The Greens ended election night with two seats on a knife-edge: the marginal Labor seat of Melbourne Ports and the traditionally safe Labor seat of Batman in Victoria.
In Melbourne Ports, a competition was playing out between three parties as election night drew to a close. As of 9.30pm, with three booths and most of the pre-polls left to count, Greens candidate Stephanie Hodgins-May needed 800 votes to pull ahead of Labor’s Michael Danby.
The Greens leader, Richard Di Natale, said that by defying the Labor executive and preferencing the Liberal candidate, Owen Guest, ahead of the Greens, sitting member Danby may help to deliver a Liberal government.
“In Melbourne Ports where it’s a three-way contest, we won’t know the outcome yet,” Di Natale told a room full of supporters at the Forum in Melbourne.
“But let me tell you something. At the moment we’re in a battle with the Labor party. And if we get over the Labor party – it’s currently line-ball – we’re a chance of knocking off the Liberals, who are now currently in a position to win that seat.
“The decisive factor there will be whether Labor’s Michael Danby and his preferences, which are going to the Liberal party, will elect the Liberal member. And let me tell you we’re hearing it’s going to be a very close election and I’ll just say to the people of Melbourne Ports; be careful. Because your member may have delivered government to the Coalition.”
The Greens will be hoping for a repeat in Melbourne Ports of their historic win of Prahran in the 2014 Victorian election, when candidate Sam Hibbins managed to defeat sitting Liberal Clem Newton-Brown by a narrow margin of less than 3o0 votes.
The other seat still up for grabs by the Greens, according to Di Natale, is Batman, in Melbourne’s north, which candidate Alex Bhathal has contested for a fifth time. She’s hoping to wrest the seat from embattled Labor MP David Feeney and would require a swing of more than 10%. As of Saturday night, a swing of 10.3% had gone her way.
If she wins the seat, Bhathal will be the first candidate in 20 years to actually live in the electorate.
“We do live in the electorate … we’ve got one house,” she said, taking a stab at Feeney, who forgot to declare his $2.3m negatively-geared house on the parliamentary register.
“I really feel like we’ve put our electorate on the map. It’s wonderful to be able to reach out to our communities and realise that they share our progressive values as well. It’s been an amazing experience over the last few months for Batman. I’ve been realising for weeks there’s been a swing on.”
In the weeks leading up to the election, Di Natale said his goal was to increase the party’s primary vote, retain Adam Bandt in the lower house and hold on to all 10 senators. Bandt was comfortably re-elected to his seat of Melbourne on Saturday night.
In the event of a hung parliament, Di Natale also warned tough negotiations were ahead.
“When the phone does ring – and it will ring – the issue dangerous climate change, the treatment of innocent people seeking asylum in this country, they are things that will be front and centre in any negotiation,” he said.
Batman, Wills, Melbourne Ports, and the Liberal seat of Higgins in Victoria, Grayndler, Sydney and Richmond in New South Wales, and Fremantle in Western Australia are all seats Di Natale said he was confident would become Greens seats in coming elections if not this one. By the end of the night, it seemed Di Natale was correct in predicting the gaining of Greens seats in the House of Representatives may be a gradual process.
The party’s candidate for Higgins, Jason Ball, had achieved an 11.2% increase in the Greens vote by the end of the night but it was not enough for him to take the seat from the Liberal’s Kelly O’Dwyer. And in Wills, candidate Samantha Ratnam’s 12.1% swing towards her was not enough to beat Labor’s Peter Khalil, a former advisor to Kevin Rudd who managed 53.2% of first preferences with 40 of 45 polling places returned and 53.30% votes counted.
“I am so proud of what we have achieved,” Ball said.
Di Natale said it was “time to take on business as usual politics, to smash the duopoly, to take on the Coles and Woollies of politics, and we are here to do that”.
“We have seen swings of 10% or more to the Greens in Higgins, in Wills, in Batman, in Melbourne Ports,” he said.
Bandt thanked the electorate of Melbourne for returning him to his seat for a third time, saying they had given a “vote for a real alternative in the house of government”.
“And just like the last election, the Melbourne fever is spreading, and the seats around us look like they’ve increased their vote as well,” Bandt said. “Some of those seats are too close to call. But what is crystal clear is that people want an alternative.”
