It was reported that Laura Nuttall lost on Saturday, but reports of her demise may have been premature. Photo: Supplied.
Could Greens MLA Laura Nuttall be the ACT election’s Harry Truman?
Following the 1948 presidential election, President Truman famously held up the incorrect Dewey defeats Truman front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune on the day he claimed victory.
While not carrying the same historic significance, national media definitively reported Ms Nuttall lost her seat on Saturday. It appeared Liberal candidate James Daniels had edged her out for the fifth and final seat in Brindabella.
However, there has been a remarkable shift in the vote count since then, with an election analyst projecting Ms Nuttall may have her nose in front as of Monday (21 October).
“The Liberal vote has come down a lot compared to the early preference distributions, and the Green vote has gone up relative to Labor,” Dr Kevin Bonham said.
“That’s put [Ms Nuttall] in a position where she can get ahead of the Labor candidate and get Labor preferences to beat the Liberals … but that’s not the only scenario. The count is very complicated.
“It seems as if you pressed the button now, the Greens should win … we’ll just have to watch the votes come in over the following days; if the postal votes were stronger than normal for the Liberals, that could save them. But at the moment, it looks as if the Liberals have work to do.
“There is also a remote and freakish scenario in which Labor [Mick Gentleman] could still plausibly win that seat … it’s quite extraordinary that they’re in the contest because they only had two quotas.”
Harry S Truman holds up an election day edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune, which – based on early results – mistakenly announced ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’. Photo: AP Photo/Byron Rollins.
According to the published ACT electoral commission data as of Monday, Mr Daniels has received 3577 first preference votes to Ms Nuttall’s 2969, with just under 80 per cent of the total vote counted so far.
However, Dr Bonham states the Green “looks like winning” because she is getting a higher flow of preferences from ACT Labor and Independents for Canberra, which is projected to push her above the Liberal. However, the result remains in doubt.
News Corp has reported the expected overall ACT election result is that Labor and the Liberals will win 10 seats each, with a “collapse” in the Greens vote to lose half their seats (from six to three).
However, if Ms Nuttall gets up in Brindabella, it will mean the Greens will end up having four seats and the Liberals nine – the same amount they won at the 2020 election.
The remaining two seats have been won by Independents for Canberra’s Thomas Emerson and independent Fiona Carrick.
This means that Labor and the Greens combined have a comfortable majority of 14 seats in the 25-seat assembly, reducing the need for Chief Minister Andrew Barr to rely on the support of the independents to govern.
Mr Bonham said we may not know the final result in Brindabella until the end of the week as postal votes that are received as late as this Friday (25 October) are still to be counted. The formal declaration of the final result occurs on Wednesday, 30 October.
He also said talk of a Greens vote “collapse” may be overstating things.
“All the big three parties have lost votes. Labor has lost the most, the Liberals seemed to have lost a bit and the Greens have gone backwards as well. A lot of it is just increased competition from Independents for Canberra and Fiona Carrick, who have done well … I don’t think the Greens have done particularly badly in the circumstances. I don’t think they ran as good a campaign as in 2020 … it was always the case that they were vulnerable to a small change because they got incredibly lucky with winning seats last time.”
The veteran election analyst says the only other contest still to be decided is Murrumbidgee where two Liberals, Ed Cocks and Amardeep Singh, are battling it out for the fifth and final seat.
“I don’t see the other seats being competitive at party level. People have talked about the Independents for Canberra in Yerrabi, but I think they’re too far behind the Greens to catch up,” he said.
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