As you can see from the election tracker at the top of this page, we’ve called 75 seats for Labor – enough for a minority government.
If the party wins just one more seat it will have a working majority in the House of Representatives even after one of its MPs is appointed speaker.
At this stage, that 76th seat could be the Melbourne division of Macnamara (which encompasses suburbs such as St Kilda). First-term Labor MP Josh Burns faced a three-corner contest with the Greens and Liberals on Saturday.
As it currently stands, Labor is ahead of the Greens in Macnamara by less than 2000 primary votes. The Liberal candidate placed third and the majority of Liberal preferences appear to be flowing to the Labor candidate. However, it’s still a tight race and so Nine (and the ABC) haven’t called the seat.
Another pathway for Labor to form majority government, or even strengthen its position as a majority government, is the seat of Brisbane. On election night, it looked like that seat might go from Liberal to Green. However, the Labor candidate has since leapfrogged the Greens by about 100 votes.
Elsewhere, and the Liberals have very narrow leads in the outer Melbourne suburb of Deakin and the NSW South Coast seat of Gilmore.
Watch this space.
