Face Of Nation : We are pretty sure we know what happened on Saturday night, but a glance at the raw voting figures might confound your certainties. It would reveal losers were actually top performers, and top performers went nowhere. The Liberals benefited from a massive surge of voters. Right?
Not really. The Liberal first preference tally actually fell by close to 1 per cent, according to Australian Electoral Commission counts posted at midday. The Liberal votes was 3,293,099, a 0.91 per cent fall from the 2016 level. It’s barely moved over two years, and certainly was not a flood of support. So it must have been a Labor decline that did it in. No so. Labor’s first preference vote fell even less than the Liberals’ The ALP had 4,016,676 primary votes, a drop of 0.87 per cent from 2016.
The lesson, as in all modern elections, is not how many votes a party gets, but where they are cast. The Liberals won 27.76 per cent of the primary vote and Labor 33.86 per cent. But we know who won the election. For example, Labor supporters would have been chocking the ballot boxes in inner city electorates, but that predominance of voters changed nothing. The ALP was almost always going to win those seats.
