-Monaro, who worked hard on this campaign in very difficult circumstances.
The overall winner appears too close to call. This is a good result for the Greens in a challenging context of the COVID crisis and a Melbourne Cup field of candidates.
If Labor wins, it will send a clear message that voters want to see the back of this government that has failed to take action on the climate crisis, has failed them on the recovery from the climate-fuelled bushfires and is now mismanaging the economic crisis.
If Labor holds on, it’ll only be with the help of preferences from Green voters. There is a clear message for Labor that they must shake off the yoke of the coal billionaires and the gas corporations that want to hold back action on the climate crisis.
If Labor holds on, it will also be because of preferences from the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, who want to wind back the gun laws, so I’d maybe hold off on the “Labor must” decree, when it comes to preference flows. (The Greens vote is also, at this stage, down by almost 3% with the Hemp party having taken up part of that vote.)
Updated
Kristina Keneally points out that she did predict this result:
I actually did predict we might very well be in this position. I said this was going to be a difficult night for Labor, for the reasons I outlined. Especially given that this is a one-in-100-year byelection in a one-in-100-year pandemic.
Updated
The final observations are just as you would imagine they would be.
Sussan Ley thinks the fact we don’t have a result is extraordinary:
I don’t think anyone would have predicted that at 20 minutes to midnight tonight. No one would have predicted it would be so close to the wire. That devastating drop in a primary vote continues what we saw at the last general election. That is really bad news for Anthony Albanese.
Literally everyone thought it would be too close to call tonight. Like, everyone.
Updated
“Scott Morrison is a star,” says a Liberal minister about the Liberal prime minister, “and I think the people of Eden-Monaro know he is the one to lead the rebuilding effort.”
So, gold star commentary there.
Updated
Antony Green ends the ABC coverage with Labor ahead of 0.7% based on the postal trends (which have not been entered into the AEC results as yet).
We are still waiting on preference counts from pre-poll – as well as some of the pre-poll as well.
And plus, those postal votes are about double what you usually see in an election campaign – there are about 13,000 to 14,000 votes expected to be coming in (plus, the AEC has to legally wait for almost two weeks before they close the mail room).
Updated
Fiona Kotvojs finishes with this:
We have still got, in our community, a tough couple of years coming ahead. Recovering from the fires is going to be tough.
It is hard and unless you have been through it, I don’t think anybody knows how hard it is. It’s going to be tough after Covid-19. We have gone well, but it is going to be tough. A government that gives leadership, a government that gives direction, a government that sets a base that supports people is what we need.
But the other thing that is essential is a community that loves, cares and respect each other.
A community that supports each other, a community that uses that base and makes it grow.
If we keep doing that as a society, we are going to come out of all of this stronger that we were when we went in. And that is the Australia I want to be part of. That is the Eden-Monaro I want to come out of all of this. And that is the Eden-Monaro and the Australia that I will continue to work for regardless of the outcome of this election.
Here is where postal votes end so far:
The initial two-candidate-preferred (TCP) count for postal votes able to be counted tonight is now available as follows.
— AEC ✏️ (@AusElectoralCom) July 4, 2020
- McBain(ALP): 2,394
- Kotvojs (Libs): 2,464
This figure will be added to the AEC tally room tomorrow morning. #EdenMonaro #auspol
Updated
Counting has finished for the night but data is still being slowly uploaded to the AEC site.
Still, we won’t be getting a result tonight.
Updated
Fiona Kotvojs:
This year, it’s been a tough year.
Twelve months ago if you had asked somebody to write down what was going to happen in the next 12 months in Australia, let alone in Eden-Monaro, you would never have written down what has happened.
You would have thought it was science fiction if somebody had written it, you would have told them it was rubbish.
We have still got the drought we had last year. We have had floods and bushfires and Covid-19.
This has been a tough year, so tough. I have spoken to people before the campaign, but I have particularly spoken to people through the campaign.
They have shared their stories of what has happened and their own experience. There have been the people whose orchards were destroyed, a lifetime.
There have been farmers that I know who have had to shoot their cattle when the fires went through. I can’t imagine anything worse.
There have been people who still wake up with nightmares because of the fires. And together as a community, we need to work to address those issues. For me, as somebody who is from the south coast but who knows the rest of this electorate well, and to my parents have spent a lot of time in Queanbeyan and across most of the rest of the electorate, for me it’s important that we work together as a community and that we deal with these issues, that we have the leadership from the government and we have somebody who works for us to connect the two. That is what matters for me.
Kotvojs also thanks the 13 other candidates – “each one wanted to serve” – and acknowledges that each one has given up a lot to run.
Updated
Fiona Kotvojs:
We don’t have a result, and it would be really nice to say that we did tonight, but we don’t. It’s been 100 years since the government has won a seat of the opposition in a byelection. The average swing against the government has been 3.8% in those byelections. So far, we are going the other way ... and that’s really good, that’s fantastic.
I chose to run last year, because when I left the high school, I had to go away to study and I had to go away for work. I only came home in 2005 when we got satellite internet and that meant I could come home back to my parents’ farm.
My dad is here tonight, which is great, along with my husband. And when I came home, I discovered that things hadn’t changed much; most of our young people still had to go away.
And when they go away, they find a partner when they are away, just like I did. And on the whole, they don’t come home. And that’s just crippling our small communities and its crippling our towns and the whole region. And I wanted to change that and I gained the skills to be able to do that, and that is what I wanted to do. For me, that was important.
(Before 2016, Eden-Monaro was represented by an MP from whichever side of politics won government. So for a good portion of that time, the Coalition had stewardship over Eden-Monaro.)
Updated
Fiona Kotvojs addresses the LNP event
Fiona Kotvojs has taken the stage. She has gone for a blue(ish) scarf over a grey(ish) suit, thrown in quite the jaunty fashion (but you also know someone spent time getting it to sit “just so”).
Updated
Anthony Albanese gives her three cheers and then tells the room to have a good night.
The results now have Labor, on the two-party preferred measure, ahead 51% to 49%.
Updated
Kristy McBain gets a little emotional at the end of her speech, as she says this:
Over the next couple of days the spotlight will fade, the mail in your letterboxes will dry up, the robo calls will end! But we still have a big challenge ahead of us.
Recovery is going to be hard in Eden-Monaro and we need to continue to fight every single day to support the people that are being left behind and are falling through the cracks.
I need to be clear about this. When the cameras go away and the spotlight fades, my resolve will not.
Regardless of the outcome of this election I will continue to stand up for these regions that I know and love.
I will continue to stand up for people affected by bushfires, continue to stand up for farmers. I will continue to stand up for mothers who need maternity services. I will continue to stand up for better roads, better access to healthcare and education, I will continue to stand up for workers and I will continue to stand up for regions. Regardless of what happens.
So thank you all for your support.
Updated
Binders and binders of women here, at least from this angle.
Liberal HQ in Queanbeyan goes quiet for the first time in hours, to listen to the Labor speeches. @abcnews pic.twitter.com/YkhDOdeK3q
— Tom Lowrey (@tomlowrey) July 4, 2020
Updated
The Nationals have moved back to 6.1% of the vote (about where they were at the last election) so Larry Anthony has to be breathing a sigh of relief there, at this stage.
Sky News has also moved to “no official Eden-Monaro result tonight”.
That is because there will be no official Eden-Monaro result tonight.
Updated
Kristy McBain, the former Bega mayor, says the last time she addressed a room like this it “was New Year’s Eve and I had a roomful of people and I was telling them that if they didn’t live here they to leave immediately, and for all of those people that could not protect their own homes, they had to make decisions about where to go, whether it was an evacuation centre, whether that was to stay with friends and family, whether that was to make some decisions about whether they were best place to protect their own property.
“The way I felt that night is much bigger than the one I feel tonight.”
McBain:
Anthony [Albanese] and I visited numerous people during the course of this campaign, some who are still living in caravans, some waiting for debris to be cleared up. Some who thought they would have access to assistance and still haven’t received it.
These are the people I am most worried and concerned about and these are the people that our government needs to be worried and concerned about. I want to stand up for these regions because I want my kids to be able to grow up here, have a career here and live here for the rest of their lives. Like Brad and I have been able to do …
We want to make other people come here because it is truly amazing to be a regional person.
The lesson we have learnt from the black summer bushfires is that leadership matters. It matters when you show up and it matters that you listen to people.
No region has done it tougher, and we know that, but our challenge has only just begun because recovery and rebuild is going to take time for this community.
I want to thank all of my opponents during this election campaign because they have truly shaped the campaign itself, so thank you to all of my opponents and I wish you all well in the future.
Updated
Kristy McBain has gone with Labor red (of course):
As of tonight, this is still too close to call, but that’s OK because what I want you to know is that in this election we said we would stand up for people.
We said we wanted to give a voice to those people who have been left behind.
We sadly to make sure that we shone a spotlight on people in Eden-Monaro that were doing it really tough, and in this election campaign we have definitely done that.
To all those people in Eden-Monaro, all the people struggling, to small businesses, tourism and hospitality providers, forestry workers, our farmers, those people that have been impacted by this fire – thank you for allowing us to share your stories and shine a spotlight on what matters most, and that is people.
Updated
Anthony Albanese:
As of tonight, which is still being counted so it is to early to an outcome, what we can declare is as of right now we are over 2,500 votes ahead.
(The Labor supporters are excited by this.)
And I would much rather be Kristy McBain than one of her opponents right now.
Kristy McBain has shown herself to be principled, to be passionate about her community, to be absolutely committed and hard working, and I do thank sincerely the family for landing Kristy, not just to the Labor party, but to the whole community.
We said during this campaign it would be about the people of Eden-Monaro, and it will continue to be. She is articulate, she is considered in what she has to say, she is someone who is about finding solutions, not just having arguments. She is someone who has already made an enormous difference to this community, and will make an even bigger difference in the future. I give you Kristy McBain!
Updated
We’re going to hear from the Liberals after this.
But there will be no result.
And no concessions.
I have never felt more sympathy for King Sisyphus.
Updated
Anthony Albanese addresses Kristy McBain event
The Labor leader is at the Labor campaign party.
He’s gone with no tie.
Anthony Albanese:
I said when Mike Kelly resigned, that it would be tough for Labor to hold this seat. That we started off on 48% of the two-party-preferred vote because we lost a member who had been an outstanding representative. But we made a commitment at that point in time that we would stand out during this campaign as the Australian Labor party always will, for the people who are left behind.
Updated
Sussan Ley says Labor, which is a smidge ahead at the moment, has failed in its campaign to “send the prime minister a message”:
All through the campaign it was about “send Scott Morrison a message”.
All Labor’s campaign was “send the national government a message”.
That message hasn’t arrived in the form at which it was demanded to be sent, so clearly people have strongly endorsed the prime minister’s leadership and we have just had a fantastic local candidate.
Anthony Albanese is in a world of pain tonight. He has relied on a popular local mayor, on the one in the Labor party prior to a couple of years ago, to carry this result to where it is.
Kristina [Keneally] representing the Labor party tonight, has been all over the place when it comes to [the reasons], is it local or national?
With the result that we see, all of a sudden it is local, but the messaging from Labor throughout this campaign will send the prime minister and the national team and government a strong message, and that simply has not happened.
This is a strong endorsement of the work that we are doing and I hope the confidence that people have in the leadership of the prime minister.
The prime minister now has a Newspoll approval rating of 68% – so it’s not as particularly strong an endorsement, using that metric, as Ley might point out.
Updated
Right, so we have the Queanbeyan City pre-poll count in.
Labor suffered an almost 8% swing there, while the Liberals were down 1.3%.
The Nationals were the winners there, with a rise of 5.1%.
But you are not going to see a result tonight.
Updated
Good God.
We have another 30 minutes to go.
.@AntonyGreenABC saying the AEC will count until 11pm #auspol
— Katharine Murphy (@murpharoo) July 4, 2020
Updated
I think everyone should just have the “good grace” to let this night end.
Sussan Ley just asked Kristina Keneally to “have the good grace” to recognise how well Scott Morrison has handled Australia’s pandemic response:
The Labor party is so worried they will not get across the line in a byelection that history tells them they should comfortably win is a real blight on their failure to acknowledge.
I think Kristina should have the good grace tonight to acknowledge the leadership of the prime minister, to actually recognise where we are held in an international standing when we have made those very difficult decisions.
We are the only country that Moody’s has reaffirmed our credit rating. It is a delicate balance between throwing people on the unemployment heap and managing this health crisis.
We have done it, we have been recognised for it, it is a good thing for you to also recognise, Kristina.
Keneally fires back that Ley should have the “good grace” to recognise Labor supported all the pandemic measures:
I would like to do that as long as you have the good grace to acknowledge that Labor came in and supported jobkeeper and called for it before you even brought it forward, supported jobseeker, supported the measures you have put in place.
What I am saying, Sussan, is tonight’s byelection and vote takes place in these extraordinary circumstances. I think for you and I to sit here talking about insider, inside-the-belt, Canberra bubble issues, does disrespect to people in the community who are nervous and worried.
Updated
Sussan Ley is now pointing out that Labor put out election materials for Nationals voters, saying if you vote Nationals 1, then put Labor 2.
The handout at some of the booths did look like it could come from the Nationals party, but the small print on the authorisation said it was from the Labor party.
Ley says the Nationals might have a look to see there is any recourse for that.
Given that the courts already ruled there was no recourse for Liberals advertising during the federal election, in Chisholm, which mimicked AEC advertising, saying put the Liberals first ( in Chinese), I am going to go with saying an authorised handout is probably not going to have many issues.
Updated
Over on the ABC, Kristina Keneally and Sussan Ley are still arguing about whether or not there is a preference deal between Labor and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party.
I mean, really – does anyone care at this point of the night? And when Victoria is on the verge of a state lockdown, and a deadly pandemic is our lived reality?
And that arguing about preference deals four hours and 20 minutes after polls closed doesn’t actually do anything?
And the Coalition has taken One Nation preferences in the past?
Ugh.
Updated
The Nationals vote has dropped to 5.5% – which is where the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party is also sitting. It had been at 6% about an hour ago.
We are still waiting on the pre-poll count though. There is not enough to confidentially call it.
Even the Sky News ticker has gone from “Barilaro says Liberals have won” to “too close to call”.
Nope, wait, it’s gone back to “loss could test Albanese’s leadership”.
Updated
Antony Green* has Labor ahead with a 0.4% swing on the two-party-preferred measure, with 54% of the vote counted.
*This previously said Antony Albanese. Apologies. It has been a long four hours.
Updated
The Liberals are feeling good because Labor has not had a runaway win.
But the margin at the beginning of all of this was 0.9%.
A government hasn’t won a byelection seat from another party for about 100 years.
Which is why there is a sense of excitement about a seat which will do nothing to materially change the parliament. Or anything, really.
Labor, which has been careful to manage expectations from the beginning, given that the seat, until 2016, went with whoever was in government (and Mike Kelly only just hung on at the last election because of his personal popularity), points out that this is also a one-in-100-year pandemic.
And before any pundits get excited about what this would mean for Anthony Albanese’s leadership, they need to remember that the leadership spill rules have been changed, and the Victorian branch, which is most likely to agitate for change, is in administration and in the control of the federal executive.
Also, and I am pretty certain of this, given the scores of people I talk to each week, no one is really focused on politics right now.
Updated
Once again, it is – as they say in the biz – too close to call.
Updated
Over at the Tally Room blog, Ben Raue has this breakdown:
Labor gained a solid 3.3% swing in the east (ie. the coastal region), and much smaller swings in the south and west, which are the areas that the Liberal Party won in 2019.
Labor lost 1.6-1.7% in both the north (including Yass and the former Palerang council area) and the Queanbeyan urban area.
The pre-poll votes are not distributed in the same pattern. There are a lot less pre-poll votes cast in the north of the seat, and relatively more in Queanbeyan. I assume a lot of those voters from places like Bungendore went in to Queanbeyan to cast a pre-poll vote. There were also 943 pre-poll votes cast at three centres in Canberra.
Overall, almost 22,000 votes were cast on election day in regions where Labor gained a swing, while just over 22,000 were cast in regions where the Liberal Party gained a swing.
There are relatively more pre-poll votes in areas which swung to Labor: about 23,000 in the east, south and west, compared to about 19,000 in the north and Queanbeyan.
Overall this doesn’t look decisive: it suggests that Labor might do a little bit better than expected, but there is not a huge bias in terms of where these votes were cast. There is more than enough votes to put either side over the top.
On the first count of postals (3,000):
The ALP has won 34.3%
The Libs have won 42.2%
Nats are on 4.3%
SFF are on 5.2%
and the Greens have won 4.9%
Updated
We are all running out of ways to say “we have to wait to see what the pre-poll is doing” but Ben Raue has this breakdown of what we do know:
Labor gained a decent swing in the east (south coast) and smaller swings in the Liberal Party's strongest areas in the south and west. Liberals gained decent swings in the north and Queanbeyan.
— Ben Raue (@benraue) July 4, 2020
Updated
Yup.
Sky News is so bored waiting for new results Barilaro, Credlin and Richo are arguing about nuclear power. #auspol
— Phillip Coorey (@PhillipCoorey) July 4, 2020
Updated
With the AEC results showing 72 of the 86 booths being counted, Labor is *just* ahead – but not even by a full percentage point.
It is all going to come down to the pre-poll, and no one has a handle on what those trends are yet because we don’t have enough of them.
Labor is pessimistic, the Liberals are cautiously optimistic, but really no one has any idea.
The Liberals are cautiously optimistic because over the weeks the pre-poll was opened, the Labor branch-stacking scandal broke in Victoria. Scott Morrison, meanwhile, had (and still does) record-breaking popularity.
Postal votes tend to favour the government.
But the fact is, no one knows. If it breaks towards the Liberals, I don’t think it will be sending the message that a byelection in normal times would send. If Labor holds on, nothing changes.
But we won’t know for a while yet.
Updated
Guys, I think everyone needs to come to terms that there won’t be a result tonight.
The NSW Nationals leader, John Barilaro, is again saying that with the pre-poll Nats preferences, the Liberals will win tonight – and he is predicting that will be by a “decent” margin.
Updated
Richard Marles just pointed out that keeping the Sky News program going for an hour, with no new information, has been “heroic” and thanks Angus Taylor for his “comedic input”.
Marles says he is still nervous but says there is literally no new information.
Which is another way of saying IT IS TOO EARLY TOO TELL.
Updated
Over on Sky News, Angus Taylor has seemingly blamed Anthony Albanese for a swing against the Greens.
Over at the Poll Bludger blog, William Bowe has the preference flow worked out to:
Preferences to Labor 6,753 – 58.2%(+6.3%)
Preferences to Liberal 4,856 – 41.8% (-6.3%)
Which gives you an idea of where tonight is heading – preferences will prove crucial.
Updated
Nationals candidate concedes
Trevor Hicks is conceding he has not won the night.
He has so far won about 6% of the vote – and campaigned for 36 days (because the Nationals couldn’t get their act together, including a spat between Michael McCormack and John Barilaro, which came out in the form of text messages that somehow found their way to the media).
Anyways, Hicks is being quite conciliatory, thanking both McCormack and Barilaro.
I wish I could go a bit further, but obviously it was always a hard task with Covid restrictions and, you know, in such a short time that we’ve had.
But I think we’ve made an impact for the farmers of this region. I think the dairy farmers right around Australia need a royal commission.
(A royal commission for the dairy industry is not government policy.)
Updated
Sussan Ley says Scott Morrison’s leadership has helped hold up the Liberal vote:
Scott Morrison’s outstanding leadership has resulted, I think, in the two-party-preferred vote holding up and the recognition that this is just simply not going Labor’s way. And the other thing I might mention is that while much is being said about Mike Kelly’s popularity, and I don’t have any comment on that, I don’t remember seeing a single corflute for Anthony Albanese through the whole electorate. I think I saw one for the Labor candidate in Wagga which is outside the electorate of Eden-Monaro but on the booths today nobody reported a corflute with Albanese’s face on it.
Kristina Keneally points out that Morrison wasn’t there today. Ley says he is running the country. Keneally then says that she hasn’t seen much from the Nationals leader either:
Michael McCormack didn’t feature on the National party’s corflutes, either, they had John Barilaro, a guy who couldn’t even bring himself to vote for the Liberal party candidate in 2019.
But I think this is a bit of a spin here from Sussan but she does come from the Scotty-from-marketing spin, so cut her some slack – it is what she is expected to do.
What our scrutineers are telling us is that on the booths, so not the pre-polls, but on the booths, we are seeing 20% of National party preferences outside of Queanbeyan coming to the Labor party and some closer to 30% of their preferences in Queanbeyan are coming to the Labor party. So we’ll wait and see what happens here tonight but it’s fairly clear that the coalition between the Liberals and the Nationals hasn’t resulted in what Sussan says – a maximising of the vote for the Liberal party.
I do think that we have to bear in mind that the change in the primary vote has to come from the loss of a popular local member and the fact that there’s 14 candidates on the ballot paper. I don’t think you can expect anything different here. This is – as we’ve been saying all night – such an extraordinary set of circumstances with the coronavirus, that you know, I can’t – I’m not surprised by these results. I started out the night by saying this was going to be a difficult night for Labor. And I understand from our pre-poll scrutineers that things are still going somewhat slowly. It may be another 20 minutes before we start getting any indications yet.
Updated
We’ve been telling you all night to watch the pre-polls. More than 40,000 of them. I hear the count in the pre-poll centres is slow.
It’s possible we won’t know much concrete for an hour or so. But the situation as I see it is this: Labor’s vote in Queanbeyan is down on the past federal election. Labor would have wanted a stronger kick up out of the Queanbeyan votes tonight. If the pre-poll votes are less favourable than the trend in Queanbeyan, the Liberals could well grab a victory in this byelection.
Obviously if the pre-poll result breaks more favourably for Kristy McBain, then Labor holds the seat.
Updated
Larry Anthony is also pointing out that the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party had No 1 on the ballot, which gives it between 1% and 2% of the vote (with donkey votes – people just numbering the boxes in order).
The Nationals are pretty off the SFF for saying it would not be giving its preferences to the Coalition, thereby giving them (officially) to Labor – which Anthony says is a “betrayal” of its supporters.
The SFF says it made its preference decision based on what has been done in the electorate since the bushfires – which is not enough.
Updated
John Barilaro says the Nationals vote will give the victory to the Liberals.
He says it proves that when the “Nats come out to fight”, they come out swinging.
Updated
Over on Sky News, the NSW Nationals leader, John Barilaro, has declared that the Liberals candidate, Fiona Kotvojs, has won it.
Richard Marles says there is “still a long way to go” but, given the environment the vote was being held in (a pandemic, no real face-to-face campaign) he feels Labor being in the hunt is a pretty good result.
Updated
At the moment, with just under 40% of the vote counted, Labor is ahead by 0.3%.
Updated
If you missed the major Victorian news late today, you can catch up here.
Updated
My eye is now twitching every time I hear the word pre-poll.
But for context, there are about 43,000 pre-poll votes in an electorate with just over 114,200 voters. Add in the postals, which are estimated at between 12,000 and 13,000, and there is a lot going on in the pre-poll.
The AEC sent out 16,800 postal votes. That’s not normal.
Updated
And again – we need to see the pre-poll.
Still have no idea who is going to win tonight but a couple of observations. Labor's primary vote is down. The trend over the past hour or so has been a narrowing of Labor's 2PP lead. Some of the Queanbeyan booths are in, but they don't seem to be boosting Labor's vote #auspol
— Katharine Murphy (@murpharoo) July 4, 2020
Updated
The federal president of the Nationals, Larry Anthony, says of John Barilaro’s admission on Sky News that he voted for Mike Kelly (Labor) at the last election it was the actions of “one individual”.
Which Barilaro is. But he is also the parliamentary leader of the Nationals party in NSW. Which is in a coalition agreement with the Liberals. So, yes, one individual, but kinda an important one.
Anthony is doing amazing verbal gymnastics with David Speers as he pretends he doesn’t care:
Well, it’s an issue in that I would prefer that he didn’t vote that way. And as federal president of the party and in a coalition with the Liberal party I want to make sure that we have the best swapping of preference allocations today by Trevor Hicks to the Liberal party and, again, I want to say this, David, that I think it was important that we ran a candidate and we ran it in Queanbeyan and the other point is that we are polling better than the Shooters and Fishers and many of the commentariat had written us off.
He also points out that, at about 6%, the Nationals have not taken a step back in their primary vote (so far).
He points out that the Nationals were only in the race for four weeks, so it is a good result.
He doesn’t point out that the reason they were only in the race for four weeks was because of internal fighting, in which Barilaro was very, very much front and centre.
Updated
I am running out of ways to say it is too early to tell.
But it is too early to tell.
The issue is that the pre-poll booths are being counted very, very slowly because the scrutineers have to all stand back and socially distance, and the tables are all spread out, and it just slows down the process.
At the moment, Labor’s primary vote is down 4%. But Kristy McBain is doing very well in preferences.
Updated
William Bowe has made an interesting observation:
Labor are getting a stronger flow of preferences (60-40 compared with 53,5-46.5, booth-matched) than 2019 despite Greens being down by 3.5% -- John Barilaro effect? #EdenMonaroVotes https://t.co/8xhkv20Z1E
— William Bowe (@PollBludger) July 4, 2020
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On the ABC, a debate has broken out between Kristina Keneally and Sussan Ley over whether or not Labor has made a preference deal with the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers.
Keneally:
There is no preference deal. The idea that Sussan Ley is saying there is a preference is rubbish.
The Shooters and Fishers put out their own how-to-vote. They have not had many people handing out how-to-vote. Their voters are tending to follow their own choice, but the Shooters and the Fishers made the decision to preference Labor above the Liberal party because they were of the view that this Liberal party had left people behind.
Left them behind with the bushfires. Left them behind in the drought. Left them behind with the jobseeker and jobkeeper program and the millions of people who have been cut off.
Can I also make the point here? Kristy McBain is getting preferences from the Greens, from the Science party, from the Hemp party.
We preferenced in a way that made it easy for people to put Kristy McBain first and have an easy flow on the preference card.
Ley:
There is symbolism and the statements you make about having a party that has, you know, the views that it does associated with your result in this campaign and that’s something that you do have to own, whatever that result is.
I think that when people look at a ballot paper and when they look at what they’re handed by theLabor party promoter at the booth and they see where they’ve placed the Shooters on that list, you know, Labor has made very high-handed statements in the past about not wanting to cosy up to interests that are totally in antithesis to their philosophy and that’s what we have done here.
(I guess the same would apply for One Nation and Clive Palmer then.)
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Looking at the AEC results, Labor’s primary vote is down by 3.86% – which falls in line with what Labor has been saying, that Mike Kelly, the former member’s popularity, accounted for about 3% of its vote in that seat.
On the ABC, Kristina Keneally says she is going to “really hold back on any optimism” until she sees the pre-poll.
That’s because half the electorate voted before polling day – including as the Victorian Labor scandal was revealed.
Traditionally, postal votes tend to favour the government.
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With 62 of the 86 booths counted, Labor is ahead with about a 1.2% swing.
Labor has done well on the south coast, which was hit hard by the bushfires, and the Liberals are doing quite well in areas like Yass, where business is the primary concern.
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Kristina Keneally says she is hearing that the counting is going “slower than expected” – there is a lot of social distancing going on in the counting centre, which has slowed things a little more than usual.
Basically, everyone is preparing for there not to be a result tonight.
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Evening all. Hope you are settling in for an interesting night. I’ll keep this early observation short and sweet. The early news from the count is reasonable for Labor.
Kristy McBain is ahead on the two-party-preferred count 51.2% to Fiona Kotvojs on 48.8%.
Just over 20% of the vote counted. But reasonable is all you’d say right at the moment. We are waiting on the big booths to report two-party-preferred counts and, until they do, you’d be mad to make any kind of prediction. The results to this point reflect counts in small booths.
Also, there are a huge number of pre-poll votes to be counted in this byelection, and previous contests tell us people can vote quite differently at pre-poll than they do on the day.
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Over on Sky, John Barilaro says he believes the Liberals will win.
OK.
We have just under 23% of the vote counted and Labor has seen its primary vote rise to 37%.
The Liberals are just under that at just over 34%.
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Murph has an update:
One of the Queanbeyan booths has just come in but no TCP yet. 35 of 86 polling places returned. McBain ahead with a 2% swing #auspol
— Katharine Murphy (@murpharoo) July 4, 2020
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The other thing to keep in mind, when it comes to supporters of minor parties like the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers – they don’t really follow how to vote cards.
It is the same with One Nation supporters – people will vote as they want.
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Here is Antony Green (at this very early stage of the night):
#edenmonaro - 7.9% counted - ALP Predicted 2CP=52.9% +2.1% swing - results at https://t.co/dHLwqq5lsL #auspol
— Antony Green (@AntonyGreenABC) July 4, 2020
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So far, with just under 3,000 votes counted, Labor’s primary vote is down by about 3% to 34.6%.
The Liberal vote is up by about 0.6%.
The Nationals vote is also down – by about 1.9%
The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party is the main beneficiary, up by 5.5%.
The SFF nabbed the top spot but preferenced Labor at No 2 on its how to vote.
Labor’s deputy leader, Richard Marles, is one of the Sky analysts – he says he is “still pretty nervous about how it is all playing out”.
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But that is not to say the polling booths today didn’t have some colour …
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Postal vote applications more than doubled for Eden-Monaro, compared with the 2019 federal election.
Obviously, a lot of that has to do with Covid-19.
Labor also ran a very big postal vote campaign.
It makes it almost impossible to compare the booth count to what came in just over a year ago.
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Given the number of Covid-19 infections today, the number of police who are involved, and the fears of what it could do in terms of spread to the rest of the country, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise if this happens:
A senior Victorian government source tells me the Andrews Government could move as early as tomorrow to extend the lockdown to entire Melbourne metro area #COVID19Aus
— Kieran Gilbert (@Kieran_Gilbert) July 4, 2020
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About 50% of the electorate voted before the election.
That is going to make the poll count a little more difficult – postal votes won’t be counted for a while. By law the AEC has to wait 13 days for votes to come in by post, and pre-polling isn’t counted until after the day’s votes are counted.
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Asked about the NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro’s admission that he voted for Labor at the last election, Zed Seselja says:
I don’t think that’s helpful and I’m a friend of John Barilaro. I don’t know why you would have wanted Bill Shorten if you’re a Conservative, if you are on the centre-right of politics, why you would have wanted Bill Shorten to come in.
That’s a question he will have to answer. I would argue that airing those things in the last week of the campaign isn’t helpful.
Asked about Barilaro’s criticism of the ABC cuts (and yes, Paul Fletcher’s office, they are cuts), Seselja says:
John Barilaro is a mate of mine but I disagree with him on that, and I don’t think it was helpful. In terms of what his motivations are, that’s a question for him. I just make the point I campaigned for John Barilaro. I know many both in Canberra and in the region have campaigned for John Barilaro in the past and obviously they would be disappointed with that.
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Speaking to the ABC, the Liberal senator Zed Seselja is also managing expectations.
Asked if the government’s bushfire response has been adequate, he says:
Well, I wouldn’t say it was inadequate, but there are things we can do better and we would have liked things to have moved more quickly from time to time, but there has been no lack of effort from the government, we’re putting in an extraordinary amount of resources to try and help that recovery you of course when people are suffering, they will hear that message at a byelection, but I think we’ve got a lot to be proud of in terms of the bushfire recovery and in terms of how we handled the pandemic and how we’re working to recover our economy from this great crisis.
So obviously that’s been our message, but of course, traditionally in byelections, governments do go backwards at a rate of about 4%.
There are people who are living in shipping containers – and they are some of the lucky ones. There are a lot in tents. With no hot water, and no way to rebuild their jobs.
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The Shooters and Fishers party decided to preference Labor at this byelection. That vote could prove to be very, very important.
Here is part of why the party decided to preference away from the government:
All the major parties are cut from the same cloth. Everybody knows there is no difference between them any more. The Liberal Nationals have screwed regional communities like Eden-Monaro over one too many times at a state and federal level, and the Labor party are no better. They just haven’t had the chance recently to screw things up because they are not in government. We are recommending going against the governing party because they haven’t performed. If Labor was in power we would go against them too if their leader was in Hawaii while the district they claimed to care about was burning to the ground.
Our decision to recommend a vote away from the Liberal-National government has been made a lot easier given the fact that we have pleaded with both state and federal governments to increase backburning and give regional landowners a greater say over their land. Just like everything with the Liberal Nationals these days, they have sat on this for years, promised change, and done nothing.
We are fighting for the forgotten people this election while they fight amongst themselves.
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The popularity of Labor’s former MP, Mike Kelly, accounts for about 3% of Labor’s vote in Eden-Monaro.
Both the major parties are playing it fairly cool – as reported earlier, neither is willing to take the favourite tag.
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The count is slowly starting to come in but it is only a few polling places.
So far, Labor’s primary vote is down, but it is too early to show any trend.
The early booths tend to be the smaller ones and the votes are too small to make any early guesses.
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It has been a huge day in Victoria – and this is the news that is going to be dominating Australian headlines for the next week. If you need to catch up, you’ll find all the information here:
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Scott Morrison won’t be appearing during the byelection, we are being told.
He has been focused on the pandemic response.
Anthony Albanese is in town though.
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This should not come as a surprise to anyone (that John Barilaro won’t say who he voted for).
The NSW Nats leader has not ruled out having a tilt himself at the next election. Having a Labor MP will make that a lot easier for him, in terms of internal Coalition politics.
BREAKING: John Barilaro confirms he voted Labor after Nationals in 2019 but won’t say how he voted today - great @SkyNewsAust at the moment thanks
— Thomas O'Brien (@TJ__OBrien) July 4, 2020
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The count is going to be slightly different for AEC counters at this election:
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Polls are closed
That’s it – the polls have closed.
Let the counting begin.
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For those wanting to follow along with the count, you can follow it here:
#EdenMonaro polls close at 6pm. Results will progressively upload to our tally room through the night – https://t.co/kBJRa4MO5S #Auspol #EdenMonaroVotes
— AEC ✏️ (@AusElectoralCom) July 4, 2020
Count process: https://t.co/gBSPDitDla
https://t.co/waHDV4EkGQ
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Polls are open for a little while longer.
The big news though is in Victoria where 108 new cases of Covid-19 have been diagnosed in the last 24 hours. Two more postcodes have been placed into lockdown, accounting for the suburbs Kensington, Flemington and North Melbourne.
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And, of course, it has been as chilly as my cold dead heart out there today, as Mike Bowers found out:
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And as a catch-up on what you might have missed, this piece by Katharine Murphy and Paul Karp gives a pretty excellent run-through of what has gone on:
The Australian Electoral Commission has boosted resources in an effort to ensure a result in Saturday’s Eden-Monaro will be known on the night, rather than dragging on for days in the event the contest is decided by a handful of votes.
With voters in the New South Wales marginal seat heading to the polls on Saturday, Liberals believe they have made up ground during the contest, but strategists think Labor remains in front and is likely to hold the seat. Labor strategists believe their candidate, Kristy McBain, has run a solid campaign but no one is predicting victory.
A poll conducted late this week for a progressive thinktank had McBain ahead of the Liberal candidate, Fiona Kotvojs, 52% to 48% in two-party-preferred terms. The sample size was 643 residents and the poll had a margin of error of 3.9%.
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Paul Karp has taken a look at the campaign so far:
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Hello
Welcome to our live coverage of the Eden-Monaro byelection.
As with all byelection campaigns, it has been a slightly weird one – more so this time around because it has been carried out in the midst of a pandemic. So it’s been a little strange even for a byelection.
Mike Kelly, whose retirement for health reasons sparked the contest, won the seat for Labor in the 2019 election with a reduced margin of 0.9%.
So just a handful of the 114,000 or so voters changing their mind would flip the seat to the Coalition.
In terms of actual impact, the result of this byelection is fairly low stakes.
If Labor’s Kristy McBain wins, it’s the status quo. If the Liberals’ Fiona Kotvojs wins, the government gets another backbencher.
There is, of course, the normal pundit talk of “what will this mean for the opposition leader’s leadership” but the answer there too is fairly shrug-worthy. Labor has been “managing expectations” from the beginning, pointing out that the byelection has been carried out in a once in 100-year pandemic. Also, the Victorian branch of the Labor party has been suspended, and is under the administration of the federal executive. Given the changes to the Labor leadership rules, changing a leader these days is not as easy as creating rumblings in the party room.
And of course there are other candidates. The Nationals candidate, Trevor Hicks, has been pulled in all sorts of directions by the never-ending drama between the NSW Liberals and the NSW Nationals. The Greens and Shooters, Fishers and Farmers parties are also fielding candidates, and their preferences will be crucial. Labor received criticism for striking a preference deal with the SFF but has returned fire over the internal drama between the Coalition partners.
Throw in the size of the electorate (it’s about the size of Switzerland) and the vastly different experiences of voters – while Queanbeyan is focused on business and recovery from the pandemic, much of the south coast communities are still struggling to get housing and running water after the summer bushfires destroyed their towns – and you have an electorate with a lot of different priorities.
The shared experience though is the suffering. Eden-Monaro is doing it tough. Very tough. And if you have seen people living in shipping containers, making one-hour round trips to have a hot shower, you know exactly how tough I mean.
Whichever candidate wins has a massive job ahead of them.
So stay with us, as we run through the night’s events. We may not get a result tonight – pre-polling numbers are very high and postals could prove crucial.
But, like every election, no one really knows what is going to happen until it happens.
You have Mike Bowers on the ground and I’ll show you some of what he has captured over the last day of campaigning.
You have Katharine Murphy watching the result, so keep an eye out for her analysis – and you have me, Amy Remeikis, keeping you updated through the night.
Polls close at 6pm – so grab yourself something nice to drink, pull up a comfy chair and get ready for wherever the night takes us.
Thanks for joining us – you can always join the conversation by hitting me up on Twitter, if you so feel the need.
Ready? Let’s get into it.
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