Huon: Harriss well ahead on primaries but Clare Glade-Wright may be a threat to him on preferences.
Rosevears: Jo Palmer projecting for large primary vote lead. Remains to be seen if there is any threat on preferences
NEPEAN (VIC): Marsh (Lib) leading
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Live comments (scrolls to top)
Refresh every 10 mins or so after 6:30 for latest updates
7:14 A couple of booths in in Nepean and the Liberal candidate, Marsh, is at this stage in front. Probably if things stay as they are he would be able to beat either Hutchinson or One Nation on the other's preferences. At this stage One Nation are in third, noting they need to be well over Hutchinson to avoid being eliminated by Greens preferences. So seems a good start for Marsh but this does depend on what One Nation's preferences do.
7:10 Trevallyn Central does its thing and pushes Monson down to fourth. The Liberals will be hoping that she stays there.
7:07 Rosevears is weird. My projection says the primary vote totals should finish about where they are except the Greens should come up a bit. Palmer is probably going to need something close to a quarter of preferences against either Labor or Monson.
7:02 Huon: huge numbers for Harriss in the Ranelagh booth (one of the Huon Valley booths). I now project him around the low 30s to a lead of something like 10 points. Is that enough? Hard to say.
7:00 Prospective indies in Rosevears must be kicking themselves as they see Monson who was barely even findable at the start of the campaign move into second on primaries. Palmer is projecting to low 40s at this stage.
6:53 Strong Port Huon booth for Harriss sees him much closer to Glade-Wright now and I project him to improve. Nothing from Nepean yet by the way. By the way the booth I had as Margate was actually Middleton (not sure what happened there!) but Middleton is a booth that I would expect to be very good for Glade-Wright so the projections have shifted with that corrected. I am now projecting Harriss for a substantial lead.
6:49 One of the Legana booths is in and Palmer has gone above 40 in my projection (which would probably be enough) but an interesting thing here is that Monson is in third and threatening Labor for second. What will Greens preferences do between Labor and Monson should it stay like that?
6:46 Glade-Wright wins Middleton booth (not Margate as previously advertised, not sure what happened there!)
6:43 Rosevears is going too! In the first two booths, Palmer roughly matched the Liberal state tally in one and was well below it in another, meaning I have her tracking for about 39, at which point the preferences of obscure independent Monson (who is getting a high vote so far by being the only independent!) would be important.
6:31 And we're off! In Huon, Glade-Wright tops two Bruny booths (not surprising) and Harriss tops primaries in Southport but not by much. These are very small booths but look like a very good start for Glade-Wright who at this early stage projects competitively with Harriss for the primary vote lead (on average my very early, very unreliable projections put both of them around 31). However Harriss may lift later. Interesting start. That Southport booth looks less than wonderful for Labor given it is not far from McKibben's home town.
6:20 Have also noticed some Rosevears booths that weren't in action or were under other names in the 2025 state election: there are now two Legana and two "Trevallyn" booths. Trevallyn Central is the standard (and very green) Trevallyn booth, Trevallyn is the previous Riverside West (not green!), and Riverside North was not at the state election.
5:40pm: The usual "yes this thing is on" post. A few things of note. Firstly in Huon there is a third Bruny Island booth on North Bruny, which will be called North Bruny; probably it will behave like other Bruny booths (very green/left). TEC have told me it's a reinstatement of the former Barnes Bay booth. For Huon I'll be projecting Labor and the Greens off the 2025 election, Glade-Wright off the Peter George group total at the 2025 election (noting that I expect that to be unreliable to a degree) and Harriss off both his 2022 result and the Liberal 2025 result (I don't expect either to be great but the truth may be somewhere in between!)
As concerns Nepean there will be a very low day vote which may be highly unreliable and we don't have useful comparative data for One Nation's likely performance on prepolls and postals in an absents-free by-election, so things will be a bit rubbery. One Nation will also perform much better in lower socio-economic booths and Nepean is quite a mixed bag economically.
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Intro (Saturday 2 pm)
We're here again, it's counting night for two more Tasmanian Legislative Council seats with first-term incumbent Dean Harris (IND) facing Labor, Green and tealish IND challengers and fellow first-term incumbent Jo Palmer (Liberal) up against Labor and the Greens. You can see my seat previews here:
and also my assessment of Legislative Council voting patterns
I've had less time to cover the LegCo election campaigns than normal as I was overseas for two weeks in April. During this time I had very little spare time anyway but my ability to update the site was further affected by my laptop charger expiring in smoke and my phone charger being unreliable. However all is back to normal now.
As I note, a Labor opposition that normally votes with the government (hmmm) means that the government isn't often troubled on the floor of the chamber, but its proposed greyhound racing ban is one where it may need all the numbers it can get and won't be wanting to see any wins for the red team tonight. Nor would it be keen to see independent Dean Harriss replaced by an independent to his left in Clare Glade-Wright. Tonight will be an interesting test of how everyone's travelling, noting that Labor tends to do badly in these contests in the north and would do well by historic standards to get anywhere near winning Rosevears.
Also tonight is an interesting by-election in Victoria where the Liberals are trying to fend off One Nation and a teal in the seat vacated by former deputy leader Sam Groth, who won the seat impressively in 2022 and has been a problem magnet ever since. I'm not really sure whether it's better to run separate threads or cover them on the same thread; I've decided to do the latter to reduce the risk of me getting confused between threads, noting that the LegCo is my primary focus until it settles down. The Nepean contest has been marked by more Victorian Liberal chaos though the One Nation campaign has also run into some problems; see William Bowe's rundown.
I would expect first LegCo figures from around 6:30. Note that in Huon the first booths that arrive are often on Bruny Island and these are very green/anti-salmon booths that are highly unrepresentative. When I consider there is no realistic doubt about the fate of the LegCo seats the magic word CALLED will appear in the header. Until then it will contain a brief summary of how the count is going in each seat, which may at times be out of date.
Early in the night I'll be projecting party totals in Rosevears off the 2025 state election until numbers settle down. I have a range of projection ideas for Huon and I'll announce which ones I've managed to implement in time once the count gets underway. Note that we will not get postals tonight for the LegCo seats as Tasmania does not count postals til midweek. We should however get plenty of prepolls.
