2019 Australian federal election




A federal election was held on 18 May 2019 to elect members of the 46th Parliament of Australia. The election had been called following the dissolution of the 45th Parliament as elected at the 2016 double dissolution federal election. All 151 seats in the House of Representatives and 40 of the 76 seats in the Senate were up for election.
The second-term incumbent minority Liberal/National Coalition government, led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, won a third three-year term by defeating the opposition Australian Labor Party, led by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. The Coalition claimed a three-seat majority with 77 seats, Labor finished with 68, whilst the remaining six seats were won by the Australian Greens, Centre Alliance, Katter's Australian Party and three independents.
The electoral system of Australia enforces compulsory voting and uses full-preference instant-runoff voting in single-member seats for the House of Representatives and optional preferential single transferable voting in the Senate. The election was administered by the Australian Electoral Commission.
The result was considered an upset as polling had placed the Coalition consistently behind for almost three years. It was the first time since 2001 that a Federal government in Australia won a third consecutive term in office. The Coalition benefited from a stronger-than-expected showing in Queensland and Tasmania. The Liberal National Party of Queensland won 23 of the state's 30 seats with a statewide primary vote of 43%. Indeed, the net two-seat swing to the LNP in Queensland was enough to allow the Coalition to regain its majority.
On election night, Shorten declared his intention to stand down as leader of his party, but to remain in parliament. The Second Morrison ministry was sworn in on 29 May 2019.

Background

Previous election

The outcome of the 2016 federal election could not be determined on election night, with too many seats in doubt. After a week of vote counting, neither the incumbent Turnbull government led by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of the Liberal/National Coalition nor the Shorten Opposition led by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten of the Australian Labor Party had won enough seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives to form a majority government.
During the uncertain week following the election, Turnbull negotiated with the crossbench and secured confidence and supply support from Bob Katter and from independents Andrew Wilkie and Cathy McGowan in the event of a hung parliament and resulting minority government. During crossbench negotiations, Turnbull pledged additional staff and resources for crossbenchers, and stated "It is my commitment to work in every way possible to ensure that the crossbenchers have access to all of the information they need and all of the resources they need to be able to play the role they need in this parliament".
On 10 July, eight days after the election took place and following Turnbull's negotiations with the crossbench where he secured sufficient confidence and supply support, Shorten conceded defeat, acknowledging that the incumbent Coalition had enough seats to form either a minority or majority government. Turnbull claimed victory later that day. In the closest federal majority result since the 1961 election, the ABC declared on 11 July that the incumbent Coalition would be able to form a one-seat majority government.
It was the first election result since federation where the post-election opposition won more seats than the post-election government in both of Australia's two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria.

Result

In the 150-seat House of Representatives, the one-term incumbent Liberal/National Coalition government suffered a 14-seat swing, reducing it to 76 seats—a bare one-seat majority. With a national three-point two-party swing against the government, the Labor opposition picked up a significant number of previously government-held seats to gain a total of 69 seats. On the crossbench, the Greens, the Nick Xenophon Team, Katter's Australian Party, and independents Wilkie and McGowan won a seat each. On 19 July, the Australian Electoral Commission announced a re-count for the Coalition-held but provisionally Labor-won Division of Herbert. At the start of the Herbert re-count, Labor led by eight votes. The AEC announced on 31 July that Labor had won Herbert by 37 votes.
The final outcome in the 76-seat Senate took more than four weeks to determine, despite significant voting changes. Earlier in 2016, legislation changed the Senate voting system from a full-preference single transferable vote with group voting tickets to an optional-preferential single transferable vote. The final Senate result was announced on 4 August: Liberal/National Coalition 30 seats, Labor 26 seats, Greens 9 seats, One Nation 4 seats and Nick Xenophon Team 3 seats. Derryn Hinch won a seat, while Jacqui Lambie, Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm and Family First's Bob Day retained their seats. The number of crossbenchers increased by two to a record 20. The Liberal/National Coalition will require at least nine additional votes to reach a Senate majority, an increase of three. The Liberal and Labor parties agreed to support a motion in the parliament that the first six senators elected in each state would serve a six-year term, while the last six elected would serve a three-year term.

Changes in parliamentary composition

Since the 2016 election, a number of parliamentarians resigned from their seats, while some with dual citizenship were disqualified by the High Court of Australia in the parliamentary eligibility crisis. However, in the cases of disqualified House of Representatives MPs, most of these were returned in resulting by-elections. Some MPs changed their party affiliation or their independent status.
Following the parliamentary eligibility crisis, the AEC's form for nomination was updated to ask detailed questions on whether candidates are disqualified under Section 44 of the Constitution of Australia. Three Victorian Liberal candidates had to withdraw based on section 44 issues.

Change of Prime Minister

Following the Liberal Party leadership spill on 24 August 2018, Malcolm Turnbull was replaced as prime minister by Scott Morrison. Turnbull resigned from parliament on 31 August, triggering a by-election in his former seat of Wentworth. The by-election was won by independent Kerryn Phelps. This, combined with National MP Kevin Hogan's move to the crossbench and the resignation of MP Julia Banks from the Liberal Party, reduced the government to 73 seats going into the election; a net three-seat deficit.
Further dissatisfaction within the Liberal Party saw a number of centrist and economically-liberal candidates announce that they would nominate as independents in wealthy electorates, with a specific focus on "addressing climate change".

Candidates

The nomination of candidates closed on 23 April 2019.
There were 1,514 candidates in total.

State of electorates

After effects of boundary redistributions for the next election, and the 2018 Wentworth by-election, the Mackerras pendulum had the Liberal/National Coalition government on 73 of 151 seats with the Labor opposition on 72 seats and a crossbench of six seats.
Assuming a theoretical nationwide uniform swing, the Labor opposition needed at least 50.7% of the two-party vote to win 76 seats and majority government. The incumbent Coalition government no longer held a majority, and required at least 51.1% of the two-party vote to regain it.
The key marginal seats were as follows:
; Notes

Retiring members

Members of Parliament and Senators who chose not to renominate for the 2019 election are as follows:

Labor

Graphical summary

Assessment of polling accuracy

The result of the 2019 election was in stark contrast to the aggregation of opinion polls conducted over the period of the 45th parliament and the 2019 election campaign. Apart from a few outliers, Labor had been ahead for the entire period, by as much as 56% on a two-party-preferred basis after Scott Morrison took over the leadership of the Liberal Party in August 2018—although during the campaign, Labor's two-party estimate was between 51 and 52%.
During the ABC's election coverage, election analyst Antony Green stated, "at the moment, on these figures, it's a bit of a spectacular failure of opinion polling", with the election results essentially a mirror image of the polls with the Coalition's two-party vote at around 51%.
The former director of Newspoll, Martin O'Shannessy, cited changes in demographics and telephone habits which have changed the nature of polling from calling random samples of landlines to calling random mobile numbers and automated "robocalls"—with the ensuing drop in response rates resulting in lower quality data due to smaller samples and bias in the sample due to who chooses to respond.
Several analysts and statisticians found the lack of variance of the two-party preferred estimates concerning—truly random poll sampling would see the results "bounce around" within each poll's margin of error, but the differences between figures in the final few weeks of the campaign were so consistently small as to be highly improbable to happen under random chance. Some analysts suspected the phenomenon of "herding" had occurred—as polling companies attempted to adjust for bias, they had "massaged" their results to be similar to other polls, resulting in an artificial closeness. Modelling performed after the election suggested that "herding" was the more likely explanation for the polling error as compared to skewed sampling.