Groom By-Election Live And Postcount

Groom (LNP 20.5%) - CALLED (6:37 pm), Garth Hamilton (LNP) elected.  

Swing 3.29%, compared to historic average 6% for government seat by-election vacancies.

Updates will appear below the dotted line, scrolling to the top.  Once counting is underway refresh every now and then for new comments.  

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FINAL: 3.29% is where it finished; SAP prefs split 52.5% to Labor while Lib Dems prefs split 71.8% to LNP.

Second Thursday: Swing now down to 3.29%. 

Thursday: Garth Hamilton is in parliament now but the count continues; the swing keeps dropping, now down to 3.38%.  There are at least 2637 postals to go, with potentially over another 3400 outstanding but most of those will never arrive.  

Wednesday: The swing on postals is now down to 7% and the overall swing to 3.5%.  

Tuesday: Around another 3000 postals counted, and the swing on postals has come down to 7.5% bringing the overall swing down to 3.6%.  It will be mildly interesting to see if this trend continues and pushes the overall swing down towards 3%.  

Monday: Around another 2000 postals counted and the swing is now down to 3.8%.  Nearly all of the remaining votes to be counted will be postals but later postals will probably weaken slightly in their flow to LNP.  

Sunday 4 pm: Around another 2000 postals have been counted, very slightly improving the LNP 2PP.  In theory there might be over 16,000 to come but in practice a few to several thousand won't show up.  

Sunday: Around 5000 postals were added sometime last night or this morning and these split only 68-32 to the LNP, compared with 77-23 in 2019.  As a result the swing to Labor has come up to 4%, which is squarely in the "nothing to see here" range.  It will probably change little on further counting.  Note also that the Sustainable Australia vote is down a point to 8.01% and will probably fall below the Greens' 7.96% from 2019. 

9:35 End of night wrap: I'm going to assume we're not getting postals tonight and wrap this up here, though I'll add in if anything more does arrive.  What we've seen so far is a 3.1% 2PP swing, which William Bowe notes is 2.8% in the booths and 4.0% in prepolls.  The postal figure might be more like the latter, so the swing may rise a little, but it will land well below the historic average for a government vacancy.  It's likely to land at the solid-for-Coalition end of the not much to see here range, but it might get into the good for Coalition, mediocre for Labor range (which I set the boundary for at 3%).  Anyway the Coalition will be happy with this one, since there is nothing to see here by way of evidence of Labor's vote recovering in any real sense from the 2019 Queensland federal malaise.  As with the competitive Eden-Monaro result, it is consistent with the idea that the government is travelling fairly well, as suggested by the federal polling.  The low profile and low combativeness of the Groom campaign, though, mean that not too much should be read into this one.  

9:00 I initially posted that another prepoll had put the swing up to 3.5% but both PB and AEC now project just 3%.  One more big prepoll and hopefully some postals to come.  

8:35 A couple of big prepolls have reported primary votes and this has pushed the projected swing up to over 3% (PB) again.  What I've found with the SA vote:

* The SA vote is high where Labor did best in 2019, but that doesn't mean SA are taking votes from Labor disproportionately as Labor also has higher primary vote swings in such booths.  

* The SA vote is higher in booths that were best for the Greens in 2019, suggesting that about a third of the SA vote probably came from Greens voters.  

* The SA vote has no relationship with the size of the One Nation vote in 2019.  

* There's some negative corellation between the size of the SA vote and the primary vote swing to the LNP, suggesting some level of competition between the two for votes leaving other parties.

Not easy to read a great deal into all this.  

8:00 The high Sustainable Australia vote is of some interest; I'll have a go at working out where those are coming from during the lull while waiting for the prepolls.

7:49 Labor have failed to win any booths, subject to confirmation.

7:16 Labor doesn't look like winning Toowoomba Taylor St or Newtown off those primary votes either.  Not sure where they're going to win a booth from here.   

7:06 Swing projections converging around 3%, which is solid for the Coalition if it stays that way.  

7:00 The LDP have done well at the Darling Heights booth, putting them up to 5.4% now and with a much better chance of retaining their deposit.  

6:55 It's notable that Sustainable Australia is doing well and the LDP badly in the big booths - which is a hazard for the LDP's deposit.  In some of these Sustainable Australia is polling over 10%.  

6:47 The AEC-projected 2PP swing has crept up to a more reasonable 4% swing to Labor, but Poll Bludger projects that to come down to 2.4%.

6:37 Several more booths are in and the projected swing is down to 1%, though that might not be entirely accurate because of changing postal vote patterns.  For what it's worth, CALLED.  Hamilton will clearly win.

6:27 Divisional Prepoll has returned a 2PP with a 2.7% swing to Labor.   

6:24 Several more booths have reported and so far the LNP has a 12% primary vote swing to it; Labor has a 4.5% primary vote swing to it.  That would see the parties finish somewhere around 65-23 on primaries, and we still have to see what the preferences do but that isn't looking like a 2PP swing against the LNP of any size at this stage.  

6:21 We're off, with a first preference from Bowenville where the LNP leads 78.2% to 11.3% (cf 68.1 to 18.4).  Sustainable Australia lead the Lib Dems by 1 vote and both are tracking to get their deposit back!

6:05 Polls have closed.  Another fun thing to watch for tonight: will Labor win a regular booth on 2PP?  The closest in 2019 was 55.86% to LNP at Newtown.  Mount Lofty (58.8) could be an interesting one and others that were under 60-40 were Harlaxton North, Harristown, Toowoomba City, Toowoomba South and Toowoomba Taylor St . 

Intro (4:55 Qld time)

Welcome to my coverage of tonight's Groom by-election, in which I will keep an eye on such riveting issues as who will finish last and whether the Liberal Democrats and/or Sustainable Australia will get their deposits back!  There is also the overall question of the two-party preferred swing - a modest swing to Labor is the normal result for a government vacancy, so there might be implications if the swing is absent or in the LNP's favour, or if there is an unusually large swing to Labor.  My preview was here and so little has happened during the campaign I've barely even edited the thing since writing it.  Some surprise has been expressed that Labor is even contesting the thing, but as my preview notes, Oppositions nearly always contest Government by-elections.

Antony Green's post here re postals is worth a read, and you will get a swishier results display at Poll Bludger.