10:47pm – I’m going to call it a night. One final point to note is that the ABC upper house results page has just flipped the final seat in Mining and Pastoral from One Nation to the Shooters.
10:35pm – South West (33% counted):
South West is currently electing two Labor MLCs and one each for Liberal, Nationals, Greens and One Nation. This is a loss of two Liberal seats to One Nation and the Greens.
While the current calculator is giving one of the seats to the Greens, Tom’s probabilities actually suggest there’s a 72% chance that seat will go to the third Labor candidate, and the Greens’ Diane Evers only has a 28% chance. I presume this is because the Greens are less than 1% ahead of Labor when Labor is knocked out and elects the Greens.
10:31pm – South Metro (32% counted):
Antony’s calculator is currently gifting three seats to Labor, two to the Liberal Party and one to the Liberal Democrats. This is a gain of one for Labor and the LDP, and a loss of one for the Greens and the Liberal Party.
The LDP result is not particularly robust: Geeklections gives the LDP only a 70% chance of holding that seat, with most of the remaining possibility going to the Daylight Savings Party.
The Greens also finish the count on 0.95 quotas, just behind the second Liberal: if the Greens vote increases in later counting they could come back and win.
10:28pm – North Metro (32% counted):
North Metro is currently producing a result of 3 Liberal, 2 Labor, 1 Greens. This would be a drop of one seat for the Liberal Party and one extra seat for the Greens.
This result isn’t vulnerable to small changes flipping the result. It is possible that, if the third Labor candidate overtook Family First, they would win the final seat instead of the Greens.
10:24pm – Mining and Pastoral (5% counted):
This is the least reliable, since the vast majority of votes are yet to be counted. Labor and the Nationals are each on track to win two seats, with the Liberal Party and One Nation each winning one. This is a gain of a seat for Labor and One Nation, and a loss of a seat for the Liberal Party and the Greens.
The margins of victory are not particularly tight, and the vote would need to shift quite a lot to produce a different outcome. But considering only 5% is counted, this is quite possible.
10:21pm – East Metro (28% counted):
Currently the seats are splitting three Labor, one Liberal, one Greens, one Fluoride Free WA. This would be a loss of two Liberal seats to the minor parties.
On the current vote, Tom Clement gives the Greens and Fluoride Free roughly 85% chance of winning their seats. There are some narrow paths to victory for the second Liberal candidate or the first One Nation candidate.
10:19pm – Let’s run through each upper house region in turn.
Firstly, Agricultural (35% counted):
Currently the seats break down as two Labor, two Nationals, one Liberal and one Shooter. This is a loss of one seat for the Liberal Party and a gain of one for Labor. At the moment it appears that the Shooters have a buffer of about one-fifth of a quota over One Nation, so this could change if One Nation’s vote grows in late counting.
10:10pm – At this point we know most of what we will know tonight regarding the lower house. By my count Labor has won at least 38 seats. The Liberal Party is on 11, and the Nationals are on five.
I have five seats listed as undecided. Kalgoorlie is very messy and we don’t even know which candidates are the top two, so it’s not possible to conduct an indicative preference count. The preference count has barely started in Pilbara, so it’s not clear if that seat will stay with Nationals leader Brendon Grylls, or flip to Labor.
There are three seats which are conventional Liberal vs Labor races. Labor is leading with 51% after preferences in Murray-Wellington and leading by a handful of votes in Jandakot. The Liberal Party is narrowly ahead in Geraldton.
9:31pm – It’s clear that the Western Australian upper house crossbench will be very diverse – Antony’s calculator (now with errors fixed) is giving seats to One Nation, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, Fluoride Free WA and the Daylight Savings Party. It seems unlikely that Labor and Greens will reach a majority, but they won’t face a solid conservative bloc with an upper house majority.
9:23pm – Since there’s some problems with the ABC’s upper house results, I’d suggest looking at Tom Clement’s Geeklections site. Tom is taking the raw election results and running many simulations based on the preference tickets, and he is currently projecting the most likely outcome of 12 Labor, 9 Liberal, 5 Nationals and 3 Greens – which would leave Labor and Greens two votes short of a majority. But Tom’s website does more, showing the chances of each party winning in each region.
9:13pm – The upper house numbers are very confusing – it appears two seats actually going to the Shooters are being credited to Daylight Savings. But it’s worth noting that both Daylight Savings and Fluoride Free are currently projected to win seats. One Nation is currently leading for only one seat.
8:57pm – We’re starting to get some small numbers in from the upper house. Antony Green’s preference calculator gives the final seats to the Shooters in Agricultural and One Nation in the South West. In both regions, the calculator gives Labor an additional seat. It also appears that Labor and the Greens could win four seats between them in the East and South Metro regions – in both regions the combined Labor/Greens vote is over four quotas in the lower house, and is sitting at a similar level in the small number of upper house votes counted so far. It also appears likely that Labor or the Greens will gain a seat in the North Metro region. If the left wins an additional seat in all six upper house regions, that would give Labor and the Greens a majority.
8:21pm – I count 14 seats Labor has gained from the Liberal Party: Balcatta, Belmont, Bunbury, Collie-Preston, Darling Range, Forrestfield, Joondalup, Morley, Mount Lawley, Perth, Southern River, Swan Hills, Wanneroo and West Swan.
Labor is also leading in Burns Beach and Geraldton, and Kalgoorlie will take days or weeks to decide.
8:10pm – It’s too early to draw any conclusions about the upper house, but it’s interesting to look at lower house votes by upper house region. One Nation is polling less than half a quota in North Metropolitan and South Metropolitan (although they wouldn’t have run in every seat). One Nation is on about 60% of a quota in the East Metro and South West regions, and about three quarters of a quota in Mining and Pastoral and Agricultural. It suggests they are likely to pick up two seats, but none of those figures are conclusive enough to call any seats.
8:03pm – It’ll be interesting to see how the swing to Labor varies across the state – there was a theory that the party was performing better in the marginal seats. I’d like to wait for more preferences to be counted and to ultimately judge on the two-party-preferred swing, but Labor has definitely gained larger primary vote swings in more marginal Liberal seats. The Labor vote is up on average by 11.7% in Liberal seats with margins under 12%, compared to 7.85% in the other Liberal seats and 10% in Labor seats.
7:47pm – The Liberal Party has suffered a massive collapse in Bunbury – the ABC currently has it on 32%.
7:41pm – Sorry, this website is struggling with the traffic now. Been meaning to make some technical updates but house-moving has gotten in the way. I was just writing something about how interesting Kalgoorlie is – we really won’t know who will come in the top two until the count is finished, with One Nation preferences deciding who out of Liberal and Nationals will go on to face Labor.
7:27pm – The trend at the moment suggests that Labor is on track to gain all of the Liberal seats held on margins of less than 11%. Labor is recording large enough swings to win in Balcatta, Belmont, Collie-Preston, Forrestfield, Kalamunda, Morley, Perth, Southern River, Swan Hills, Wanneroo and West Swan, although in some cases this is based off a single strong booth. We have no results from the other three Liberal seats held by margins of under 11% – no seat in this range has a swing small enough to allow the Liberal Party to hold on.
7:16pm – We don’t have enough booths to call them yet, but it looks likely that Peter Abetz has lost in Southern River.
7:13pm – After five booths, it looks likely that Labor has gained Balcatta (7% margin). It also appears that Forrestfield is likely to fall.
7:06pm – Let’s discuss Collie-Preston. It’s an unusual seat, with extremely pro-Labor Collie paired with other pro-Liberal towns. The redistribution redrew the seat into a notional Liberal seat, after Labor’s Mick Murray was narrowly re-elected in 2013. We don’t have many booths yet, but it appears that there has been a small swing to Labor and a large swing away from the Liberal Party, which should be enough to re-elect Murray (which would count as a Labor gain).
7:02pm – We’re seeing sizeable samples from numerous country seats which is starting to give us an idea of support for One Nation. They’re on 13.6% in Kalgoorlie, 10.6% in Central Wheatbelt, 9.2% in Collie-Preston and 9.3% in Geraldton. If the party polls around 10% across the non-metropolitan region they’ll be a contender to win seats in each region – a full quota is roughly 14.3%.
6:59pm – We’re seeing a big drop in support for the Liberal Party in Geraldton, with that vote moving to One Nation and Labor. We don’t have a preference count there, since Labor came third last time, but it could well be in play.
6:50pm – Four early booths in Kalgoorlie suggest a significant drop in the vote for both the Nationals and the Liberal Party. The Nationals hold the seat with a 4.1% margin over the Liberal Party. Sitting Nationals MP Wendy Duncan has retired, and Labor appears to be performing quite well in a seat which used to be Labor heartland.
6:45pm – Central Wheatbelt is held by the Nationals by an 8.8% margin over the Liberal Party. It appears that there has been a drop in the Liberal vote and a strengthened Nationals vote, with One Nation polling a distant second, based on six polling places.
6:00pm – Polls have just closed in Western Australia. I’ll be posting results updates here, as well as contributing to the Guardian’s live blog. Don’t expect much for the next half hour.
The exit polls point towards a 12% swing to Labor, which would likely give them a majority.
It’s 9pm in Sydney where I am – I expect we should have a reasonably clear idea of who is winning (or if it’s very close, we’ll know that it’ll be very close) by around 7:30 WA time, and around 9pm WA time we’ll start to see a slowing down of the lower house results and the first upper house results. I expect the results will dry up by 11pm-midnight WA time, so for those of us on the east coast it could be a late night.
