With just one full day of campaigning left before federal election day, opinion polls are pointing to Anthony Albanese’s Labor government winning a second term. That is, unless Peter Dutton and the Coalition can mount one of the most remarkable comebacks of all time to snatch an unlikely victory. Daily Mail Australia breaks down the five possible scenarios that Australians could wake up to on Sunday morning.
Scenario #1: Labor majority
This is certainly what Albo will be hoping for, especially as the polls have turned in his favour since the start of the campaign.
Labor won 77 seats at the last election, giving it the narrowest of majorities in the then-151 member House of Representatives. The new government then picked up the Victorian seat of Aston when former education minister Alan Tudge retired from politics, winning a by-election in his marginal outer metropolitan Melbourne seat.
Electoral redistributions in three states have shrunk the size of the chamber to 150 seats, with the Labor-held seat of Higgins in Melbourne abolished.
This means that Albo entered this campaign defending 77 seats, needing 76 to win a majority.
That doesn’t leave him with a lot of room to lose seats, at least not without winning a few off the Opposition and the Greens, which published polls suggest might happen.
For Albo to retain majority government he’ll need to win some seats because it’s hard to imagine Labor not losing as many as four or possibly five seats.
Albo is hoping to pick up the Queensland seats of Brisbane and Griffith from the Greens, as well as the far north Queensland electorate of Leichhardt now that popular local Liberal MP Warren Entsch is retiring.
It would be a real coup for Albo’s campaign to win three seats in Peter Dutton’s home state, even if two of them were victories over the Greens.
The buffer it would provide Labor with would be a necessary marker to retaining its majority.
But there are other seats in Labor’s sights if it is to win with a majority. At the top of the list sits Sturt in South Australia, Christopher Pyne’s old seat. With the popularity of the state Labor government, Albo’s strategists are hopeful.
It’s always possible Labor finds other Coalition seats around the country to grab and bag – such as Deakin or Menzies in Melbourne, the two most marginal Liberals hold. The redistribution in Victoria has actually made Menzies a notional Labor seat on the numbers. But realistically, given the unpopularity of Labor in Victoria, the heavy lifting will need to happen elsewhere.
Most importantly Labor will need to sandbag its currently held seats and win the ground fight, electorate-by-electorate. This would mean it would contain swings against it in outer metropolitan areas of Sydney and Melbourne, holding onto those seats despite preference flows against them.
So far the government has dominated the national campaign, which is prerequisite number one in the quest to win a majority. Published polls have it well in front on the all important two party vote. If it also wins most of the tight contests, majority government beckons.
Albo will be hoping for a Labor majority – but he doesn’t have a whole lot of room to lose seats
Scenario #2: Labor minority
This is still the most likely scenario in my view, although the longer the campaign has gone on the more likely it has become that Labor either wins outright or only narrowly loses its majority.
Albo’s victory in 2022 was tighter than it felt on the night, chiefly because the majority was so slender. As a result the government doesn’t have much electoral fat to burn, and let’s face it, times are tough.
Cost of living pressures have been extreme. The standard of living for many Australians has fallen. Higher interest rates and a per capita recession for most of Labor’s time in office are all black marks against the government, and that’s all before you even consider the housing crisis and the surge in immigration.
As a result the Opposition has had plenty to work with over the past three years, kicked off by a poorly orchestrated Indigenous Voice referendum campaign Albo unsuccessfully spearheaded. An issue that resurfaced in the final week of the campaign when Labor’s senate leader Penny Wong claimed the Voice was going to be back on the agenda soon enough.
While the Coalition hasn’t had a great campaign, far from it, the damage done to Labor could be enough to take away its majority, even if only just.
A hung parliament in which Labor governs in minority has a broad range. For example, there is a big difference in how a hung parliment will play out between Labor retaining 74 seats verses only winning 70-72.
As mentioned, Albo starts this campaign with 77 seats, the Coalition holds just 54. Even if Labor lost 10 seats to Peter Dutton in a straight swap – with no other seats changing hands between the crossbench and the major parties – Labor would still retain government in minority. But it would be a much more messy scenario than Labor only losing three or four seats, for example.
A Labor parliamentary team of just 67 in the House could appoint a crossbencher such as Tasmanian Andrew Wilkie to the Speakership and then go searching for eight crossbenchers to support it in a hung parliament. Four Greens are automatically locked in, and Albo would certainly find four more to secure a second term in The Lodge.
The most likely scenario for Mr Albanese, however, is a minority government…
How long he would survive before his own colleagues knifed him in the back after such a poor performance, especially from here with expectations that Labor will perform much better than that high, is another matter.
That’s right: Labor won’t lose this election even if it loses just shy of a dozen seats. If the transfer were to get higher than that, the equation of course shifts. But that’s very unlikely.
Don’t forget, as the incumbent PM, Albo can go to the Governor-General in the event of a hung parliament and tell her he can control the House. Unless a vote of no confidence is issued against him, that’s accepted to be true.
I can’t see enough crossbenchers pledging to do that immediately, unless Team Dutton won more seats than Labor. Besides, the more likely version of a hung parliament is one in which Labor maintains a clear lead over the Coalition in terms of the number of seats it holds, which brings us to the next possible outcome: a surprise on election night.
Scenario #3: An unlikely Coalition minority
This appeared much more possible before the campaign than it does now. To be on the cards Team Dutton would need to win a haul of seats from Labor and win back some of the teal held seats such as Goldstein and Curtin.
While not impossible, unless something dramatically shifts both of the above options for a Labor win are comfortably more probable. So much so that the betting markets have all but written off the chance of a Coalition win, even as a minority government.
If Dutton is to defy the odds and win his way into Kirribilli House on the waterfront of Sydney Harbour, the Coalition will need to do the heavy lifting in NSW, winning seats like Gilmore, Robertson, Paterson, Bennelong and Parramatta, where it has based its campaign headquarters.
The remaining seats will need to be won in Victoria (such as Chisholm, Aston and McEwen), Lyons in Tasmania, Lingiari in the Northern Territory, Boothby in South Australia and Tangney in WA. But Labor’s internal polling has it inching ahead in many of these seats.
For a Prime Minister Peter Dutton to become a reality, the Liberal leader will need to sweep a series of seats in New South Wales
If the polls are wrong, however, and Dutton can pick up all of these seats, he would win a dozen seats from Labor, giving him more seats than Albo, helping the Coalition lay claim to forming minority government.
If the Coalition also won seats from the crossbench, including defectors since the last election (Andrew Gee, Ian Goodenough and Russell Broadbent), a Coalition minority government would be very hard for some teals to even resist.
The likes of Allegra Spender and Sophie Scamps would almost certainly back the Coalition into a change of government, alongside crossbench support from Bob Katter, Helen Haines and Rebekha Sharkie.
If all of the above occurred Dutton would move from 54 to 74 seats, just shy of minority government, illustrating just how difficult it is for the Coalition to win this election in any way.
While the above scenario isn’t impossible, in the eyes of most it has well and truly faded from view.
Scenario #4: Coalition majority
This is the outlier result. A chance of momentum that would create history. For it to happen Albo would best (in the worst possible of ways) the ‘unloseable election’ results of both John Hewson and Bill Shorten in 1993 and 2019 respectively.
No first term federal government has lost a re-election attempt since 1931, which would make even a minority Coalition win a history defying event.
To win with its own working majority, Dutton would need to pick up 22 seats all on his own. The previous scenario gave him a maximum of 12 seats won off Labor, plus winning back three mid-term Coalition defectors’ seats.
Dutton needs 22 seats all on his own to win a working majority in the House of Representatives
It’s also possible Liberals can win the Queensland seats of Ryan and Brisbane from the Greens. The latter being a genuine three cornered contest with Labor.
But that’s still only 17 seats picked up, leaving five more needed to secure a Coalition majority. Which is also assuming Team Dutton doesn’t lose a single seat to Labor or the crossbench.
So where would those remaining five pick ups have to come from? The teals would need to lose a few, and the floodgates would need to open in Victoria, where the Labor state government is about as popular as poison.
No wonder the better markets have a Coalition majority at long odds. Scenario #4 is all but off the cards.
Scenario #5: Hung parliament: re-run election required
Few are really talking about this scenario, and for good reason now, but it was not out of the question when the campaign started.
Technically any hung parliament can result in a re-run if the government of the day sustains a vote of no confidence on the floor of the House of Representatives.
While it’s unlikely that would happen immediately even if Dutton defied the odds and outperformed the polls, if negotiations for a minority government break down, crossbenchers might prefer to force another election. Especially if they think the government is weakened by doing so.
If both major parties’ share of seats were in the 60s, and they both required many crossbenchers to get a majority, it would make a re-run election more likely.
Albo has already indicated he’s not interested in negotiating on policies or terms of engagement with crossbenchers if the parliament is hung. Such belligerence could upset the crossbench to the point where it drags us all back for a fresh vote.
Or if that looks likely, and neither major party leader can come to terms with the crossbench, Albo might proactively call for a fresh election, which as the incumbent he can do, so as to not appear weak and be forced to one.
I think this scenario dropped out of contention when the Dutton’s campaign started to falter and Labor’s scare campaign on issues such as Medicare started to bite.
And what about the Senate?
No matter what happens in the House of Representatives where who forms the next government gets decided, half the senate is up for re-election.
How that pans out will play an important role in what the next government can achieve by way of policy.
The most significant Senate contest is in the ACT where former Wallaby David Pocock is up for re-election.
Unlike state senators, territory senators face re-election every three not six years.
Pocock is likely to win, which means that he’ll continue to be an important swing vote in the Senate.
Beyond that contest, it’s the half Senate result from the 2019 election that is up for re-election this time. Those senators who won seats in 2022 don’t face re-election until the next federal election three years from now.
The Coalition exceeded expectations in 2019 by winning another term in government. It also won Senate seats it’s unlikely to retain this time around.
That is likely to give Labor one or possibly two or three extra Senate spots, meaning that it becomes slightly less reliant on the crossbench to pass legislation than it was in its first term.
But the Greens will still have a powerful say. The minor party has a senator up for re-election in every state, but it would certainly hope and expect to win a position in each contest.
It is harder for minor parties to win seats in the Senate now than it used to be, ever since the major parties got together to change the rules after a series of recent crossbench wins.
Irrespective of which of the above scenarios play out in the House, the Senate will remain hung with the balance of power largely controlled by the Greens.
That’s a workable scenario for Labor, but an absolute nightmare for the Coalition were it to somehow find a way to form government.
